Denis Fodor:

>You're probably right in hazarding that their names don't vault to mind
>as models of the composer-within-the-canon.  But composers of serious, or
>classical, music they are.  That still leaves them non-canon composers,
>along with, say, Miklos Rozsa, and Williams, and Webb who at least have
>mass audiences in the movie houses they compose for.

I am not sure what you mean to say here.  Just what does it take to get
into your canon? Not a mass audience, clearly, so you are left with unnamed
authorities, I think.  What are their criteria? What I meant, though, is
that some of the music of the composers I mentioned can have strong and
lasting appeal, on its own terms.  Some of Handel is boring in comparison
to some of Stoelzel and I actually prefer the symphonies of Dittersdorf
to most of Mozart's.  Shapero's symphony is a much greater work than, say,
Schubert's First.  It and Thompson's Second have thrilled me for four
decades.  If these works are not part of some received canon, so what?
and so much the worse for it.

Jim Tobin