Stirling Newberry wrote:

>The middle movement from the symphony I am working
>on is available as an mp3 file at:
>
>http://www.mp3.com/ssn

One of the most fascinating books on music I have the pleasure to read is
Stendhal's "Briefe ueber den beruehmten Komponisten Joseph Haydn" (Essays
on the Famous Composer Joseph Haydn).  I picked up a 1922 publications in
a second hand book shop printed in old fashion Germanic script.  I still
don't know if an English translation exists, but it is fascinating as a
document of a contemporary talking about a contemporary.  What really
struck me was the fact that people then really cared about contemporary
music (albeit at the expense of older music).  So much so that The Academy
of Ancient Music in London played Handel.  If Handel was ancient to Haydn's
contemporaries then a Bartok or Schoenberg should be ancient to us:  yet
they are considered 'modern'!

Today we are all too content to listen to yet another version of the
Beethoven 5th Symphony as if we haven't heard it often enough.  There are
probably people who take no interest at all in contemporary composition.
How many of you are looking forward to looking forward to the completion
of a certain performer's Mahler, or Haydn symphonic cycle, rather than the
completion of a certain composer's next work in progress? How many of you
have lamented that some composer of the past languished in obscurity when
you could be doing something now to stop history from repeating? Shame on
you all!  (And probably me too...).  But here Stirling Newberry has given
us all an opportunity to make good.  Not only that but it was with great
pleasure that I listened for the first time in what seemed all too long
to a freshly minted composition of great depth and pathos.  I don't think
I do that often enough these days.

There is a pleasure in discovering a new composition, like the fascination
of the acrid smell of fresh paint on a canvas which has barely dried or
like the aroma of freshly baked bread.  It is the joy of discovery, and of
fresh morning air.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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