Tagore and Einstein

John Starrett provided this cute dialogue between Tagore and Einstein.
Some comments:

>TAGORE: It is like the musical system in India, which is not so
rigidly fixed as western music.

This is probably not the case. Each system (and we are assuming here
that Tagore is referencing Indian and Western "classical" or "courtly"
or "art" music--take your pick of favorite term) works with its own sets
of rules, and when you hear a raga, you are pretty sure it's a raga, and
when you hear a symphony, you know it's a symphony. One might argue
that each symphony (a guy like Stamitz wrote hundreds of them) are
simply "frozen ragas"--each symphony was a realization based on a system
of rules, just like each raga is, with a different set of rules. One
might also argue that in the development of the symphony from ... the
late Baroque to the late Romantic, there was more change--and therefore
more freedom--than in the last 300 years of raga practice. Yet this
remains to be proven, either way.

>EINSTEIN: In Europe, music has come too far away from popular art and
popular feeling and has become something like a
secret art with conventions and traditions of its own.

Well, that probably better describes the Indian raga and courtly music
than Western music, at least in the past 100 years, when Western music
is taught all over the place (no more "secret art") and Indian
traditions have been jealously guarded in the guild-like "gharana"
system.

I need not go further with this, but I sure am curious if this is a real
dialogue, or a fictional creation. John?

Andrew Kaye