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E. Roy Weintraub wrote: 
 
 > I admire Tony Brewer, and his work, but find [his] line of reasoning 
> distressing. Brewer's "enjoyment" of Beethoven's music is more 
> complex, and socially connected, than he appears to understand. That 
> the BBC plays Beethoven more than Ravi Shankar is not unconnected to 
> his familiarity with, and pleasure in, the music. That Brewer knows 
> how embedded Beethoven is within the standard British performance 
> canon is knowledge he was not born with, nor is his knowledge of 
> harmonic structure independent of his not having grown up on a 
> Hopi reservation. Brewer's understanding of Beethoven's music is 
> fully contextual, and the contingencies of his personal and social 
> history cannot be "abstracted out" to locate his _real_  or _deep_ 
> understanding. 
 
I don't see--true as it is--how this bears on Brewer's point, which was 
that the contingencies of *Beethoven's* "personal and social history" are 
irrelevant when it comes to understanding his music. Surely we could not 
understand it were it not for bunches of cultural and biological and 
social facts about us, but *what* we understand when we finally get it is 
just as surely not these things. 
 
E. Roy Weintraub also wrote: 
 
> The point is that "understanding" the "Spring Sonata" is not different 
> from "understanding" Ricardo on rent, or Samuelson on comparative 
> statics. 
 
I agree with this, but think it cuts differently than it was perhaps 
meant to. We are no less obliged in the one case than in the other to 
make a judgement of worth, a judgement which is not reducible to a 
summing up of our, or Beethoven's or Ricardo's, context. 
 
Kevin Quinn 
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