Clichés

[ibanezmonster]

It might be accurate but the echt-Japan/rock gardens/waterfalls imagery with regard to Takemitsu is played out.

I think he did that to himself- "I Hear the Water Dreaming," "A String Around Autumn," "Rain Coming," "Rain Tree Sketch," "Rain Spell," "Spirit Garden," "A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden," "Toward the Sea," "Water Music," "Waterways," "Grass," "I Hear the Water Dreaming," "In the Woods," "Landscape," etc.

[Coco]

I'm starting to think he was kind of a boring composer anyway. 

[ibanezmonster]

He's one of the few composers where I have to be in a certain mood to listen to- and if I'm not, I kinda feel the same way. 

[ibanezmonster]

How nearly every effing symphony ends on that held whole note. That really irks me.

Yes, exactly! 
Glad someone else noticed this. I might listen to a movement of a Brahms symphony and think, "Wow, every note is perfect, except the final chord is so cliched."

[DavidW]

You two don't like returning to the home key?!   You Xenakis nuts you!

[westknife]

Beethoven - cathartic

Haydn - musical jokester/prankster

Brahms - successor to Beethoven

[Coco]

Good ones.

[DavidW]

Brahms - successor to Beethoven

I'll add to that.  I hate the phrase "spiritual successor" which means vaguely influenced by, or these two composers have the same cliche descriptions so I'll just say that one is the spiritual successor of the other.

[ibanezmonster]

You two don't like returning to the home key?!   You Xenakis nuts you!

Not when it's so blatant, like how it sounds, "I must dutifully end it on the final chord."
Take Mahler's 9th's ending- it does end on the final chord (Db) (the key of the movement, not the entire symphony, since the first movement is in D)- however, the way it's voiced and fades out is way different than a typical ending.

[Mirror Image]

Koechlin = New Agey

[Opus106]

Irks me every time: Bach - dry, academic, soulless.

[EDIT: Classical] Music is meant to be profound (even if the composer did not have profundity on his check-list whilst composing )

We still see HIP/PI = mechanical, soulless in some CD reviews

I'm sure I'll be adding more to the list as and when I make a note of them in other threads.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Mahler - anguished
Brahms - autumnal
Schoenberg - dissonant
Bruckner - "cathedral in sound"
Schubert - melodious
Prokofiev - spiky
Mozart - heavenly

They may be cliches, but they fit

[Grazioso]

Regarding atonal works in general, they are described as

dense
difficult
thorny
spiky

And others I am forgetting

Which is another way of saying an atonal work is as pretty as a rose bush

[Grazioso]

Well, there's the cliche that for the British music press, the Three B's, aka the Holy Trinity, can do no wrong. Of course, I refer not to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, but to Boult, Barbirolli, and Beecham

(Is "British music press," said with a sneer and grumblings about the Penguin Guide, a cliche?)

[Lethevich]

There's also the cliche about the British music press being any worse than the other provincial ones

[Superhorn]

  Karajan's conducting is too smooth and glossy .  Solti's is too nervous,hard-driven and soulless.
  Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times.  Zubin Mehta is just a shallow glamor boy and doesn't care about
  contemporary music 
   Mahler's music is too mawkishly sentimental  and hysterically overblown.   Richard Strauss declined as a composer after Der Rosenkavalier, and his later operas are worthless.  The Alpine symphony is the worst of his tone poems.
Or the Symphonia Domestica.  Furtwangler's tempi are much too slow.
    Before the arrival of Alan Gilbert as music director, the New York Philharmonic was a stodgy,staid, conservative orchestra which played little but the same old orchestral warhorses. 
   There is no humor in Beethoven's music.   Dvorak's early symphonies are negligable works.  Schumann  could not  orchestrate well. 
   Period instrument performances give us the music exactly as it sounded in the past and exactly as the composers would have wanted it to be interpreted. 
   Wagner's Ring  is a highly anti-semitic work which glorifies Naziism .  His librettos are lousy .and  the stories
   ridiculous and absurd .  The characters are all cardboard ones.
   American orchestra do nothing but play the same old warhorses and rarely if ever play new or recent music .
   All orchestras today sound the same .  Music directors of today's orchestras spend too little time with their orchestras.   

[DavidW]

That's a good list Superhorn.  Another two sound the same silliness ones I dislike:

Vivaldi wrote the same concerto hundreds of times over
Haydn wrote the same symphony 104 times over

[snyprrr]

refulgent

[Coco]

refuuuuuuulgent spleeeendor

[chasmaniac]

Classical cliches are funny, and some do have the reek of refulgent splendour about them, but they're not in the same ballpark as "rock'n'roll all night long". Ouch. I got chapped just writing that.