Your Top 10 Favorite Composers

[Ken B]

Karl & James, folks. They're here all week! Please remember to tip your waitstaff.

[Jo498]

I think the point is not to denigrate popular musicians. Some of them are without a doubt very capable musicians.

But I find it difficult to deny both the overwhelming dominance of popular music in our culture (and that means that it enters our lives to a considerable extent even if we do not care for it because it simply blasts from some speaker in many public spaces very frequently) and its narrow spectrum. And I do think that both of these things actively work against the appreciation of classical (and other) music.

Again, we are talking about a tradition of only 50-60 years of anglophone popular music with its roots mainly in blues and some other (slightly older) genres. Despite concept albums and some other experiments etc. it is futile to deny that it was and is dominated by fairly simple 3-5 minutes songs that often share most structural features. There is nothing wrong with that and there might be some poetic and evocative or instrumentally brilliant pieces among them.  But that there are many names for sub-sub-genres like Death metal, Speed metal, Soft metal whatever can hardly hide the fact that the overall range of that popular music is fairly narrow. And this is partly because it usually has to have certain features to become or remain popular. There is also no denying that a large amount of that music is tied to thoroughly commercialized "youth cultures" with their own clothing, jargon etc.

Be that as it may, the problem is not that there is some popular music but that because of its pervasiveness and pseudo-breadth many people are hardly aware of other music. (Again this would also include a lot of instrumental Jazz and e.g. Indian Classical and some ethnic music most of which are even less known than classical.) Or if they encounter it they find most of it that does not confirm to the features of typical popular music strange and irritating. This is only to be expected if one's taste is formed in the way it is.

I am not quite as pessimistic that adults cannot overcome this conditioning. But I think it is one reason why in an age where the access, at least on youtube or radio is easier than ever classical music is probably less popular than 50 or 80 years ago. (Although I am not sure about that except for anecdotal evidence and the general complaints that the classical audience was "dying out")

[Karl Henning]

Karl & James, folks. They're here all week!

No, I'm in and out through the course of the week.

[Karl Henning]

I do believe, though, if we ever have a lone parrot (if you have two birds, they are apt to communicate one with another, and not to respond particularly to attempts to have them imitate speech), one of the first phrases I'll teach him is, Like I said many times before.

No, but really.

[Karl Henning]

No, I'm in and out through the course of the week.

I'm in Fall River Wednesday through Friday nights.  May run out to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, too.

[Karl Henning]

John, what is your email address? I want to send you my latest app. A button that reads "Press here to move Shostakovich down." It's still in beta testing but I can see you need one desperately.

(* chortle *)

[Brian]

I love Webern, a master of miniatures. But there is a huge gulf between that and pop tunes. Same applies with Art song, piano pieces and all that mostly smaller scale stuff & instrumental music. But overall, yea .. it's longer and more involved. It has a richer History too.

Let's talk about an example here. Is there a "huge gulf" between the way Franz Schubert writes a song and the way Paul McCartney writes a song?

Part of the problem pop music faces is that, if you hear it on the radio 809523 times, you're going to start resenting it. The same holds true of classical music - which is why so many GMGers hate "over-played" works like Pachelbel's Canon or the Blue Danube waltz. If you look past that over-familiarity - if you look at the actual technique & skill & intention of the composition - is there such a "huge gulf," "longer and more involved and richer," when you consider Schubert lieder vs., say, Pet Sounds or Rubber Soul?

[Brian]

I don't think you're being much fairer to pop music, frankly. And this is one of the things that irritates me so much about GMG. My nephew, who is into what I merely call "heavy metal", can rattle off a heck of a lot of subgenres of heavy metal, in much the same way that people here can have discussions about whether it's best to have someone of Austrian background playing Mozart (as is currently happening in the Mozart thread).

It's an inherent cultural bias to subdivide what you know and care about in great detail, and to treat something that you only know sketchily as less diverse. It's exactly the phenomenon that allows people to talk about individual states of the USA but treat "Africa" as if it's a single undifferentiated culture. It's exactly why people distinguish people of their own 'race' far better than people of a different 'race'. It's exactly why I'm as interested in whether or not someone from my own city is a northsider or a southsider, but couldn't tell you much about the characteristics of different districts of Paris and absolutely nothing about the different districts of Lagos.

What you use to teach English literature is going to depend a great deal on the depth with which you're teaching it. You're unlikely to introduce kids to authors from previous centuries in primary school. When they're a bit holder you might throw them a few of history's greatest hits like Shakespeare, but you're still not going to introduce them to a range of authors from across the centuries, only the really huge names. Once someone gets to university and decides they're going to study literature as a dedicated subject they might end up in a course about Scottish authors during the Enlightenment.

But not everyone's going to spend their life studying literature. Frankly not everyone has time for it. Everybody specialises. Everybody who bothers to post on this message board is inherently a specialist, because you care enough about music to want to talk to other people about it. Should anyone who wants to specialise in music as an interest be aware of a wide range of traditions? Absolutely.

But does this mean the general masses ought to be instructed past being vaguely aware of a few really big names like Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? No. Because in the same way that some of my friends deeply into literature discover that I haven't read many of the great pieces of literature (hey, I've seen a movie version of some of them), anyone who is deeply into music is going to discover that a lot of their friends haven't heard many of the great pieces of music. It's simply not realistic to expect that everyone has the same knowledge and experience base. It's never going to happen because people are off exploring a hundred other things that I, personally, don't find as riveting as I find music.

Agreeing with Karl that this is an outstanding post.

[Karl Henning]

Twelve? Let's see . . .

Stravinsky
Schoenberg
Prokofiev
Shostakovich
Chopin
Berlioz
JS Bach
Rakhmaninov
Sibelius
Nielsen
Brahms
D. Scarlatti

Getting the first ten is easy ... and then I wonder, whom am I leaving out, and I'll kick myself (figuratively) for the omission?...

Rhetorical q.'s:

Would I substitute LvB for D. Scarlatti?

Would I substitute Vivaldi for D. Scarlatti?

Is it odd to have Brahms there, but not LvB?

Shouldn't I make room for "Papa"?

[Karl Henning]

Part of the problem pop music faces is that, if you hear it on the radio 809523 times, you're going to start resenting it. The same holds true of classical music - which is why so many GMGers hate "over-played" works like Pachelbel's Canon or the Blue Danube waltz.

Very good point.  Baby, you're a firework.

[Karl Henning]

Resolved:  It is no particular virtue, just being scornful of a pop song, or of pop music as an industry.

[James]

Let's talk about an example here. Is there a "huge gulf" between the way Franz Schubert writes a song and the way Paul McCartney writes a song?

Part of the problem pop music faces is that, if you hear it on the radio 809523 times, you're going to start resenting it. The same holds true of classical music - which is why so many GMGers hate "over-played" works like Pachelbel's Canon or the Blue Danube waltz. If you look past that over-familiarity - if you look at the actual technique & skill & intention of the composition - is there such a "huge gulf," "longer and more involved and richer," when you consider Schubert lieder vs., say, Pet Sounds or Rubber Soul?

In that prior post I was merely speaking to the suggestion that I somehow was overlooking shorter works within the vast 'written tradition' (as opposed to a oral or folk tradition) that Classical music is, and I pointed out Webern was a master of them (he's one of my favorite musicians ever) .. Webern wrote a lot of songs. You think the average pop consumer would 'get them', or anything else Webern wrote? How bout side by side with pop hits on the Radio? I say, nope. Large adjustment required, that is what I ment by gulf in that instance. That is perhaps an extreme example (but of the Lied tradition), I still believe it would be hard for people raised on only commercial pop music to get into the art songs & song cycles of Schubert, Schumann, Faure, Strauss, Mahler, Stockhausen etc, heck even Dowland (whom I love a lot) .. all of which have a lot of substance to them. More than you're average pop song .. which tends to border on adolescent, let's face it. Not to mention the performance aspects which tend to be, let's say "different" to put it gently.

But by & large Art music is more involved musically, yes. Even shorter, sung things. Pitting studio pop albums Rubber Soul or Pet Sounds against the much earlier nearly 600+ Franz Schubert 'art songs', cycles won't really change things.

And your point about familiarity breeding contempt may be true .. but more so for simple repetitive pop tunes which don't require much effort to absorb or get, and you're more likely to come by. Art song and all that that entails is foreign territory for most people, so are large choral edifices, symphonies, concertos, the world of chamber music, electro-acoustics, operas, secular/sacred music, heck most instrumental music ..  In general, Art/Classical music has a lot more mileage going for it, especially on the listening end of it - it will take many, many listens to absorb it's content before you reach the point of contempt or whatever, and even if you do - going through the musical anatomy of it all, you will come away from the experience 'learning' so much more.

[Florestan]

Let's talk about an example here. Is there a "huge gulf" between the way Franz Schubert writes a song and the way Paul McCartney writes a song?

Let´s actually talk about more than one example. In your opinion, which are McCartney´s equivalents of, say, Erlkoenig, Der Doppelgaenger and Der Wanderer?

[Ken B]

Let´s actually talk about more than one example. In your opinion, which are McCartney´s equivalents of, say, Erlkoenig, Der Doppelgaenger and Der Wanderer?

Spoilsport.

[Mirror Image]

Let´s actually talk about more than one example. In your opinion, which are McCartney´s equivalents of, say, Erlkoenig, Der Doppelgaenger and Der Wanderer?

Why must there be any comparisons made in the first place? These are two different genres that require a different set of ears for each.

[Ken B]

Are people not getting the word right? Great music from the past isn't great because it's "classical". It's "classical" because it's great and has lasted. If you try to define classical in value free terms and get in the wabac machine to any point in the past you'll find a lot of contemporaneous music meeting your definition which has since sunk without a trace, largely unlamented, and was no better or no worse than most contemporaneous music today.

Let's shift subject. I think the best theorem in mathematics is Cauchy's Analytic Function Theorem. This is a pretty widely held opinion amongst mathematicians. Now this theorem is till taught to every mathematician, and is central to vast branches of the subject. It's a classical theorem as it were. But lots of theorems from the same era are now forgotten.

[Mirror Image]

Getting back on topic for a change...

Another feeble attempt at a 'Top 10' (in no particular order):

Ravel
Bartók
Sibelius
Nielsen
Vaughan Williams
Elgar
Rachmaninov
Schnittke
Martinů
Shostakovich

Five Honorable Mentions: Janáček, Prokofiev, Britten, Szymanowski, and Villa-Lobos.

My list would look the same, although, now I would probably put my Top 5 in order:

Sibelius
Nielsen
Vaughan Williams
Bartók
Ravel

[Mirror Image]

No. Same set of ears. But more demands placed on them for classical music in general. More effort required. Especially for those just raised on simple pop tunes.

What I'm saying, which is true whether you want to acknowledge it or not, is that you can't listen to either genre the same way. Both satisfy me, but where I prefer classical music as my 'final stop,' this shouldn't mean that popular music doesn't satisfy me in a completely different way. You'll never grow as a listener, James, if you continue to uphold this sense of superiority you seem to carry with each successive post you make. I still believe you're the most shallow listener I've ever met. Your growth as a listener is still in the kindergarten phase. How you will get out of this rut you're in is to stop being such a pompous jerk and accept that there's a lot of great music out there besides classical music.

[Jo498]

Interestingly, art songs, the genre that is closest to popular (and also folksy) music seem to be an acquired taste even among listeners of classical music. Sure, there have been several albums with songs by Schubert and others by pop or folk artists (Streisand, Baez, Sting, at least one German Folk Singer (Hannes Wader) and probably more. But generally, many people who are used to amplified voices find that classically trained voices sound unnatural or mannered.

I admit that I have not liked any of the classical pieces I have heard sung by the artists just mentioned (I got rid of a "Classical Barbra" Album many years ago and never bought the Sting/Dowland because I strongly disliked the samples). One reason is that their voices seem often overtaxed even by fairly "simple" songs. (And it is worse in more difficult music. I adore most of the 1960s albums of Joan Baez and own all of them but her voice that sounds so natural in folk songs sounds uncontrolled, the vibrato even ugly in the Bachiana Brasileira that is included on one of them and there is also a shipwreck on the Xmas album, I think) Apparently the vocal lines are often too difficult to be sung "naturally" with an untrained voice. Admittedly, this is speculative and there might be examples of similar crossover projects that worked better. (And I'll be the first to admit that some albums with opera singers trying Jazz or popular stuff might be even worse.)

[Todd]

Let´s actually talk about more than one example. In your opinion, which are McCartney´s equivalents of, say, Erlkoenig, Der Doppelgaenger and Der Wanderer?

Erlkoenig - Helter Skelter

Der Doppelganger - Eleanor Rigby

Der Wanderer - Yesterday


I forgot, did Schubert write his own lyrics?