Len Fehskens wrote:

>Further, your inference that because classical music, though good, is
>"marginal" for most people in general, it should also be the case that
>atonal music, because it is marginal for most classical music listeners,
>must also be good, is just as odd a syllogism.
>
>I, like many other classical music listeners, admit that my ears and brain
>have limits, and the "logic" of some music exceeds them.  That doesn't make
>that music bad, any more than it makes me closeminded.

It's likely that the reason I prefer the Razumovsky quartets to Beethoven's
last five is that late Beethoven exceeds the limits of my ears and brain.
I could make this the first leg of another unsound syllogism:

1) I like late Beethoven less than middle-period Beethoven because the
logic in late Beethoven is too deep for me.

2) I like Boulez (much) less than late Beethoven.

Therefore:
3) The logic in Boulez is (much) deeper than in late Beethoven.

There might be several reasons why I could fail to understand something.
Three which come immediately to mind are:  it might be too deep for me; it
might be in a foreign language; it might be gibberish, and I'm looking for
a meaning which isn't there.  I don't believe that Boulez can be so much
deeper than late Beethoven.  Since there do seem to be people who enjoy
Boulez, I suppose the "foreign language" explanation is better than the
"gibberish" one.  Quite why a foreign language is thought to be necessary
when there's so much still going on in the traditional CM language escapes
me too.

Peter Varley
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