In Europe you get surtitles, Ken, so you can check on what they're supposed to be singing. I look some of the time - they help when the Regie is particularly obscure and you have never heard the opera before. I don't personally think the libretto is theory, exactly - & I've never seen anybody (in Europe) reading a libretto by flashlight, even when there were no surtitles.
It is a fact, though, that (most?) people have to learn to listen to so-called classical music . Sometimes a little theory helps orientation. I find myself agreeing with Kasper.
It does, after all, mean contemplation, viewing, like a spectator, thus speculation, in the Greek. That's why we say "point of view"; everybody has one (just as Mr Jourdain was amazed to find himself speaking prose). Or that's how I see it...
mj
Wenn vollkommene Herrschaft über seinen Gegenstand die freie kunstreiche Ausbildung desselben möglich macht, so können doch die künstlichen Schraubengänge der Polemik nicht die Form der Philosophie sein.
If perfect mastery of one's subject makes its free, artistic development possible, then the merely artificial turns of the polemical screw cannot be the form of philosophy.
F.W.J. Schelling
----- Original Message -----
From: Kenneth Wolman
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: Theoretically ... (corrected, what was I thinking)
Jon Corelis wrote:
> Is it possible to read poetry without theory?
>
> Is it possible to listen to music without theory?
>
> Is it possible to cheer Bogart's wisecracks in Casablanca without theory?
>
> Is it possible to weep at Orlando pleading before the Duke in As You
> Like it without theory?
>
> Is it possible to fuck without theory?
>
With theory.
You can sit in an opera house and listen to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron,
to Penderecki's The Devils of Loudun, or even to Puccini's La
Boheme...and if you're reading the libretto with a tiny flashlight
you're wasting your time. Go buy a record. Theory is life at 9th hand.
The first eight are the ones clapping in derisive unison.
kw
--
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
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