A field I love and a great review of a book I'm sure to buy. Brilliant!

"Yet during the war, Ross shows, in one dismaying incident after another, that Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Anton Webern were swept up in Hitler's rage and made vile public avowals of anti-Semitism themselves."

Schoenberg, an earlier convert to Christianity, re-converted to Judaism in the early 1930s out of solidarity with his fellow Jews; and he fled Berlin for the US in 1933. I find it difficult to believe that he was caught up at any time in any right-wing anti-Semitic nonsense.

Strauss and Webern did, however, compromise themselves.

BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.

In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations.

"This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schonberg I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know."

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I don't understand atonal music.

Far as I can tell, Schoenberg and his disciples destroyed the grand tradition of Western music. This book sounds like a great way to get a better handle on the context of the stuff though. I'll probably pick it up, but I don't think I can ever enjoy atonalism as music per se.

I almost booed Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie Hall after he played some minimalist atonal piece of crap. Several people actually did. I think it might've been Boulez, but it's all the same.

Composers like Golijov are starting to revive things though. Music that embodies the flavor and complexity of the contemporary world AND it's fun and pleasing to listen to. Imagine that.

I have some suggestions for you.

Much of George Crumb's work is very quiet, haunting and beautiful. I'd suggest "Ancient Voices of Children" or "Vox Balinae: The Voice of the Whale."

That last one is for three masked players -- in concert, they're supposed to wear cloth masks. The ending involves the same little phrase repeated by the musicians over and over playing softer and softer until their gestures no longer actual the instruments -- you simply can't tell when it ends.

"Ancient Voices of Children" is more like opera, it's all in Spanish and has a soprano, a boy soprano and a counter-tenor (a male singing in alto-soprano range). Very exciting and very beautiful.

All this mass of analysis on classical music and the point of why classical is losing popularity is completely missed. All art has to change and grow or it dies, and when it dies and becomes stagnant, it slowly loses audience. You want to look at broadway musicals, it's not that tastes have changed, it's that the musical form was stagnant, and because of that it died as an art form. You want to look at modern rock and roll, it has become an art form with exact boundaries and as such is constantly losing ground to hip-hop which is fluid and able to change and grow.

Audiences need this stimulation, they need the new. Classical music is wedded to the violin the piano, you can't use a James Brown sample in classical music, you can't use a heavy metal riff in classical and that is the real reason that classical continually lost relevance. Not Schoenberg!

The same problem is true for all art, it's true for movies, for music for everything. It doesn't matter how good the television series "The Simpsons" is, after a while it gets old because of the limitations and boundaries imposed on itself by how that particular show has been defined.

Nothing else matters really. Art needs to be constantly redefined. If an art form like classical music allows itself to have set boundaries, it inevitably will fossilize, which is what has happened. No composer can save classical music. The only thing that can save classical is for classical to give up the old forms, hire some hip hop rappers, some metal guitarist, play at raves with Armand Van Helden. Give up on Beethovan, Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg and embrace the new. Now this will never happen, because those that support classical music like it the way it is. They don't want hip hop music contaminating their pristine classical music, that's why they listen to it in the first place, they don't want samples and scratches invading their Beethovan. So there's really no hope for classical music as a popular form of music with any kind of meaning in our time. It still has some value though. It's still good musical training for musicians who later decide to make relevant music in the studio for the real music stars of our age.

What's defined as "classical" music by people like you who dismiss all of it is exactly stagnant. What it is in actuality is (or was until the mid-20th century) exactly what you said it should be. It was a continuously evolving form starting at the end of the middle ages essentially. If you say Bach and Wagner were writing the same kind of music, you don't know anything about either's.

It continued to adapt and change and bring in audiences until the idea of writing truly great music that could be widely enjoyed became utterly passe (thanks to you know who and friends).

And no thank you, I do not want James Brown samples in the middle of Beethoven anything. Are you crazy? Why don't you listen to the new Pletnev/RNO recordings of the symphonies and see how much variation and flexibility is possible with this stale old music.