Bernard Chasan wrote:

>it is a simple matter where you get into a situation where you can't
>possibly listen to your entire collection in the time alotted to you.

Good point.  And truer than ever as that collection continues to grow.  And
in the matter of new music? It can't possibly compete with the works in and
out of your collection you have listened to repeatedly over a lifetime with
different levels of maturity and understanding.  I recently calculated I
had listened to Brahms' Fourth Symphony about 35-40 times in my life.  And
after reading Gunther Schuller's analysis of the symphony in his new book
"The Compleat Conductor," I listened carefully yet another time to various
parts of each movement of the symphony of the five different versions in my
collection.

This latest "audit" of Brahms' Fourth, counting the repeated references to
Schuller's analysis in between "listenings," ate up exactly two and a half
hours during one recent Saturday afternoon, before my wife came home and
found something better for me to do.  As a result I never did get to listen
to Robert Levin's reconstruction of Mozart's Requiem, something that was in
the back of my mind to do that day.

Now, I have ordered Aaron Rabushka's Concerto for Clarinets and Chamber
Orchestra which I have never heard.  When I get around to that one hearing
it deserves, am I going to "know" it the same as I know the Brahms Fourth?
The first time I heard Brahms' Fourth I hated it because it didn't sound
anywhere near as good as Brahms' First.  It was 25 years before I began to
see the Fourth was the more genuinely creative work, and the symphony's
final passacaglia possibly the finest thing Brahms had written.  The point
is how many times will I get to listen to the Rabushka, and do I have
another 25 years?

Bernard Chasan suggests that a passionate collector is a dispassionate
listener, and that if music is too accessible, the great works become
wallpaper.  In my case, the rule is never to play the music unless I
have the time to listen.  Accessibility was never the problem.  Time
increasingly is.

John Dalmas
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