On 22 Jul 2005 at 19:48, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Jul 22, 2005, at 7:07 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > You're making the same mistake as the Texas rulemakers. > > No, I'm not. > > > You're looking at "normal" for the population of men. > > > > We're looking at "normal" for individuals. > > No, what you are doing is misreading my words in order to play games > with the word "normal". I explicitly stated that I'm not passing > judgment on anyone but only stating the fact that the physical > mechanism for countertenor singing is different. You chose to ignore > that and rebut an imaginary person who is arguing that countertenors > are abnormal, inferior, and wrong. I'm not sure who, if anyone, is > claiming that. It certainly isn't me.
Well, it seems to me that the TMEA is making that argument. I apparently misunderstood you to be defending the use of "normal/abnormal" as a criterion for rejecting certain singers. [] > That's the point I'm trying to make about countertenors. The way they > sing is outside the norm. That's not a criticism, it's a fact. All > your arguing about how a certain countertenor you know was a better > singer when he sang countertenor is completely beside the point. > That's true of almost any serious countertenor singer, and I've known > several of them. So, then, you are *against* the TMEA's rules that prohibit countertenors, however "abnormal" their vocal production, from participating in all-state choir? Personally, I think the use of the word "normal" for this is wrong in the first place. What is meant instead is "normative," i.e., what *most* people do. "Abnormal" means unhealthy or wrong, whereas there's nothing unhealthy about countertenor vocal production. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
