Leaderboard

Essentially I agree with Austenite's picks … Little Wolfy Mozart puts his phrases in a little gold box with a pretty red ribbon around it. Bow and curtsy. Everyone should see the film Accidental Tourist, with one of John William's more subtle and most lovely scores. Eric Satie is underrated. Take some time to hear Gnossiene and Pieces froides. The originality of his tonal language is a musical anomaly. The mild mannered maniac Alfred Schnittke is underrated, compared to the unexciting Shostakovich, who wears some kind of mantle in the history books. I don't see it. Strauss, a great orchestrator - listen to Vienna Waltzes - I don't know about the other bombastic stuff. Hans Zimmer came upon the scene because of his innovations in film score delivery. He has his moments but not all are musically based, but a cross between sound design and music. I wish I were him. Film makers are always saying, I'd like something like Hans Zimmer. But honestly, I don't hear a Hans Zimmer sound. So it's a disservice to call him underrated or overrated. He just delivers. John Adams is overrated. Everything's the same. Over and over. No one mentioned Handel, the only composer Beethoven had any use for. Maybe his wife underrated him? Charles Ives was underrated and dismissed, much like a Republican at a cocktail party. But for originality no one can touch him, and he's awesome.

An accent mark never indicates if a note should be short. As Pater mentioned, sometimes performers add a tiny space between accented notes to emphasize the accent, but it should not be confused with a staccato (.) marking. If you want a note to be accented and short, I usually put the accented staccato marking on the note, or a marcato marking.

Underrated: 1. Cherubini - Fantastic composer in all genres. His Requiem in C minor is a masterpiece and he wrote excellent chamber music as well. Beethoven held him in very high regard which is no mean thing. 2. Bruckner - I can see how his music is not everyone's cup of tea but I definitely fall into the camp that he is the great symphonist after Beethoven. Since Mahler has risen in popularity, suggesting a tolerance for longer works, I would hope Bruckner would get more recognition, especially since I think his music is more accessible. 3. Charles-Valentin Alkan - I consider him, not his more celebrated friend and neighbor, Chopin, the premiere piano composer of the Romantic era. His music may be more uneven compared to the more polished Chopin, but I daresay, no other composer has ever written such music with a range of emotion and scope (a significant part of his lack of popularity is the difficulty of his works). Overrated, almost any late 20th century, 21st century composer. Some examples: John Cage (most famous work is 4'33" of silence which should tell you something), Sorabji, Stockhausen

How can you look at Bruckner with his great symphonies, perhaps the greatest symphonist after Beethoven, as overrated? If anything he is underrated when compared to Mahler. I think Bruckner's symphonies are more introvert while Mahler's are more extrovert. But that doesn't make them any the less great! Look at the gigantic 8th symphony. Or the 9th dedicated to God Himself. What other composer reached the level to dare dedicate a work to God? I can conclude that you simply haven't understood them, or haven't given the time to try to understand them. The 4th and the 7th are also masterpieces. But I agree that it is a bit subjective. Bruckner's gigantic symphonies might be more suitable for some temperaments than others. I agree that Wagner is overrated. But the fact that he was his own librettist and staged his own operas must be taken into consideration in the assessment of the greatness of his genius. I also agree that Mendelssohn is underrated. While I think this is a good thread, I must say that the greatness of a composer often has nothing to do with how they are rated by people. A particular composer might be overrated at one era and underrated in another, or vice versa.

During speedy playing there is a tendency to shorten strings of accented notes in order to get the next accented note out with a good strong emphasis on it while staying up to tempo... and then the conductor yells at you if that's not appropriate to the style of the piece. :D But consider that you can put accents on long held notes, and you wouldn't think about shortening those. You just accent the start of them and then hold them out to full value. An accent doesn't specifically mean to shorten a note, but in practice, that's often what happens. Depending on your style as a composer and the style of the piece, it may be completely obvious that you mean accented and detached without any extra staccato marking and you can skip that step to save time and keep your score cleaner. But if you are the sort of person who marks every niggling detail of crescendo and phrasing and the slightest of tempo changes are written out, rather than assuming the players can add some rubato, then you should add the staccatos too. If you're specific with everything else, people will assume that the lack of a staccato marking is intentional and significant, even though the style of the music would seem to indicate one. If you don't want to clutter up the score with all those dots and you don't care that Sibelius plays it back slightly differently, you can use a general style marking instead for a long accented and staccato passage. That looks cleaner than page after page of notes with accents and dots if you also need room for hairpins and phrase markings.