A young lady of my acquaintance wrote the following for a short class assignment in an Intro to Western Music class. I am pleased to see her write this in part because, when I made her acquaintance when she was 17, she was at most dimly aware of the existence of CM. I am curious what people think of her notion that it may have been normal for people to socialize during concerts in the 18th century (my guess: in the home, yes, at church, no). I recall once hearing Ravi Shanker in concert, who mentioned that the musicians on stage vocally supported one another because, as he noted, Western audiences were silent during performance, whereas in his native India he received vocal responses from the audience during a performance. Do the musicologists on the List think that Descartes, or Cartesian thinking, helped shape music of the Baroque? Finally, if anyone knows of Baroque opera being performed in the Philadelphia area in the next couple of months, I'd appreciate your passing it along. When I suggested Shostakovich's "Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk" as a graduation present, the young lady mentioned she'd prefer to hear a Baroque opera. It is noted in Kerman's Listen that Baroque music somehow keeps its distance from the listener (Kerman, p. 99), even when it is supposed to be emotional. This is the general impression I have always had of famous pieces from the late Baroque period: its formulaic and contained quality seemed to demonstrate emotions, but somehow in an impersonal sort of way. It was hardly surprising to discover that musical composition of this period was shaped largely by the ideas of thinkers such as Rene Descartes, whose classification of the "affections" directly influenced their expression in music. Baroque music was highly schematized because of Descartes' idea that human emotions can be ordered and so it followed that the representation of such emotions in music should also be ordered and controlled. Johann Mattheson was a musician who applied Descartes' ideas to musical composition, declaring that in order for music to fulfill its purpose as a "moral lesson," emotions should be "clipped or held by the reins" (Taruskin and Weiss, p. 218). This holding-the-music-by-the-reins effect is something I hear in Baroque music such as Vivaldi's Concerto in G. The first movement of this piece has a ritornello that returns three times, becoming more dramatic than before each time. We can see these ritornellos and the expressive solos between them as out-of-control emotions that are allowed to run their course, but only to a certain limit. Vivaldi ends the movement with a simple restatement of the first ritornello, drawing back the passions into an orderly state. The second movement of this piece does the same thing, with a theme in the beginning, variations and solos that are fast and dramatic, but then, they are reined in by the theme which returns at the end. This variation form was commonly used in Baroque music, perhaps serving as a musical blueprint for expressing the emotions as Descartes classified and ordered them. I thought Samuel Sharp's account of opera-going in 18th century Naples was very interesting because of what seemed to be the Neopolitan audience's lack of interest in the music. Maybe opera in the 18th century was like rock concerts today, a place where young people can gather to scope each other out, gossip, pass the time, all under the guise of the purpose of listening to music. Samuel Sharp recounts a joke he heard about people in Naples who go to "see, not to hear an Opera" (Taruskin and Weiss, p.233), which I think ironically is the truth. Considering that Baroque opera halls were probably highly ornate, if not downright distractingly gaudy, and that there are characters in costumes involved, it was very much a spectacle to see, perhaps even more than to listen. It is also interesting that concert-goers get quite irritated nowadays when you talk during a performance (of course, this only applies to "classical music" concerts), although it may have been commonplace and even normal for people to socialize during concerts in the 18th century, when the availability of recorded music had not yet made live performances a rare opportunity to appreciate in silence. Larry