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Date: | Sun, 11 Jun 2000 15:27:57 -0400 |
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Steve Schwartz wrote:
>However, I can say for sure that, despite Sarah Caldwell and the premiere
>of several important operas in that city, Boston has never been an "opera
>town." In his study of Gottschalk, _Bamboula!_, S. Frederick Starr uses
>New Orleans (and, by extension, New York) and Boston as two poles in
>American musical life: essentially, Mediterranean and Germanic.
A sentence that left me waiting for another shoe to drop. (Maybe it
fell too softly for me to hear.) Which city is Mediterranean and which,
Germanic? I can see NY, which I understand can indeed be linked for some
purposes, to New Orleans as Mediterranean, though hardly to the exclusion
of the Germanic. And Boston? I'd have thought it was more English (pace,
the Boston Irish) than Mediterranean or Germanic. I'm reminded of Ned
Rorem's division of European music into "German" and "French", neither
necessarily being based upon composers' nationality. Was the
Mediterranean/German distinction intended to be of the same sort? Whether
it was or not, I'd be curious to read a more detailed explanation for the
distinction if it's possible to present one.
Walter Meyer
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