Composers you don't get

[Luke]

Same here. It's like pumpkin pie. "You don't like it because you haven't tried my pumpkin pie."

No, I just don't like pumpkin pie.

It's more that

a) me not liking it means nothing
b) I probably don't feel that strongly about it anyway - there's no one I actively dislike, just some who so far have interested/grabbed me less
c) even with composers I don't adore, there are individual works I do adore (e.g. the Wolf's Glen!)
d) if I tried the piece/composer again, I'd very likely like it very much. It's me that changes and matures, not the piece

so I'm not of a mind to make those sort of statements

[Ken B]

It's more that

a) me not liking it means nothing
b) I probably don't feel that strongly about it anyway - there's no one I actively dislike, just some who so far have interested/grabbed me less
c) even with composers I don't adore, there are individual works I do adore (e.g. the Wolf's Glen!)
d) if I tried the piece/composer again, I'd very likely like it very much. It's me that changes and matures, not the piece

so I'm not of a mind to make those sort of statements

Yeah but the thread is not composers you think suck, it is composers you personally do not see or understand the appeal of whilst acknowledging that others whose opinions you respect do.

[Karl Henning]

Yeah but the thread is not composers you think suck, it is composers you personally do not see or understand the appeal of whilst acknowledging that others whose opinions you respect do.

In that spirit, Wagner.  There is a swath of his work which I like all right, a very few pieces which enthuse me;  but I don't get how one could be . . . a Wagnerite.

[Karl Henning]

I mean, apart from just considering it a cult

[kishnevi]

In that spirit, Wagner.  There is a swath of his work which I like all right, a very few pieces which enthuse me;  but I don't get how one could be . . . a Wagnerite.

He was the Stockhausen of his day, only he knew how to write good music.

More seriously:: I think his status in the 19th century was due to his ideas:  the idea that opera was a continuous drama and not a set of musical set pieces created for the singers to display their vocal talents, the marked increase of chromaticism and orchestral size, and so forth.   Things we think of today as natural or even bloated and too old fashioned he promoted when they were newfangled inventions (and for some of them he counts as the inventor).  He was therefore a symbol of The New in Music, and attacked or adored as such.

[Philo]

There aren't any composers I don't get but there compositions by composers that I don't get. The two most prominent are:

Mozart's Symphonies (I've heard all of them by at least two different conductors, and the 41st I've heard umpteen times).
Schubert's Piano Sonatas (I've heard all of these so many times, especially the last three).

[EigenUser]

Most of Stockhausen and most of Mozart, to name two off of the top of my head.

...but I will keep trying!

[Fagotterdämmerung]

  At first I thought "No one in particular...", and then a really obvious name struck me: Palestrina. Time and time again I've seen him listed as the apex of Renaissance music, the be-all and end-all that thoroughly exhausted all musical possibilities of the period before Monteverdi and the Baroque came in.

  I don't get it. By all means he was a good composer, but head and shoulders above Des Prez? Tallis? Really? His music strikes me as very plain even compared to his contemporaries, but the Renaissance is one of my favorite time periods and I really want to hear the work that makes me agree with folks on this one. 

[Christo]

Let me confess - once again - I never came to grips with:

Mozart (though I love Beethoven, and even some Mozart; Haydn is another blank space)
Schumann (though I love Mendelssohn)
Brahms (though I adore Dvořák)
Wagner (though I was really impressed by Parsifal)
Strauss (all of them  )
Puccini (I find water more tasty  and am fond of late Respighi)
Stockhausen (didn't even try hard, as I did with the others listed here before)
Messiaen (though I admire the man, and used to be fond of the stories about him, told by an old musical friend (now deceased) who knew him personally) 

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

  At first I thought "No one in particular...", and then a really obvious name struck me: Palestrina. Time and time again I've seen him listed as the apex of Renaissance music,

That's a very old-fashioned view, isn't it? My impression is that Palestrina was long regarded as the apex because not much other Renaissance music was known or played. This conventional wisdom has changed a lot in recent decades, because we know those other masters better.

[Ken B]

  At first I thought "No one in particular...", and then a really obvious name struck me: Palestrina. Time and time again I've seen him listed as the apex of Renaissance music, the be-all and end-all that thoroughly exhausted all musical possibilities of the period before Monteverdi and the Baroque came in.

  I don't get it. By all means he was a good composer, but head and shoulders above Des Prez? Tallis? Really? His music strikes me as very plain even compared to his contemporaries, but the Renaissance is one of my favorite time periods and I really want to hear the work that makes me agree with folks on this one.

He isn't head and shoulders above Josquin. No-one could be. He is also from 100 years later. He is primus inter pares with late renaissance composers, Lassus, Victoria, and so on. You need to remember that for centuries this music was neglected and his was the name that survived. So he became an emblem. There are more recordings, good ones, of some of his masses. But we are only recently getting great recordings of the vast amount of music of that era.
A specific recording? PCA, 4 part Lamentation on Archiv, long OOP I think ... 
Or the PCA masses on Brilliant cheap.

[Linus]

I just don't get Brahms.

So, he's got some great ideas and powerful themes.

But by the end of a piece I feel like I'm back at square one, as though I haven't really experienced anything. To me it seems like the compositions never really develop. He twists and turns his themes a bit, but there's no new energy infused to the piece, which makes each theme sound pretty sentimental. What am I missing?

[ritter]

I just don't get Brahms.

So, he's got some great ideas and powerful themes.

But by the end of a piece I feel like I'm back at square one, as though I haven't really experienced anything. To me it seems like the compositions never really develop. He twists and turns his themes a bit, but there's no new energy infused to the piece, which makes each theme sound pretty sentimental. What am I missing?

I have similar feelings on Brahms, Linus (I've mentioned it elsehwere)..it's strange: I get te impression Brahms has everything I believe a composer needs to achieve "greatness" and yet, IMHO, he doesn't...he actually bores me to tears (with one or the other exception in his works)...I can't pinpoint what it is that's missing from that "everything"...

Cheers,

[Fagotterdämmerung]

  Brahms: short bus Beethoven.

  I enjoy his work, though. It's a little like me and popcorn: I never make it at home or buy it, but if someone's having some a theater I'll probably enjoy it a good deal. Same when Brahms is on the concert program.

 

[Linus]

I have similar feelings on Brahms, Linus (I've mentioned it elsehwere)..it's strange: I get te impression Brahms has everything I believe a composer needs to achieve "greatness" and yet, IMHO, he doesn't...he actually bores me to tears (with one or the other exception in his works)...I can't pinpoint what it is that's missing from that "everything"...

Cheers,

Yes! I also feel he has "everything" in theory, but the actual output lacks something fundamental.

It's tempting to say that it's because Brahms is "lazy", too content with the road paved by Beethoven and therefore lacks the drive that is needed to pave new roads. Perhaps originality is a prerequisite for greatness after all.

There's also the rumoured perfectionism of Brahms. Perhaps his sketches had greater energy than his final works? We'll never know.

[Purusha]

Brahms does a lot of things at a technical level that can be hard to appreciate at first. In the case of his themes, it is all about modulation and defying expectation. When you think a melody is moving towards a certain path he suddenly changes gears completely, radically altering the mood of the piece only to suddenly pick things up to where they first broke off. And he does this continually. He is purposely making things harder from himself and by extension for the audience as well. Add to this a thick contrapuntal texture and relentless rhythmic alterations or implications and you get something that can pretty though to wade through the first time around. There is a reason so many 20th century composers used his music for inspiration though. Brahms the progressive indeed.

[Karl Henning]

  Brahms: short bus Beethoven.

http://www.youtube.com/v/caxST63cOd4

[Karl Henning]

http://www.youtube.com/v/9D8waN3sZ8c

[not edward]

I think that Brahms is perhaps seen as an inferior Beethoven because (at least for the second half of his career) the drama is often implied as much as explicit. And though Brahms is not nearly as conservative as he's made out to be, there's nothing like the overt radicalism that you see in the late Beethoven quartets and sonatas.

If I absolutely had to choose between the two, it would be Beethoven, but as time goes by, my opinion of Brahms continues to edge higher.

[Mirror Image]

Granted, I don't know all of Brahms' oeuvre (I still need to explore his chamber music which I've heard so many great things about), but I think this constant comparing him to Beethoven or even trying to doesn't really do the man's music justice. Okay, he revered Beethoven and it even took Brahms a considerable amount of time for him to even compose his first symphony, but what lay beneath the surface of his music is someone who understood and accepted the tradition of classical music at that time and took these classical forms and injected them with his own ideals about how he would like to express himself. On this front, I believe he succeeded. Some people may have difficulty with his music and that's certainly fine, but I think Brahms is one of the most accessible composers of the Romantic Era and a lot of this has to do with what is lying beneath that rugged, highly structured surface.