Feldman insisted on the primacy of the spiritual: "Byrd without Catholicism, Bach without Protestantism, and Beethoven without the Napoleonic ideal, would be minor figures. It is precisely this element of 'propaganda' - precisely this reflection of a zeitgeist - that gave the work of these men its myth-like stature."

There's no question that Babbitt contributed to the expansion of musical language in the twentieth century. Bravo to him for that. And some people really like his music. I don't think the "his music is witty/no it isn't" argument is going to be resolved anytime soon. I have heard that Gunther Schuller thinks that Babbitt's music is the best thing that ever happened. So he's got some fans, he's obviously done something right, music-wise.

There's still the question, though, of past polemics, past crafting of "the new music scene", past conceptualization of what new concert music could, and should, be. I'll say this: to the extent that Mr. Babbitt is in any way to blame for the deep pit into which our music scene seems to have been buried, and out of which I and many others are attempting to crawl, then I do, in fact, bear a grudge. By this I refer to the fact that few people know that there is such a thing as a composer, and that many who are aware of this tend to associate "new music" with something that clearly has been written without regard to the possibility of their deriving meaning from it. Past statements by Mr. Babbitt suggest that this is, in fact, the case, and that the pit was consciously and deliberately dug.

I feel the consequences of that decision, or what I perceive as those consequences, all the time. [For example, why do we have to take it as a given that "surprise" is a regular emotion felt by people who enjoy our concerts? Every concert, someone is "surprised" to actually like the music we write. Why is this so surprising?] I can't say whether Babbitt's description of the appropriate relationship between "specialist" and "layman", and his concept of the public sphere (with composition divorced from it), had anything to do with the present condition. I'll wait for Alex's forthcoming book to tell me that. But if it's causation and not merely correlation that we're seeing, here, then I have a hard time getting down with the birthday cake and party favors.

There's also the argument that this struggle (my "crawling out of the pit", which is sort of gross, I recognize, like something from The Ring - the movie, not the opera cycle) is good for us - makes us stronger, less complacent, and so on. This line would suggest that constant flux and struggle is part of a strong artistic tradition. There's value, then, in any strong personality, such as Babbitt's, who can challenge the prevailing order. And, the argument could go, look at the state of contemporary music performance today - most people seem to think that it's better than ever (though Babbitt's own interview seems not to share this perspective). That benefits everyone.

I'm sympathetic to this argument. But I don't see anything in it to suggest that the ideas of a previous generation, which I consider frankly toxic - in their dissociation of elite behavior from the public sphere - should be accepted. And there's a tacit acceptance that goes along with these birthday parties, like inviting Condy to be your keynote speaker without mentioning Iraq. That acceptance makes me very uncomfortable indeed.

Finally, there's also an argument that says that my whole line of reasoning is silly, that composition has always been an elite and largely removed activity, and that to suggest that the post-war period was anything more than an institutionalization of that reality is ignorant. This is hard to deny, but I believe there is a way forward besides giving in to that isolation and renouncing the idea of the public sphere. Perhaps I'm an idealist, but I think we have more to offer, as artists and people, than that view suggests. And now I'm veering towards issuing a polemic of my own....

It's a small community we exist in and it's nice to see that a composer is getting attention. That he is getting attention for his skin color, hair style, piercings, and supposed cross-musical connections is hardly surprising enough to even be disappointing. I generally find his music to be pretty unremarkable, but it's certainly no worse than a lot that's out there.

I will say this, though: I simply don't hear the "hip hop" in his music. Or, perhaps a better way of saying this is that I hear it as much as I do in the music of, for example, Todd Reynolds and Caleb Burhans - which is to say, little-to-none. And to my ear, they are both better violinists (unarguable) and composers (my taste, I guess) than DBR is. Which makes it hard to focus on "the music" in DBR's case since the only reason we're talking about him is because his promotional machine has taken his career to a different level than theirs, driven by his claims about associating with hip hop and the ease with which his image fits our preconceptions of how someone making those claims would appear.

I won't go as far as to say that his claims about hip hop are "false"; that is far too strong for what is, in the end, a personal issue. If he listens to hip hop, of course it's in his music, somewhere. I know that I struggle with my own hip hop background, and how it plays out in my "classical" music (oddly, opaquely); it's an open question for me and not something that I feel comfortable wearing on my sleeve. That said, people are attracted to the idea of the hip hop/classical mix; when I've been interviewed, and my background comes up, people get excited by that direction. Unfortunately (for me, I suppose), I can't follow that up with claims about the hip hop influence on my music, at least not of the variety that are easily seen or sold. When performers have asked me to write music that is "influenced by hip hop", I have come up blank. The one time I tried, I wrote a very strange work that really sounds nothing like hip hop, but plays off of a couple of sounds that exist in that music.

In the end, the stakes seem pretty low. I don't think that anything is really lost by having DBR out there, doing his thing; there's no reason to begrudge him his success. It's a hard field and you do what you have to do. More power to him for having something to sell.

Hip hop, even more than jazz, has not been received as a highly sophisticated musical form by most people. Certainly, there's no doubt that the musical-intellectual community has largely ignored hip hop as music (even while embracing it as a sociological goldmine). There has been some limited work in getting into the music itself, but there's not much, and it's not hard to see why. The components of analysis are tricky - it's not generally about harmony or melody, but about rhythmic interplay, emphasis and accent structure, sound quality, and other such elements.

I'm actually writing my dissertation on this very topic, maybe because of my own difficulty in locating hip hop within my notated composition. While it might seem unimportant to unpack the structure of this music, I think that the neglect is part of a pattern of ignoring the inherent complexity of Black (and other minority) art forms, treating them as interesting cultural artifacts with little inherent value. The broader battles in our society about race are not going to be won in the academy, to be sure, but it does seem to me that it would do a world of good to suggest that someone like KRS-One - a formerly homeless African-American man from the South Bronx - is an artist of the highest caliber and a worthy figure of emulation (at least artistically) for youth who are constantly told not to follow in the steps of "people like him". Acknowledging the value of rap music as music helps with that project.

As for DBR, to the extent that his music reaffirms the misconception that hip hop is all about repetition, or sampling-at-will, or whatever else people hear from hip hop in his music, and to the extent that it ignores the more sophisticated musical elements of hip hop while claiming to be representing that music, then it is problematic and even dangerous. But I'd need to (and perhaps, will) do a more thorough job of listening to his music before levelling that kind of claim.

The point isn't that music gets some kind of "real credibility" when it's discussed intellectually. Far from it. The point is that hip hop is one of the most widely utilized forms for creative expression today among a segment of the American underclass that has been the victim of overt and covert racism for hundreds of years. It is also not taken seriously, as music, by most people in this country. As I say above, intellectuals or those in the ivory tower are not going to solve this problem, but given their (our) disproportionate control over resources, attacking the problem in that arena seems like a reasonable place to start - along with, of course, confronting people directly on the issue (like my older relative who pulled me aside at a family function to ask, and I'm not kidding, what kids could possibly see in this rap music, and why they weren't listening to Perry Como).

And of course the kids who are rapping and listening to the music don't need me to tell them that they are justified. Please. But they do need to stop being told by society that "it's not music", or that it's a problem, or that it's responsible for the social concerns of Black America. These are things people say. I would like to see those messages replaced by affirmative ones, messages that recognize the primary place of hip hop among inner city musical practices (especially male), and work with that fact to help kids move in positive directions.

How does the Academy intersect with that? Well, can a kid send his rap tape in with his college admissions packet and expect it to be treated as more than a curio, or (heaven forbid) treated in the same way that a classical piano recording, a newly composed string quartet, a jazz performance, or even a pop song recording would be? At best (in some schools), it would be counted as a positive extracurricular activity. But it certainly wouldn't be accepted as something central to the application, or something that the student would be expected to pursue in college (unlike, say, basketball, another inner city cultural activity that has been very differently received by elites). There are probably a few exceptional admissions officers at exceptional schools where this is not the case, but that's beside the point. Even a good-hearted music professor would probably not feel that he or she has a sufficient understanding of the music to evaluate it on its merits.

One thing that might help to fix this problem is to have actual scholarship going on at universities on hip hop. Maybe this is the wrong avenue to pursue, but I hope that if I become a professor someday, I will be the guy to whom CDs of hip hop beats and raps are sent. Of course, we're far from that place - witness the Cornel West fiasco at Harvard, where his forays into hip hop were treated as Evidence A for his lack of intellectual rigor. There are many different issues being wrapped together, here. DBR is somewhat tangential to the bigger issue. The only reason that a thread on him wound up leading me down this road is because he himself makes claims about his connection to hip hop that seem to me to be missing something. I'm certainly not claiming myself to be any kind of absolute authority, just someone who listens to a lot of that music and also a lot of the music that's more along the lines of what DBR seems to be writing. And as I said before, more power to him for finding a new avenue for notated music (and I mean this, though I know it may sound totally disingenuine, and I know that a lot of people disagree). Where I have trouble with him is on the level of what is left out, actually - which seems, to my ear, to be the core of what makes hip hop a great art form. That's the danger. And in that way, DBR is actually closer to someone like Darius Milhaud than to Anthony Braxton, I'd say - a decent composer (maybe someday or to some people, better than decent) who uses another musical genre in a fairly watered-down way.

Isn't it interesting that both sides of the abortion debate, and both sides of the Israel/Islam debate, claim vulnerability on their side? This is the problem. No one who feels vulnerable is willing to back down at all. I won't accept a world in which the government prohibits women from making a choice that falls squarely within the personal, ethical realm. To violate that space is to make all women (and therefore all of society) vulnerable to the whims of our government and our patriarchy. But I also don't expect that someone who believes that a fetus is a human being, without drawing a distinction between the two (irrational as I may find this), will back down, either. Everything Massey says about other vulnerable members of society is true, but it doesn't change the vulnerability of the fetus, if that's how you look at the matter. I don't know what could change that perspective, honestly.

As for Jews and Arabs (and other Muslims now, too), the Palestinians are genuinely oppressed; the vulnerability there is clear. By extension, other Muslims feel oppressed by this situation. But for Israelis who have been defending what they see as their land since the inception of the state (and before), the image they see is one of their being surrounded by hostile forces that want to drive them into the ocean. This is largely true. Furthermore, Jews tend to feel vulnerable all the time; it's part of the diasporic condition to be consistently beholden to your hosts. Israel is the one exception to the diaspora, but it has its own problems. So again, both sides feel under attack, and vulnerable, and there's no room for movement.

And yes, it's always about America, but it's also always about the Jews. Why a Holocaust contest? Because Denmark was one of the few (perhaps the only) Continental European nation to act ethically in World War II? I doubt that the reasoning is so subtle. Would Middle East Muslims care about America if it weren't for our support of Israel? I'm not so sure, even with the recent Iraq debacle.

What always makes me most sad is to see Arab faces on the news and to see traces of my own family in the contours. The Semitic stock, as much as it's been diluted in Jews via the diaspora, is still there, and I wind up seeing shades of my family and friends in the angry faces on TV or in photos. Isaac and Ishmael, the prophecy continues....

There certainly is the public interest. Consider the 1600 journalists who were flocking to Indiana for the event. As others have suggested, televising executions might force some death penalty supporters to confront the gray horror of Big Government executions. Perhaps. Could the widespread viewing of an execution and the attendant (and sure-to-be-nauseating) media spectacle actually cause people to conclude capital punishment is a practice worthy of a supposedly great and democratic nation?

The argument against such reality-TV fare is that it would be too gruesome, a debasement of the culture. Think of the children. No doubt, there is something unseemly and primitive about public executions. But the obvious response is that government, in general, should not be engaged in conduct that cannot bear full exposure. We can make rare exceptions for, say, true national security secrets, but not for matters of taste. Americans who support capital punishment may not want to see it on television (just as veal aficionados may not want to watch a documentary on the slaughter of calves). Let them switch the channel to a World Wrestling Federation match. But those citizens who wish to argue against the death penalty by showing the savagery and dishonor of government executions should have the opportunity to do so.

Dan McDermott says that "we are living a double standard" by granting degrees to classical musicians while chastising athletes who single-mindedly pursue their dreams ("If a Student Can Major in Piano, Why Can't a Player Major in Passing," December 4). Well, a different and much more prevalent "double standard" grants athletes access to higher education with far greater ease than similarly qualified musicians or writers. More disturbing is the author's suggestion that supporting the arts is classist. If he doesn't see how the arts are more than just "entertainment", I'm glad he left the field of music to become a salesman. But why is this issue even being raised in the sports section?