I write:

>>Why is it necessary for the tonal/atonal* argument to go so far past the
>>simple issue of personal like and dislike, almost becoming a quasi-moral
>>issue of which one must permanently take a side? Wouldn't it be odd if
>>someone on here said in passing that he didn't like dark meat, and
>>suddenly the whole list was flooded with pro-dark meat/pro-white meat
>>postings, with even the list dignitaries jumping into the fray,
>>ceremoniously delivering wax-sealed proclamations for or against?

Pablo writes:

>You're right, John.  However, let's see why does this discussion returns
>in various threads.  By the way, your analogy of dark/white meat is very
>good in order to understand this kind of polemiques: do you remember what
>happened at the first century A.D. in Antioch?.  Read the Facts of the
>Apostles (11: 5-9)

Perhaps this is why listeners and composers imagine themselves compelled to
take sides:

If instead of saying that I liked white meat, I called myself, (or was
designated), a "pectoiphage," or a "stethovore," (those lovely, warm
words combining Greek and Latin roots), can you see what how this changes
perception? Each carries with it a cultural baggage for composer and
listener--begging questions of origin, cause, predilection; to name a few.
And so consider the words "A-tonal" or "Serial-ist" in the same way--
"Act", (Schoenberg: I'm an atonal *Composer*), becomes "aim," (Schoenberg,
desperately trying to put the cat back in the bag: "I'm NOT an *Atonal*
composer.) Here's another way of looking at it: An act can be seen as one
point on an xy graph, but add the weightiness of a label, and suddenly you
have two points, and an implied direction.

Can one find that obligatory statement, "realizing that the winds of
progress had passed him by...." in the liner notes or biographies of any
conservative composers *before* the 20th century? The end of Mahler's life
overlapped w/ the beginning of Schoenberg's, and yet, AFAIK, Mahler was
fascinated, but not intimidated or worried that his music would suddenly
be rendered obsolete by Schoenberg's ideas.

Could some 20th-century conservative/innovative angst and polarization
regarding personal aesthetic value and "properness" of direction, (not that
art *should* have direction), be attributed to classifications where the
evocation, (as Schoenberg above seems to have noticed), takes on a life of
own?

John Smyth