Robert Peters to Bernard Chasan:

>>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.
>
>Thank you for these sentences!  I am a very poor reader of scores but a
>(hopefully) pretty good listener.  If it was right that music exists in the
>score I would feel like excluded from a puritan's esoteric club.  What good
>is a piece of music without the listener? (Or is a meal already there in
>the recipe? - Hooray for pragmatic handling of all matters musical.)

It's funny to read this opinions.  People who don't read music always
have this sort of self-defensive reactions.  A "classic" of this consist
of starting a meatphysical discussion adressed to prove that music doesn't
exists without sound or without listeners.  My question is:  what are you
defending of?.  I don't know that esoteric club from which Peter feels
himself excluded, but if it does actually exists, I don't think that Peter
is missing anything good.  I suppose that everybody will agree to this
"obvious hexalogue":

a) The ability to read music is a tool, not a blessed or magical state of
musical understanding.

b) Being a tool, that ability only has meaning if you want to perform
certain types of music, or if you want to study some technical issues of
it.

c) No player or composer is better fitted to "understand" music just
because of his condition.

d) No good music can be understood only by playing it.  (That's stupid:
is just like saying to a player that "music can be fully understood only
by composing it")

e) Music do exist at the score, and certainly can exist without a listener,
but....  what do we care?

f) What the hell means "a better understanding of music"?

OK?

Pablo Massa
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