Mr. Berger lets a few sloppy mistakes mar his review. Another letter writer has already pointed out that Schoenberg was proudly and observantly Jewish, at least after his reconversion; Roger Shattuck's "The Banquet Years" was first published in 1955, not 1968;"chord triads" is an awkward jumbling of proper musical terminology ("triadic chords," or just "triads," would have worked); and Arnold Schoenberg could not have heard his "Verklärte Nacht" over the radio at a drive-in in LA in the '60s, as Berger seems to imply, since he died in 1951.

Sorry to be picky. I was glad to learn, thanks to Berger, of Alex Ross's new book. His New Yorker columns are indeed valuable.

P.S. Is TomRichford (see letter above) goofing on us, or is he carrying Bigfoot's baby? Webern was marginalized by the Nazis, who didn't get his music at all. This makes the sporadically pro-Nazi sentiments he expressed all the sadder. If someone wants a good intro to Webern's music, his Opp. 5 and 9 (aphoristic works for string quartet), or 6 and 10 (intense little orchestra pieces) are a good introduction.

Captcrisis is not quite right: "classical" music was written for the striving middle class. Hence Verdi's love of being paid; hence Mozart's cultivation of the truly rich (they can pay for your music). Who did James Brown perform for, the poor folk he came from or the newly affluent who could afford to pay him and the Flames really, really well? Neither Brown nor Mozart was a dummy.

Mozart wrote the definitive glosses on this: "The Marriage of Figaro" is about a servant who teaches his employer to be a mensch; "Don Giovanni" is about a servant who stands by as his employer's lust destroys his own life and that of those around him. It's a comedy, not a tragedy, because the servant (Leporello)--and we--get to watch it happen.

A teacher of mine once said that the classical rule against parallel fifths (think of the head-whapping monks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) came about not because parallel fifths sound bad (they don't--popular music has always been full of them), but because they make music sound inexpensive. Music written for peasants has parallel fifths all over it; music written for aristocrats or the bourgeoisie who replaced them doesn't. Whether or not music has parallel fifths in it tells you how much someone paid for it.

My point, besides thanking Mr. Berger again for a provocative review, is that the Rolling Stones, or Kanye West, didn't put class struggle into music. It had already been there for centuries.

"Throughout his political career he has argued for legalizing gold and silver as legal tender, ending most foreign aid, abolishing the income tax, eliminating the Department of Education, and ending the federal war on drugs, among other things."

With a few tweaks, this sounds like the domestic platform of the American Party of the 1970s. Remember those guys? They were basically John Birchers whose party ran an insurgent Republican congressman (again with the insurgent Republican congressman!) named John Schmidt in '72, apparently because Nixon was too much of a commie, and fell behind George Wallace in '76. The paranoia of the old fringe right is just below the surface of the Paulist movement, but in these days of build-your-own-reality via the Internet, that goes largely unremarked.

It should be quite depressing to anyone with a sense of history that such a wholesale detachment from the complexities of American society should, in A.D. 2007, be considered fresh and incisive. Were it not for his anti-war stance, how would Paul be viewed by the political virgins pointing and clicking under his banner?

to have an adult in charge again? That was my thought as I listened to this collegial but reasonably direct discussion of real issues on NPR. We have two different conversations going here: The Democratic candidates grapple with the issues of living in the real world while the Republicans posture and puff out their chests while pressing manufactured focus-group tested adrenaline/testosterone buttons (Terror! Gays! Abortion! Terror! Taxes Increases! Terror!).

The level of discourse in the NPR debate (a true debate--notice that the candidates were allowed to actually speak to one another, i.e. engage in *dialogue*) was a refreshing change from the Fox-driven festival of Newspeak that we have had to live with for the last many years. Maybe our body politic is learning to speak in complete sentences again, finally.

Huckabee fears God; I fear our perverted way of selecting our presidents. Given a system that can produce a two-term George W., the election of Huckabee or someone like him is only too plausible. The anonymous poster who hopes that Huckabee gets nominated doesn't have the whole picture. Keep in mind that the way we select our president makes the way the Holy Roman Empire picked its emperors look rational and democratic.

Take an electoral system driven purely by money, give two randomly self-selected states a laughably disproportionate role in selecting the party nominees, and cap it all off with an electoral vote system that allows the people's choice to lose. Now add candidates like Huckabee whose foreign policy, to the extent that he has one, comes from the Book of Revelation, and whose importance is swollen by our country's contempt for public education.

Mix well. Enjoy. How can this perverted means of choosing our presidents not create disaster? If 2000 taught us anything, it's that if the worst imaginable Republican candidate manages to work the Rube Goldberg machinery that governs party nominations in his favor, he is just as likely to find a way of manipulating the general electoral process.