robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (05/04/84)
References: I would like to make a few points to the readers of net.music who are upset by the partial secession of some readers/writers to net.music.classical. (I am presently one of the heaviest contributers to the new group; before it formed I was reading net.music and net.audio, and I haven't dropped my subscriptions to them. I have even continued to contribute a little to those groups.) (1) I can't speak for all news programs, but if you subscribe to net.music, most of you will automatically get *.classical as well. In any cse it's easy to look at all the groups. So we are not "running away" from you. (2) Grouping the notes into categories certainly makes it easier to find the kind of note that one is interested in reading. Adding more subgoups will help even more, for any news group that has heavy traffic. Don't be embarassed to think about additional intelligent subdivisions. (3) When I write a note, I write it to an audience. This is different from standing at the beach giving an oration. I WAS intimidated from sending many notes about classical music to the old groups, because their tone was vastly different (on the whole) from the tone of a group of people interested in issues of classical music. (4) The tone of net.music (not net.audio) is remarkably similar to that of net.flame. When I'm in a flaming mood, I'll read (and write to) net.flame. I don't need yet another flame group! (I did contribute a flame to *.classical, but it was not an Ad Hominem flame.) (5) What is the appropriate subject of net.classical? Obviously it is not resricted to Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. I think that most new subscribers are considering the musical traditions that developed into the classical music of Mozart, and then the traditions which followed these. In addition they are considering, for every other culture, kinds of music that may have been regarded, within those cultures, in ways similar to the ways we regard the clasical music of our culture. To get some good inductive definitions of the ground covered, just read the group for a while. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison