Unpopular Opinions

[North Star]

In Scotland they lowered the voting age to 16 from 18. The drinking age is 18.
Better would have been to lower the drinking age and raise the voting age.

That is a peculiar interpretation of the meaning of the word 'better'.

[Jo498]

In Germany the voting age (age of majority) used to be 21 until about 1975. Now it's 18 as had been the age for driving cars and military service before. Smoking/Drinking age is nuanced between 16 (no hard liquor) and 18 (now also for smoking/buying tobacco, this used to be 16 until a few years ago). But to my knowledge this is not enforced as strictly as in many other countries. Until a few years ago one could buy cigarettes from vending machines without proof of age (one only had to be tall enough to reach the slot, probably most 10 year olds are).
For some communal/regional bodies the active voting age was lowered to 16 in some regions, but 18 still applies for all important elections.

[Mirror Image]

When I browsed through this thread a few weeks ago someone had posted a link to an older article by some contemporary british composer (whose name I forgot) that was very critical about Shostakovich. I seem to be unable to find it without going through 50 pages of thread. Does anyone remember the link or name of the composer?

EDIT: Found it, it's amw's reply #913. the comment linked is by Robin Holloway dating from 2000.
http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/26th-august-2000/41/music

It's also important to remember that Holloway's opinion is just that an opinion. Having heard some of his music, I have to say I'm not particularly impressed with his music and so his negative thoughts on Shostakovich mirror my own about his music.

[North Star]

It's also important to remember that Holloway's opinion is just that an opinion.

I'd say it's barely an opinion.  0:)

[Mirror Image]

I'd say it's barely an opinion.  0:)

Yeah, more like a rant.

[Jo498]

Holloway should have gone more into detail, but I do find his view interesting nevertheless. He is very probably not a great composer himself, so his opinion should not carry much weight because of his "rank", but neither does he seem to reject most of Shostakovich's music because he belongs to some "school" or because of some general prejudice against non-avantgarde music. His points are not a very deep criticism, but I can understand a few of them (even if I do not share all of his impressions).

[Luke]

Holloway may or may not be a great composer (personally I actually think he is an extremely fine one, and I would think that even if he hadn't taught me and been generally a key figure in my own musical education), but he certainly has an extremely deep and comprehensive knowledge of the entire extended repertoire, and I don't know him ever to have tossed out any of his opinions without being able to back them up thoroughly and persuasively. I'd actually suggest that he is rare among composers in the completeness of his total and thorough immersion in the repertoire (e.g. I think I know my Janacek, but turns out he knows it much more deeply than I do). When he taught me he had some pretty outrageous things to say about all sorts of pieces - but you could always see where he came from, even if you disagreed. The flip side, too, was his obvious, almost spiritual devotion to so much else. Disagree, fine, he would only expect and welcome that, but don't dismiss his opinions as unfounded.

[North Star]

I don't know anything about Holloway, but his reasons for not thinking much of Shostakovich, as he has written on that piece, don't seem to amount to anything substantial - he's not as colourful as the colourists, "a rapid degeneration from innocent cheerfulness via terse grimness to the long- drawn-out torture by excruciation and vacancy of the final works" in the string quartets, "neutral or indeed repellent: battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion, exercises or instructions in communal lament and celebration, rendered by portentous slow music and mirthless fast music, nearly identical from work to work, coarsely if effectively scored, executed with horrifying fluency and competence, kept unflaggingly going long after its natural cut-off point had passed", " habitual harshness, meanness, over-emphasis"

I would like to see what are Holloway's foundations for these arguments. And why should Shostakovich be as colourful as the colourists, and how are the "intended comparisons" Haydn, Beethoven, and Mahler - especially since Holloway goes on to say that "There simply hasn't been a Shostakovich-shaped niche" - if those are the closest comparisons, I'd say the Shostakovich-shaped niche is certainly there.

[Luke]

My point is that, in the real world, there are some people who might profess an opinion with which I disagree who I will happily grant that they know what they are talking about, and that maybe I ought to take what they've said as an invitation to re-examine things I thought I knew. Holloway is one of those people. As far as Shostakovich goes, I love him, I don't agree with Holloway about him, particularly about the Preludes and Fugues...but then I look at Holloway's own contrapuntal keyboard writing (e.g. his Bach-inspired Gilded Goldberg's) and think, well, this man knows what he is talking about, I can't just dismiss his opinions as easily as that. And I can see at least the germ of Holloway's point in every single one of the passages you quote, although I draw different conclusions from them.

[Mirror Image]

I don't know anything about Holloway, but his reasons for not thinking much of Shostakovich, as he has written on that piece, don't seem to amount to anything substantial - he's not as colourful as the colourists, "a rapid degeneration from innocent cheerfulness via terse grimness to the long- drawn-out torture by excruciation and vacancy of the final works" in the string quartets, "neutral or indeed repellent: battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion, exercises or instructions in communal lament and celebration, rendered by portentous slow music and mirthless fast music, nearly identical from work to work, coarsely if effectively scored, executed with horrifying fluency and competence, kept unflaggingly going long after its natural cut-off point had passed", " habitual harshness, meanness, over-emphasis"

This quote alone from Holloway's article is enough to make one bust out into laughter. He's certainly entitled to his opinions of course, but, like I said, this article was just one giant rant on why he believes he's in the minority but the reality is there's plenty of people that dislike Shostakovich as much as they dislike Ives. He's just blowing off some steam. That's the way I look at it.

[North Star]

My point is that, in the real world, there are some people who might profess an opinion with which I disagree who I will happily grant that they know what they are talking about, and that maybe I ought to take what they've said as an invitation to re-examine things I thought I knew. Holloway is one of those people. As far as Shostakovich goes, I love him, I don't agree with Holloway about him, particularly about the Preludes and Fugues...but then I look at Holloway's own contrapuntal keyboard writing (e.g. his Bach-inspired Gilded Goldberg's) and think, well, this man knows what he is talking about, I can't just dismiss his opinions as easily as that. And I can see at least the germ of Holloway's point in every single one of the passages you quote, although I draw different conclusions from them.

I agree that I can see where he hears these things in the music, but in the end Holloway really writes more about not hearing anything special in the music, and I don't think that he's proving anything, regardless of the greatness of his musical mind, and I don't see how one should re-examine the music with thought of not hearing the same things he doesn't. But then again, I'm rarely interested in anyone's negative response to works of art.

[Ken B]

Well, might as well wave the red flag at the shosty bulls. Holloway's comments about the symphonies are pretty fair. 14 is a masterpiece, 1 does promise things not deilvered in many later symphonies, and as a set they are very mixed and not at the level of Mahler say. Of course those are also his official face music. But the concertos are a different story, as are the P&F and quartets.

[ibanezmonster]

What if being colorless was Shostakovich's intention and it ended up being an attractive quality of his music when one is in the mood for it? I mean, when you want to portray a message as gloomy as what he writes sometimes, you don't want to make people think of the Carebears.

When it comes to negative reviews of composers who have been established for decades/centuries, there's no real point in criticism other than to express how you personally feel... I might not listen to Mozart or Rossini because most of what I've heard I seriously have no interest in, but I'm not going to say it's terrible and explain why. They write music that doesn't quite entertain me (or may even annoy me), but oh well, move on. Now, saying something about Dzorevashvili's music is another story... 

[Jo498]

I certainly believe that Holloway could expand his points, but a magazine article is not the place for that and so they may not be as convincingly made as they could have been.

In any case it seems that people underestimate the meteoric rise of Shostakovich's music in the last 30 years or so. When I started listening to classical music as a teenager in the mid/late '80s hardly anyone would have put him even remotely in the league of Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok or Prokofieff.
More conservative listeners dismissed him because he belonged to the "Soviets" and for fanciers of avantgarde his music was hopelessly outdated. (I find Holloway's comment interesting, because he belongs to neither fraction). Of course the political filing changed almost completely after more biographical details were known, but as Holloway points out this should not dominate the evaluation of the music.

Nowadays Shostakovich is obviously much better represented on discs and probably also in concerts than e.g. Ives, Szymanowski, Martinu, Hindemith... Of the generation around 1900 maybe only Messiaen comes close (although I doubt it).

[springrite]

Here is maybe an unpopular opinion: most of the opinions expressed on this thread are fairly popular.

[amw]

Here is maybe an unpopular opinion: most of the opinions expressed on this thread are fairly popular.

I pretty much agree with this (sorry to reduce your unpopularity).

A truly unpopular opinion would be something like JS Bach's music is awkward and incompetent or Beethoven is not dramatic enough or Schubert's melodies are pedestrian and lacking in interest or something.

[Karl Henning]

My point is that, in the real world, there are some people who might profess an opinion with which I disagree who I will happily grant that they know what they are talking about, and that maybe I ought to take what they've said as an invitation to re-examine things I thought I knew. Holloway is one of those people. As far as Shostakovich goes, I love him, I don't agree with Holloway about him, particularly about the Preludes and Fugues...but then I look at Holloway's own contrapuntal keyboard writing (e.g. his Bach-inspired Gilded Goldberg's) and think, well, this man knows what he is talking about, I can't just dismiss his opinions as easily as that. And I can see at least the germ of Holloway's point in every single one of the passages you quote, although I draw different conclusions from them.

Regardless of questions of popularity, I find this opinion sound.

[Jo498]

I pretty much agree with this (sorry to reduce your unpopularity).

A truly unpopular opinion would be something like JS Bach's music is awkward and incompetent or Beethoven is not dramatic enough or Schubert's melodies are pedestrian and lacking in interest or something.

Earlier in the thread there are some that come close (although I am not sure if all of these were meant seriously):
JS Bach is boring.
Only about a dozen pieces of Mozart's are worthwhile.
Schumann wrote a couple of good pieces but he's probably the most overrated composer in all of music history.
Schubert wrote a few more good ones, but he's nearly as overrated as Schumann.

I am also slightly puzzled how many contributors do not seem to care for "baroque and classical" which probably means: anything before Beethoven (as I doubt there are many friends of Renaissance music who completely reject baroque).

[Karl Henning]

. . . (as I doubt there are many friends of Renaissance music who completely reject baroque).

Some certainly, perhaps not many.

[Jo498]

To clarify: I would still be astonished how many reject music from Monteverdi through Mozart, even if they were all rabid fans of Perotin, Dufay, Josquin and Palestrina...