Robert Peters wrote: >>I think music does not have to be beautiful. To which Dave Lampson replied: >I think music must contain an essential core of beauty, or it's not music. Robert Peters is in distinguished company--or was. About three score and ten years ago the illuminati started the spin away from the old pleasure that was bound to the hexachord and toward a new taste for unconfined chromaticism. Result: for some seventy years the great majority of music lovers have tried to avoid the likes of Schoenberg and Webern and Boulez and Stockhausen and their atonality and seriality. They find their music unpleasant, ugly. For some reason that I cannot fathom but accept intestinally, the atonal or serial stuff simply sounds awkwardly contrived. It does not sound natural. Of course, I don't know whether I'm right, but I do know that a great many people interested in music either share my feelings or exceed them. To put a point to it--after all, we're dealing with a thread here--music lovers generally find the atonal and serial stuff unpleasant and ugly. They do not feel that these qualities, or lack of them, make ugly music pleasurable. Ugly music is something one dislikes. Even something one loathes. Which is not the same as claiming that the hexachordals won't accept excursions away from what comes naturally. In instances they go for them in a big way--say, in Bach's well-tempered experiments and in Beethoven's late quartets--but they seem to accept them only on the proviso that the piece overall remain anchored to the hexachord. To be sure, there are some very fine and highly intellectual musicians who at bottom consider beautiful and artistic only such music as is exceeddingly complicated. Charles Rosen I think is one of them. But to the mainstream of those seriously hooked on classical music this only demonstrates that the Rosens of the music world are sated with the beauty of cm and are looking for new kicks in the other realm, the realm of ugliness. But the way things look, they're going to have to keep looking, before they succeed, if ever they do, in selling the run-of-the-mill music buff ugliness and displeasure. Denis Fodor