Denis Fodor replies to me:

>Achim Breiling writes:

>>Well, Denis, you wrote: music lovers generally find the atonal and serial
>>stuff unpleasant and ugly.  As I take *generally* as *always* I think you
>>will have a hard time to proove that and I would be interested to see those
>>numbers....
>
>Well, Denis didn't quite write it that way.  It was his contention that
>big-time concert goers generally found avant garde music such as atonal,
>serial, and aleatory ugly.

Sorry Denis, but you wrote in the posting I was originally refering to (from
friday 15.9.):

>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.

There is nothing written about concert goers at all, also in the rest of
that message!  I am not a native speaker of English, thus I apologize if I
might have misunderstood the meaning of the word *generally*.  I agree that
the majority of concert goers dislikes atonal music.  Nevertheless, I can
not agree that music listeners or lovers in general do not like this music!

Denis continues:

>And, of course, it's entirely clear to me that quite a few members of this
>list enjoy the kind of avant garde music that we're talking about here.
>On this, at least, I can give you one of those numbers that you crave:
>932 subscibers, the last time I looked.

Well, this number tells absolutely nothing concerning our problem.  You can
as well tell me the number of inhabitants of Munich.  What we would need to
know is how many of these 932 agree with you thet atonal music is ugly.

I rarely go to classical concerts as really new and adventurous repertoire
is seldomly played and I do not want to spend 50000 - 100000 Lire for a
Brahms symphony or a Beethoven piano concerto (to these I can listen at
home choosing from a large number of different recordings).  I only go to
The concert hall if more than half of the time will be spent for works I
do not know.  Now as Denis pointed out rightly in a *normal* philharomnic
concert in these days 20th century or contemporary works are usually small
fillers between huger standard repertoire works.  I could imagine that most
people who would be interested in these fillers (like me) would not want to
spend the money to listen most of the evening to something else.  Thus, I
suggest that Denis and his fellow concert goers are a bit biased because
they in fact came because of the major works and thus are annoyed about
those nasty fillers.  I myself would rather prefer a different concert
programming, where only works by 20th century and contemporary composers
are played or where only 19th century works or only Baroque works are
performed on one evening.  Then a concert goer could much easier decide
what concert will fit with his musical tastes.

Achim Breiling