Steve Schwartz wrote:

>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.

I think I still stand by what until now was my one and only post to
this thread, in which I essentially advised the lady whose tentative
preferences for starting a classical music collection contained only one
work written before 1900 that it was a list of great works, singularly free
from fluff, but an unlikely one for people starting to listen to classical
music although this didn't mean that she might not find any or all of them
fascinating.  I avoided then, as I wish to do now, any comments that might
fuel a debate such as has ensued.

It suspect, however, that even if a person can appreciate a composer of
the last hundred years w/out having familiarized himself w/ the composers
that had come before, s/he's still absorbing the earlier music, if only
indirectly, as every composer (except the very first) has been exposed
to the music of his own predecessors.  While that earlier influence may
be more obscured in some composers than in others, I would suggest that,
somehow, in some way, virtually all of today's music is haunted by the
ghosts of earlier composers.  My statement may be a stretch if applied to
Cage's 4'33" or to Stockhausen's sonata for crashing towers, but I think
it would apply to the composers on Peggy Lucero's list.

>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.

While I know this doesn't affect the arguments herein one way or the other,
I just want to remark that, I think "La ci darem' la mano" one of the
finest seduction arias that I know.  Since there is no seduction involved
in *Tristan* (mutual contempt transforms into mutual attraction, thanks to
a love potion), I would think comparison of the eroticism in *Tristan* to
the sex games in *Don Giovanni* (a favorite opera of mine, along w/
*Tristan*, but in which I find nothing erotic) somewhat inapposite.

Walter Meyer