Your Top 10 Favorite Composers

[Madiel]

I'm just wondering...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcn4h1DiMWI

whether it's safe to say...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1L6p4B2hBs

that all the great music...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT7_IZPHHb0

is rhythmically interesting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7pQytF2nak

or whether that is in fact...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHxmAsINDk

a wild generalisation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK23BhEQVyU

[Todd]

I am discussing pop music.

Not really, not if you are relying on one local radio station to form your opinion of current pop music.

I can't see any point in offering pop acts for you, specifically, to listen to. 

[kishnevi]

James, did you ever try what is called "world music"?

[Todd]

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

Yes, yes.  In my day, and all that, I get it.

[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