What an INDICTMENT........ You should subpoena Edin.
Sheesh.....
RT
From: "howard posner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Lutelist Net" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 5:01 PM
Subject: [LUTE] Re: Karamazov
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.
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