If you search for "the best piece of music ever" on Google...

[mmcirvin]

you get all sorts of things, but Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Handel's "Messiah" come up a lot. I'll agree that they're pretty good.

Up into the 1980s, Beethoven was the Einstein or Shakespeare of classical music, the default composer people thought of when you told them to name a composer. The stereotypical classical pianist had a bust of Beethoven on or near his stereotypical piano. Charles Schulz constantly made jokes about him.

This notion of default "greatest" status is interesting. Einstein became a public super-celebrity after the 1919 eclipse expedition that provided (pretty crummy) confirmation of general relativity. Before that, the canonical smart guy, at least to Americans, was probably Thomas Edison. I don't think James Clerk Maxwell ever had public celebrity status. Maxwell never got his due. That guy was freaking brilliant. Einstein thought so too, so there.

Anyway, at some point the top composer name-check spot switched from Beethoven to Mozart. I blame the movie of "Amadeus." Classical stations started playing Mozart all day long. I like the guy's work but you can only take so much of it before it's like eating sugar cubes from the bowl.

But Beethoven probably still has more instant tune-recognizability. He wrote two, count 'em, two themes that everybody with even a vague knowledge of music recognizes, and might even be able to name the piece they are from. Well, maybe three, but the third one is mostly known as a cellular ring tone. Except for that guy who wanted to jam it on Jake Haller's piano.

To do better than that with instrumental music, you have to get into John Williams/Henry Mancini territory. Maybe Sousa.

(addendum: At least Maxwell got the highest mountain range on Venus named after him. It looks a little odd what with all the names taken from historical women and goddesses that cover the rest of the planet. I think it was one of the first surface features named on Venus, so named because it was first seen by means of radar from Earth, and radar guys would naturally venerate Maxwell.)

Comments

Countin' down the top composers!

[(Anonymous)]

So, in a McIrvin universe, who *is* the most celebrated composer?

I agree that Mozart's too... well, actually, he's too neat. Pretty without (often) being beautiful. Trite, at times. (Plus, he was in "Parenthood".)

Beethoven, for me, is too far the other way. Alright, it's not Wagner, but he's still got his fair share of sturm-und-drang and pomposity. He says "why 'boom' when you can 'BOOOOOM!!!'?" For me, sometimes 'boom' is enough. (Plus, he was in "Air Force One".)

My nomination, boringly predictable I know, but there you are, is the Bachmeister. He had range, but he had style. He had precision, but he had emotion. (Plus, he sang the theme to "Welcome Back, Kotter".)

Love,
Casey B

Re: Countin' down the top composers!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. I'm pretty much a musical ignoramus. I tend to like music that goes "BOOOOOM!!!" Beethoven delivers that, though he's not my favorite for listening all the time.

I like me some Rimsky-Korsakov. Also Shostakovich, who sometimes has a crazy frenetic quality I find appealing, but I haven't heard as much of him as I want to. And 19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric wind band stuff that Sam got me listening to: Holst and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

And Percy Grainger, who is probably best known for unearthing the tune now known as "Danny Boy" and releasing it upon the world, but who was a fascinating weirdo: a masochistic repressed pedophile, textbook Oedipus-complex-guy and anthropological crackpot who did ethnomusicography before it was cool, refused to use Latin-derived words in his everyday speech, dedicated an adaptation of Kipling's "hanging Danny Deever" to his mother, and eventually became a pioneer of electronic music because he wished to eliminate the human element from performance.

The stuff that traditionally gets demerits for being too cheeseball and programmatic, I tend to like. Saint-Saëns. Leonard Bernstein.

And I have been obsessively listening to David Amram's "Triple Concerto" a lot lately, particularly the third, most famous movement, Amram's "Rondo a la Turca," which r0x0r my s0x0r.

samantha2074 introduced me to most of this stuff. The big problem for ignoramuses listening to classical music is that without fashion that varies from week to week, it's hard to get started: if the canonical Top Ten composers don't instantly grab you, what do you do? But Sam has a big record collection and some quirky tastes that I was able to inherit partially. Since she plays in a wind band, she likes wind band music, and she's partial to Russian, British and American traditions.

Bach was amazing. I haven't seriously listened to much of his music. But what I have... Once I went to a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance in which somebody performed a short cello piece he wrote; I forget what it was, exactly. But you got the sense just from listening to it that this guy had been through a lot of hard knocks and come out sadder and wiser, which is an incredibly complicated emotion to hear in a short piece of instrumental music.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Maxwell blew it for himself because he consorted with demons.

Gary Oldman blew it for Beethoven because "Immortal Beloved" was no "Amadeus." Gary Oldman is no F. Murray Abraham, though he's up there.

Google wins again

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that Beethoven wrote a fourth universally-recognized tune, but it turns out that "For He's A Jolly Good Fellow"/"The Bear Went Over The Mountain" (used in Wellington's Victory) was pre-existing.

Re: Google wins again

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In a similar vein, Mozart is often accused of writing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", but he didn't.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

For the record, i hated "Fü Elise" way before Nokia (further) immortalized it. It was what precocious girls always wanted to play on the piano when i was taking music lessons as a young'un.

My classical music knowledge is not broad, either, but one of my stepdaughters is a music major, and she seems to love Dvorak. Wagner has shown more range than i imagined, too. Robert Fripp seems to like Bartok a lot but i can't dig his stuff. The one piece of classical music i have which mp3 i play often is John Adams's "The Chairman Dances", but that's 20th century.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances are pretty cool.

The top classical piece in my collection is currently a Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra recording of the Lezghinka (whatever that is) from Khachaturian's Gayane Suite, which is better known for the Sabre Dance immortalized by plate-spinners on the Ed Sullivan Show, but the Lezghinka rocks harder. Number two is Shostakovich's Dance #1 from Jazz Suite #2, which is really cool though as far as I can tell it contains no actual trace of jazz.

I like Stravinsky too.

Re: Countin' down the top composers!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, Jorn Barger once posted a blanket critique of classical music to a.r.k, on the basis of a day's worth of classical radio listening, in which he complained that it was emotionally puerile and prone to the smug, cutesy use of nursery-rhyme themes. I suspect that he had just overdosed on Mozart, and I think that the predilections of classical radio programmers might actually be a barrier to enjoyment for the uninitiated.