my copy of Andrew York's "denoument" finally showed up today (no more listening to pirate mp3's...yay). And I highly reccomend it to anyone who's into classical/fingerstyle guitar....or just anybody looking for something mellow to listen to chillax from the metal for an hour. He's got a short essay in the booklet that I really like, so I shall share it:
"We live in a highly technological time, and this has given us many gifts; one of which is the ability to record music and disseminate it widely. in our homes we have the opportunity, at the touch of a switch, to hear more music in a month than our ancestors would have heard in their lifetimes. The negative side to this is that many of us have become very jaded. There is so much music and information bombarding ust hat it is easy to become numb. it's inescapable; there are few places where we are not subjected to music whether we wish to be or not. But think how it musc have been for a European in the seventeenth century, if by chance he should find himself in the rare position to encounter an ensemble of performing court musicians He has never before heard such music; and as he draws nearer to listen, the beauty and the architecture of the music seem truly divine. What brilliance of tone! What intricacies of rhythm and melody! The incredible complexity, but how harmoniously it all fits together. The music moces him deeply-perhaps even changes his life. Chances are that he will never hear such music performed again in his lifetime, and the memory of it will stay with him forever as magical and profound. But in our time, we have lost the perceptionof music as profound, many people probably can't imagine such a response to art. This is the price we pay for the musical accessibility of today; the power and uniqueness of music is diminished.
I like to think that with effort we can crack the perceptive barriers built up by musical unundation and unseal our ears and perceive freshly, like a child, the magic that is still living in music. If there is anything I would ask of the listener, it is to make the effort on fresh ears, and listen as if you've never heard such sounds before. It is my hope that you will be thus rewarded."
-Andrew York, November/1993
There's another paragraph that goes before those ones, but these two get the point across.