Excuse me, martle?

Simon is most certainly NOT getting a beating from anyone.

If you actually read the thread, ff has made some irrelevant comments which I have demonstrated to be false. The fact that ff has then refused to accept the logic and gone off at another tangent simply indicates that she has lost the original argument. But she is, indeed, a wonderful wordsmith and a master at tangential operations.  

As for little c, if you read the posts again you will find that c, as usual, is making interesting points with relevant links and not taking sides at all. Little c and I have a long history of discussing many things. (I might add that I consider c's posts to be amongst the most valuable and interesting across the whole range of subjects we talk about). When we disagree - which isn't that often - we have never been less than courteous to each other. A little gentle ribbing is expected, of course...

I do appreciate the comments made by some others. Yes, I don't hold back with my opinions - why should I? - but I have never been unwilling to apologise, retract or change my mind as appropriate.

It is indeed one of the joys of these forums that so many different views are expressed - largely without rancour.

Finally, though I disagree with Ian on virtually everything, I think the MB has become a far more vital and interesting place since he's been posting. Where he speaks from knowledge and experience, his posts - clear and courteous despite, at times, some rotten provocation - are fascinating and IMO of great worth.

bws S-S!

Regardless of what one thinks of Simon's arguments (and I don't see them the same way that you do), it's simply the case that a lot of people in the wider world do indeed think that new music is worthless, a 'con', that people who supposedly like it are pretentious or gullible, etc., etc. (same goes for modern art). In the narrow boundaries of new music circles, it's very easy to just dismiss those opinions as ill-informed, those of cranks, etc., etc. - but one would then have to say that about large numbers of the population (not that that would bother new music snobs, of course). Woolly liberal new musicos don't so much gang up to stifle dissent as remain blissfully aloof from it in their own rather pampered and wholly unrepresentative world of like-minded people, whilst still of course expecting the wider population to support (through their taxes) their interests. That sort of complacency, and the insistence on a mode of discourse that precludes anything that lies outside a certain consensus, is what I take objection to.

No direct implication, no, but the last sentence of the passage I quoted is insinuatingly offensive. A statement doesn't have to be inaccurate for one to question the motivations behind making it, and the subtext here seems to be that if their music is as hairy and/or camp as they are then it is automatically worthless. I take 'camp' in this context to mean 'effeminate', and I find it very odd of you not to want to question all sorts of embedded ideologies in a comment which roughly equates to 'Down with the pointless and effeminate musical mainstream, let's replace it with something robust, healthy and beardless'.

That's a fair point.

Yes, that's completely true.

This is where we part company. Your understandable objection to snobbery in the music profession seems to have blinded you to people like me who don't agree that new music is a con but also don't feel the need to denigrate others who think so. I do think some of those who, like Simon, make needling remarks about new music 'charlatans' are ill-informed, but I don't think that makes me a snob towards them, any more than I'm being a snob when I disagree vehemently with you.

Well, it is indeed objectionable, but I do think you ought to be more careful not to give the impression you think this applies to all of those within the new music profession who defend the music they're interested in. There is such a thing as an ill-informed attack, and there is such a thing as a non-complacent and non-snobbish attempt to counter such an attack. (There are also, as it happens, people - like myself - who've never had any support at all from taxes, grants, or anything else; who've worked quite hard for very little money in support of music we believe in; and yet who continually strive to question ourselves and make sure that we're not being complacent in our assumptions about the value of that music.)

No, there are many people who are drawn to a wide range of earlier classical music, but still feel the same way about much of that composed in some type of modernist/atonal idiom. Including plenty of Radio 3 listeners, I would imagine.

Well, you know that I violently disagree that those people are frauds and dupes, but I'll encounter exactly the same opinions when I go back to my home town and am with family and their friends. And many of these people listen to Radio 3 and go to classical concerts.

Right - I didn't recall that, I thought it was Lord Byron who expressed such support (and that was here)? Certainly I'm not prepared to debate with active supporters of the [edit: silly party] (the question of debating with working-class people who are misled by the [edit: silly party]'s propaganda is another matter, but let's not open that can of worms).

Hmm...I'm not particularly fond myself of the style oft he discourse on that thread, possibly because several of the participants have aesthetic senses I find difficult to understand.  I imaging that after the first one-hundred posts or so, light-hearted jabs at the supposed aesthetic vacuity of works, people and movements that I regard to be quite the opposite might begin to irk me a little.

Excuse me? To be healthily robust does not necessitate beardlessness.

This is NOT, for once, an opinion, but a fact, as I speak on this issue with knowledge and experience as someone healthy, robust and with a beard.

S-S!

That's not snobbery, it's reality, IMO. All kinds of people can be misled by all kinds of propaganda. But some people are genuinely misled and some people take up ideas out of self-interest. The former are, IMO, more likely to be the less well-educated, who are probably more likely to be part of what is called the "working-class" (though I don't like or use that expression myself) and therefore it is more likely that discussing things with them will bring results.