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Date: | Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:52:08 -0500 |
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Jocelyn Wang writes:
>>The overt hostility to non-tonal music is amazing. You'd think that its
>>existence has caused lasting damage to classical music lovers.
>
>It has. It has rendered a large number of listeners unreceptive to almost
>anything post-Ravel. I understand being wary (I am), but unwillingness
>to give something new a shot IS closed-minded. The worst of the damage is
>that composers who do write melodic, tonal works (and they do exist) have
>audiences that often react like an animal that flinches as soon as it sees
>someone do anything that even resembles raising his hand. That, sir, is
>lasting damage.
The question really becomes whether atonal music "caused" this. I'd love
to see something other than a parade of anecdotes on this point. Right
now, it's simply a point of faith. I don't expect you or anyone else on
this list to provide that kind of study. I can say that you'll also have
to account for how atonality turned people off to *all* classical music.
>Bernard Chasan <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
>>Ms. Wang unhappily exhibits a dogmatic intolerance which a bit surprising
>>in a person who runs a concert series.
>
>Ah, there's a bit of the old atonal-lovers' mantra: I don't like what you
>want me to like, therefore I exhibit a dogmatic intolerance.
Again, you do have a dogma and it has made you intolerant. There's nothing
necessarily wrong with dogma - in fact, there are definite advantages.
It's made you intolerant in the sense that you don't judge or even have to
listen to the individual work - in short, just what you were complaining
about the intolerance of audiences against most modern music.
>Secondly, someone elsewhere described it as a 20th-Century concert series,
>or something like that, and it is not that. We do perform a lot of works
>by living composers. We have an enormously talented Composer-In-Residence
>in R.C. Barrows. Many unknowns send us their works, and if we and the
>performers like them, they get played. (So much for being closed-minded.)
Only so far as atonal works (and repeats) are concerned. I made that
claim, because the programs you've posted that I remember have been that.
I was trying to actually point out that you had no animus toward the 20th
century as such, just a piece of it.
Steve Schwartz
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