Ian Crisp:

>Since then my attitude to recorded music has changed, and I now place a
>much higher priority on live music than on recordings, which I think are
>rather like stuffed animals in natural history museums - useful for study
>and as a reminder of the real living things, but very very different from
>them in most of the ways that matter.

A provocative point of view which I cannot share, because you don't get a
chance to hear more than a very small fraction of the range of available
music live.  So it is perhaps a self indulgence to use recorded music to
reach practically the entire repertory of western music from the twelth
century to this year, but it is an opportunity which I cannot pass up.
Franz Schmidt's Third Symphony live in Boston? Don't hold your breath.
The piano music of Mompou? Maybe within the next five years.  the Choros
number 11 of Villa Lobos? Get real!!  But for the cd collector, it's all
there tonight.  So whatever losses must be endured from listening to
records versus live music,(and I am not sure what Ian has in mind) the
payoff is huge.  (IMHO, as usual.)

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University