Re: GG: & Adorno

[kb@terminus.cs.umb.edu]

    "The silent, imaginative reading of music could render actual playing
    as superfluous 

Only if you're good enough at reading music. Being able to read music
and hear it in your head is a learned skill, and not all that easy to
acquire, at least for some people (namely, me). And anyway, I think
there is value to someone being able to *play* the music as they heard
it in their head, so others can hear it that way, too -- either because
they're not capable of reading the score, or simply because it's another
viewpoint on the material.

    as, for instance, speaking is made by the reading of
    written material; 

Speaking is made irrelevant by reading? I don't think so!
Speaking and reading offer different qualities.
Consider poetry, for example ...

    such a practice could at the same time save music
    from the abuse inflicted upon the compositional content by virtually
    every performance today.

Sure, there are abusive performances. There are also wonderful
performances -- such as GG's :-). Should we give up the latter merely to
avoid the former? I don't think so.


All that said, I really like the quotes :-).