Bernard Chasan wrote: >I love lots of twentieth century music, and not just the conservative >stuff. Nonetheless I believe that there is a deep vein of ugliness in >much of this music. Ugliness to match ugly times? Perhaps. And yes, >I know that what I might find ugly to the point of unlistenable, others >find expressive and even beautiful. I think music does not have to be beautiful. It is art: art wants to express and sometimes it wants to express things which are not beautiful, things like anger, grief, ugliness, crime, jealousy etc. Then the music must not be beautiful. I do not want to find Tosca's screaming at the end of Puccini's opera beautiful: it has to be ugly, terrifying. And, yes, modern music cannot sound like Mendelssohn because we do live in different, less harmonic, much more disturbing times. That is why Lloyd-Webber is so disappointing: because the music is too smooth and "beautiful" to be true. Robert Peters [log in to unmask]