#2 - Global Reference, Must Be True

[Adam Tyson]

While context needs to be taken into account, mikewazowski, I think it's a safe bet that any time an author writes about "modern times" they are referring to the era in which the passage was written. The reference in the first paragraph to "modern
scholarly editions" would mean scholarly works written fairly recently, at least relative to the time period in which the music being written about was composed.

[crispycrispr]

Hi, I don't understand why (E) is right. The passage only says that "musicologists" had trouble with accessing the school, but musicologists aren't musicians ..? Or am I supposed to assume that musicians include musicologists?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Crispy,

It's both that the musicologists couldn't access it, and, according to the first paragraph, one of the reasons it was inaccessible was that the scores were inaccessible. If the scores aren't accessible, the musicians can't really play it. There weren't recordings at the time the music was being played, so without the scores or scholarly research, there wouldn't be a way for musicians to access it.

Hope that helps!

[crispycrispr]

Ahh, I see. Yes, it does! Thanks so much!

[rightway1566]

Hello, I'm still not following the explanations as to why E is correct. Like someone previously mentioned, I hesitated to conflate musicologists with musicians. Second, I'm not seeing in the passage where this music was unavailable to modern musicians, just that it wasn't published in scholarly editions. To me this left open the possibility that the music was still somehow available outside of an academic environment.

The only line I feel could justify E is "Indeed, much of this repertory has more or less vanished from our historical consciousness" but I still felt as though inferring that "much of the music of this school has been little known even to musicians." was a bit too strong.

[Adam Tyson]

Some people struggling with answer E as you are, rightway1566, might be placing too much emphasis on finding a direct quotation in the text to prove the answer, rather than using the context of the passage to draw a reasonable inference, as we do with Most Strongly Supported questions in the Logical Reasoning section. If musicologists and other scholars cannot get access to the music easily, it would be reasonable to assume that musicians also cannot easily get their hands on it, unless we assume that musicians have some secret club that musicologists are not allowed to enter, in which the music is kept hidden in locked vaults, only to be viewed by those who will play it and not study it!

The overall gist of the first paragraph is that the music is scarce - it is generally unavailable, it has vanished, and those who wish to study it encounter formidable obstacles. How formidable would those obstacles be if scholars could just find a musician and ask to see their copy, or attend a concert and listen to and even record the music? No, it must be that musicians generally also lack easy access, or else this would make no sense.

There's also some further evidence in the way the author talks about Temperley's anthology, saying that it has "intrinsic value" in part because it "reproduces nearly all of the original music in facsimile." How valuable could that be if the music was already widely available to musicians? Again, this strongly suggests that even musicians have lacked general access to the music.

Finally, what makes E the correct answer is that it is better than any of the other answer choices. Correct answers on the LSAT need not be perfect (though in my opinion, this answer is pretty darn near perfect); they only have to be the best answer among the five choices presented. Don't reject an answer just because you don't fully love it! Reject it because it is clearly wrong and because another answer is clearly superior. If there isn't a better answer, you have to pick the one you hate the least!

[ashpine17]

I originally picked C for this answer choice. Is this incorrect because of the tense "are"? With Temperley's work, the original scores are NOT extant.

[Robert Carroll]

ashpine,

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Temperley's work made the scores not extant. If anything, I see that Temperley reproduced the original scores in facsimile, so, if anything, that might make answer choice (C) an opposite answer - the work is definitely still in existence.

Robert Carroll