On Jan 30, 2006, at 12:43 AM, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Andrew:
When I read my comment
There is in the U.S. a dogmatic divide between "contemporary" and
"classical" music that just does not exist in Europe.
and your reply
I reiterate (for the third time now in this thread, so far w.o
rejoinder) that this is no longer the case in Philadelphia.
I suspect that we may not mean the same thing by "contemporary", that
is, that I suspect you are using the word in a way that includes the
late Alan Hovhaness,
The Hovhaness reference confused me for a minute, because I was
referring to living classical composers, of which he is not one, and of
recently dead composers in a similar style--of which he is also not
one. (Nothing against H., BTW; I think he's gotten a bad rap over the
years).
Only after some thought did I realize that you were using
"contemporary" to mean "popular." To be quite frank, you shouldn't do
this. Every person I've ever encountered who uses "contemporary" in
this way, does so because they honestly believe that popular music
*postdates* classical music, that is, that all classical music is old
(and vice-versa), and that popular music superseded it. By your own
statements, you know better than this, so it ill becomes you to
willfully adopt the language of the ignorant.
I will concede that classical musicians such as me use a number of
words in specialized ways. A "composer" to us is a classical composer
(as numerous posts over the past week attest); similarly "French music"
is French classical music, and "contemporary music" is contemporary
classical music. I think you know all this.
The purpose of language is to communicate. Ask yourself whether you
succeeded in communicating your thoughts when you used "contemporary"
the way you did. Your post, and my reply, have generated a whole,
lengthy subthread to which every single contributor misunderstood your
original posting, nor did anyone on the list other than you say "hey,
wait a minute, that's not what he meant!"--which implies that the whole
list misunderstood you.
A word to the wise.
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