Joseph Sowa: >I think that the exodous from emotion in music by the "professionals" is >because they got mad that normal people recognized it was there, too. Not if you actually read the people who proposed it. It began as a reaction against what was felt to be *excessively* emotional performances - performances which ignored score indications in favor of the interpreter's Higher Truth. Later, other people wanted to say that the emotion is in you, and the music acts upon it - a view, incidentally, that strikes me as fairly accurate. How this occurs is rather an interesting question, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing necessarily to do with the actual emotion of the composer. People have swooned over works written in cold blood and have condemned as "mathematical" (whatever that may mean) music that composers have felt very deeply indeed. Vaughan Williams provides examples of the first and Brahms examples of the second. Steve Schwartz