I keep finding myself writing these painful missives. By rights I shoudl be kissing up to critics. Afterall, half the time the critic likes the person, and then checks out the art, and the critics view of the art is 50% their view of the person. But then a critic writes something like: ".. he selects music that speaks of its time. " And another critic praises this as making sense. Now, as a card carrying member of the intelligensia - of course I believe that the world would be a better place if people actually said what they meant, meant what they said, and when they invoked tools of logic, they actually followed them. I'm not sure of this - no one can be - but ti is what I believe. Mr. Stienberg, on the other hand, belong to the chattering classes. The phrase "music that speaks of its time" isn't a phrase - one cannot determine the menaing by the definitions of the words. It is, instead, a single word, a single hieroglyphci. One whose true meaning is "this is a person who is part of my club." Because if Stienberg had catually meant "music which speaks of its time." in the 20th Century, they would not have been wasting time with classical music. Classical - by definition - is music which is cabale of resistig the ravages of time, and which is, its structure, able to transcend the limitations of time. That's what being a classic means. If Micheal Stienberg had been a thinker - as opposed ot merely a fine annotator of other people's work and another flunky in the trenches of the great propoganda machine which is our literary culture's substitute for music and art ciriticism - he would have realised that his project was a poor one from the beginning. He should have been listing Frank Sinatra, Rodger's and Hammerstien and Mick Jagger's works. Bob Dylan's works or John Lennon's. If you want to know what was going down in the late 1960's - then "The Times they are a changin'" will tell you more then the entrie output of Roger Sessions and Pierre Boulez combined. Even within the realm of the classical - where is "Rhapsody in Blue" - no other classical work so struck a nerve - both among classical musicians and the general public. The real basis of the list is "Works Micheal Stienberg likes, and thinks of as being representative." Fine, its about his taste, we are, all of us, entitled to our tastes. But what we are not entitled to do is confuse taste with reasoning - or taste with art. Perhaps these are th works that Micheal would annotate the century with - but all that says is "these are the works which I am a partisan of". At which point the list makes no more, and no less, sense than any other "best/favorite" list. Look at the works which mee the objective criterion which *aren't* there. First off, Scriabin's *Prometheus*. No musician so powerfully captured the qasi-millenairian rage which infested pre-revolution Russia - the intoxication with excess and occultism - the creation of cults of personality. Few, if any, works spoke more of, and too, its time than this one. Next - Strauss *Metamorphesen* and *Four Last Songs*, next one of the Britten operas - *Billy Budd*. Berg's *Violin Concerto* - his orchestra pieces are largely reduntant for communication after one has included Schoenberg's and Schoenberg's are largely redundant after including Mahler's. Next - Varese *Poem Electronique* or in fact any music which relies on the realm of the electrical. And so on. Perhaps this is Stienberg';s witness, but at that point, he shouldn't be considered a reliable one. - - - But back to the real problme, the entire project is off of base from its inception - regardless of how well carried out it is. Classicl music is not reportage, and it is not created so that people will have something to chatter about, and something to rationalise their existance over. Micheal write's his list because he is part of that group trained to identify themselves with the 20th century. The victories of the academic modern, and those precursors it claims as its own, are his victories, its strength, his strenght. In itself this is no worse that the various eclisastical histories of Britian that MacCauley wrote in the late 19th centuyr - justifying the imperialism of that age. But they are certainly no better. It isn't that scribblers like Micheal should not be allowed to take Chauvinistic pride of the accomplishments - real or imagined - of people who they deam to be part of their movement. But the very act of describing what motivates his writing shows it to be something which on no account needs to be published, and certainly not taken with any degree of seriousness. In terms of intellectual content, it is no more than listening to a 16 year old who has just discovered the joys of hte electroc guitar trace his history fo the most kick ass albums he's heard. A history of how to get laid with your guitar at least has the virtue of being honest in what it is trying to accomplish. - - - They say that history is written by winners. Not entirely true. History is written by the camp followers of the winners, the people who, eing unable to do, glory in what others have done. Again, nothing wrong with this in the abstract - after all, only in Lake Woebegon can all the children be above average - but in the concrete it means that history that is presented to us, at any given moment, is largely composed of the lies that a small group of people tell themselves so they can get up in the morning. And right now there is a large disconnect between what the larger mass of people need, and wha tthe scribbling classes need. As a result - what is written about classical music is largely irrelevant bird cage liner - because the general public leanrs quickly that the critic is not an accurate guide to what it is they are looking for. And the average person is not a fan of the 20th century per se. Being a fan of the 20th century *an sicht* is a disease of a rather small group of people. but what this shows, at rock bottom, is how secondary classical music is to peopel's thinking. Mr. Stienberg is a writer about classical music, professionally, and yet his project is to make a list of works about a time and place - the job of pop - and in terms which would be familiar to the sports page. Pop and sport are the genres which supoply the norms and templates. Once classical music did. That is the change that lies at the heart of the decline of classical music, and it is being advanced by those within as eagerly as those without. 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