Robert, and all, Point made, sometimes strange things can work. I always loved the Swingle Singers doing Bach's Brandenburgs. And I think Bach would rather have liked it himself. A slightly jazzed scat version that maintained the structure of the pieces (if not the stricter aspects). But I don't think Handel would have enjoyed the perversion of the Halleliuah Chorus done by a bunch of drunken Tigertones cadging drinks at Harvard in the fifties. The words weren't exactly sacred (How's your mother, how's your father, how's your sister Sue - and while I'm asking, 'bout your family, how's your old Wazoo), and the repetitions were ad nauseum - but as the parts weren't strictly defined the members could drop out to drink at leisure while the rest maintained the continuum of Groundhog Day music.
There is a value to playing with the play. I'll take a segment of a piece (or the entirety of a song) and play it on the whistle, then the bowed psaltery, then the psaltery, then the harp (I'm not yet to improvising the lute into the sequence). Within the orchestration of the grandest symphony there is yet a theme, and a counter theme, that can be extracted and make a chamber piece out of it. I repeat my feeling that music is a sense of the song, and the setting. And if the setting is smaller than the original the result can yet have the sense of both the setting and the song. Seager and I were playing at the same time, our politics weren't the same. But the man had a wonderful feeling for making his banjo do anything. Best, Jon > As strange as Rites of Spring on guitar might sound, a few weeks back I heard a recording from the 60s of Pete Seager doing the slow movement of Beethhoven's 7th on banjo, and it was quite intriguing! From a recording apparently entitled "just fooling around." This was heard on WFMT in Chicago. Robert To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
