Gee Aldus, its about all I can do to understand the music that I specialize in. I have spent so much time performing traditional American and British Isles folk music over the last thirty years that I never realized how irrelevant I have become. Your stinging endictment of specialization has not fallen on deaf ears. I have decided to take a crash course in Italian, French and Spainish so I can include a few baritone arias in my apparently mundane repertoire of English language traditional folk music.

That I speak no Italian doesn't keep me from enjoying the overtures or the body of music that supports the vocalists of the operas. And I am not so complete a provincial lout that I can't tell the emotions in a voice no matter what language its in, except maybe German.

But I wonder, if only a person who understands and appreciates all of the worlds music and the languages that they include is allowed an informed opinion, how will they have had the time to become competent enough to perform them all.

Don