DiamondSoul

I pretty much agree with what everyone's said so far. The sentiment of "they just don't make [insert some art form, i.e. music, here] like they used to" is not at all new to our generation. In any form of art, works are gradually filtered out over time, giving the illusion that artists of older generations created more consistently "good" works than those of the present generation. Nevertheless, there are certain societal differences between the world today and the world of a century or two ago, which are very interesting to discuss. Black Orpheus, in my experience of musical academia, it actually seems like the gulf between popular music and music being composed in universities is getting smaller (which, in my opinion, is a good thing; each can learn valuable things from the other). Perhaps my university is a bit of an exception; I don't know. We are currently looking to hire a new composition faculty member, and one of the topics that candidates had to present on as part of the selection process was something like "discuss the integration of a style of classical/academic music with a style typically considered outside the realm of classical/academic music". Also, as it happens, we DO actually require composition majors to take classes in electronic composition; again, perhaps this is unusual for music curricula today. Ananth, I really liked your comment about "sterile" music. I would add to it that I think, in some ways, composers like Cage are almost more like philosophers than musicians. Rather than trying to create an aesthetic work of art, they aim to challenge ideas we take for granted about the nature of music and of the arts in general. This is certainly a worthy goal, but I agree with you that, when academia becomes too obsessed with these works as "modern music masterpieces", it's rather misleading, as the merit of such works is so drastically different from the merit of the works of Beethoven, Brahms, etc. I think we need to expand our language for describing these more philosophical and less aesthetic works, rather just calling everything we study in school "great art".

Hence the words "2nd millennium" in the thread title :P Though now that I think of it, I realize I neglected to put the word "western" in the thread title.

My grounds were mostly the quality & quantity of their music, how well known they are, and their influence on other composers. Though, as I said, I'm unfamiliar with many of these composers. My main source of names was my music history textbook (or "resource guide" if you want to be technical, as it's not really a full blown textbook) so I have at least a very basic familiarity with everyone on the list. In a situation where I was totally unable to decide how to rank two or more composers, I would resort to the cop-out method of comparing the lengths of their wikipedia pages :P. There are probably several significant composers (like Shostakovitch) who I forgot.

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 surprised nobody has mentioned Grieg's yet. I'm actually surprisingly ignorant of piano concertos for a pianist :/ but of the few I'm familiar with, I'd have to say Grieg's is fantastic. I'm also a fan of Saint-Saens's 2nd.

I'm currently in the process of getting my bachelor's degree in composition (and computer science, incidentally) from Western Michigan University, so I put "other" in the poll.

I'm a pianist, and I'd be happy to give this a shot.

When I write music from my head, I usually do number 3 on the list (hear everything at once and pick the individual instruments out of it). However, I think my best music comes from using javileru's method (improvising for a long time and transcribing). Like many of you, I have something playing in my head almost constantly.