> I think that said reviewer's classical knowledge is limited to
> those mass-produced Mozart-and-Beethoven grab-bag CDs. There is something
> called the avant-garde, which dawned near the beginning of the past
> century, going against the grain in more ways than one with regards to
> musical compositions. Atonality, serialism, pushing instruments to their
> extreme limits, experiments in masses of sound, dissonance, musique
> concrète, the emergence of mistiness-clarity, and a bunch of other things
> came to and Goldenthal makes use of some of those in his scores all the
> time.

Yes, and knowing several people who have performed in orchestras for decades, I don't know a single person who actually ENJOYS performing "masses of sound." The San Francisco Symphony union fought to wear earplugs while performing avant-garde dissonance.

Are you willing to defend avant-garde styles as the overriding historical norm of all classical music? I doubt it. You need to check the definition of the word "norm"...

> So, to say that he ignores the rules of contemporary music is to show,
> very blatantly, that one does not know what contemporary music is.

How can you make such a definitive statement about such a vauge term like "contemporary"?

It amazes me... the distance to which Goldenthal fans seem to go to challenge a rather mundane, non-descript sentence in an otherwise untroubled review...

Christian