On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, thomas mark montgomery wrote:
> ...I surely have doubts that the greatest musical minds of our
> civilization, having created works which have survived their own
> natural time and place, would have produced works that could have ever
> come across to the audiences of their day or this one as 'corny'.
No argument there. The greatest composers write timelessly. The trickier
aspect is performance practices, which are more subject to fashion.
Performance practice is harder to document than a score, and therefore
difficult to do authentically. Thank you for setting me straight on the
Schubert issue (Dre, also) - I now understand that Schubert considered
concert renditions by a pro singer the optimal medium for his songs. So
much for VIP (vaguely informed performance) practice! ;-)
I do believe we'd all be better off we accepted the fact that our culture
is goofy and all past and future cultures were and will be goofy. We're
taking ourselves too seriously if we think we wouldn't go back to
Schubert's time and not find every aspect of his daily life hilarious,
people were no less ridiculous then than they were in the 1970s. Maybe
we've gotten used to the horned helmets and torpedo bras on Wagnerian
sopranos, but art has always been corny.
Tako
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