ABSTRACT
Discrimination without negation is a different kind of difference. It is a difference that does not draw the line that does not step back in order to point, to throw out an object and put it in its place, in perspective. The music may be sombre, tragic, agonized, but the underlying compact is pleasure, the sensuous pleasure of life in a richly diverse environment. Madonna the Hot, Babbitt the Cold, Beethoven the Great, all can be such opacities. Sometimes opacity inheres in the object, which is its own wrapper: Gerardos Egg. A wrapper becomes translucent to the extent that it turns toward representing its inside, the artwork, and becomes a description of it. It writes from its content for us to read. In this category, to various degrees, fall my brief characterizations of Babbitts Bouncing Bubi, Madonnas Bird and also Heinrich Schenkers analysis of Beethovens Eroica, Richard Toops analysis of Brian Ferneyhoughs Lemma-Icon-Epigram and so on.
