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Are there any 'Great Composers' left?

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Author Topic: Are there any 'Great Composers' left?  (Read 3266 times)
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ahinton
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« Reply #15 on: November 10, 2012, 06:55:24 am »

One other, slightly facetious point on this topic...

... Mr Norman Lebrecht has been touting 'the death of Classical Music' for some time now (whilst continuing to live on its proceeds).

Since Mr Lebrecht is almost always wrong, to have him chipping in on behalf of the 'no hope' faction can only give succour to those of us who believe classical music has a bright future ;)
Touché! I think that you're right about this. Mr Lebrecht occasionally lapses into sense (as Sorabji once said of the critic Martin Cooper many years ago) - and even very good sense sometimes - but, as you rightly observe, his customary hobby horse is indeed the impending death of "classical music" and he's now been riding it around in ever-decreasing circles for so long it's a wonder that he's not as saddle-sore as his readership must be bored stiff by it all. Yes, he does indeed live on its proceeds nonetheless (or at least benefits from them - I have no idea what his income sources and levels are and it's none of my business, of course); might this be described as a case of "writing the hand that feeds it"?

This drum that Mr Lebrecht long ago bought for himself to beat remorselessly is, however, a single drum and not a drum kit. He seems conveniently to ignore vital factors about what I do accept (as do you and others) about the problems that face the "classical music" world today and these are not even all about finance; where, for example, has he ever written perceptively and intelligently about the sheer volume of music available to listen to, the problem of its disproportionality to the amounts of time that anyone can devote to listening to it and the fact that this can be argued to have a kind of diluting effect? Well, of course he wouldn't write about that kind of thing, would he? - because it would drive a coach and horses right through his noisy but ill-conceived arguments about the death of "classical music", to the extent that this problem only arises in the first place because there's so much of it about!

You are sadly right about the orchestral climate, although mercifully and wisely you refrain from doing a Lebrecht and claiming that orchestras everywhere are dying because no one any longer really wants them; it is nevertheless a major problem and there needs to be a sustainable international rescue plan here because of the sheer quantity of excellent orchestral repertoire that has been created over the past 200 years or more and which will otherwise begin to perish as a consequence.

As to the thread topic itself, it is, of course, impossible to say. It has been raised, perhaps understandably, on the back of the recent death of Henze and Carter, two major figures in 20th / 21st century music each of whom had continued to work well beyond their threescore years and ten (Carter's creative lifespan itself exceeds that period of time by at least 14 years!). Our perspectives on those two composers have, however, had to grow just as they themselves grew; what might we have said for their respective greatness half a century or so ago? Furthermore, tastes and fashions change, but then so do deeper and more considered assessments; views on the "greatness" of, say, Sibelius and Vaughan Williams have fluctuated from time to time and place to place and, whilst it seems to be generally accepted that they are now (well, the first of them, anyway) more or less assured a place in the pantheon of "great" composers; the entire business of what constitutes a "great" composer and how composers come to be recognised and regarded as such is a far less straightforward matter than some might at first assume.
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Neil McGowan
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« Reply #16 on: November 10, 2012, 01:42:10 pm »

where, for example, has he ever written perceptively and intelligently about the sheer volume of music available to listen to, the problem of its disproportionality to the amounts of time that anyone can devote to listening to it and the fact that this can be argued to have a kind of diluting effect?

A most apposite and well-made point indeed :)  Our parent's and grandparent's generation may have had access to gramophone records, but they were far from 'accessibly' priced - a complete opera, or a major symphonic work on 78s cost a working man's weekly wages.  And you had to keep flipping the sides over :( Thus relatively few recordings ever came out, and even fewer recordings of complete works. Yet currently there is such a vast volume of recorded music available, that no-one could possibly hope to hear even more than a fraction of it.

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there needs to be a sustainable international rescue plan here because of the sheer quantity of excellent orchestral repertoire that has been created over the past 200 years or more and which will otherwise begin to perish as a consequence.

I wonder if we aren't all 'too close' to things to get true perspective? :)  If we map the history of notated polyphonic music back to, say, Scholia Enchiriadis, then 'classical music' has been going since the C9th (or earlier). The period of time in which the symphony orchestra has been involved is relatively short, and may in fact prove to be passing phase? Let's face it, the reason we have an ensemble in which there are, let's say, ten desks of first violins, is because one violin on it's own isn't enough to carry the 1st violin line in orchestral music. But that doesn't mean that things are fated to remain forever thus ;)

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but, as you rightly observe, his customary hobby horse is indeed the impending death of "classical music" and he's now been riding it around in ever-decreasing circles for so long it's a wonder that he's not as saddle-sore as his readership must be bored stiff by it all.

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ahinton
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« Reply #17 on: November 10, 2012, 04:12:15 pm »

where, for example, has he ever written perceptively and intelligently about the sheer volume of music available to listen to, the problem of its disproportionality to the amounts of time that anyone can devote to listening to it and the fact that this can be argued to have a kind of diluting effect?

A most apposite and well-made point indeed :)  Our parent's and grandparent's generation may have had access to gramophone records, but they were far from 'accessibly' priced - a complete opera, or a major symphonic work on 78s cost a working man's weekly wages.  And you had to keep flipping the sides over :( Thus relatively few recordings ever came out, and even fewer recordings of complete works. Yet currently there is such a vast volume of recorded music available, that no-one could possibly hope to hear even more than a fraction of it.
Indeed - although one point about this that I failed to make is that the proportion of recorded and broadcast music that is listened to today is vastly greater than that which is listened to live, as a consequence of technological changes that would have seemed unimaginable in the days of 78s and before the BBC Third Programme.

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there needs to be a sustainable international rescue plan here because of the sheer quantity of excellent orchestral repertoire that has been created over the past 200 years or more and which will otherwise begin to perish as a consequence.
I wonder if we aren't all 'too close' to things to get true perspective? :)  If we map the history of notated polyphonic music back to, say, Scholia Enchiriadis, then 'classical music' has been going since the C9th (or earlier). The period of time in which the symphony orchestra has been involved is relatively short, and may in fact prove to be passing phase? Let's face it, the reason we have an ensemble in which there are, let's say, ten desks of first violins, is because one violin on it's own isn't enough to carry the 1st violin line in orchestral music. But that doesn't mean that things are fated to remain forever thus ;)
You are broadly correct about the length of the history of Western "classical" music and, as you say, we are, of course, far closer in time to the orchestral repertoire of the past 200 years or so than we are to those much earlier examples of notated polyphony, but I'm not convinced that these facts of necessity determine that we therefore cannot "get true perspective" on the more recent music. There is surely considerably more extant music of the past 200 or so years that is written for orchestras of various sizes than there are extant earlier scores and there has been far more of the former than the latter performed, recorded and broadcast; it is also the case that a fair proportion of the former has remained more or less in the performed repertoire (and thereby in the listening public's ears) with a greater degree of consistency than has been the case with earlier music and, in addition, orchestral music from, say, late Haydn and early Beethoven to the present day covers a vastly wider range of styles and approaches than can be found in any 2+ centuries' worth of earlier music (which, of course, is not in any sense a pejorative criticism of music before Haydn!).

The rise (or perhaps more properly return) of the chamber orchestra alongside the modern symphony orchestra is, I think, the most likely indicator that might tend to endorse your proposition that things are not necessarily fated to remain as though the full symphony orchestra is forever king, but the sheer wealth and variety of those 2+ centuries of music scored for full symphony orchestra that have emerged from so many countries ought to ensure that the symphony orchestra never suffers the fate that Mr Lebrecht seems so determined to accord to symphony orchestras, those who compose for them and those who listen to them.
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« Reply #18 on: November 10, 2012, 05:41:54 pm »

I am absolutely delighted that a thread I started with no great expectation of take-up has engendered such lengthy and illuminating discussion :)

I must admit that I launched the thread simply as a response to the deaths of Henze and Carter and to the departure from the musical scene over the past 20 years or so of so many of my favourite composers.

If one takes the USA as a particular national example, over the period from 1980 onwards we have lost Barber(1981), Hanson(1981), Mennin(1983), Thompson(1984), Creston(1985), Sessions(1985), Persichetti(1987), Thomson(1989), Copland(1990), Bernstein(1990), Siegmeister(1991), Schuman(1992), Flagello(1994), Gould(1996), Hovhaness(2000), Diamond(2005), Rochberg(2005), Dello Joio(2008), Foss(2009), Lees(2010), Carter(2012).

Now I wouldn't want to claim that all of these composers were "great" (although some were ;D) but each was a composer of substance and most rank as considerable symphonists. To a music-lover like myself, whose prime interest is in orchestral music and who continues to regard the symphony as at the pinnacle of musical achievement, the loss of so many fine composers within my lifetime and the last three decades in particular represents a loss of such talent that it pains me to reflect that, if I look at the present American musical scene, I can count on the fingers of only one hand composers I would regard as worthy to rank along those who are now deceased.
With respect to living American composers like Adams, Glass, Corigliano, Harbison, Rouse, Danielpour..........and, yes, now it begins to tail off :(

(Incidentally....I listened again this afternoon whilst on a car journey to Elliott Carter's Symphony No.1-what a superb work it is :) However, Carter did decide to take a different turn so it is pointless to speculate further ;D)
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Neil McGowan
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« Reply #19 on: November 10, 2012, 06:44:08 pm »

covers a vastly wider range of styles and approaches than can be found in any 2+ centuries' worth of earlier music

Errrm, I'd beg to differ there ;)  If we took the two centuries from 1250 to 1450, you would find a diversity of forms, genres and methods of composition no less great than in the period from Haydn to the present day ;)  From the latter period of organum, by way of liturgical music-dramas, through to isorhythmic motets, for example? :)

And then if you took the next two centuries - from Dufay, Landini and Ockeghem, and the Eton Choirbook - by way of the entire period of Renaissance polyphony, through to Cavalli and early Lully - the breadth of innovation and achievement is no less great ;)  Look at the styles of composition these two centuries cover... from motets based around a cantus firmus, through to Tallis, Byrd and Palestrina, then on to Monteverdi's operas and the seconda prattica?  :)
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ahinton
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« Reply #20 on: November 10, 2012, 07:08:31 pm »

covers a vastly wider range of styles and approaches than can be found in any 2+ centuries' worth of earlier music

Errrm, I'd beg to differ there ;)  If we took the two centuries from 1250 to 1450, you would find a diversity of forms, genres and methods of composition no less great than in the period from Haydn to the present day ;)  From the latter period of organum, by way of liturgical music-dramas, through to isorhythmic motets, for example? :)

And then if you took the next two centuries - from Dufay, Landini and Ockeghem, and the Eton Choirbook - by way of the entire period of Renaissance polyphony, through to Cavalli and early Lully - the breadth of innovation and achievement is no less great ;)  Look at the styles of composition these two centuries cover... from motets based around a cantus firmus, through to Tallis, Byrd and Palestrina, then on to Monteverdi's operas and the seconda prattica?  :)
I did specifically note that my remark was not intended to be taken as a pejorative criticism of the range of musics before Haydn! - and, of course, I agree entirely with the examples that you put forward here - but I don't think that, even in its totality, that range could quite be compared to Haydn through Beethoven through Berlioz and Schumann through Liszt, Bruckner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, Busoni and so on and so on up to and beyond Schönberg, Henze, Xenakis, Ferneyhough, Rubbra, Hovhaness, Shostakovich, Brian, the mid-20th century American symphonists and far too vast a myriad others to mention - oh, and Carter, of course!...
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« Reply #21 on: November 11, 2012, 01:09:09 am »

I don't want to discuss what was in the past. Composers expressed their ideas and thoughts by different forms and conventions.

But we are in 21 century now.
I think the composers should have freedom and the right to choose whatever means are available to them (in style or idioms) to express their ideas.

I know there is pressure to follow convention and idiom of the time, but we are in the 21 century and we are embracing all ideas of the past and developing them all.

There is no need to throw the baby with the bath water anymore.

There are people who like particular  style and feel they can express their ideas  in that style. There are people who are more or less like  all styles (or most of them), there are people who combine styles and genres and different instrument (contemporary or period or electronic).

We live in an era when we embrace many ideas and it has to be the same in music. We are inclusive society now.

The audience has to be able to choose what they like to listen to. There are  people for every genre and style and idioms. I believe it because I meet different people and different preferences.

There are many great composers living in our time. The same goes for performers.
There are some people who don't belive it , but by our past history we find that in retrospective people find great composers under their noses.
This is my private opion and I belive I have a right to have my own private opinon on different things in life. If others feel differently it is ok with me.
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« Reply #22 on: November 11, 2012, 01:27:11 am »

You have absolutely every right to have your own opinion and every right to express that opinion :)

I respect that totally.

And what you say is very welcome indeed in its open-minded and optimistic outlook on contemporary music :)

I can assure you that I certainly don't want to see classical music disappear and that I accept that others today and future generations will have a very different outlook to mine.

In a sense I am a prisoner of the past ;D I love the orchestral music of the period from (say around 1860) to the present time, not, of course, excluding Beethoven or Schubert!
I am comfortable with tonal, romantic, neo-romantic music. I also like a very great deal of "gritty, grim and, sometimes, abrasive dissonance within a broadly tonal framework" (if I can express it that way). I love to spread my interests to all sorts of less well-known, neglected, unsung composers......BUT that type of adventure does involve-I know-spreading myself widely WITHIN an idiom and a format with which I am generally familiar and reasonably comfortable.

As an aside (which I cannot resist ;D) I was denounced on another forum for being too "old-fashioned" in my tastes and on another as having too "modern" a musical taste.
I can't win ;D
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« Reply #23 on: November 11, 2012, 07:37:43 am »

It is funny and amusing to be too modern in one forum and too old fashion on the other. It happens to me when I meet different students or talk to different friends.

I am a person who probably would be more comfortable in classical, Romantic and "gritty, grim and, sometimes, abrasive dissonance within a broadly tonal framework"  . But I encounter young people who may have very different tastes. Sometimes our tastes agree and sometimes they don't.
I noticed that small children (age 6 7 or 8) like contemporary popula style (starting with Ragtime and then different swings, music from popular cartoon or perhaps some folk tune). Everyone starts their development somewhere. It is very difficult to make them play what I like. Maybe I want them to play what I used to play, but then they don't practice and in this situations I always lose. My students usually don't come from highly sophisticated musical backgrounds and I have to win them over to music so to say.


After this initial introduction they broaden their range of musical preferences and develop.
I used to feel very pessimistic about classical music future. But I don't anymore.

Parents and children love music like they always had in the past if not more. We have children playing different instruments and at exam time all examination boards (Assiciated Board, London College, Royal Irish academy) have many candidates playing for them. I think there are other boards, but I am not as familiar with them as with this three boards.

There are people teaching Suzuki method and there are new methods too (colour strings).

I have optimistic opinion on the future of classical music. Contemporary style now includes many idioms and people can find what they like and then extend their range after they are introduced to different styles.
I usually can not make them like different style than their preference, but I can introduce them to that and with time they accept many different things. Pushing things and styles on people when they don't like it usually is not successful.
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autoharp
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« Reply #24 on: December 24, 2012, 02:03:12 am »

Apologies for being a party-pooper, but can someone please define the word "great" in the context of this thread?

Hmm. I thought not.

I don't mean to be cynical. Honest.
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« Reply #25 on: December 24, 2012, 03:33:35 am »

Not that it gives me any pleasure to provide this particular link.......but it's a start :)

http://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/what-makes-a-great-composer.pdf
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« Reply #26 on: December 24, 2012, 05:20:27 am »

Apologies for being a party-pooper, but can someone please define the word "great" in the context of this thread?

Hmm. I thought not.

. . .

Too soon Mr. Speedy Gonzales Autoharp! How about this, from the O.E.D.:

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15: Of persons: Extraordinary in ability, genius, or achievement.

a. With explicit reference to some special department or kind of activity. (Qualifying an agent-noun or some equivalent personal designation; also predicatively with in or as.)

e.g. "Freethinker No. 63: The Great Poet, and the Great Painter, think alike."

b. In wider sense (usually qualifying man): Eminent in point of mental or moral attainments or magnitude of achievement; of transcendent qualities in thought or action; exhibiting signal excellence in some important work. In recent use, the designation is often felt to imply in addition more or less attribution of loftiness and integrity of character.

e.g. "J. Caird Univ. Serm. 261: The great man is he who approaches more nearly than others to the ideal of man’s nature."


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autoharp
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« Reply #27 on: December 24, 2012, 06:27:58 am »

Fair enough! Many thanks for your elucidations, gentlemen.
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Caostotale
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« Reply #28 on: December 24, 2012, 07:15:08 am »

In my point of view, there are probably more 'great' composers at the current time than there ever were in the past, or at least more potentially 'great' composers. The talent is certainly there. The only problem is that the individualism necessary for that talent to flourish is subjected to unprecedented degrees of socioeconomic and cultural 'leveling' that completely devalues their work. 'Greatness' itself is subjugated to the same totalizing reification that has eroded so many other traditional values and, as a result, it becomes more important for all persons to mold themselves into functional cells of an increasingly panoptic world. Nobody wants to risk being a cancer and nobody wants anyone else to truly become powerful (unless your artistic 'power' is akin to Bono's or Paul McCartney's).

Despite the gloominess of our coming dystopia, I still take massive exception to the idea that, somehow, the age of 'great' composers is at an end. Rather, I agree with the idea that many classical music fans are simply half-assed consumers who have spent way too much time letting a few pyramid-like old guard institutions (orchestras, record companies) BS them into thinking that the genre is somehow no longer robust. Even with the presences of more listener-alienating 'academic' musics like Babbitt's and Stockhausen's and disheartening populist tripe like Glass, Reich, and the holy minimalists, there is bountiful evidence that shows less-flashy composers all over the world are still writing wonderful works and have been all along.

That being said, it's still very hard to be optimistic in an atmosphere like America's. The complete and utter lack of decent music education and its hideous replacements (initiatives like the School of Rock) are dreary to say the least. On the other end, the growing academic insularity of worthless musicology programs and the decay of standards in composition programs make me feel like college music programs are just another place where talented people get requisitioned so that they can never get in the way of society's productive/consumptive status-quo (not to mention that it fills the pockets of those institutions' private owners quite nicely). Some of the smartest and most creative people I know have essentially tossed their artistic values to the wind due to the administrative and boorish devil's-handshake that is modern academia. Again, the greatness is there, albeit completely stymied by the brutality of contemporary life.
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« Reply #29 on: December 24, 2012, 08:30:51 am »

Well said that man!
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