mikeh-375
old school
Music is one of if not the most obvious examples of where this whole "progress" horse s#@$ sucks bogwater. There's nothing out there the level of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Mahler, and hasn't been since probably Richard Strauss. In other words, this century doesn't even meet the standards of one hundred years ago...the skill sets have diminished that obviously, and not just among composers.
Young people do need to listen to older, studied, experienced people in music...especially when it comes to listing people like Kanye West as a great composer. The last great composer in music (at least Occidental music) died shortly after the second world war, and most musicologists (shoot most music graduates) would have a hard time refuting that. Not that there hasn't been wonderful music since...hell no, and I happen to like more than a few two and three chord rehashes. But no one's convincing a music graduate that music has progressed anywhere since Strauss, Bartok.
Parsifal, I'm not sure what you are saying here, are you condemning some of the great geniuses (who are surely on a par with Mozart et al) of the latter 20thC and up to the present? I get your subjectivity, but to dismiss Britten, Tippet, Henze, Boulez, Messiaen, Lutoslawski etc. etc. with such a short shrift doesn't ring true at all to me and probably a lot of composers. Ok you may not like their music, but those bad boys and others are supremely gifted (and in some cases visionary) composers and it doesn't seem right to dismiss them without at least acknowledging their uniqueness and brilliance, regardless of taste. Britten for example had the fluency, skill and ease of Mozart quite apart from being one of the finest pianists of his generation, with perfect pitch, able to write about 12 pages of full score a day, away from a piano. Boulez's ear was so fine that british musos called him the french Correction, one time he picked up on wrong notes in Stockhausen's Gruppen for 3 orchestras. Messiaen was a theroetical innovator who also just wrote directly to the page, Shostakovitch was another prodigy who bled music just like our Classical and Baroque heroes... I could go on.
Not coming on to you here as I often agree with your posts....but not this one....
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