Rick Mabry wrote: >As a thought experiment, does anyone believe that we could, by force >of culture, reverse this? If a person were raised in an environment >in which (our) sad tunes were played for happy occasions and vice versa, >would that work without drugs, beatings, etc? there was much talk on the radio this past week as the anniversary day of Toscanini's playing Barber's Adagio as a stand-alone came. For some reason this caught the attention of a number on NPR programs (I guess that they have nothing better to discuss). One person pointed out that, whereas this has become our national funeral music, it was considered by some well-acquainted with it as "music to make love by". Indeed one choreographer obtained Barber's blessing to use it as a ballet segment for such activities (this of course besides the string quartet mvt., the Agnus Dei, and the Adagio for Strings stand-alone). The same is often said of Mahler's Adagietto (symphony no.5). Often used as funeral music but originally quite likely a love piece for Alma. We who lived with the Kennedy funerals hear both often as funereal and profoundly sad and those associations have been learned and are not inherent to the music. Cheers, Yoel