Mark Wheeler wrote: > You are absolutely right, I personally have no problem with him > changing the > last chord, I also would not do it
Indeed... > but if he wants to why not. Here's one reason why not: suppose I started this post this way: Mark Wheeler wrote: > You are absolutely right, I personally have a problem with him > changing the > last chord, I also would not do it I've changed one word and completely misrepresented what you said. I'm lying, and committing an act of gross disrespect toward you. Similarly, if I tell you that I'm playing Dowland's music and make arbitrary changes (by which I mean deliberately rewrite the actual notes) in that music, I'm also lying, and showing a gross lack of respect toward Dowland, and if you aren't already familiar with the Big D, you may make judgments about Dowland's music that are based on those arbitrary changes. If you hear a minor chord at the end of Forlorne Hope you may think Dowland was incompetent. Or you might really like the idea of a renaissance composer who ends pieces with minor chords, and buy every Dowland recording you can find, only to be so crushed with disappointment at the uniformly major endings you hear that you commit suicide by hanging yourself with an old theorbo string. So the point is that "what the hell, it's all about self-expression" is not the be-all and end-all of musicianship unless you're playing the blues. There are other considerations. It doesn't mean the page is always sacrosanct, though and my view of it is that Forlorne Hope is. I suppose reasonable minds can differ about whether sticking a minor chord on the end of Forlorne Hope is significant enough to worry about (of course, if it's not significant, why do it?). Dowland would have thought it musically illiterate, just as Mozart would have been appalled if someone had rewritten his music to insert parallel fifths. I found it jarring and deflatingly anticlimactic. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
