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       M U S I C          T H E O R Y         O N L I N E

                    A Publication of the
                  Society for Music Theory
      Copyright (c) 1993 Society for Music Theory
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Volume 0, number 2      April, 1993      ISSN:  1067-3040   |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

  General Editor                          Lee Rothfarb

  Co-Editors                              David Butler
                                          Justin London
                                          Elizabeth West Marvin
                                          David Neumeyer
                                          Gregory Proctor

  Reviews Editor                          Claire Boge

  Consulting Editors
	Bo Alphonce		Thomas Mathiesen
	Jonathan Bernard	Benito Rivera
	John Clough		John Rothgeb
	Nicholas Cook		Arvid Vollsnes
	Allen Forte		Robert Wason
	Stephen Hinton		Gary Wittlich
					  

  Editorial Assistants                    Natalie Boisvert
                                          Cynthia Gonzales

  All queries to: mto-editor@husc.harvard.edu
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AUTHOR:  O'Donnell, Shaugn
TITLE:  Commentary on Neumeyer's MTO 0.1 essay
REFERENCE: mto.93.0.1.neumeyer.art

File:  mto.93.0.2.odonnell.tlk

Just a quick reaction to Robert Judd's comments about David  
Neumeyer's "Schoenberg at the Movies." While several of his points  
are pertinent (e.g., on aesthetics and cognition), the issue of opera  
composition doesn't seem particularly relevant. I find a rather  
substantial genre-gap between opera music and film music (a notable  
exception being musicals). A film score generally acts as a gloss on  
the drama, hence the possibility of Neumeyer's commutation tests,  
while an opera score is a musical version of the drama. (Just listen  
to Schoenberg's Op. 34 on your headphones next time you enjoy a  
performance of Salome to test this.) I don't mean to downplay the  
significance of the relationship between drama and music in either  
genre, but the two perspectives are remarkably different and  
therefore merit distinct treatment regarding aesthetic, cognitive,  
and analytic issues. The contrast between the performance orientation  
of opera music and the artificial soundspace (created by modern  
recording technology) of more recent film music further separates  
these two genres.

In reference to the "tinsel" question: I say it's all music, from MTV  
to the concert hall, whether it's Bartok's Fourth Quartet, Coltrane's  
"Giant Steps," Lennon's "Imagine," or anything else you care to name  
(Baroque fugue, rap song, etc.). I may be laughably naive, but is  
there really any need for the continual segregation of the musical  
world into "cultivated" and "vernacular" traditions?

Shaugn O'Donnell
Queens College/CUNY
odonnell@aaron.music.qc.edu
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END OF MTO ITEMS