Robert Peters replies to Leon Le Leu:

>>It is very easy for us to condemn Strauss now for staying in Germany
>>under Hitler but what would we have done?
>
>I cant speak for you but I would have emigrated.  I cannot live without
>freedom and in the company of people who enjoy taking other peoples
>freedom.

This may be so; I wouldn't know.  I'd never want to defend those who
stood idly by, but feel it diminishes the very few who resisted and
rebelled against their leaders, neighbours and times, to consider that
ordinarily decent, fair-minded people would be capable of responding in
such a way.

Not so for most fair-minded people of our day: it would be indecent even
to consider otherwise.

Then again, many of the seemingly decent now stand by in apparent silence
while structures that we all once erected at great cost are systematically
taken apart, some say irreversibly.  So let's just say I'm of two minds
about just how politically enlightened we've all become.

On a related subject, and a musical one this time, just this morning CBC
radio played the Martin Luther King Jr "I have a dream" speech.  I was
struck by the man's astonishing clarity of vision, and that not one of
those stirring words sounds imbalanced, dated or overwrought.

Beyond that, though, it struck me just how *musical* a composition that
speech is: not only its pacing & cadences, but his seemingly careful
attention to rises & falls in volume, the balances between cool vs fiery
rhetoric, and also between the more mundane vs moving passages.  I don't
think it downplays that moment's greatness to guess that careful rehearsal
went into its composition, with close attention to pauses, intonations,
the crowd's expected responses, etc.

I'm not sure what the historical record would show, but: does anyone
else feel this way?

Bert Bailey