Where have the Great Composers gone?

[James]

Once again it seems common ground eludes us.  Honestly, I am not the least interested in what seems to wind your clock.  Call me "full of shit" or "just plain dumb" - water off my back. 

Sure .. what it means to be a great musician eludes you as well then. It has nothing to do with "us".

[Karl Henning]

Once again it seems common ground eludes us.

Partly because logic, decency, and US spelling all seem to elude the fellow who writes:

You're full of shit imo. No offence.

[Karl Henning]

Mouth was running before brain was engaged.

[San Antone]

Sure .. what it means to be a great musician eludes you as well then. It has nothing to do with "us".

Who is a great musician, in your opinon?  Please indulge me, I really would like to know.  Given your posting history I have some idea, e.g. Stockhausen.  But I'm curious who else you might wish to name.

[James]

Who is a great musician, in your opinion?  Please indulge me, I really would like to know.  Given your posting history I have some idea, e.g. Stockhausen.  But I'm curious who else you might wish to name.

Stop pretending that great musicians and works of art are essentially useless and not worth seeking out. No one with a brain is buying that.

[Ken B]

Stop pretending that great musicians and works of art are essentially useless and not worth seeking out. No one with a brain is buying that.

Actually James I think this is wrong. Lots of smart people have convinced themselves to buy just exactly that. Just as they have convinced themselves to believe all cultures are equal, that all truth is socially constructed, that all forms of knowing are equally valid, that wishing makes it so. Never underestimate the capacity for self-deceit, especially amongst smart people.

[San Antone]

Stop pretending that great musicians and works of art are essentially useless and not worth seeking out. No one with a brain is buying that.

I'm not saying that "great musicians and works of art are essentially useless and not worth seeking out".   I am just more interested in listening to new music than I am in listening to great works from the past.  I've done that, but now don't really care about it anymore.  I am also not interested in attempting to determine why a work is great and which new works are great.  I am not putting that process down, it is just not how I choose to spend my time.  As in all things, YMMV.

Another question: is greatness relative or is it like infinite?  In other words, can you rank greatness?  Is Beethoven greater than Stockhausen?  Or are they both simply great?

[Mister Sharpe]

I'm not saying that "great musicians and works of art are essentially useless and not worth seeking out".   I am just more interested in listening to new music than I am in listening to great works from the past.  I've done that, but now don't really care about it anymore.  I am also not interested in attempting to determine why a work is great and which new works are great.  I am not putting that process down, it is just not how I choose to spend my time.  As in all things, YMMV.

Another question: is greatness relative or is it like infinite?  In other words, can you rank greatness?  Is Beethoven greater than Stockhausen?  Or are they both simply great?

Greatness - like anything else - is definition-contingent.  If greatness, for example, is defined as influence on future composers, LvB wins hands down, though Stockhausen's influence is not inconsiderable and LvB has had longer to be influential!  As the OP I must say that 1.) the discussion has wandered from the thread's original intent and 2.) sanantonio's listening MO is not prescriptive - it is personal and he was generous enough to share it with us.  I think it's interesting and laudable in many respects, particularly for beginning listeners.  For if the Great are truly so, their greatness, however defined, should be apparent to them.  No worries (except for being unkind to one another). 

[Monsieur Croche]

Alas, "supreme assholes" are actually a dime a dozen...

Good classical pianists are also a dime a dozen....

[Andante]

But this analogy does not work at all. There is no obvious external function against which a piece of music or art should be judged,

I don't know what you mean by "external function" but I would suggest that the audience would be a pretty good place to start as far as music is concerned, as for art I just do not know perhaps only your peers.

[Andante]

Understandable and nothing objectionable in that (if you allow the slight modification: I don't care if a piece is an artistic masterpiece or not, if the recording doesn't sound good to me I will not buy it.).  I was merely describing circumstances (not uncommon) in which the sole representation of a piece may not sound good.

I was referring to the musical work not audio quality of a recording however I do see what you mean and agree.

No, the piece has never been played.  I have quite a "backlog" of works in a similar situation.

That is a great pity are there no local groups that would rehearse it? The quintet I mean

Where did I accuse anyone of these vices?

You say "The musical experience is rejected by the many, but the inadequacy of the performance in fact means that the crowd are not competent to judge the actual merits of the piece. Most of the audience, perhaps, are completely unaware of their reduced competency in this matter, and are content to condemn the piece as rubbish."

I don't know the type of "crowd" you mean but the general competency of audiences that I mixed with at concerts were very competent to judge, most have the ability to play instruments and can read music others are studying music and some of course are just lovers of music but belonging to the grey brigade may be set in their ways.
The musicians, and if an orchestra the conductor that I have heard are professional and a substandard performance would not be presented, if it is a premier work the composer is present at rehearsal and I would hope correct anything that was not to his/her liking  Please don't take offence at my comments they are not meant to be confrontational.

[Monsieur Croche]

Lots of smart people have convinced themselves... to believe all cultures are equal, that all truth is socially constructed, that all forms of knowing are equally valid, that wishing makes it so.  Never underestimate the capacity for self-deceit, especially amongst smart people.

You forgot to mention the accompanying phenomena of lay audiences having come to think their emotional reaction and empiric opinion of a work is of equal weight to the deeply informed and well thought out opinion of those from a professional classical music community who have all made a life's study and profession of music... the democratization of all via zInternet is a major catalyst and vehicle for this, i.e. "My uninformed empiric jejune vote counts as much as the opinion of any expert."  [Ergo:  "I am a professional critic," and.. Yiruma's music is classical; Lodovico Einaudi's music is classical; any movie score involving a symphonic ensemble is classical, etc.] 

Or, as the "Arrogant and Elitist" composer Charles Wuorinen put it, "the response of the untutored becomes the sole criterion for judgement."

This is where we then see online posts of an wholly empiric opinion stated with full confidence in its legitimacy while that opinion is completely unencumbered by any real information, agreed upon criteria, or facts.  That leads to the belief the opinion actually carries some real weight, that it should or would influence 'the establishment's' opinion.  Once made public, when anyone then counters that opinion with another, informed or otherwise, the counter argument is met with wholesale astonishment and/or hostility -- often accompanied by major butthurt.  (Unprecedented in all of western history up until this era, some now believe that how they feel about something has the equal weight of an informed and well-reasoned opinion.  Go figure.)

The dilemma which is inexorably inherent in trying to really answer the OP and of what is great, is that any and all arts necessarily include an aesthetic (which could involve a discussion on the design of a street lamp.)  There is -- quite simply -- no one criterion or set of criteria to assess if a work of art 'is great.'  Whatever those criteria are, they can never be as objective as some seem to not only wish but hope for -- i.e. those criteria will be to one degree or another, subjective and relative.

But ohhh, and ahhh, the current fashion of relativism... I am more than a little on board with being in agreement with your mini-rant.  Two of the most abhorrent phrases for me to hear, anathemata both, are, "Good enough," and "Its all good."  Virtually any time you hear either one of those uttered, the near to exact opposite is the case ;-)

Still, there is 'relative'... and then there is 'relativism.'

Terence McKenna denounces relativism :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OX77Qv66qw

...another fun one, a parody lyric about Millennials...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHPfgsTVTjA

Enjoy.


Best regards.

[nathanb]

Actually James I think this is wrong. Lots of smart people have convinced themselves to buy just exactly that. Just as they have convinced themselves to believe all cultures are equal, that all truth is socially constructed, that all forms of knowing are equally valid, that wishing makes it so. Never underestimate the capacity for self-deceit, especially amongst smart people.

As a student of sciences, I understand that all words, including "truth", "objective", "subjective", "great", "equal", "sound", and "music", are all human constructs, and therefore that too be as assertive as both Florestan and James (as dissimilar as the two may seem) in their beliefs that they are right and we are wrong... well, it's all pretty foolish at the end of the day.

My main goals in this dimension/plane are to (1) try to make it through each day, (2) listen to some rad tunes simply because they make my neurons and synapses tingle, and (3) help others towards the lofty goal of "Not Being A Dick" because, in spite of my awareness of the illusory nature of all of this, that shit annoys me.

In this thread, I am exercising (3) primarily.

[Mahlerian]

I don't know what you mean by "external function" but I would suggest that the audience would be a pretty good place to start as far as music is concerned, as for art I just do not know perhaps only your peers.

Which audience, the one that goes to "new music" concerts or the one that avoids them assiduously?

The audience remains obligated to reality, regardless of how much some who claim, for example, that Boulez's music is senseless noise, might wish that they were under no such constraints.

[Andante]

Which audience, the one that goes to "new music" concerts or the one that avoids them assiduously?

I was referring to the audience at the time the particular work is played just an ordinary concert going audience.

[NorthNYMark]

Thank you. I will try to explain my opinion on the subtle differences you pointed out. Yes, a lot of what I talked about is mechanical "play by play" evaluation. Music theorists don't actually think, though, that "greater complexity of such patterns of instability and resolution, for example, would constitute a "better" work". For one, instability and resolution means very, very different things depending the composer, and indeed, even in a given piece, different kinds of patterns exist. A lot of pieces aren't so strongly tied kinds of instability and resolution, see my post on Japanese noise music above, for example. Second, complexity (or even stratification, or structuring) of said content isn't a good thing per se as Monsieur Croche pointed out, but a kind of aesthetic that may be chosen, and the analyzer is to point it out when it occurs. Maybe it's better to say that a piece is good, by mechanistic consideration, if it realizes that mechanism's full potential, or close to full potential.

And finally, even with pieces with very similar goals or styles, especially pieces of the same composer, it's philosophically difficult to made claims of better using purely mechanistic considerations. It's somewhat imprecise. Beethoven's late quartets are mechanistically unrankable amongst themselves, but are probably mechanistically rankable above the middle and early quartets.

OK. This is important. The evaluations and aesthetic statements I'm talking about do have subjectivity. They are not purely objective and universal, because that's not possible. What I mean is this: the events and mechanisms are traceable objectively by sheet music analysis. The salience of those events on psycho-acoustic response is not so bulletproof objective. But the concept of salience is greatly important for music theory, for good music theory is informed by salience!

For example, the mirror fugues in Bach's Art of Fugue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-g5mT8p00o are first played normally, then inverted. While the inversion of the entire given fugue entails a lot of structurally intricate and shapely qualities, the actual salience of such a procedure is an imperfect recollection of the themes and motifs that the inverted fugue recalls from the initial fugue, brought to light in a new context, and recalling similar devices in the earlier contrapunctus movements in Bach's entire Art of Fugue. It is important for music theory to make that claim of salience, even though salience is somewhat subjective.

For another example, take the post-serial procedures of Boulez's La Marteau sans Maitre. The post-serial procedures used are very intricate: take a tone row, divide it up in different but related ways, and take those pieces and pitch-multiply them into sets. Then take that matrix of sets, and go through it in a certain order. This is very intricate, but the actual salient affect doesn't pick up tit-for-tat on this structure. Rather, the affect is of a dialogue of harmony and line of instruments, with a quasi-statistical feel of half similarity, and half stochasticism. And indeed, Boulez decided to modify about 10% of the notes from the mathematical procedure. He understood the quasi-statistical regularity and emergence.

Generally, take the messy concept of motivic recall. Certain motivic recall is obvious and consciously perceived by the listener, and certain motivic recall is not obvious and consciously perceived, but structurally important. Which is conscious and which is subconscious is subjective and listener dependent, but good music theory tries to recognize some kind of difference in salience. Also, music theory writing, while as much as possible tries to treat, for example, harmony and rhythm as a unity, tends to "divide and conquer" when explaining its mechanisms in words, and then it's hard to tell which mechanical attributes out of the many that are occurring at once are the most salient and important to the listener's psycho-acoustic response.

Psycho-acoustic salience, while subjective, is inseparable from the description of mechanistic clockwork. Psycho-acoustic salience is also non-rigorously treated... we do not use brain scans to inform music theory. And yet psycho-acoustic salience's subjectivity isn't nearly as subjective as musical taste. Why? Because generally listeners who do like a given piece of music have similar experiences, and the subjectivity is in whether two listeners will, in fact, both like it.

Just wanted to write a quick thank you for your thoughtful and detailed response. I have been pretty busy over these last few days, but will try to respond soon.

Mark

[Jo498]

I don't know what you mean by "external function" but I would suggest that the audience would be a pretty good place to start as far as music is concerned, as for art I just do not know perhaps only your peers.

You used as comparison for difficult music "only liked by experts" a car that "car designers like but does not drive". A car has an obvious function, namely to be driven and transport goods and people on certain types of roads. So a car that does not drive is obviously faulty.
Music often does not have such a function so one cannot simply claim that some music is "faulty" in the sense such a nonfunctional car would be.

You might say music has the function to "please audiences". Fair enough, but "the car designers", i.e. a bunch of experts are an audience. And there is a huge potential audience that ignores even the most popular classical music. So audience is ambiguous, there are many types of audience and it would be fine for a composer to compose mainly for the "music designers".

[mc ukrneal]

Can a work be great, but not good? is that allowed?

[North Star]

Can a work be great, but not good? is that allowed?

It doesn't seem allowed by logic, unless 'greatness' is defined by consensus, and 'goodness' more subjectively.

[Jo498]

It all depends on what one means with "great" or "good". Maybe it would be viable to say about some piece that it was historically extremely significant but "flawed" in certain ways, so according to some criteria not great or good but still "important".