Jocelyn Wang writes:

>It may be insulting to Boulez, Carter, and company,
>but I don't see how it's any more insulting to their listeners
than
>those occasional What's-so-great-about-Mozart threads are
>to Mozart lovers.

There is a major difference, in that someone who is not keen on much of
Mozart like me is still capable of following any musical argument that he
may present me.  I know many of his works really quite well - I even like
some of them.  The same goes for Johann Strauss.  In contrast to this is
the attitude that if Boulez's music does not make sense to someone
unaccustomed to dodecophony it must therefore be bad music.  This sounds
likes someone who doesn't read German reading Goethe and concluding he must
be bad because it doesn't make sense and gives one a headache.  There are
plenty of people who feel this way in general about classical music in
general - that if unlike pop music, the idiom does not make sense, it must
therefore be 'bad'.  I don't expect anyone to like either Boulez or Goethe
but I can't any criticism seriously unless it is based on deeply thought
out considered understanding of their scores/texts.

>Many living tonal composers have a hard time even being considered for
>programming because there is the ridiculous attitude among many music
>directors that if it's modern, it has to be [a]tonal.

I presume Jocelyn was meaning to write 'atonal'.  In fact this attitude is
not in the least bit ridiculous, because even amongst the conservatives in
contemporary composition, tonality fails to be such a powerful universal
structural principle that it once was.  Tonality in contemporary
composition is a kind of vestigial pseudotonality to which ears accustomed
to anachronistically tonal popular styles of music necessarily react in
the same way that Jocelyn's ears do to Boulez.  In a funny way they are
absolutely right in doing so.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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