Where have all the giants gone?

[FrenchAK]

Ah, Gustav Holst. By far my favorite composer.

Brings me back to my symphony days, playing portions of Holst's suite. I may have been the least competent violist, but it was the experience of a lifetime. Now those were the days.



What were we talking about?

 

[nutdog]

That sounds like intelligent design to me.

I'm so confused.

 

[GoesThump]

What happened to us that stops us having genius people today?

I am confining my remarks here purely to music, and not genius as a general phenomenon.

We have as much genius as we ever did. I don't think anything stops us from HAVING genius, so much as PERCEIVING genius.

Bluntly, we live in a musically illiterate society. (TB excepted, of course! )

Go back and read the reviews of Brahms & his contemporaries in the Viennese press of the 1860s-70s. Remember, these were not scholarly articles. They were directed toward the general music loving public. Compare that with an issue of Rolling Stone from the 1960s and 70s.

And then compare that to what passes for music journalism today. The writing caters to the general audience in each case, and in each case we see a drop in quality and depth. Music occupies a much less important role in middle class society than it did 150 years ago.

I hope this trend will reverse, but I am not optimistic.

Oddly, I was just listening to the Planets the other night - a recording of Holst himself conducting it. (Available on the Naxos Historical label.) It's fun to hear his take on it.


GT

 

[GoesThump]

I blame the music industry and it's greed to make a fast buck with proven top-ten formulae.

Crap is being slung at us by so rapid pace, that we probably couldn't even recognize talent if it hit us square in the nerds.

Well, the guy with the bucks always called the tune. Being a kapellmeister wasn't really so different to being employed to make stock music for commercials. Further, popular taste often produced gluts of me-too-ism. Vienna got swamped with waltzes in the 19th century.

I agree w/your comment about crap being slung at a rapid pace & that obscuring our ability to recognize talent. Then again, there was *always* more crap than good stuff. History is a filter that way - a lot of the junk fell by the wayside. (Of course some of it was good, and fell through the cracks for other reasons.)

I'd like to ask the group 2 questions I like to ask my college classes:

1) Who has heard of Mozart?
(all hands go up, except for the one guy at the back of the room sleeping.)

2) Without peeking at Wikipedia, who has heard of Dittersdorf?
(generally I get one or two hands out of 30 students.)

That's what I mean by historical filtering.

GT

 

[john turner]

I agree wholeheartedly but in a lot of ways I'd consider both to have worked in the film "industry" more than the music "industry".

yeah, that's true, but i don't think, in 100 years, that distinction will matter. i see both of these guys, along with a few other similar composers doing things like movie music or game music, being remembered for the music they do and not the medium that music is primarily presented in.

after all, i've seen at least two shows that i remember of the atlanta symphony doing specific "soundtrack" composer's music over the past decade - one with howard shore conducting the lotr soundtrack, and the other with them playing the music of john williams.

 

[GoesThump]

yeah, that's true, but i don't think, in 100 years, that distinction will matter. i see both of these guys, along with a few other similar composers doing things like movie music or game music, being remembered for the music they do and not the medium that music is primarily presented in.

Spot on. We don't generally listen to Bach in church anymore.

GT

 

[echoSE7EN]

Danny Elfman

 

[john turner]

Danny Elfman

oh yes. him too.

 

[Mayers]

I think music is too mainstream now to have true genius ... but we have a lot of talent people and more of greedy relying on old formulas.

On the other hands we still have great composer nowaday like Howard Shore ( Lord Of The Ring )and Nobuo Uematsu ( Final Fantasy game ). Both had their music played by prestigious orchestra. Even Stephen Hopkin ( yeah the actor ) composed great music that have been played by many orchestras in Europe. I don't think our classic composer like Bach, Chopin, Prokofiev etc knew or the people knew they will be remember up to this day.

It seems that since 1960 the music became more and more dumb and I don't see anything that will pass the test of time.

 

[Jools4001]

What happened to us that stops us having genius people today?

Simon Cowell.

Or, more specifically the modern obsession with instant gratification. People want the fame and the kudos, but don't want to put the work in to achieve what Holst and other 'genius' composers were capable of.

I also think that there were composers of greater genius than Holst, but have no doubt that people of equal or greater genius exist today, and not just in music but in all forms of human endeavour.

It's just that today, more than ever before, they have to clamour for attention amidst a welter of information channels. The world that they are trying to be noticed in has to sift a near infinite amount of worthless dirt before these little nuggets of gold get a chance to shine. And the world is doing this with a shorter and shorter attention span, after all, these days if you can't express your genius to the world in less than 140 charac...

 

[aborgman]

Wrong. We are not exposed to more genius...

Yes, we are.

Remember - I'm not talking about just music. I'm talking about everything.

You know Stephen Hawking is?

Probably 90% of the people living in England during the life of Newton never heard of Newton.

we are exposed to more redundancy, idea stealing (sampling) "artists" that could care less about the music and care more about the pay day.

Yes, we're exposed to more of that also.

As Sturgeon's law says - 90% of everything is crap.

That ratio ain't changing any, but the total volume it applies to has expanded massively.

And when someone nowadays say's "he/she is a genius"....nope...just different from the norm. Lady Gaga comes to mind....that is of course if you forgot Madonna...which Lady Gaga is. Real music is still alive in the classical sense....composers still writing brilliant pieces for an orchestra.

Pop, Rap, even country is just now yesterdays regurgitated soup.

Ah... the good old idea that higher complexity = better.

 

[odin70]

Spot on. We don't generally listen to Bach in church anymore.

GT

Quite often in Europe we do.

 

[bucephylus]

Are you guys really comparing classical musicians with pop musicians? Really, now?

Oh, you forget that Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis are all modern.

+1 Philip Glass is fantastic.

More generally, my impression is that we have sort of gotten backwards; "We used to use things and love people, now we use people and love things," as the saying goes.

I definitely feel that many professions are now pursuing the dollar rather than the project or the reputation. In academic circles at the college level, tenure is now 95% determined by how much contract money the professor is bringing in with (in most cases) zero weighting going to teaching. The MBA programs teach that the dollar is the prize. We reap what we sow.

The talent and genius are still out there. The ground is a bit less fertile at the moment. Don't expect it to change soon, but I am always happy to be surprised.

 

[GoesThump]

Quite often in Europe we do.

You lucky people.

Still, the fact remains, the majority of Bach listening isn't done in church anymore.

GT

 

[ugly_bassplayer]

Wrong. We are not exposed to more genius...we are exposed to more redundancy, idea stealing (sampling) "artists" that could care less about the music and care more about the pay day.

And when someone nowadays say's "he/she is a genius"....nope...just different from the norm. Lady Gaga comes to mind....that is of course if you forgot Madonna...which Lady Gaga is. Real music is still alive in the classical sense....composers still writing brilliant pieces for an orchestra.

Pop, Rap, even country is just now yesterdays regurgitated soup.

This shows just how ignorant you are about hip hop culture my friend.