remain equally certain that the absence of such explanation from you leaves us all wondering why you state that you hear everything you think you know about KSS in all of his music but then clam up on the reasons
Quite simply the reasons are very similar to those in Wagner, the ideological nature of whose rhetorical approach have been analysed with great subtlety by many - though there are vastly fewer redeeming factors in Sorabji.
Taken literally, this might (rightly or wrongly) be taken to suggest the possibility that you find
Tristan und Isolde repellent but not as much so as anything by Sorabji; well, that's up to you, of course.
I don't go into it because I really can't be bothered with all the pedantic stuff and failure to see the bigger issues that I know will be forthcoming from you,
Again, you indulge your seemingly preternatural habit of claiming advance knowledge of things that you do not actually possess; this gets more recognisable (not to say more predictable) with each successive instance...
and also because I'm not really interested in talking about KS any longer
Well, that's a relief! - and ought also to constitute some kind of guarantee that this thread can now progress without your further input (although, if I remember rightly, you had stated before that you wwere not relly interested in making further comments of KS but that appears not to have stopped you now)...
(if I remember rightly, I did give some precis when talking back at TOP on the subject, in response to autoharp asking for more; after hearing people commend the Transcendental Studies, I went off to hear them, hoping to find something different, but if anything they were worse, and so posted on those). I'd recommend reading Adorno's In Search of Wagner, in many ways his best book on music, and one which has been vastly influential on hermeneutical studies of Wagner since then.
OK, folks - so let's all of us (at lest all of those of us that are interested) go read (or re-read) Adorno on Wagner and we'll all thereby acquire a pretty thoroughgoing understanding of Pace on Sorabji...
As far as 'moral crusades' are concerned, the fact that relentlessly you want to come in on numerous different sites to attempt to refute any suggestion that music might have something to do with gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, etc., speaks for itself. That's what I would call a crusade. Why are you so bothered to do so otherwise?
What I have on occasion done is nothing of the sort and it is certainly not as "relentless" as you yourself can be and sometimes are when you take your soapbox for a ride on your hobby-horse; what I have in fact done from time to time (in accordance with what I believe) is suggest that, as soon as one put a foot on such territories, one is immediately confronted with ample research material (of varying quality and convincingness) but precious little conclusively explanatory evidence not as to whether such connections may exist but precisely how they work and what specific effects they exert in the music of different composers. Perhaps at some future date we will all be able to understand more of such things (after all, we are unlikely ever to understand less than we do now). I hope that I make myself clear (though I take leave to doubt it, the best will in the world notwithstanding).
As to your use of the term "crusade", you appear to reveal that it denotes actions by someone that fail to meet with your own personal approval for whatever reasons; OK, so now we understand that bit, although you've yet to explain the "moral" bit (please don't feel under any obligation to me to do so, however).
If anyone really wants more detail on these subjects, then we should have a different thread concerning 19th/early 20th century aesthetics and Weltanschauung, their varying relationships to right-wing ideologies, and how these composers (often very consciously) set about their compositional work so as to make these things manifest. A complex subject; what has been ascertained and analysed by a very wide range of thinkers looking at various different art forms in this respect often gets to the heart of lots of things I've merely felt instinctively beforehand, or helped to bring about a wider understanding of what is at stake in certain seemingly innate reactions.
I agree with you here and, speaking personally (although very possibly also for other readers of this thread), I have to add that unhooking such discussion from the Sorabji Appreciation thread will be more than welcome, so perhaps you'd like to initiate this new thread (although whether it ought to go in the 19th or 20th century categories or somewhere else altogether I am not sure).
But I sort of imagine from various quarters we would get the usual anti-intellectual, anti-musicological, anti-theoretical platitudes. It's very much a no-go area for those who have a lot vested in the innate value and importance of such work.
One would hope that such a thread would encourage a wide range of ideas and thoughts from a range of contributors possessing an equally wide range of persuasions; whether and to what extent you might get any particular kind of responses from any quarters is surely best left to a wait-and-see" approach, unless you meant that, much as you'd like to initiate such a thread, your "sort of "imagination may nevertheless persuade you to prefer to desist from so doing in order to avoid the risk that some people might contribute things that you'd prefer not to see and/or which do not happen to accord to your own views...
Best,
Alistair
