At a time when most composers aligned themselves with one school or another, Bartok possessed a genius for synthesis that contemporaries mistook for a compliant eclecticism.
Inventing a new, radical kind of realism, he populated his pictures with ordinary people, embracing their imperfections and weaknesses with a candor that many of his contemporaries mistook for vulgarity (2 ).
Outsiders, uninitiated into the subtleties of contemporary art, could mistake it for the effort of an enterprising artist of 5 or 6, freely expressing himself in haphazard lines on the nursery room walls.
You will see that name in contemporary documents by mistake.
You have to wait until the hall is absolutely quiet and sense that everyone is concentrating; then you begin this great work all alone, your colleagues gradually entering one by one, building Mozart's famous controversial chords (which his contemporaries thought were mistakes!) on top of your bass line.
It is memory that keeps contemporary people from repeating mistakes, but sadly, memory fades as those who shared history fade from the scene.
The Magna Carta, though, with its own conglomeration of small and large concerns, its mixture of particular corrections and sweeping reforms, its history of conflicted ambitions and compromises, proves how mistaken this contemporary perspective is.
It's not such a costly mistake with contemporary players, but if you get stuck with a Bobby Jones fake, you're out a couple thousand bucks.
It is important that the positions of terminal nodes, all of which represent contemporary species, not be mistaken as having some significance, because they do not (see also Fig. 11).
I did not retro-diagnose Cavendish or Dirac, and I tried to avoid doing that because I think it's a mistake that contemporary writers on autism make.
