On 27 Jan 2006 at 13:17, Andrew Stiller wrote: [quoting David Bailey, unattributed:] > > >It's time we start celebrating the LIVING composers, those who are > > >chronicling OUR TIMES in their music, reflecting OUR LIVES in their > > >art.
[snip] > 2) The problem with the first of the quoted statements is that great > music is not immediately diagnosable--by anyone, ever. It has to sit > out there for decades and interact with the culture before what it is > can be really known. . . . I disagree with this, but it's very complicated, so I'll leave my reasons aside and move on to something I can more easily explain. > . . . Furthermore, the stature of any piece is to an > important extent determined by the stature of its creator (minor > Mozart gets more worshipful attention than better works by lesser > composers), . . . . In my opinion, this is a REALLY BAD THING, and something we should work very hard to avoid. Just because Mozart wrote it does not mean it's "great music" (however you define that). > . . . and the stature of any composer cannot be fully known > until death. . . That's a statement that assumes a lot about what we're talking about. It assumes a certain 19th-century, "great master" point of view, one that requires time to "winnow out" the "chaff" so that we end up with the Really Great Pieces of Music. As anyone who has spent any time looking at the "minor composers" will tell you, it's not so clear exactly why Bach is great and Rameau is only near great. Or why Telemann or Vivaldi are considered hacks by so many (they were both brilliant composers who wrote volumes of music in a variety of styles). Our modern definition of great music is circular, in that a few composers got picked as models (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and this troika was in place by 1798, as evidenced by comments found in the first year of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, for instance). Now, these are not bad models, since all three were extraordinarily gifted and versatile composers. But once they become the models, all other ways of approaching music fall by the wayside. The definitions of "great music" get reworked to correspond to how those composers wrote, and thus other composers (especially the really brilliant ones who had distinct and interesting musical styles of their own) can't measure up. This is going to happen any time you have a "great composers" model of music history, as opposed to a more historicist approach, looking more at what music was composed and played in any repertory at a given time. > . . . --which in turn is why dead composers are more highly > valued than living ones. It is possible for a composer to blow it late > in life, as for example Milhaud did, so to a certain extent everything > remains on hold as long as the composer is contributing new works. I don't think there is any requirement that our musical culture be structured in this fashion. > You may rail against this as unfair, but the situation is as it is. > The very concept of "masterpiece" is intimately tied to the concept of > "master," and you can't have one without the other. I vote for getting rid of both concepts and instead looking at what was there historically. If you do that, you find all sorts of interesting things that will be invisible to anyone wearing their "Great Masterpieces" glasses. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
