John Smyth wrote:

>What I miss in Bach, (and it's not his fault), is orchestral
>color, and changes in meter and dynamics within single movements.  His
>music, *within movements,* is infused with what I would call a sort of
>"mono-emotionalism".  There is no sense of ambiguity and mystery.  The
>Baroque is characterized by logic, restraint, and understatement; and while
>one can always find exceptions, the era as a whole just doesn't turn me on.

In my first college semester I took Music 101 (yes, that's what it was
called), taught by Professor William Austin, who maybe then, but certainly
later, had acquired a reputation in musical circles.  I'd signed up for
the course as what I thought would be an easy filler course and found it
instead one of the most demanding courses I was to take and one in which I
probably learned more than in most others I subsequently enrolled (which
admittedly is not saying much).  The course had no text book; we were to
use the money budgeted for texts to buy a subscription to the university's
chamber music series.  (That's how I first became acquainted w/ Bartok's
Fourth Quartet.)

Each week we were given a list of recordings to listen to in the
university's music library.  During one such week the assignment consisted
of just two works, Rimsky-Korsakov's *Sheherazade* and J.S.  Bach's Second
Brandenburg Concerto.  I suspect, though I no longer remember for certain,
that these works were assigned to illustrate how two composers, living in
different times and in different places, and writing in different styles,
wrote works for the orchestras of their times.  Both were new works for me
at the time.  Each in its own way captured my fascination.  Each remained
a work to which I've turned over the years for listening enjoyment, neither
at the expense of the other.

Walter Meyer