Exception Noted

I went and got myself involved in the latest scuffle involving A. C. Douglas at sounds & fury (see my post yesterday) when I agreed with Scott Spiegelberg's side of the argument. In a post yesterday, ACD wrote of what he clearly perceived as an ad hominem attack in my post, for which I am sorry. What I said was that I was puzzled by how "intelligent people, who are not untrained in music," by which I meant Schopenhauer, Proust, and ACD (not bad company, I thought), could "really think of music as so ineffably mysterious." People can certainly appreciate music without analyzing it intellectually and historiographically, but for me that sort of listening seems subjective and superficial. All I wanted to do in my post was to direct readers to the argument, which I found interesting. I did speculate that ACD's embrace of music as an aesthetic mystery might be related to his personalized style of musical analysis. For any offense that my post may have caused, I apologize. With the rest of his response, I think ACD said enough that we can call this even and move on. Lesson learned. Again.