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Showing content with the highest reputation on 11/14/2014 in all areas

  1. Not really, you'll get at least as many great composers in any other given century of music. Like, look at 1850-1950. A century of music and you have Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Puccini, Strauss, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky & Prokofiev, along with early Shostakovich, and that's just classical music. Could just as easily say all earlier composers spent their lives preparing the way for them. For the ~1715-1830 group if you're including Bach and Handel you also need to include Rameau, Couperin le Grand, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. Hell, in the interregnum (1830-1850) alone you have Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz and Bellini, all of whom are standard repertoire figures beloved of listeners. I think that brings us to the main problem really which is that there is too much music. We have to thin it out some so it's not just Bach and Haydn and Beethoven getting all the attention. To start with, Beethoven is far too overplayed, causing his music to lose its value and uniqueness due to its omnipresence. To preserve what's left of its value we need to destroy the music, in order to preserve it in collective memory—the "Age of Beethoven", 1770-2014. Beethoven's achievement would then become far more valuable to future generations if all that was left of it was the documentation in text of its effects on people—we have already forgotten how to listen to it. The Ninth Symphony no longer inspires terror and awe, the Fourteenth Quartet has lost its nature of intense inwardness and become simply comfortable background music. Send them to the bonfire so that the memory of them will inspire us further. The same could profitably be done with Bach and Mozart, and the works of Haydn, Handel and Schubert are far too numerous in number and could easily be reduced by one-half or more without much loss.
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