It is astonishing to note that some subscribers to this list approach music
not as an art to be appreciated, or as a medium to test one's maturing
powers of discrimination and taste, but rather as an opportunity to join
in partisan battle for this composer or that composer, as if matters of
discrimination and taste had no relevancy.  As if all that mattered is not
the music, but the composer's name, the composer's reputation.

These partisans are absolutists.  Each and every note written by their
particular champion is sacrosanct; moreover, any criticism of one or more
of the works of their hero is simplistically interpreted as a blanket
condemnation of all of the composer's works.  Dare to mention in a
statement about one composer a contrasting statement about another
composer, and right away: an almost puerile dichotomy arises.  It is X vs.
Y, A vs.  B.  The armor is donned.  The battle joined.

It is astonishing because in my experience people who enjoy classical
music are generally more serene and mature, more educated and sophisticated
than the vast majority of people who will not listen to it under any
circumstances.  I am told the average age of those who buy classical
records and who attend classical concerts rises yearly.  Must it not follow
then that we are all graying in wisdom as well as in our hair? Our powers
of discrimination and taste being tuned yet finer and finer?

A professor of literature once told me that appreciating poetry is a
solitary vice, one that seldom can be shared.  That was the case, he said,
because if one truly knows poetry, one will find that too many other people
one might want to share the experience with only know reputations.  Unless
you answer the question, Who wrote that?, they will not know how to
respond; and if you deviously attribute the poem to a well known poet
before you read it, they are sure to say they loved it.  The one thing he
wanted me to remember from the course was that there were not many bad
poets inside the pantheon, but an awful lot of bad poems outside it.

So I say, why not leave the great composers in the pantheon, and be honest
about the music outside?

John Dalmas
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