On 24 Mar 2008 at 22:49, shirling & neueweise wrote: > sure there is a lot of crap out there;
Sturgeon's Law is everywhere applicable. > there was a lot of crap > written in mozart's time too A lot less that many would have you believe -- we don't really know any significant portion of the music of Mozart's contemporaries, actually. > (and from his own hand), Compared to what? Setting aside the music written before he was 10 or so, most of what he wrote in his teens is as good as anything written by his adult contemporaries, and much of it is better. > of the > thousands of symphonies written up to the mid-late 1800s, how many > still survive? Of the thousands of orally composed songs of the troubadours, how many survive today? Actually, NONE OF THEM. But survival says nothing about anything other than SURVIVAL. > part of this reason has to do wioth economics and > politics, but part of it is because they were just shit and not worth > preserving :-P . I think this is completely wrong. Anyone who has examined a significant amount of a cross section of the music of a past period finds some surprisingly interesting stuff in the "discard" pile. > but i wouldn't simply state that mozart was a > cheeseball composer because of some fluffy things he wrote early on I think you should leave the historical examples out of your posts. They do much more damage to your case (by exhibiting your ignorance of the historical context) than they help. In fact, both times you've used Mozart as an example, you've been guilty of the same mistake you accuse the critics of new music of -- you know too little about the subject to make a valid point, and end up harming your argument. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
