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The most overrated composers of all time are you people, and that is saying a lot, considering the consensus is that all of you suck.

So I threw this list together in a couple days. Due to my unfamiliarity with many of the composers on it, it's probably royally screwed up, and is in no way meant to be final, absolute truth. I'm mainly just curious to see what y'all would/wouldn't change about it. So, without further ado... 50. Gunnar Berg 49. Claudio Monteverdi 48. Gustav Holst 47. Francesco Landini 46. Anton Dvorak 45. Milton Babbitt 44. Samuel Barber 43. Perotin 42. Arcangelo Corelli 41. Johann Fux 40. Maurice Ravel 39. Phillip Glass 38. Charles Ives 37. Guillaume de Machaut 36. George Gershwin 35. Leonard Bernstein 34. Henry Cowell 33. Johann Pachelbel 32. Jean Sibelius 31. Domenico Scarlatti 30. Georges Bizet 29. Giacomo Puccini 28. Georg Philipp Telemann 27. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina 26. Edvard Grieg 25. Richard Strauss 24. Sergei Prokofiev 23. Felix Mendelssohn 22. Franz Schubert 21. Gustav Mahler 20. Sergei Rachmaninoff 19. Bela Bartok 18. Robert Schumann 17. Joseph Haydn 16. John Cage 15. Antonio Vivaldi 14. Frederic Chopin 13. Aaron Copland 12. Franz Liszt 11. Hector Berlioz 10. Igor Stravinsky 9. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 8. Richard Wagner 7. Arnold Schoenberg 6. George Frideric Handel 5. Claude Debussy 4. Johannes Brahms 3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 2. Johann Sebastian Bach 1. Ludwig van Beethoven

I'm always dumbfounded when people say that the major Classical figures had great influence on many modern trends in Western music. I realize that both Serialism and Minimalism don't necessarily require a non-tonal style, but I think you would agree that it would be an outright lie to say that the majority of "modern" classical music is/was tonal (modern being the start of 20th and into the 21st century). Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to attack you or modern classical trends. I've just always been confused when someone says that they can see how something like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo7TKBxqno8) influenced something like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iUeqnB_sPM&feature=related). To me they seem to be UNIVERSES apart.

I know. How ridiculous has this thread gotten! I agree with your opinion though that means nothing more than we agree and think serialism is kind of lame. Other people can think what they want. I don't care. Just don't make one or the other a 'right' view and get all bent out of shape trying to prove your case to make your opinion fact.

Let me sound my disapproval of this quote by quoting Marie's son in Wozzeck, famous last words: "hop hop"

Any list of "DA BEST COMPOHSARS" is going to be 1. needlessly controversial and 2. dumb. Just for fun, it's nice.