John Bell Young, with quill superbly sharpened to kill, writes in the
coldest of blood:

>...The layman, the sometime concert goer, the melomane (as the French so
>charmingly call him), is one whose principal mode of musical engagement is
>hearing, not listening...

I feel addressed.  As far as this layman's concerned, this thread's
actually about melody and that is what a paragraph is to a writer--either
a Mickey Spillane paragraph, or Henry James paragraph...

>Some may be perfectly content to allow art to stagnate as they hold on
>to old, petrified ideas.  That's rather like dressing up with no place
>to go.  But for those of us who prefer a more imaginative route, one that
>celebrates life, not death, music is an art form whose time has not yet
>come, but continues, along with the elements that define it, to evolve.

Again I feel addressed.  John's view, here expressed, reminds me of
Theodor Adorno. As, really, a philosopher of aesthetics, he claimed for
himself merely the role of a critic.  Why critic? Because he negated (=
criticized) everything in art that was established.  I supposed he was
cued by Beaudelaire who insisted that modern art had to be against the art
of the past in order to qualify as _modern_ art.  Of course, Adorno wisely
avoided going that far--he considered Bruckner modern--by allowing that
the assay of art's legitimacy needed to be probed via the process of
dialectic.  In this dialectic Adorno, the Listener, always chose the
negative(=critical) side for himself.  Me, the Hearer, tends toward the
positive side.  I prefer the art of Byrd to the art of Cage.

But I do admit to being smitten overall by John Bell Young's tour de force.
Certainly worth hearing.

Denis Fodor                             Internet:[log in to unmask]