Jocelyn replies to Ian Crisp:

>>The only simple and convenient thing here is to shrug off all
>>responsibility for understanding and decision-making by palming it off
>>onto the crumbling shoulders of the long-decomposed composer who lived
>>his life in a different world.  Try to understand him by all means, but
>>don't give the dead power to make choices for the living.  Like it our
>>not, that's ours (for a while) to do the best we can with, then to pass
>>on to others.
>
>Wow.  The composer's dead, therefore living performers have carte blanche
>to mess up their works any way they darned well please.  Oh, yeah, that's
>some reverence for art.

This is hyperbole.  I doubt if you asked performers who omitted the repeat
that they would reply they had carte blanche to mess up works any way they
darned well pleased.  We're talking about taking or not taking a repeat in
the last movement of the Jupiter symphony - or so I believed - not an Orgy
of Musical Permissiveness.  I'd suggest that performers who failed to
follow the repeat probably had some other reason, possibly even a musical
one, which prompted their decision.  Or is that an unreasonable assumption?

Steve Schwartz