Your Top 10 Favorite Composers

[Mirror Image]

You only have 1 set of ears, that is the truth, you don't put on different ears to listen to something that may be different than what you're accustomed-to  or conditioned to hearing. And most people aren't too familiar with Art music at all, they are inundated with simple pop music from early on in most cases. Art music is uncharted territory for most pop consumers, they will have to rely on the ears-mind they have to get into it .. there is a learning curve required.

These are nothing but asinine generalizations that hold no water.

[Todd]

Thankfully no .. as most pop lyrics are pretty dumb.

It was a rhetorical question.  Schubert wrote only half-songs, really.  Same with most Lieder, Melodie, Art Song writers. 

Not all of Schubert's songs have particularly good lyrics, either.  Just because they were written a couple hundred years ago doesn't automatically make them good. 

Given that there are north of 50,000 albums released every year, no one is in a position to be able to assess "most pop lyrics".  The most you can say is that most pop lyrics you've heard are dumb, but you've heard a tiny fraction of what is out there.

[Mirror Image]

Oh so you have different pairs of ears at home? Each set specially tailored? I supposed you have different brains to connect to all those different sets too?

Get your shit together, boy.

What I'm saying, since apparently the idea of thinking, and more importantly comprehension, is beyond you, is that every genre of music has it's own language and like any language you can't just pick it up and understand it right off the bat. In other words, we listen to each genre of music differently hence why I enjoy listening to a wider spectrum of music and you'll continue to have a limited range and musical vocabulary because you can't separate one genre from the next.

[Todd]

Thankfully, there is more to those lied than just words. And the best of them have stood the test of time for many reasons. And he proved himself in lots of other areas too, of course.

There is more to art song than the lyrics, true, but not all the lyrics are great or even good.  The same applies to some pop music.

Yea .. that's one of the problems with pop entertainment, so much of it is dumped out there, as if that validates it, most of it shouldn't be put out. It's ephemeral by nature anyhow, mostly effluent .. . I don't listen to music for the words, most pop consumers do I noticed. A lot of the themes are the same.

How many art songs have been composed since the Renaissance, and how many have never been recorded, and how many are not performed today?  All you're doing is comparing a tiny fraction of art songs that still are performed and recorded to the very tiny slice of available pop songs that you have heard.  Your personal experience is very limited.

Time filters out the bad and the mediocre.  There are many bad and mediocre compositions from centuries past, and generally the best are remembered.  Something similar is already happening with pop songs from decades past. 

[Mirror Image]

That's bull. The nuts & bolts of all music are the same, what is done with those raw materials is what we should be noticing. The creative scale. The musical plane. The time, the place too. And again, you aren't going to find a wider spectrum in music than Art music. It's been around a lot longer & covers more ground, musically. In a lot of cases 'genre' as it applies to pop music - should read, cliche. Stylistic cliche & trends, that most mold themselves into, which is a sad phenomenon and lacks creativity. You will always have a few that lead the way, but the rest just ride on the coattails.

The only thing remotely 'cliche' are your posts. There's good and bad music in all genres. Accept it or not, you're wrong and will always be wrong if you continue to flaunt the idea that whatever you say is some kind of universal truth.

[Brian]

I don't listen to music for the words, most pop consumers do I noticed. A lot of the themes are the same.

"A lot of the themes are the same" - hah. And just how many "classical" songs do you think are about falling in love, getting dumped, and feeling blue? It's not like all of Hugo Wolf's songs are odes to Grecian urns and hymns on the praises of Aristotelian ethics.

[Todd]

But how many pop consumers are willing to absorb art lied to see if this is true or not ..  enrich their musical experience & understanding. Few.

Maybe, but what do you mean by few, and how do you know?

My personal experience with pop music isn't limited at all, I've heard all the main ones .. and at this point, most of it is the same. It's all been said and done it almost seems. And very, very little, if any of it, will have  much of an enduring life as performance music as the best Art music does.

Your personal experience with pop music is not just limited, it's very limited.  How many new pop albums did you listen to last year?  5?  50?  500?  5000? 

When you write the "main ones", I suspect you are referring only to the better known acts that are generally on major labels and get wide distribution and probably sell pretty well.  Again, that just points to how limited your experience is in the context of what is available. 

[Jo498]

I doubt that even a professional pop music critic would listen to 500 or more new albums a year... What are these numbers supposed to tell us? That there is so much out there, therefore a lot (or a bit) of it must be really good? That one has to listen to 100s of obscure popular music albums before one is allowed to comment on popular music?

There is probably a Dan Brown novel every other year or so and dozens clones in between, I assume. There must be hundreds of similar books and some become bestsellers, like Brown. But it is enough to read two pages by Dan Brown (actually half a page suffices, see the link further above) to recognize it as poorly written.

[Madiel]

When the early English settlers arrived in America some communities almost starved because they would not eat the local produce, which was strange to them.
Imagine then a community living in subsitence unaware that the fruits around them are plentiful, flavourful, and and nourishing.
Jo498 and Florestan and James might suggest that these people are missing out, and that their lives would be enriched by partaking of the fruit.

I don't read that as Jo, Andrei, and James claiming that people who do are better people, only that they would have a better life, subjectively.
Some here, it appears, disagree with me. What food snobs you three are!

Except the local produce is pop music. And what's actually happening is that a bunch of people here who have discovered cuisines from far away and long ago are promoting them.

[Madiel]

You really think that Heavy Metal, because there are silly names for lotsa subgenres, is as diverse as, say 1800-1830 in classical music? Not to speak of ca. 1500-2000 in classical music? I don't really know what to say about that, it's too obviously wrong as far as I am concerned.

I doubt you know enough about heavy metal to make a proper assessment of it in comparison to 1800-1830 in classical music. Which is the whole point. Whereas I know that I don't know nearly enough about heavy metal to discuss it at the same level of detail that my nephew can (my nephew being quite musical), you just dismiss the very idea that it could be possibly as interesting as an intimate discussion about what was going on in Europe during a particular generation.

"Silly names"? Who cares what the names are, the point is that someone knowledgeable in the subject can pick up the distinctions. Meanwhile I can pick up at least 4 distinct phases in the career of Vagn Holmboe. Do those distinctions not exist merely because most of the rest of the world hasn't listened to enough Holmboe to be aware of them?  Do all Danish composers sound alike?

Statements like something being "too obviously wrong" are merely a way of avoiding a discussion you don't have something more to say in.

[Todd]

I doubt that even a professional pop music critic would listen to 500 or more new albums a year... What are these numbers supposed to tell us? That there is so much out there, therefore a lot (or a bit) of it must be really good? That one has to listen to 100s of obscure popular music albums before one is allowed to comment on popular music?

No, anyone can, and does, comment on pop music, and how it is inferior to art music.  It happens on this board regularly.  Classical fans here have found their tribe, that much is clear. 

The problem is such opinions rely on ignorance.  Not that there's apparently anything wrong with that.

I'm approaching 70 years of age .. I've watched the landscape for years. I can say with total certainty that being into Art lied is certainly very niche. Most people stick with pop music  pollution and are fond of the music of their adolescent years, which is pop-oriented.

An assertion based only on your experience.  My experience is that for most people, music is not particularly important, and it declines in importance as they age.  That has no bearing on what is good or bad or mediocre.

Do you honestly think it's a matter of numbers? Or quantity? When I say the main ones, I'm referring to trend setters & creative pilars of bygone eras .. You honestly think that what is being done today is that different, musically?

The numbers are important because opinions being offered here are based on very limited samples, and on top of that, very limited samples of western pop music.  I doubt many people here listen to much Afropop, or Indian pop music, or Cambodian pop music, yet they are content to say all pop music is the same lower quality, and that it has all been done, and so forth.

[Madiel]

There are plenty of niches within classical music as well. Heck, there are times when I find the general GMG focus on orchestral music rather fascinating. People are often more familiar with the orchestral version of a work that was originally written for some other forces than they are with the original.

I've gone onto some composer threads, in particular, and raised something about, say, chamber music or songs... and been met with complete silence. Everybody spends pages and pages discussing which are their top 5 symphony cycles, but talk about some non-orchestral work and they're struck dumb.

Heck, there are Beethoven pieces people don't know a lot about. Why are almost none of us familiar with op.6 and op.45? Is it because they're inferior music, or just because we don't have a million pianists blaring them at us?

Why do I notice these things? Because of my own particular interests and way of listening to things. Those who find orchestral music to be their "normal" don't notice. There's nothing objective about any of this. My biggest issue here is not that people prefer classical (orchestral) music, it's that some people treat a preference for classical (orchestral) music as some kind of objectively preferable state of affairs.

[Madiel]

Pop music is actually considerably influenced by African roots, but never mind that kind of detail...

[Todd]

Pop music was born and bred in the west

A dubious statement that relies on not listening to modern pop music and ignoring its history, especially given the very broad definition you have opted to give it elsewhere.  Again, how many new pop recordings released in the last five years have you listened to?

[Mirror Image]

Finding good pop music is a systematic process of trial and elimination. The same theory applies to all music. It's all subjective and as orfeo points out there's nothing remotely objective about any of this and I'm perfectly fine by that as I'll continue to listen to music that moves me while people like James thumbs their noses at something just because it doesn't coincide with their almighty opinion (aka THE UNIVERSAL TRUTH).

[Todd]

I hear it every day .. it gives me a headache. And there is nothing 'modern' about it, btw. It's largely, kids stuff.

So how many?  And what artists, in particular, give you a headache?

[Madiel]

Most pop music is repetitive rhythmically & 4/4.

Well, I gather there are some types of heavy metal that avoid that problem. Or try math rock.

Or just try one of my favourite songs of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVMwDd8V_kY

EDIT: Pop music. So rhythmically uninteresting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M_Gg1xAHE4

[Madiel]

I hear it every morning on the local radio station that plays all of the popular 'hits' of the day, or every time I go out driving ..

Oh man. If you're relying on a radio station to convey the sum total of pop music, that's your problem right there.

[Mirror Image]

I hear it every morning on the local radio station that plays all of the popular 'hits' of the day, or every time I go out driving .. have did this all my life. I follow the news and watch television to see what is going on .. I've never felt the need to keep track of it like this.

You're no better than an ostrich that has it's head buried in the sand. I don't believe for a second that you know anything about popular music other than what you've been exposed to via someone else. On your own, you haven't got a clue and it shows.

[Todd]

I hear it every morning on the local radio station that plays all of the popular 'hits' of the day, or every time I go out driving .. have did this all my life. I follow the news and watch television to see what is going on .. I've never felt the need to keep track of it like this.

So you're not really discussing pop music, but rather just the contemporary version of Top 40.  That explains a lot.  Assuming you are listening to something owned by Clear Channel or something similar, you are hearing an exceptionally small variety of pop music.

There are apps that let you listen to music from all over the world for free.  Pop music, classical music, Mongolian throat singing, whatever you want.