Your Top 10 Favorite Composers

[Madiel]

There is probably more variety found from 1965 thru to 1975 in popular musics than what is going on today!

When I observed how a person who grew up in the 1960s would be far more comfortable with pop music from the 1960s, I genuinely had no idea that you were a walking, talking example of the effect.

That's the music you know.

If you're listening to a radio station that plays today's top 40 hits, you are never going to hear the variety of what is going on today, in exactly the same way that you have orchestras that turn out a steady diet of Beethoven and Brahms and wouldn't touch some of your preferred 20th/21st century classical with a 10-foot pole. Heck, many classical radio stations don't explore all that far. Trust me, I've had a look at how often the main Australian station plays Holmboe...

You're simply not making a fair comparison for all the reasons I've set out before. You're a specialist in what you like and a generalist in what you don't. And there's nothing wrong with that so long as you don't think that your generalisation is an accurate representation of what a person with a stronger interest in pop music of the last few decades will hear.

[Ken B]

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

Yeah. (Yeah, yeah.)

[kishnevi]

Like?

Are you a tourist on their first visit to a foreign country, in need of a tour guide to tell you what is and is not important? 


If you have such a lack of curiosity that you want us to tell you what is of interest instead of exploring on your own, then supplying you a list is a useless enterprise.

[Ken B]

I am discussing pop music. Instead of getting things wrong about me, (I mean really) why don't you tell me what you think are today's most outstanding pop songs, things that are doing something really fresh on a musical level, something that a highly versed musical individual may find interest in?

You misunderstand the purpose of thread, which is to sneer at anyone naive enough to believe in achievement or merit. Relativer than thou.

[Todd]

I'm waiting to be educated, I guess it is too hard for you to advocate the best of today's pop music to some old geezer like me, with those tastes.

Someone with such advanced and self-pronounced wisdom, knowledge, and taste as you can do some of your own homework and not rely on one local radio station or any forum member not up to your lofty aesthetic standards.  And you already know, and have repeatedly written, what you think of music you haven't even heard.

[Todd]

Actually, let me try a James:


"50 Best Albums of 2015

40 Songhoy Blues, 'Music in Exile'

To find the heaviest-hitting blues-rock of the year, take a sharp left at the Mississippi Delta until you're in the deserts of Mali. Though rooted in the nation's world-famous guitar lineage and chugging with the rollicking Saharan-rock rhythms made popular by contemporary bands like Tinariwen and Terakraft, Songhoy Blues are a far harder and punkier affair: Think Ali Farka Touré's iconic desert blues shredded out by kids raised on hip-hop and Jimi Hendrix. Their debut album, produced by Marc-Antoine Moreau and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, is the blazing solution to a year without a new Black Keys or Jack White album, full of lyrical solos, entrancing rhythms and melancholy lyrics like those of "Desert Melodie," a protest of the jihadists who outlawed music in the northern part of their country."


Let me know if you need a higher ranking one James, and I can cut and paste for you.  (I mean, come on, you mentioned Hendrix, the reviewer mentioned Hendrix ..)

[Florestan]

Erlkoenig - Helter Skelter

Der Doppelganger - Eleanor Rigby

Der Wanderer - Yesterday

Coming from you such brevity is a bit of a letdown. I should have expected one of your customary lengthy technical essays on Schubert recordings, this time elaborating on the above stated similitudes. Nevertheless, I´ll take your word for it.

I forgot, did Schubert write his own lyrics?

That´s a good point. Indeed, McCartney the composer stands in the same relation to Schubert as McCartney the poet stands to Goethe or Heine.

[Madiel]

Again, now is the chance to advocate, but you don't.

Fine, I'll advocate the following artists, almost none of whom I would expect to hear on radio any time soon.

Radiohead, Tori Amos, Something for Kate (or Paul Dempsey as a solo artist), george or any of the Noonan siblings' subsequent projects (Katie Noonan being more prolific), Patty Griffin, Beyoncé's last two albums, Fiona Apple (especially her last album), Janelle Monae, Moloko / Roisin Murphy as a solo artist, and the only album by the Dissociatives. That'll do for now.

There is of course not the slightest guarantee that you'll like any of this, any more than there is a guarantee that we will like the same classical composers. I think we've already established that one of your most beloved classical composers leaves me stone cold.

But, as others have said, if you actually had any kind of curiosity about these things you would go and explore yourself. I sure as hell didn't find out about many of my favourite pop artists by blindly following the radio. My sister and I used to regularly buy each other albums for Christmas and birthdays, and that largely died out because I kept coming up with wishlists with large numbers of performers my sister had never heard of and often albums that had never been released for sale in Australia. I'd been told about them by other music fans, I'd read articles that made me curious, I'd seen critics lists, I'd stumbled across a video somewhere on the internet or on the late night music clips show that runs for 7 or 8 hours.

Your protestations that you've heard it all are deeply unconvincing, because you wouldn't have heard most of it unless you went looking for it.

[Karl Henning]

Your protestations that you've heard it all are deeply unconvincing, because you wouldn't have heard most of it unless you went looking for it.

Deeply unconvincing, too, because it aligns with his history of intellectual lethargy.

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[Karl Henning]

Coming from you such brevity is a bit of a letdown. I should have expected one of your customary lengthy technical essays on Schubert recordings, this time elaborating on the above stated similitudes. Nevertheless, I´ll take your word for it.

That´s a good point. Indeed, McCartney the composer stands in the same relation to Schubert as McCartney the poet stands to Goethe or Heine.

Is Satie's work, too, inconsiderable, because its simplicity compares so obviously to the, let us say, dexterity of the songs and piano music of Brahms?

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[Karl Henning]

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.

Excellent point, thanks.

There's no real purchase in present assertions that (say) "Yesterday" will sink without a trace. In the first place, the assertion is hostile and speculative; the question needs to be revisited a hundred years hence.

In the second, there is no present indication that "Yesterday" suffers any artistic ill health; I shouldn't be surprised if, somewhere in the world, someone performs the song to an audience who think well of it, each and every day. I do not think it a grave risk of error to surmise that it may become a classic.

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[Madiel]

I'm tempted, for the sake of fusing together the actual topic and the massive deviation that has now engulfed it, to try and come up with a list of favourite composers that combines classical favourites with pop music ones.

It's a scary thought, though. It's difficult enough trying to compare my reactions to Bach with my reactions to Faure. The prospect of trying to evaluate my taste for Rachmaninov compared to my taste for Radiohead is rather daunting.

[Florestan]

Is Satie's work, too, inconsiderable, because its simplicity compares so obviously to the, let us say, dexterity of the songs and piano music of Brahms?

My reply was to Todd´s claim that Paul McCartney´s Helter Skelter is the equivalent of Schubert´s Erlkoenig. I don´t quite get what Satie and Brahms have got to do with the issue. 

Anyway, here is McCartney himself on Helter Skelter:

"Umm, that came about just 'cause I'd read a review of a record which said, 'and [the Who] really got us wild, there's echo on everything, they're screaming their heads off.' And I just remember thinking, 'Oh, it'd be great to do one. Pity they've done it. Must be great – really screaming record.' And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn't rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, 'Oh well, we'll do one like that, then.' And I had this song called 'Helter Skelter,' which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise." (emphasis mine)

I simply fail to see any similarity between a ridiculously noisy song written solely for the purpose of outdoing the competition in the genre (I use its composer´s own words) and Schubert´s Erlkoenig. That is all.

[Karl Henning]

I'm tempted, for the sake of fusing together the actual topic and the massive deviation that has now engulfed it, to try and come up with a list of favourite composers that combines classical favourites with pop music ones.

It's a scary thought, though. It's difficult enough trying to compare my reactions to Bach with my reactions to Faure. The prospect of trying to evaluate my taste for Rachmaninov compared to my taste for Radiohead is rather daunting.

That, for me, is the interest in the exercise. The truth cannot be well served by either the Horse Race, nor by Everything Is Beautiful, in Its Own Way; but, I think, by some humane balance of moderated models of both "extremes."

[North Star]

And here's me thinking classical referred to neoclassicism (or to the classical antiquity), and that if a sculpture or a piece of music was (or was not) in this style, it didn't necessarily tell us whether it has lasting aesthetic value.

[Madiel]

In chronological order:

Bach, J.S.
Haydn
Beethoven
Chopin
Brahms
Dvorak
Faure
Rachmaninov
Ravel
Holmboe

I'm damn glad I chose to go with chronological order.

Haydn
Beethoven
Brahms
Faure
Holmboe
Joni Mitchell
Tori Amos
Patty Griffin
Thom Yorke
Paul Dempsey

[Karl Henning]

My reply was to Todd´s claim that Paul McCartney´s Helter Skelter is the equivalent of Schubert´s Erlkoenig. I don´t quite get what Satie and Brahms have got to do with the issue. 

Anyway, here is McCartney himself on Helter Skelter:

"Umm, that came about just 'cause I'd read a review of a record which said, 'and [the Who] really got us wild, there's echo on everything, they're screaming their heads off.' And I just remember thinking, 'Oh, it'd be great to do one. Pity they've done it. Must be great – really screaming record.' And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn't rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, 'Oh well, we'll do one like that, then.' And I had this song called 'Helter Skelter,' which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, 'cuz I like noise." (emphasis mine)

I simply fail to see any similarity between a ridiculously noisy song written solely for the purpose of outdoing the competition in the genre (I use its composer´s own words) and Schubert´s Erlkoenig. That is all.

A most interesting post, thanks, дорогой 

To work backwards, (1.) we can announce that Boléro is not music, using its composer´s own words:

I have written one masterpiece, and that is the Boléro. Unfortunately, it contains no music.

A simple illustration that it will not do simply to refer to the composer´s own words as a definitive indicator.

(2.) In neither case, though, is the context especially simple.  In both cases, meseems, we have a composer coping with his relations to the public.  Ravel was, perhaps, sniping at what the public has fixated upon, and complaining that other works of his, which cost him greater effort and of which the composer himself thought more highly, go unregarded.  McCartney, as any reasonably intelligent pop artist who has had more than one popular success, wrestled with the conflicting elements of the public´s expectations (expectations established by his own successes), and the artistic impulse of expanding one´s palette, of not simply repeating oneself.  What did he mean by this remark?  I don´t have the definitive answer.  There may be elements of modesty, of which (in the context of a discussion of a "classical composer") we would typically speak well.

(3.) Your rhetorical dismissal, too, depends on regarding the two elements in a negative light.  Let´s concede for argument´s sake that it is a ridiculous song.  Why is that suddenly ineligible in vocal music?  Offhand, we should probably call Игорь Фёдорович´s Тилим-бом ridiculous, but not consider it anything negative.  And you´re really going to dismiss "Helter Skelter" as noise, dismiss McCartney´s exulting in cooperating in a song which is a celebration of noise?  What are you, your own grandmother, that we only allow songs which sound pretty?    In short, sure:  it´s ridiculous, and it´s noisy;  and that´s how it´s made.

(4.) Parenthetically, when one has written something ridiculous and noisy as a caprice (a time-honored musical occupation), and it is the material for an adaptation such as the following, we have the beginning of an argument that one has created a classic:

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

(5.) I am a little surprised to hear you, a fellow fan of the musical 19^th century, pooh-poohing outdoing the competition, which (broadly interpreted) also enjoys an ancient musical pedigree.  But as I read it, McCartney was not trying to out-do The Who, but that he had formed a certain idea from a written review of the record (again: the faculty of imagination, which, if our subject were Schubert, we would be lauding); that on listening to the actual record, he found that it did not match his mental profile of the music — and so he set out to create a recording which matched his mental expectations.  I do call that drawing inspiration where one finds it.

(6.) As to Todd´s post, you asked for his opinion on an equivalent, without specifying what would satisfy you as equivalence.  I should have called it a suggestion, rather than a claim;  it´s true that he offered the suggestions without explanation, but I expect there could be reasonable and interesting discussion on the question.  Perhaps he will enlarge.

[Florestan]

Why, you supplied the essay I had been expecting from Todd. Thank you too. 

What did he mean by this remark? 

I don´t know. He made it two days before the release of The Beatles, which contained the piece.

Your rhetorical dismissal, too, depends on regarding the two elements in a negative light.  Let´s concede for argument´s sake that it is a ridiculous song.  Why is that suddenly ineligible in vocal music?

You read "ineligible" where I implied "non-similar"or "non-equivalent".

And you´re really going to dismiss "Helter Skelter" as noise, dismiss McCartney´s exulting in cooperating in a song which is a celebration of noise?

Thank you for producing further evidence for Helter Skelter not being anywhere near remotely similar /equivalent to Erlkoening, of which we might perhaps agree upon it not being a celebration of noise.

What are you, your own grandmother, that we only allow songs which sound pretty? 

The idea that I allow only songs which sound pretty is false and I don´t know which part of my post lead you to infer it.

BTW, I have never talked with my grandmother(s) about music so I don´t know what songs they would have allowed. Anyway, I would much prefer leaving aside any further reference to one´s family´s members, especially those that are presumably long since dead. Thank you.

  In short, sure:  it´s ridiculous, and it´s noisy;  and that´s how it´s made.

In short, sure: that´s precisely why I fail to see any resemblance between it and Лесной царь

Parenthetically, when one has written something ridiculous and noisy as a caprice (a time-honored musical occupation), and it is the material for an adaptation such as the following, we have the beginning of an argument that one has created a classic:

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

No argument from me here.

I am a little surprised to hear you, a fellow fan of the musical 19^th century, pooh-poohing outdoing the competition, which (broadly interpreted) also enjoys an ancient musical pedigree.

My dear Karl, I am (more than) a little surprised that you misunderstood my position completely. I should have thought anyone would understand that what I object to is not to Helter Skelter as such. Heck, I even like it, it clearly looked far ahead to the Heavy Metal genre of which I have been a fan in my early 20s. I object to it being offered as an equivalent (which is precisely what I asked for) to Erlkoening. I submit to your consideration that neither the history of their composition, neither their subject, neither their music nor finally their mood and atmosphere are in any way congruent. Musically, intellectually and aesthetically they inhabit different galaxies. You are of course free to disagree and adduce evidence to the contrary

But as I read it, McCartney was not trying to out-do The Who, but that he had formed a certain idea from a written review of the record (again: the faculty of imagination, which, if our subject were Schubert, we would be lauding); that on listening to the actual record, he found that it did not match his mental profile of the music — and so he set out to create a recording which matched his mental expectations.  I do call that drawing inspiration where one finds it.

Being inspired by something does not preclude trying to outdo it; oftentimes it is precisely the goal. The "Pity they´ve done it", "It wasn't rough and screaming and tape echo at all." and "So I thought, 'Oh well, we'll do one like that, then." sequence allows for interpreting it as "doing what the Who tried to do but did not really succeed", in other words "outdoing" them.

Parenthetically, I don´t know where you got the notion that I dismiss outdoing per se. I just pointed out one of the most blatant dissimilarities between Helter Skelter and Erlkoenig: the former was inspired by another musical work (your formulation) / trying to outdo another musical work (my wording), while neither applies to the latter.

(6.) As to Todd´s post, you asked for his opinion on an equivalent

Minor correction: I actually asked for Brian´s opinion.

without specifying what would satisfy you as equivalence.  I should have called it a suggestion, rather than a claim;  it´s true that he offered the suggestions without explanation, but I expect there could be reasonable and interesting discussion on the question.  Perhaps he will enlarge.

I certainly hope so but I don´t hold my breath.

[Brian]

I simply fail to see any similarity between a ridiculously noisy song written solely for the purpose of outdoing the competition in the genre (I use its composer´s own words) and Schubert´s Erlkoenig. That is all.

The great thing about art is that it transcends, and leaves behind, the artists' original intentions, and can claim meanings, in the eyes/ears of its audience, which the artist did not imagine.

EDIT:

Minor correction: I actually asked for Brian´s opinion.

And also, the great thing about discussion boards is, anyone can answer your question.  0:)

[Brian]

I'm damn glad I chose to go with chronological order.

Haydn
Beethoven
Brahms
Faure
Holmboe
Joni Mitchell
Tori Amos
Patty Griffin
Thom Yorke
Paul Dempsey

I really like this idea!!

Very rough draft:

1. Beethoven
2. Dvorak
3. Schubert
4. Mingus
5. Ravel
6. Janacek
7. Berlioz
8. Monk
9. Haydn
10. Lennon/McCartney