Christopher Rosevear wrote:

>First impressions and enthusiasms are very often based on some little
>fragment of familiarity accompanied by lots that is new.  So my contention
>stands: it is easier to learn French, Portuguese, Spanish if you have a
>fragment or two of Latin, but you can still learn it if you have no Latin.
>Similarly it is easier to come to terms with 20th Century classical music
>via something more akin to common musical parlance of the vernacular.
>Popular songs are popular often because they are relatively simplistic and
>easily digested; going from Eleanor Rigby to Beethoven string quartets is
>one small step initially, going from Penny Lane to Lulu is another!

This is not a rhetorical question.  If a person who had acquired hearing
in adulthood for the first time through some form of surgery (it's a more
realistic hypothesis than the usual man from Mars) were to be exposed in
random order to music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler,
Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Sessions, and
Babbitt, what music would that person be likely to prefer? On what basis
would that person distinguish the various composers' music? Is there any
reason to believe that the person would start by preferring the earlier
composer and work him or herself up to the later ones?

Walter Meyer