Robert Peters replies to Leon Le Leu: >>It is very easy for us to condemn Strauss now for staying in Germany >>under Hitler but what would we have done? > >I cant speak for you but I would have emigrated. I cannot live without >freedom and in the company of people who enjoy taking other peoples >freedom. This may be so; I wouldn't know. I'd never want to defend those who stood idly by, but feel it diminishes the very few who resisted and rebelled against their leaders, neighbours and times, to consider that ordinarily decent, fair-minded people would be capable of responding in such a way. Not so for most fair-minded people of our day: it would be indecent even to consider otherwise. Then again, many of the seemingly decent now stand by in apparent silence while structures that we all once erected at great cost are systematically taken apart, some say irreversibly. So let's just say I'm of two minds about just how politically enlightened we've all become. On a related subject, and a musical one this time, just this morning CBC radio played the Martin Luther King Jr "I have a dream" speech. I was struck by the man's astonishing clarity of vision, and that not one of those stirring words sounds imbalanced, dated or overwrought. Beyond that, though, it struck me just how *musical* a composition that speech is: not only its pacing & cadences, but his seemingly careful attention to rises & falls in volume, the balances between cool vs fiery rhetoric, and also between the more mundane vs moving passages. I don't think it downplays that moment's greatness to guess that careful rehearsal went into its composition, with close attention to pauses, intonations, the crowd's expected responses, etc. I'm not sure what the historical record would show, but: does anyone else feel this way? Bert Bailey