Didrik Schiele: >Seemingly it is popular among a (rather large) fraction of people who take >interest in contemporary music and want it to be "beautiful" a.k.a "sweet" It was immensely popular for a time among a very large group of people, most of whom had no interest in classical music but who did in fact find this work beautiful, I assume. (It isn't "sweet," but poignant.) One of the most interesting things about this phenomenon is the enormous extension of the usual time-frame/attention-span that audiences for popular works of music normally exhibit. Jim Tobin