Where have the Great Composers gone?

[Mandryka]

Re the question about where are the great composers, one thing that impresses me is that since the death of Boulez, there's no composer who is a public media savvy figure, a composer who's taking a highly visible stand about the role of culture and  society. In that sense there really does seem to be a lacuna of great composers.

[Monsieur Croche]

A musical work can be clever and technically the most advanced thing ever created but unless it delivers to the majority of music lovers something that they will enjoy it is merely an exercise to be understood by a very small minority. IMO of course.

...is a mere exercise to be understood by a very small minority.
This is the label one could rightly assign to Beethoven's Violin Concerto and a number of his late Quartets and Piano Sonatas, to some Mozart works, performed a handful of times and then not (some not until over one hundred years later); a list of pieces now commonly known to most keen classical devotees which were not immediate hits could go on to some length of several pages.

So much of the older music presently readily taken in upon first hearing as immediately understood and enjoyed is now part of the canon of the literature.  Much of that repertoire now so readily liked was not initially liked or consumed by the general public, it was first consumed and appreciated by the small minority. 

Bach.  Died in 1750, music only known to a tiny minority for nearly eighty years until Mendelssohn programmed a concert of the Saint Matthew Passion in 1829. (Mozart knew nothing bur hearsay of Bach until he was introduced to it in 1782, the twenty-sixth year in his short almost thirty-six year long life.)  During Bach's lifetime, there were enough criticisms and complaints from parishioners and employers that his music was far too dissonant, harmonically too wild or unsound, disturbing, unnecessarily complex, yada, yada

Mozart.  Constant criticisms about too much dissonance (those minor thirds!) and no doubt that it 'was too complicated.'  Now known as the exemplary poster boy representative composer of classicism, being one of the most 'polite' of composers within his music, and his prudent restraint, his music was considered far too outwardly emotional and passionate; that garnered criticisms against because the composer "wore his heart on his sleeve."  [Seriously, with a certain audience, ever with us, you can't win for losing.]

For many listeners at the time, Beethoven was avant-garde, and often enough, when he 'went there,' those works of his got a similar negative reaction, or similar blank looks -- now, and then - as the avant-garde often gets from the public.  Beethoven's Violin Concerto is now considered  the violin concerto -- or at least one of the three or four violin concerti.  After its premiere in 1806, it was not performed again until 1844... the always then and now popular Beethoven, and one of his masterpieces shelved, unheard and gathering dust, for almost forty years. 

Schoenberg.  Died in 1951.  Sixty-five years later, with his music never having faded into an obscurity as profound as there was on Bach, is currently gaining more than a little hold on the general public.

Debussy's L'apres midi d'une faune (1894 -- the Milestone of "The Modern Era") confounded the professional musicians who were to premiere the work.  They were confronted with a new piece about which they had utterly no grasp of its harmony, rhythms, form or the manner in which it should be played, that an extraordinarily excessive number of rehearsals were required to get it right.  There, as so often in the past, a new piece of music was so radical that even top-notch professional musicians were at a loss to initially understand it. 

That same piece today (over one century later) is not the least puzzlement to the most naif and inexperienced listener... they follow it without any intellectual strain, and enjoy its beauty immediately.  Such is the general pattern of newer works which are not so bound to either the conventions of older eras or their present time. and the pattern too, of the general public's initial reaction to such works.  There are too many documented instances in the past when Bach was new and his work met with strong resistance.  Ditto the general public's reaction to many a work by later masters.  Most of the now 'great' composers from the past met with some degree of initial resistance at least with some of their works, and those works were initially indeed "played to a tiny minority."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ~

[James]

I don't concern myself with qualifiers such as "great" but as far as young or new composers doing what I consider very interesting and worthwhile work:

KATE SOPER

Jürg Frey

PIETRO RIPARBELLI

TAYLOR DEUPREE

LEI LIANG

TAMAR DIESENDRUCK

SOPHIE LACAZE

And many more have been interviewed and profiled on my blog.

Lots of blah, blah, blah in this thread .. you're the only guy who's offered some names. Any works in particular you'd care to recommend?

I have listened to a lot of composers of recent, on the various labels and whatnot but nothing really worth advocating.

I often think that all of the great statements for posterity have been made.

[Karl Henning]

Re the question about where are the great composers, one thing that impresses me is that since the death of Boulez, there's no composer who is a public media savvy figure, a composer who's taking a highly visible stand about the role of culture and  society. In that sense there really does seem to be a lacuna of great composers.

Well, there is something to that; only I think you have answered, not the question Where have the Great Composers gone?, but, Where have the Public-Media-Savvy Composers gone?

Even that question, though, is more about the changing world around the living composer, than it is about the artistic stature of the l. c.  And I would suggest, too, that in his own last decades, it was less any matter of Boulez being public-media-savvy, and the fact that he was a known quantity, as not merely a famous composer and conductor, but as a character who provides entertaining copy.

In that regard, Boulez clearly learnt quite a bit from Stravinsky, though he was possessed of much less charm.

[Monsieur Croche]

The real question of aesthetics seems to me to find the connections between the "deeper" properties and structures revealed by technical analysis and the subjective enjoyment. This seems often very difficult but there has to be a connection, otherwise analysis would be a "merely academic" task. Tovey used once a nice metaphor, that beauty was only skin-deep but it needed bones, muscles etc. to have a beautiful shape. Is music like that?

With apologies in advance for the ambiguity: ambiguity is innate within the discipline. That is then a yes -- and a no.  No amount of music theoretical analysis on its own can establish any admissible criterion (or criteria) as a measure of what is a good or great piece of music.  This astonishes some people.  All a full technical analysis can tell anyone is "what the composer did."  By itself it only yields dully academic and sterile X-rays without some aesthetic and practical considerations also taken into account.

The rest is aesthetic decisions on the part the of the analyst and that analyst taking into their perception as much as they can of the composer's aesthetic.  Armed with some clarification on those fronts, one has a better chance of more fairly 'judging' the piece, finding that 'it works,' or at least calling it more or less 'successful.'

The anatomy analogy is apposite, but too many lay listeners will read that to mean music has to be conformingly formalist to be any good, i.e. formalist as in Sonata-allegro symphonic form, for example.  Techniques in composition create form.  The techniques, and information garnered, from a full study of music theory can then be applied just as anyone might deploy a set of tools in making a physical object, and that does not preclude any variant or new design as being more or less functional or valid.  (More routinely, "The architecture of the piece" is often heard when discussing form.)

To believe for a moment that revised or completely new forms or different treatments of the sound could not be acceptable or work, and that but a several of formats from the classical and romantic eras only are the way to go (a mere two hundred years of one thousand years of music history and its various formats) is a highly reductive one size fits all mode of thinking.  There are just too many legitimate ways to go about it, while just about everything depends upon the nature of the idea, the aesthetic and intent of the composer in what he sets out to do.  Some composers simultaneously conceive of form along and the musical ideas [Stockhausen, staunchly in that classical tradition, was a formalist, a planner), and today most any newly composed piece you can hear is structured, whether more or less successfully is a call of the same sort as making the call on the quality of the content of a piece.

As I said, ambiguity is innate when it comes to theory, theoretical technique and the craft itself.  An artist friend who taught art in an arts college said, "There are at least several hundred ways to draw.  They are all correct."  Here, too, with several hundreds of ways to draw all being appropriate, anyone who has well-learned them all and learned from them and who has an inventive talent will come up with not only varied and morphed syntheses of those ways to draw, some of them will seem to be startlingly 'new.'


Best regards.

[Karl Henning]

As I said, ambiguity is innate when it comes to theory, theoretical technique and the craft itself.  An artist friend who taught art in an arts college said, "There are at least several hundred ways to draw.  They are all correct."  Here, too, with several hundreds of ways to draw all being appropriate, anyone who has well-learned them all and learned from them and who has an inventive talent will come up with not only varied and morphed syntheses of those ways to draw, some of them will seem to be startlingly 'new.'

We should be a bit suspicious when there is too much specificity and too much certainty in matters æsthetic. I should probably feel quite the same, even were I not a composer.

[Mandryka]

Well, there is something to that; only I think you have answered, not the question Where have the Great Composers gone?, but, Where have the Public-Media-Savvy Composers gone?

I think the two questions are very closely related.

[Karl Henning]

I think the two questions are very closely related.

Then, I invite you to make the case.

For indeed it seems to me obvious that the creation of great art, and the ability to promote oneself, are not the same skill set.  And equally obvious that the ability to promote oneself is a different skill, in different eras.

But, please, enlarge on the close relation you perceive between the two questions.

[Mandryka]

Then, I invite you to make the case.

For indeed it seems to me obvious that the creation of great art, and the ability to promote oneself, are not the same skill set.  And equally obvious that the ability to promote oneself is a different skill, in different eras.

But, please, enlarge on the close relation you perceive between the two questions.

It's just that what makes a work of art "great" seems to be a community decision, a sort of informed consensus, like all concepts I suppose. And that decision about how to apply the concept is I suspect influenced, probably powerfully influenced, by image and influence. Clearly an important and provocative and influential pIublic persona is not a sufficient condition, and it probably isn't a necessary condition. But it is nevertheless part of the criteria which determine how to apply correctly this difficult concept greatness IMO.

But I haven't done the work. I just sketch the sort of area which I think would pay dividends in aesthetics.

[Karl Henning]

It's just that what makes a work of art "great" seems to be a community decision, a sort of informed consensus, like all concepts I suppose.

That is true, but only part of the truth.  (Although, yes, we live in an era where you could find a used styrofoam cup on the road, and find a critical mass of art connoisseurs who will create a consensus that it is Great Art.)

That parenthetical cartoon aside, the communal consensus affirms the greatness, does not generate the quality of greatness in the art.  The making of great art still requires a great artist.

And there is a wide range of how well the social environs may or may not perceive that artist's greatness.

Stravinsky was a great self-promoter; but he was also a superbly great artist.

The no less superbly great artist Schoenberg, was negligible as a self-promoter.

[North Star]

Debussy's L'apres midi d'une faune (1912 -- the Milestone of "The Modern Era" -- confounded the professional musicians who were to premiere the work.  They were so utterly confronted with a new piece about which they had no grasp of its harmony, rhythms, form or the manner in which it should be played, that an extraordinarily excessive number of rehearsals were required to get it right.  There, as so often in the past, a new piece of music was so radical that even top-notch professional musicians were at a loss to initially understand it.

What does 1912 refer to? The afternoon premiered in 1894

And yes, it's a rather common phenomenon that something radical is at first rejected, then put on chocolate box covers. 

[JoshLilly]

Bach.  Died in 1750, music only known to a tiny minority for nearly eighty years until Mendelssohn programmed a concert of the Saint Matthew Passion in 1829.

Tell that to Samuel Wesley!
Honestly though, J.S. Bach's 80-year disappearance from memory is very exaggerated to the point of it now being one of the more infamous musical myths.

[North Star]

That is true, but only part of the truth.  (Although, yes, we live in an era where you could find a used styrofoam cup on the road, and find a critical mass of art connoisseurs who will create a consensus that it is Great Art.)

That parenthetical cartoon aside, the communal consensus affirms the greatness, does not generate the quality of greatness in the art.  The making of great art still requires a great artist.

And there is a wide range of how well the social environs may or may not perceive that artist's greatness.

Stravinsky was a great self-promoter; but he was also a superbly great artist.

The no less superbly great artist Schoenberg, was negligible as a self-promoter.

Yes. The acceptance of a work of art as 'great' is what is a consensus decision - after enough other artists, and cretins, have decided so (chiefly by being influenced by it), the work of art is 'great'.

[Karl Henning]

Hey, those who argue that my work is great are not cretins!  I reject that utterly! 

[North Star]

Hey, those who argue that my work is great are not cretins!  I reject that utterly! 

Hm, I think I might have meant critics.  0:)

[Karl Henning]

Some critics are indeed cretins; I think there's no real getting around that.

[San Antone]

Again, I make no claim for "greatness' on behalf of any of the composers highlighted on these channels (I do not spend time worrying about "greatness") - but here are four YouTube channels devoted to music by new composers.

incipitsify

NewMusicXX

OMaclac

Score Follower

Those are some, there are others.

While I certainly don't like everything posted, I have found some music that I do really like.

[Karl Henning]

Greatness is always a question.

[James]

I do not spend time worrying about "greatness"

I do. I seek it out because there are tremendous benefits. I love great works of art and high quality things. Much to be learned.

[San Antone]

I do. I seek it out because there are tremendous benefits. I love great works of art and high quality things. Much to be learned.

Since I consider the attempt to identify "great" works written in the last 50 years futile and subjective, I choose to ignore that criterion.  For me, only the test of time can filter out those works which audiences consistently find meaningful and enriching and could qualify for the sobriquet "great".  By test of time, I mean at least a century since the work's debut.

My interest is solely in finding new music and composers whose music appeals to my aestheitc sense.  Period.  I make no claim to being a better judge of music that will be considered great, nor does that goal interest me.  My goal is finding music I find interesting, beautiful and which I like to listen to.

However, for those, like yourself, for whom determining greatness is important - I wish you nothing but good luck and happy hunting in your endeavor.