What ho MorticiaaaAAA.  Many thanks for your kind "welcome".  Naturally, I'm sad to hear about the camels but can tell you that the lesbian raspberry canes are on the road to recovery.  The pith helmet is fine thankyou.  I trust all is well with you and that you are keeping our fellow "message boarders" in order.  I'm now going to get up-to-date with what has been posted recently so that my usual ignorance is not compounded by further ignorance.
Cheers and hugs to you MorticiaaaAAA!  I send you a magnum of champers and a large chocolate cake.

Soundwave, computers can be very annoying especially when they die on....................

Ohhh... I did say I was going to bed, and then I started thinking about string quintets. I really am going now. 

Not having visited the BBC boards for several months, I'm perhaps not as familiar as I once would have been with the personalities making certain comments, but from reading that thread alone my impression is that "ringcyclist" (who I don't remember having encountered before, unless someone's changed their name) is just a wind-up merchant. Maybe I'm too willing to give SimonSays the benefit of the doubt, but, while I don't agree with his views, I can see how a rational person could arrive at them. (I'm aware that his comments in relation to a certain political party* effectively rule his contributions out of court as far as richard is concerned, but - and I arrived at this conclusion before reading his own self-defence - as far as I can see they wouldn't require much modification to be capable of re-phrasing as: 'The [party in question] are dangerous precisely because 90% of what they say makes them look normal.' Which I would have thought quite a few of us would agree with.)

ringcyclist is the only one who is completely out of order, but he's just stirring, isn't he? He knows he can wind people up by agreeing with Simon, but the interpretation of Simon's comments he offers in order to agree with it is the least charitable interpretation possible. Even if it's true, it's distracting and counterproductive. And I think that's a pity, because as far as I'm concerned a discussion that helps even one person to understand/appreciate something better is a helpful discussion, and Richard's 'explanatory' post on Holliger obviously had that effect on the poster who said as much, and I think it's fair to assume on at least a few silent readers of the thread too.


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[*I'm adopting this slightly odd phrasing because I'm not willing to have this board's technology 'edit' me just for naming the party in question]

I don't think we should get into a long discussion of this here (especially since I imagine Richard would like to forget about it rather than log on in the morning and read all this), but I don't think dumb and button-pushing are the only two options. The third looks something like this: he convinced himself a long time ago, for what at the time were good and rational reasons, that there were a lot of bad and even charlatanous (??) defences being produced for hard-to-understand contemporary music. Over time this blurred in his mind with the idea that the music itself was bad and charlatanous (yes, I know it's not a word, but I can't reach the dictionary just now); in other words, he lost a certain ability to make distinctions. Also over time, his reactions to perceived charlatanry became so well rehearsed that he forgot to check in each individual case whether the thing he was reacting to actually merited such a reaction: this is another instance of losing the ability to make distinctions.

The result is that his original ideas have now ossified into rehearsed positions. He's forgotten the possibility of dialogue; he's also forgotten the possibility that a person is sometimes wrong and sometimes right. He therefore fails to engage even with the comments by Richard that he ought to find more sympathetic, and yes, sometimes appears in the process to be obtusely distorting them.

But I don't think he's the only person in the world who in the name of what once seemed to be a worthwhile cause has lost the ability to make distinctions, or to conduct a productive debate across perceived enemy lines. And nor is that loss of ability confined to one side of the recent Holliger/anti-Holliger argument, on which I've seen people from both sides make good points and people from both sides make bad points.

Well, I agree with what you said about those by Mozart (and not necessarily for the reasn you might have assumed!)...

Richard, I actually have tears in my eyes, I was laughing so much !  Hysterical!  Thanks everso<moppingeyeswithatissueemoticon>

Excellent, r. Thanks.