Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]> tells Denis Fodor, who's been saying
that atonal and serial composition  hasn't made it with concert audiences:

>'Broad acceptance' means here 'popularity'.  If this is your measure of
>music's worth then I suggest listening to pop music.

Thanks, but no thanks.  I've been a concert goer for well over sixty
years and I think I'll just stick with it.  To be sure, it's been mostly
performances in large halls--Chicago, New York, Vienna, Berlin and Munich,
houses whose capacity exceeds what initiates to the kind of modern music
we've been talking about could possibly dominate.  As Satoshi Akima posits,
it's chacun a son gout, but when you're just part of a large audience then
the gout belongs to the audience.  If an esoteric circle, such as that of
Adorno & Co., wish to have it their way then they should seek it in
circumstances more to their measure: small auditoria, or listening to
recordings.  Moreover, Pace Mr. Akima, the taste of the run-of-the mill
concert and opera goer is not base; rather, it's relatively elevated, else
he/she would prefer going to pop performances.

As for the point that folks who dislike Mr. Akima's kind of music simply
have not bothered to understand it, how, where,and why did understanding
become equated with liking? Readers can understand Mishima and therefore
dislike what he writes.  Or?

Steve Schwartz who, thank God, is not esoteric and writes not de haut
en bas, tackles Denis Fodor more tellingly with the assertion that music
simply isn't natural.  It doesn't grow like a flower.  Well, no; but it
does have to be perceived and for that one needs a cochlea and neural
networks and all sort of other bits and pieces of nature.  I've read in
some scietific magazine, or on the web, I disremember which it was, that
there is some research well in progress seeking to flesh out a mathematical
relationship beteen the diatonic scales and the formation of the cochlea.
Anyway, it's my claim that we're thoroughly accultured to the sounds that
make up the music that has made it through the ages and that the hexachord
is an essence of this.  "Adorno's Music", the music of an anti-elite elite
that preens itself on its heterodoxy, is not.  If anything, it's anti-CM.

Denis Fodor