Still the way guys like you
Who are they?
win arguments
...which I'm not even seeking to do, incidentally - this not about "winners" and "losers"...
is to basically write many more words than the people you disagree with, and also always find time to have the last word (which I usually never do, because I have better things to do with my time).
Or to split your infinitives as you've done here, not bother to do word counts of anyone's posts and "always find time"? - excuse me? - my last 600+-word post took me around five minutes - that's not so long, is it? - and as for "the last word", you had that until just now! How exactly do you "usually never do" something? Either you never do it or you usually do it - you can't have it both ways! Whether you have "better things" (than what, exactly?) to do with your time is open to question since you clearly didn't have better things to do with it than respond as you have done here.
I guess I just feel if you and people like you were truly sincere, you'd cut your posts down to maybe a few sentences and just say something honest like "Hey, I really like Xenakis/Sorabji/Schoenberg etc. etc. and I don't really care if you don't, and I also accept the fact that few people will ever enjoy it."
Why? I take these issues seriously and try to address the question posed in the thread topic and surrounding aspects of the subject - perhaps more so than you do - and this simply cannot be done by airing a few personal prejudices and preferences and then clamming up! (and, in any case, I have not expressed any because I feel that the subject is far too important to respond to it in so personal and comparatively trivial a manner).
Like, why do you feel the need to write more than that?
"Like," what? And why question the need to write enough to try at least to scrape the surface of the subject rather than suffuse it in a handful of personal dogmatic whinges about "complex modern music" (which, by the way, you have still not defined in your own terms but which I'm fairly sure that you could do in not so very many words if so you chose).
That's the thing that really morbidly fascinates me about you and your ilk.
Is it really? well, whoopty-doo!
What is your life like?
What concern is that of yours, especially in the specific context of responses in this thread?
What gives you so much time to write so much?
As I told you, nothing does - for I have spent very little time on this!
There's got to be something motivating you.
There hasn't, but nevertheless there is; it's the simple business of trying to address the question seriously.
For me, I jump into these sometimes out of boredom and some weird OCD quirk that I can't completely get rid of that pops up every now and then.
Your problem rather than that of the rest of us, presumably - and one over which only you can exert any control if indeed anyone can.
It's more than that though
Oh? Good!
I am motivated also by love of beautiful music and wondering why the world seems to be trying so hard to include ugliness and horror in the mix.
So you stick your head in the sand and prefer to constrict musical expression to just one particular aspect of life's rich tapestry, then? Well, go ahead - if you must!...
I agree with Bach, the aim and final end of all music should be the refreshment of the soul.
Ah - at least, we all agree on something! - even if the particular ways in which various quite different souls can be refreshed is something on which we appear not to do so...
I'd like to learn why anyone today thinks it should do otherwise.
Well, since I don't in principle think that it should do otherwise, you'll not learn that from me, I fear.
But if it can't be explained in more than a handful of sentences I probably won't read it.
The apparent fact that you won't address anything that's not in primary colours or embraces other than the most simplistic of reasoning is your problem; why on earth would you consider the "refreshment of the soul" - especially in today's immensely complex, rich, verdant and ever-increasingly fast-moving world - to be a matter that can be accounted for in a handful of monosyllables, common chords, plain brush-strokes, straight lines, quarter notes in 4/4 time, simple counterpoints and the rest? Doesn't such a notion constitute a gross insult both to the very phenomenon of the refreshment of the human soul and to fine human achievement over the centuries?
Think about it! Or, if you prefer, criticise all and sundry for writing more than two dozen words about anything that, by so doing, might risk interfering with your apparently simplistic, complacent but quite unrealistic world. You invoke Bach - one of the greatest minds in Western culture of any kind, not just in music; do you understand what you're doing in citing him, of all people, as some kind of illustrative example of what appears to be your strangely monochromatic views about "complex modern music" (of which Bach himself was a most adept creator and purveyor!)? And, in the meantime, could you just try your best to do us all a favour by attempting to define what you mean by "complex modern music"?
Thanks in advance of whatever you might come up with in answer to that (if indeed you do)...
Best,
Alistair