Bernard Chasan replies to Karl Miller and Steve Schwartz went just a bit
overboard and wrote:

>>But there is a puritanical strand in all of this- how much better to play
>>music than just to LISTEN to music!!!

Steve Schwartz  responded in courteous and reasonable words:

>Guilty.  Actually, I recognize that there is such a thing as performing
>talent (something I have very little of, incidentally), and not everyone
>has it.  My point is this: understand music as best you can.  If you can
>play, do so, because that will provide its own insight into musical works.
>There's no question that I know works I've performed far better than works
>I haven't......   I don't say that performers are better than listeners,
>but the experience of getting up a work for performance differs from the
>experience of just listening.  You can get insight both ways, but why block
>either road?

I can buy that, based on my short choral experience.  THe Nelson Mass
will always have a special meaning because I sang in it.  But my main
relationship to c.m.  is as a LISTENER.  We listeners may be at the bottom
of the classical food chain, but we spend real money on concert tickets and
cds.  More important, we play an absolutely essential role spiritually and
metaphysically.  Composers write, I assume, for themselves, for musicians,
but mainly for listeners.  (Composers on this list will no doubt comment
on this assumption.) I once happened to be discussing Bartok's wonderful
Second Quartet with an amateur chamber music player.  In his most
condescending way he told me that of course, you really couldn't appreciate
the music unless you played it.  I say to that:  horse feathers!!!  Bartok
was communicating, I assume, to more than four listeners.  And I assume as
well that he was thinking of the quartet as the source of a rich and
complex sound field and listeners in the same room as the receivers and
interpreters of the sound field.  I know that many on this list consider
that the music exists in the score, and I can understand that.  But sooner
or later those directions must be used to generate a sound field, and
that step is not meaningful unless there are listeners.  Music ultimately
requires sound, as surely as a sculpture requires a chunk of stone.  IMHO,
as always.

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University