Sorry to be so long to respond...

James Tobin wrote:

>alternate musical interpretations.  To avoid that you might just want
>to say that Shostakovich's music is strongly expressive of emotion and
>Prokofiev's is more often simply pure music without such strong emphasis.
>There you may or may not be right, but the discussion is more likely to
>stay more in the musical realm.

I guess, what I was thinking was that for me, in Prokofiev's music, I am
more aware of process than I am listening to the music of Shostakovich.

>And even there we get people like Stravinsky saying that music is
>powerless to express anything at all.  I think we might agree that
>Stravinsky was just plain wrong about this, but I am sure we could
>find people to give us an argument there, too.

I believe we can find that music will express many things to us, emotion,
narrative, etc.  But I believe, that ultimately, these are subjective.
For me, notes are the objective content of music.  I wonder if this is
what Stravinsky may have meant?

Karl