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From: ahearn@convex.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.music
Subject: Re: Re: Why classical music is not popul - (nf)
Message-ID: <39000005@convex.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Aug-84 14:30:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: convex.39000005
Posted: Tue Aug  7 14:30:00 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 10-Aug-84 00:58:11 EDT
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Nf-From: convex!ahearn    Aug  7 13:30:00 1984

#R:hou4b:-107400:convex:39000005:000:2109
convex!ahearn    Aug  7 13:30:00 1984

I'm sorry, but I couldn't let Mark Teribile's remarks pass. In fact,
I'm embarassed by them, even though I'm a rampant classical music fan
myself.

In the first place, I think building myths about the musical erudition of
past generations is pretty silly. I grant you that the leisured classes
may have been more interested in music (and poetry and art, etc.) in 
years gone by, but I doubt that the majority of people are any less musically
accomplished than they ever were. Do you really believe your average farmer
or tradesman ever even *imagined* owning a clavier in Bach's time? True,
he made music with what he had, but working people still do (as the 
underground music movement testifies.)

Second, to base the claim that "hundreds of years of musical development
...(are)..lost in two generations" on the spurious claim that people are 
not as musically aware as they once were is ridiculous. Today, I will 
listen on my Walkman to performances of music by Palestrina and Bach and
Beethoven and Stravinsky (and Patti Smith, the English Beat, the Gang of
Four, and Prince). It would be a simple matter to bring along tapes of
Chinese or Indonesian or African music, or delta blues, or Applachian
folk music. I claim that technology has made possible a more varied and
intense exposure to music than ever before in history. (This argument reminds
me of a friend who greeted my news that I'd just used a computer to
complete a  sophisticated analysis of money-supply growth with a muttered 
comment that "one of these days you'll forget how to add.")

Third, the two previous paragraphs should refute the slanderous assertion
that "the non-performers are interested only in a `song sung for an idiot'."
On the basis of that statement, I can only say thank God I spent the time I 
could have spent playing scales and doing finger exercises studying philos-
ophy and learning to *think*. (And thank God I spend it now *listening* to
music, all kinds, from the whole Earth.)


Joe Ahearn
{allegra, ihnp4, uiucds, ctvax}!convex!ahearn
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ex nihilo nihil fit