Steve Schwartz wrote:

>Sure.  At one point, to hear music, most people had to play it themselves.
>Technology has eliminated this requirement.  Of course, I don't know for
>sure and would be happy to find myself wrong.  How many on this list - not
>academic or professional musicians - read music? How many can play a Bach
>two-part invention or the slow movement of a Mozart sonata? If someone
>handed out full scores to a Beethoven symphony, how many people could
>follow it?

I play piano (fairly advanced), sang in our San Francisco symphony chorus
for 8 years, play bass, tenor, alto, and soprano recorders, and spent about
12 years playing harpsichord, continuo and solo repertoire.

I'll say one thing that happened as a result of that:  I've heard far less
recordings than most listeners in classical-music groups.  Many I've met
play no instruments and many don't read music.  But they spend hours a day
listening.  They are also among the harshest critics, in my experience.  I
think that those who go through the actual playing of some of these things
tend to be a little more forgiving or a little more empathetic.

>For example, Charlie Rose (a US chat show with intellectual aspirations)
>falls all over himself to get novelists like Paul Auster or Dom DeLillo or
>Toni Morrison on his program.  When he has anyone from classical music on,
>it's a performer.  He doesn't ask Pierre Boulez about his music, but about
>other things.  He doesn't talk to composers as composers.  He barely talks
>to them at all.

I think that it's because he has a common language with novelists.
Classical Music is a language that's quite specialized.  And, in this
country, it's not valued much in that many early schools have cut music
education to skin & bones where they exist at all.

>I would say you're right about poetry and CM, but not about fiction.
>For some reason, that art still seems to matter culturally.

Common language style and experience?

Andrys in Berkeley
http://www.andrys.com/books.html   search sheet music, videos, CDs
http://www.andrys.com/cbooks.html  newer classical music books