Cool

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By your definition, Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms would not be considered great composers.

 

How are you drawing that conclusion? Those three definitely have their own voice.

 

What LHB is saying is that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms didn't "snatch poetry out of the air", and that nobody great conjures art or music out of thin air.

 

Goethe was just being poetic! :tiphat:

 

At the end of all the rhetoric we are still left with "If I like it, it must be great art." For me "great" is not black and white. It's a spectrum that changes daily depending also on what I as a listener bring to the equation.

 

But the question that has always driven me nuts over the years is why do we only have to listen to great composers?

I keep thinking of all of the ungreat composers whose music is still very satisfying.

 

Another case of great being the enemy of good.

 

Is there a difference between a technician and an artist? Is there a difference between learning the principles of structure and creating structures? One creates structures that other people study, while others study structures that other people create. But this cannot be all... there is a powerful humanitarian attribute required for greatness in the context of art. This science is not... even in the case of Bach or Babbitt, purely logical.

 

Is there a difference between a technician and an artist? Is there a difference between learning the principles of structure and creating structures? One creates structures that other people study, while others study structures that other people create.

All great composers did both, obviously. They all read, studied and/or copied scores to learn the principles of structure.

But this cannot be all... there is a powerful humanitarian attribute required for greatness in the context of art. This science is not... even in the case of Bach or Babbitt, purely logical.

Interesting claim. You have our attention. Is there actual content to follow? Or are you going to leave us with nothing but this vague and empty assertion? What is this "attribute required for greatness in the context of art?"

 

After having heard so much classical music, I can testify to the fact that great composers are rare.

Of course, it all depends on what subjective definition of "great" you are using.

Personally, I think there are thousands of great composers out there, and the ones who stand out from the crowd should really be called "super great" or even "super-duper great" composers. That way, you would never be tempted to believe that greatness is something objective.

 

The way I see it is there are levels. Someone picks up an instrument - they learn to to play it. Their family is impressed - if they're lucky. Then their teachers are impressed. Perhaps even an audience - and if they're really cooking, a paying audience. They can earn a living - of sorts - from this instrument.

That is a particular ability: I think 'technician' is a fair enough term.

Then you have someone who picks up an instrument - and they think 'what I'm doing just isn't enough. I'm not happy with simply playing tunes other folks have written'. And they make their own tunes. These tunes might have some relation to the music they like, or perform - or the tunes might be radically different. But true originality is really tricky. And their family like them (maybe) and if they are really lucky an audience might actually pay to hear these tunes.

These people are artists.

Everything else is subjective.

So, in conclusion, to say great composers are rare is a purely subjective statement. It's impossible to measure it.

I could say, there is a great sportsperson, for example - they can do what they do with stunning prescience. And in their field they are clearly better than other sportsfolk because they score more points, or run faster, etc. But in the field of art, these measurements do not exist.

 

It's all just after-the-fact rationalisations of feelings we can't explain.

There can be as many great composers as you want there to be.

 

There can be as many great composers as you want there to be.

In a previous post, I established that there were/are approximately 100 Great Composers, as inferred from my quick analysis of Harold C. Schonberg's The Lives of the Great Composers. As an aside, I found that Schonberg singles out Sibelius as "occupy[ing] an honorable place among the minor composers", thus relegating Sibelius to the selfsame colorless Limbo from which Schonberg in another chapter has rescued Rachmaninoff. De gustibus indeed, and in spades!

But I digress. Everybody interested in classical music should read the Wallace Brockway & Herbert Weinstock classic, Men of Music, first published in 1939 and revised in 1950. B&W are a hoot, to put it mildly, with strong views strongly and colorfully expressed on their Great Composers, some of whom they damn with extremely faint praise indeed, notably Liszt and Brahms. But the book is great fun, and you will find yourself re-reading it from time to time just for the pleasure of it. Anyway, here are B&W's Great Composers as of 1950: Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Rossini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Strauss, Sibelius, Stravinsky. Just like all of us, strange eccentricity of taste, or penetrating insight.

 

I have it on good authority that there are/have been approximately one hundred Great Composers. The title of Harold C. Schonberg's classic is The Lives of the Great Composers, is it not? So I took the trouble to start a rough count of everybody in Schonberg's book who gets more than one sentence, and came up with that figure. That should settle the issue once and for all.

 

There is no reason to believe that great art is great for purely logical reasons. If the process were purely logical, we would all know of at least one example of music that produces the same response from all of us. If it were an applicable science (short of the realm of quantum mechanics), there would be at least SOME absolute truths to speak of...

 

To my mind the status of greatness can only be given to a select few. Most often the problem is coming to some agreement about who these few are.
Looking at the sporting analogy, if we take generally acknowledged "greats" eg Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, whilst they may both be blessed with some extra natural talent, it is the relentless practice they did that resulted in their achievements. So I feel it is talent and hardwork combined, ie talent and technician together. But if you ain't got that extra bit of natural talent all the practice in the world will not make you great.

 

One thing I have learned about discussions like this is if one asks ten members to define greatness one gets fifteen answers.

 

Yeah, 8 or 7 people who are satisfied with one answer they give and two or three blowhards to duke it out over 20+pages with gradually evolving answers that amount to the remaining 8 or 7 answers.

 

Reason dictates that we have no choice but to agree with subjectivity on this topic. It is still interesting to contrast composers... insofar as one makes a distinction between an artist and a non-artist, one cannot claim that all composers are artists, unless of course, one starts with the premise that "all composers are artists." The point is that we each have a criteria of differentiation; the challenge is to identify this criteria in ourselves... a broader challenge is to find a common thread between competing criteria. For my part I hold to the idea that not all composers are artists (it would seem this places me in a bind, as here I must make distinctions).

 

Yes, "it is interesting to contrast composers." Could you do so, that is, name a few composers who are artists and a few who aren't, by your lights? That would help me to understand what you are on about.

 

Great artists of any sort are rare. Maybe one in a thousand. Same with great athletes, great business executives, great scientists/engineers/mathematicians, . . If being exceptionally good at a given thing were common, then we'd change our definition of great to encompass a narrower spectrum further out on the tail of the curve.

 

Technician/Artist when presented as a dichotomy is too black and white for me. You'd have to explain yourself more thoroughly before I could jump on board with such an idea, that there is a composer who is a true artist and one who is a technician, nothing in between.

Is Beethoven an artist while Carl Nielsen a technician? I don't think so. Nor Tchaikovsky an artist while Haydn a technician. The truth is somewhere in between, and will vary from person to person too.

 

I just had a dream last night about this very topic I swear. A guy I know was being exceptionally picky with his 'refined tastes' and my friend and I were remarking on how much he was missing and how annoying it was to talk to him because he was so limited in his ability to perceive aesthetics beyond only what he had somehow decided on as being the very best.

 

As others have inferred, the term, 'great', is too broad and too subjective. For instance, IMO, the 19th century gave us countless composers. If I call Beethoven and Brahms 'great', what do I call Mendelssohn? Excellent or pretty good?

Using my measuring stick (and staying with that period), there were so many great 19th century composers, that I would end up having to isolate Beethoven and Brahms in some sort of astounding, unbelievable and ethereal category. I sometimes wonder how many individuals called themselves 'a composer' in the 1800s. There must have been quite a few whose works went nowhere, never to be heard again. Let's say you heard some of those works and then you heard Anton Rubinstein's piano concertos. You might then think that they (and he) were great.

So, I think one has to carefully define the term(s) of comparison and that is easier said than done.

 

There is a false dichotomy between artist and technician. Every great artist has also been trained with the technical tools needed in order to express his artistry. Hence we see that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven et al had great training in the techniques of composing through which they were able to express their art. Of course there are some people who are great technicians without necessarily being greater artist. But the great artists needs the technique to fully express his art.

 

I think this was meant by the starter of this topic .Great composers are rare and great musicians also.There are very skilful technicians who play and can hide behind many notes but when they have to play a so called simple Mozart pianosonata they realy have to proof themselves.

 

"'Israel in Egypt in 15 days, Don Giovanni in a month, Il barbiere di Siviglia in 18 days. Those men did not have exhausted blood, were well-balanced natures, had their heads on squarely, and knew what they wanted." (G Verdi)

 

Never ceases to amaze me what threads succeed and what threads fail.

That is, how there has been three pages following that OP is beyond me. And that is say nothing of his view, but there was so little to respond to. And yet here we are!

 

Never ceases to amaze me what threads succeed and what threads fail.

That is, how there has been three pages following that OP is beyond me. And that is say nothing of his view, but there was so little to respond to. And yet here we are!

This is nothing--I've seen threads go on for over 4000 pages in response to four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

 

The are more great composers than you think, but what is what problem is that a great composer need be discovered by a great artist and played for a great proselytiser and heard many times. Increase buy more for an opera etc. That is a tricky and a half ...

 

... when there better pieces of music by Cage.

 

4-me-personally Bach is perhaps the father of greatness. The hard part about all this (I made it many comments back): once we admit that not all composers are great we find ourselves in a dilemma. Once we admit that there is a difference between greatness and mediocrity we have drawn a line. Are all symphonies great? I am all for listening to composers that did not achieve the status of greatness; my personal criteria is fairly simple, if I like it then I listen; if I like it lots then I listen lots.

 

once we admit that not all composers are great we find ourselves in a dilemma.

Really? Most of us have already been down this road, here and in the outside world. I hate to say this because I want to avoid sounding too snotty, but most of us do not have a problem with following the music of B level composers.

 

Just think, it takes billions of people to come up with so few great composers.
Even 200 would be few. What a fractional amount. I sometimes think how
God could have created so many people, it seems unfair, but when you look at
how relatively few so-called great souls develop, it makes sense to create billions, lol
I don't judge the value of life based on "greatness."