Denis Fodor replies to Don Satz:

>>Although I am aware of the Received Canon, I do not accept it since it
>>does not correspond to my musical preferences.  In the final analysis,
>>each of us possesses our own Received Canon, and it likely shifts some
>>over time as well.
>
>You may have your preferences and you express them very well for the
>benefit of this list.  But the canon is about the nub of things, and much
>less about how they're expressed.  And the way we get to the nub of things
>is by seeking, and establishing, a consensus-- necessarily a societal,
>not an individual undertaking.

Tell that to Meister Eckhart.  Really, I think this argument is coming down
to Catholics vs.  Protestants -- received tradition vs.  the individual
conscience.

>You sift the opinions of the established authorities in order to set up
>a paradigm for what is good.

Oh boy!  Who exactly are these established authorities and who
establishes them? Is there a ballot? Do we ask for a consensus among
individual authorities as well? Do we, for example, take a Haydn expert
at face value on the worth of a particular Haydn piece? How about a
Stockhausen expert on the worth of a Stockhausen piece? It seems to me
that no one group -- composer, performer, critic, scholar, commercial
agent, or listener -- establishes this consensus.  And, once we let in
listeners, we seem to let in only certain listeners -- the ones who agree
with us.  Most of us wouldn't let in, for example, the teens driven from
malls by classical music or, for that matter, most of the educated American
middle class who have no idea who, for example, Bruckner is, let alone who
have heard Bruckner's music.  Thus, we tend to construct a consensus which
is not so much societal but which agrees with our personal view.

Again, I'm not quite sure why a consensus is desirable.  You contend it
gives you the advantage of establishing a paradigm of the good.  I've never
seen such a paradigm, so I tend to doubt this.  Far more important to me,
at any rate, is to try to understand what's before me in its own terms.  It
seems to me you can establish a paradigm of what you find good among what
you yourself like.  Since life is short, you may as well please yourself.

Furthermore, this Received Canon has changed historically.  Indeed, it
keeps changing as composers' stocks go up and down.  Even if we were to add
no one else -- and the RC membership has been fairly stable for perhaps 50
years or more -- the canon would probably change as we moved the statuary
in and out.  Is Sibelius in or out these days? If the canon changes, what
does this say for the permanent "nub?" The argument is that the permanence
of the canon guarantees something about the truth of the paradigm.  It
seems to me that the paradigm is only historically, rather than
Platonically, true, and only for a brief moment.

I realize music of this century in particular confuses many intelligent
people.  But the idea that individual taste is confirmed by some ethereal
standard, however arrived at, usually points up the insecurity people feel
toward their own taste.  This is sad.  The explanations and justifications
for the universality of individual taste become stranger and more
desperate.  The Judgment of History changes, mainly because people change
their minds and persuade others.  History, after all, doesn't exercise
judgment; people do.  The Hardwired Brain is terra incognita -- we don't
have the schematics for the brain, let alone the mind, which is what
apprehends art.  I think it more healthy to admit we like what we like
without having to apologize (which is what these justifications come down
to).

>Consider the way you couch your critiques: the discourse depends for
>its intelligibility on a canon of syntax, semantics, and the way musical
>criticism uses it to get across its meanings.

I'm not sure what point you're answering.  If it's that music has a
grammar like prose discourse, I disagree.  If it's that shared conventions
make meaning, I'd agree.  But I would add that conventions are not
permanent and that, in music at any rate, new ones get created and shared
and old ones get discarded.  Most classical-music listeners don't consider
Don Giovanni's seduction aria, for example, particularly sexy music in the
wake of Tristan.

Steve Schwartz