Posted on 01/09/2011 7:12:24 AM PST by Pharmboy
Like comparing apples and oranges.. and maybe blackberries..
His Violin Concerto No. 1 is really his greatest work. I wore out some old 78 my father had when I was four or five years old listening to it over and over. It might have been Zino Francescatti with Ormandy and Philadelpha. A number of years ago I saw a CD rerelease of this and immediately bought two copies, one for myself of course, and one I mailed to my sister as a surprise. In fact I think I'll take it out and listen to it now.
ML
2) Back
3) Schubert
4) Chopin
5) Lennon & McCartney
6) Vivaldi
7) George & Ira Gershwin
8) Rogers & Hammerstein
9) Irving Berlin
10) Willie Nelson
And you are even named after my favorite concerto.
Well, this day is off to a wonderful start!!
??????
"Traditions and styles?" Sometimes writers dwell so much on "style" they fail to say much about music. Maybe the writer is not very familiar with Dowland, Francesco da Milano, Corelli, Gabrielli, etc. It's OK to limit the list to "late baroque" (starting when?) and later, but the above comment is questionable.
Other than this, it's an interesting article.
Kollman's "Sun of Composers" 1799 (Beethoven was not that famous yet).
Hasn't he always ... It falls on us to prove ourselves worthy.
I've had this discussion before regarding the lack of great composers (like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) in modern times. The answer is so obvious that many people overlook it.
The period that roughly runs from 1600 to 1850 was a unique time in human civilization. For the first time, people with artistic ability were able to completely devote themselves to their craft thanks to patronage - a practice where wealthy individuals (usually in the ruling class) would "sponsor" an artist by either taking him into their household as a servant or providing financial support.
Yet this period of time was also before television, radio, mass media, and the countless other distractions that occupy our modern lives. So these artists and composers were basically working on their craft from sunup to sundown with little or no interruption from outside sources.
It is hard to imagine today what everyday life was like back in the days of Johann Sebastian Bach or Ludwig Beethoven but if we could, we would likely find it incredibly boring. So if you were a composer during those times, well, that is pretty much what you did the entire day (when you weren't teaching students or conducting performances of your compositions).
In sort, there are simply too many distractions in our daily life to ever attain the compositional skill set of even a Handel, Haydn or Schubert. Imagine if Ludwig Beethoven was around today, fighting traffic jams on the interstate to get to and from work, checking his stocks on his home computer, watching the NFL playoffs on TV, flying to places like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to meet with orchestras performing his works, downloading the latest John Grisham novel to his Kindle, playing Wii video games with his nephew, meeting with film directors who have contracted him to score their movies, trying to get his laptop to boot up so he can get a little composing in before the Jets-Colts game...and on and on.
While Beethoven would still be a very successful composer today based on his abilities, he'd likely never be able to produce works on the scale of the Fifth Symphony or Missa Solemnis as he did back when there were not all these distractions of modern life.
Don’t have a top 10, but my personal faves are Chopin, Bach, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg.
PING!
Excellent taste, Pharmboy. In my opinion,however, there is a big drop-off after Beethoven.
Films: John Williams, but many more great ones!
Ya beat me to it. Today’s films, are yesterday’s plays, operas etc. Williams would fit right in
“Where is today’s Beethoven? Seems like we are, at best, becoming more distracted ...”
I think the real answer is even more depressing. Western music allows for a finite number of ideas...and the good ones have already been used.
1. Bach
2. Mozart
3. Vivaldi
4. Beethoven
5. Handel
6. Dvorak
7. Rachmaninov
8. Brahms
9. Chopin
10. Corelli
1. Mozart
2. Ralph Vaughn Williams
3. Charles Ives
4. Sergei Prokofiev
5. Franz List
6. Henry Purcell
7. Giacomo Puccini
8. Claude Debussy
9. Beethoven
10. Gustav Mahler
:)
"Ahh, Bach!"
Bach
Mozart
Beethoven
Demigods:
Wagner
Haydn
Brahms
Schubert
Schumann
Handel
Tchaikovsky
Genius:
Mendelssohn
Dvorak
Liszt
Chopan
Stravinsky
Verdi
Prokofiev
Shostakovich
Strauss
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