Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>Jocelyn Wang writes:
>
>>It may be insulting to Boulez, Carter, and company, but I don't see
>>how it's any more insulting to their listeners than those occasional
>>What's-so-great-about-Mozart threads are to Mozart lovers.
>
>There is a major difference, in that someone who is not keen on much of
>Mozart like me is still capable of following any musical argument that he
>may present me.  I know many of his works really quite well - I even like
>some of them.  The same goes for Johann Strauss.  In contrast to this is
>the attitude that if Boulez's music does not make sense to someone
>unaccustomed to dodecophony it must therefore be bad music.

Ah, this tired, old, and utterly false argument yet again: people who
dislike atonality dislike it because they don't understand it, or they just
haven't heard enough of it to be used to it.  Please...  I DO understand
it, and I HAVE heard plenty of it, although I admit not being accustomed
to it, much the same way that I would never become accustomed to it if
you were to replace my mattress with shards of broken glass.

>>Many living tonal composers have a hard time even being considered for
>>programming because there is the ridiculous attitude among many music
>>directors that if it's modern, it has to be [a]tonal.
>
>I presume Jocelyn was meaning to write 'atonal'.

That is correct.

>In fact this attitude is not in the least bit ridiculous, because even
>amongst the conservatives in contemporary composition, tonality fails
>to be such a powerful universal structural principle that it once was.

This is patently closed-minded and dismissed out of hand any contemporary
tonal music merely because of when it was written.  Even Schoenberg said
that there was plenty of great music to be written in the key of C major.

Jocelyn Wang
Culver Chamber Music Series
www.bigfoot.com/~CulverMusic