Which composer would you eliminate from history?

[Karl Henning]

All this time later, I finally have my answer. Carl Orff.

Not at all a bad choice.

[Ken B]

All this time later, I finally have my answer. Carl Orff.

Don't you tell me to carl orff!

[Mirror Image]

All this time later, I finally have my answer. Carl Orff.

Yeah, I could definitely live without his music.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Paradoxically, I think there is not necessarily a contradiction between "very influential" and "not much happens if you cut him out". Because Bach was there, he was influential but IMO in an often subtle and indirect way. But this does not show that other composers would not have had a somewhat similar influence had he not existed. E.g. Handel, Palestrina and maybe some other baroque and Renaissance composers would have instead had served as inspiration. Of course, Bach focusses and concentrates all these and more elements in a superlative way and in ONE composer, and even in a handful of keyboard collections that were readily available to be studied by any budding composer, so because he was there, his music was influential.

If JS Bach had not been there, not much would have changed in the rest of the 18th century. (This is obviously not true, but only because his son Carl Philipp Emanuel was extremely influential in mid-century. And I take that this biological fact is not what was meant...) I am not sure but I do not think Haydn ever knew or studied a lot of Bach and the earlier, lesser composers of the early classical style (Richter, Stamitz, Wagenseil etc.) are also independent of Bach (again, exclude his sons or pretend that they had a different father - we are fantasizing counterfactually here). I don't know enough about this but I have seen claims that there was an Austrian tradition of polyphonic church music largely independent of Bach, e.g. Biber-Fux-M.Haydn-Bruckner.

Mozart was impressed by Bach and Handel, but Handel's music would have been there in the counterfactual case and Mozart had also learned counterpoint before he got to know Bach and Handel. Maybe we would lack some masterful movements, like the Jupiter finale, but I cannot believe that e.g. the Da Ponte Operas would have been all that different if Mozart had never seen a Bach fugue. Similarly with Beethoven, at least until the latest pieces. (And as "middle Beethoven" was more immediately impactful, we would have beacons like the Eroica or Pastoral as point of departure for the romantics anyway.)

Schubert, Berlioz, Italian opera: probably nothing changes without Bach. Same for Weber and early/mid Wagner (not sure if Meistersinger polyphony could not have been derived from other "learned music"). Tchaikovsky did not care for Bach and I have no positive evidence that Smetana, Dvorak, Mussorgsky did.

Now the more traditionalist German romantics (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms) are of course a very different case. They might have composed differently and we would probably lack some explicitly "Bachian" pieces, but again, the re-discovery of Palestrina as "only true church style" could have taken place anyway and Handel's choral stuff was well known and influential independent of (or in the real world together with) Bach's.

But I certainly admit that apart from the general fragility of such speculations I do not know enough music theory to have a reasonable guess in which cases "Bach influence" is a shorthand for quasi-baroque polyphonic technique or genuine Bach influence that could only have been caused by Bach's music and not by Fux's or Handel's.
One indication that it sometimes was used as some kind of shorthand for "learned style" is that when you look in Mozart's or Beethoven's letters etc. they will often write "Bach and Handel" (like a law firm, e.g. Mozart when referrring to the music sessions with Van Swieten) and as their music is fairly different with Bach's being much denser and more systematic and tightly organized, this could indicate that the important thing Mozart admired and wanted to learn was not Bach specific but basically the learned high baroque style.

Of course, very similar arguments could be made for other influential composers. But the spell Wagner cast on not only musicians but many other artists for half a century or more is well documented and very specific (compared to Bach or Haydn). And in my impression also Beethoven's influence on 19th century music is more specific than Bach's on any later music.

This was a thoughtful reply and I wanted to get back to it earlier, but of course 12 days is a millennium in GMG time. You seem to be saying that if Bach hadn't existed, other composers would have filled the same gap and influenced later composers in similar ways - which is similar to saying that if we didn't have an Autobahn or Expressway, you could still arrive at the same destination using a different road. But of course, Bach did exist, and there must have been a reason why whenever Brahms received a new volume of the Bach Gesellschaft, he would put everything else aside, while when a volume of Handel arrived, he would say it's undoubtedly interesting, and he'd look at it when he had time.

Of course Palestrina could be studied for basic rules of species counterpoint. Bruckner made a profound study of his style, to the point where his examiners said that he should be examining them. But Palestrina belongs to a pre-tonal world where there was relatively little instrumental composition and no model for the use of rhythm and motif that one discovers in Bach. Handel (even though Beethoven on his deathbed called him the greatest composer of them all) is less rigorously polyphonic than Bach; Mozart obviously knew Messiah since he wrote additional accompaniments for the work, but his discovery of the motets with Van Swieten was a major revelation even if we can point to only a few pieces that are direct imitations like the Jupiter finale and the chorale prelude for the two men in armor from the Magic Flute. Beethoven too learned the harpsichord primarily from playing the WTC in his youth, so to say there is no sign of Bach until the later pieces is I think unlikely, especially as there are many fugato sections in Beethoven's early and middle works.

Berlioz is a special case and perhaps points up, though negatively, what other composers learned from Bach. It was at the start of the Romantic period that instruction in harmony rather than counterpoint became standard practice for young composers. You will still see this tendency in musical instruction today, in the way young people are taught chord progressions but rarely about voice leading or inner contrapuntal lines. In a passage noted by Delacroix in one of his journals, Chopin (who had been trained in counterpoint in Warsaw) pointed out the difference between the polyphonic thinking found in Mozart versus the purely vertical thinking of Berlioz, where the melody is supplied and the other parts laid on like a veneer. Even though direct imitations of Bach are unusual in Chopin's music (the C major prelude and the C major etude of op. 10 being exceptions), you will still see evidence of canons in the F minor ballade and one of the mazurkas in A major if I recall correctly. But Chopin's inner parts are always latently polyphonic even when he is not explicitly contrapuntal, and I think it reasonable to say Bach was the best available model.

(I'm going to post this now and continue in a moment on Beethoven.)

[(poco) Sforzando]

How influential was Beethoven by comparison? For the Romantics, somewhat less I'd say. The composers who understood him best were probably Mendelssohn and Brahms, but Beethoven's rigorous use of sonata form was loosening already with Schubert. Even though Berlioz admired Beethoven enormously, with all his characteristic overwhelming enthusiasm for all work he considered great, one has only to look at the Fantastique to see a first movement superficially influenced by Beethoven's sonata form, but with an opening theme much more lyric than anything Beethoven would have worked with, and a rudimentary development section that develops nothing and instead just marches up and down the chromatic scale several times.

Very important to Beethoven's sonata form was the concept of an initial loss of stability due to modulation to a related active key (often the dominant), thematic material that lended itself to be broken up into motifs (see the opening of the Pastorale, for instance), intensification of this material in a development section visiting numerous remote keys, and a resolution by returning to the opening material, often with a balancing movement towards a related stable key like the subdominant. You won't see quite the same thing in a Bruckner movement, where you more likely see great slabs of musical material and not Beethoven's driving, teleological momentum. A piece like Wagner's Meistersinger prelude, which may seem similar to sonata form in that it has a powerfully "masculine" main theme and a lyrical "feminine" subordinate theme, really isn't in a Beethovenian sonata form at all. Already at the start of the prelude Wagner diverges to the subdominant key, something Beethoven would never do, and he is more likely to visit other keys without making the tension between various keys the essence of his musical drama. Even the "development" section in the prelude, where Wagner combines all his main themes contrapuntally, is in the home key of C major. The style of the piece is more like a processional than a sonata allegro in Beethoven's sense. Even more fragmentary is a piece like Liszt's B minor sonata, which is sometimes described as being in four movements, but I think is more truly defined as being in as many as 16-20 separate, contrasting episodes loosely joined together.

With a few exceptions like the Bagatelles for piano, including BGR's favorite piece Für Elise, Beethoven supplied few antecedents for what was to become the all-important characteristic piece in Romantic music. This genre, in which every piece had its own individual character, is essential in the instrumental music of Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Brahms. Mendelssohn's use of the term Songs without Words is another pointer to the growth of the art song in the Romantics, a genre that was of far less significance in the Classical period.

[AndyD.]

Cameo. Wow, that's bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn8KYD1Vco0

[EigenUser]

My pick is Stockhausen. He wasn't that important

Oh god, please -- never change, John.

The race so far:
Some votes for Glass. But you guys are just repeating each other.
Two votes for Schoenberg. But good, well-reasoned, tasteful and perceptive votes!
The leading candidate though seems to be Shostakovich. This is evidence the right answer is actually: Boulez.

Glad to see you back! You haven't changed a bit, either!

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

This is evidence the right answer is actually: Boulez.

THE EVIDENCE IS WRONG!!!!

On a more serious note, I would say that the composer I would eliminate from history is one who taught no one (or no one of note) and therefore had little to no direct influence on the younger generations. Someone who didn't nurture the up and coming is pretty much a historical 'dead end' in the world of music. Boulez is anything but this.

I will also disagree with the elimination of Carl Orff for the very reason of his direct influence in music education. I haven't been interested in his music much but his work encompassed more than shite like Carmina Burana.

Maybe I will think of someone who fits the bill, but I can't yet.

[Ken B]

THE EVIDENCE IS WRONG!!!!

On a more serious note, I would say that the composer I would eliminate from history is one who taught no one (or no one of note) and therefore had little to no direct influence on the younger generations. Someone who didn't nurture the up and coming is pretty much a historical 'dead end' in the world of music. Boulez is anything but this.

I will also disagree with the elimination of Carl Orff for the very reason of his direct influence in music education. I haven't been interested in his music much but his work encompassed more than shite like Carmina Burana.

Maybe I will think of someone who fits the bill, but I can't yet.

Depends on what you teach, no? I can think of a few "great teachers" or Prophets I'd gladly eliminate from history.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Depends on what you teach, no? I can think of a few "great teachers" or Prophets I'd gladly eliminate from history.

It absolutely isn't 'what' one teaches, it's what one's student learns that's probably far more important.
John Cage learnt what a conservative old traditionalist Schoenberg was in his lessons under Schoenberg and went on to compose the most un-Schoenbergian music imaginable!

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

A few thoughts:

1.) If they did this survey in 'Murica, they likely would have had to interview at least 50 people before they got a response other than something on the order of "Uhhhh. Ummm. Uhhhhhh. Huh! I dunno". Honestly, I don't know if the Brits are any brighter, but I suspect they have a better educational system.  Still, I wonder  how many "uhhhhs" and "Ummms" they had to edit out to string together a handful of semi-articulate (if still dumb) opinions.

2.) Max Reger? Really? OK lady, I'm impressed you even know who he was, but c'mon, learn how to listen to a fugue! In any case, there is infinitely worse stuff out there. Max Reger is a difficult composer to appreciate, but ultimately I believe he was a greater composer than any of the more popular big 20th Century names such as Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith

3. Debussy?? Debussy!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?! You sir, are going to hell! (I will pray for your salvation!) 

My choice? John Williams. Yes, John Williams. Not bad stuff actually for movie schlock, but not anyone who deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Wagner, as his fans seem to enjoy doing. Since everyone seems to be convinced that he qualifies as a legitimate classical composer I would eliminate him. No huge loss really IMO.

[Maestro267]

None. All have their place.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

None. All have their place.

Both an absolute spoilsport and a wise comment

[AndyD.]

None. All have their place.

That's arguable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn8KYD1Vco0   

[Parsifal]

I find the impulse to "eliminate a composer from history" alien. Why is just not listening insufficient?

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I find the impulse to "eliminate a composer from history" alien. Why is just not listening insufficient?

BECAUSE COMPOSERS MUST BE ANNIHILATED

[Madiel]

ISIS and the Taliban have shown us the way.** It's not enough to not worship pagan gods, they must be erased from history. That which does not accord with our own view must be forgotten by all.

**And frankly, some Christians were among those who showed them the way.

[AndyD.]

That which does not accord with our own view must be forgotten by all.

Oh dear.

[Madiel]

Oh dear.

Quite.

[AndyD.]

Quite.