After Mahler comes Sibelius ...

[San Antone]

Become ocean (sic) is a cross between Gloria Coates, Steve Reich, and a John Williams pretender's hack work.

I guess Pulitzer Prizes don't mean much anymore.   

Mirror Image, ignore that man behind the curtain - there is no there, there.

[San Antone]

Not to put too much faith in the Pulitzer committee, I too think Become Ocean is a grand work.  But I can understand how someone who has preconceived ideas about what is "great music" might not be able to appreciate the music.

[Karl Henning]

What's second rate music? 

A great question.  So . . . has any of us heard second-rate music? 

[Karl Henning]

Not to put too much faith in the Pulitzer committee, I too think Become Ocean is a grand work.  But I can understand how someone who has preconceived ideas about what is "great music" might not be able to appreciate the music.

Sean does seem to suffer from a music appreciation deficiency  0:)

[Sean]

Okay guys, I'm happy to sail off into the night alone.

Karl, art music is a vast pyramid of artistic worth and the deeper the strata dug the more rarefied the exhumed goods. Energy returned on energy invested eventually reaches 1:1 and it's not worth it.

North, with sufficient perspective artists can see the situation for how it really lies.

Mirror, I stay mostly with the core repertory these days, the top 700 hours tier of music, and its great interpretations. This is worthwhile.

Best wishes to you other benighted souls...

[starrynight]

I haven't read the whole thread but wasn't there a parallel 'conservative' (I don't like using the word, but as a contrast) romantic tradition in parallel to the more 'out there' people?  It didn't really end at Brahms obviously.  Of course it also morphed into the modernist romantic sounds, using that heroic symphonic rhetoric.

[Jo498]

Many composers born in the 1850s through 1880s began composing in the Mendelssohn/Schumann/Brahms-Tradition. E.g. look at the violin concerto and chamber music Richard Strauss wrote as a teenager or even his early masterpiece "Burleske".
Many lesser known ones more or less stuck to that style, although often becoming more daring harmonically.

Among those who kept a more or less late-romantic style without becoming as original as Mahler or Sibelius (that's of course debatable), I'd mention Pfitzner, Reger (often very dense "Uber-Brahmsian"), Korngold, but there are many others. Medtner, Taneyev, maybe even Miaskowsky could also be classified with them.

[starrynight]

Yeh but I'm saying Sibelius springs more from that classical romantic style, say from Tchaikovsky/Brahms.  But he shows the merging of that with the heroic modernism.  That shows the link.  Whereas Mahler is more towards that more extreme romantic style.  Big generalisations but probably workable.