Denis Fodor wrote:

>America's great orchestras including, of course, that of Philadelphia,
>have no outstanding national canon of classical music to sustain; nor, for
>that matter, do the British or the Dutch or the Spanish or the Portuguese
>or the Poles (though maybe the Czechs and the Hungarians do).  So, for the
>Phillies or,say, the Concertgebouw, the good news would be that they're not
>typecast under the Fodor system.  They are free to excel at whatever thing
>was of their choosing.

I suspected that that was your view, so I'm breathing a sigh of relief!
But actually, as I was thinking about this subject, a parallel with
linguistic dialects occurred to me.  Long ago, when it was difficult enough
to travel from one valley to the next that many people lived their whole
lives in their home village, it was easy for dialects to be preserved.
Now, with all of the world-circling media available, whole languages, much
less dialects, are dying out.  (I heard a horrifying piece of news the
other day: American accents are the latest thing in London!)

Could it be that the musical specialties Denis refers to are equally
threatened? After all, a very good musician (and all of these orchestras,
by definition, are staffed with the best) with complete command of her/his
instrument can pretty well play any style she/he hears, so what keeps an
orchestra in location X from doing an almost perfect replica of the style
of location Y?

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]