Karl Miller: >Could you elaborate a bit more about my use of the word, "about." OK--though we both may live to regret this--and as briefly as I can, because a discussion of this could turn into maddening semantic quibbling. What you originally said was: >Reflecting on your comments and others, I wonder if one could say that >Shostakovich's writing is more about emotion and Prokofiev's writing is >more often about music? By "writing" I assume you mean their musical composition, in effect their music itself. So if you say music is "about emotion," somebody is sure to jump up and ask, "Do you mean to say that particular music REFERS meaningfully to particular emotions in a way we can specify verbally?" If you say yes, then--even though you might be right--you may be subjected to a lecture on linguistics, in addition to suggestions of alternate musical interpretations. To avoid that you might just want to say that Shostakovich's music is strongly expressive of emotion and Prokofiev's is more often simply pure music without such strong emphasis. There you may or may not be right, but the discussion is more likely to stay more in the musical realm. (As it has so far, thank goodness.) And even there we get people like Stravinsky saying that music is powerless to express anything at all. I think we might agree that Stravinsky was just plain wrong about this, but I am sure we could find people to give us an argument there, too. Jim Tobin