Who is the best composer of all time? Look inside please!

well then we have the best and the favourite equalized, so then yeah, it doesn't really matter who's the best.

and- i guess - i already answered :)

Did you?

LOL!

No more discussion.

Let this thread die or keep on by new opinions about the "best" composer of all time! ;)

i just said it's wrong question to ask, and showed how i come to such conclusion.

sorry, people, had no bad intention whatsoever.

my fave five would be:

arvo part - spiegel im spiegel and fratres/cantos for benjamin britten series

igor stravinsky - the rite of spring all the way, baby

morton feldman - almost everything i could get my ears on

valentin silvestrov - silent songs during sad as hell evenings (and days)

gyorgyi ligeti - piano etudes (especially when trying to imitate them on my piano (rock)

respecta

and the it's another fave fives for another days :)

it could go forever and ever

Sorry for quoting:

valentin silvestrov

There's a new name for me.

Thanks mate.

See how it works? I'm off to youtube and then on torrentz and then on the college library. ;)

I'm hugely unoriginal in my view that Bach is the greatest composer who has ever lived. The quality of his entire output is phenomenal; a combination of hard work *and* genius makes his music so inspiring. Nothing he wrote sounds churned or hastily written*; it's fiercely intellectual but not contrived; alarmingly complex yet not at all hard to listen to.

He's also a likeable character, with a great sense of humour. A Cantata about being addicted to coffee? Harpsichord competitions won by improvising *on* the other contestants' compositions?! A three-part fugue improvised for a miserable king on a subject deliberately written to resist counterpoint. . . . no other composer combines such brilliance, flair, sophistication and *humanity*.

Having said this, I do not consider Bach's music unsurpassable, or his raw talent the only source of his brilliance. The fact is, he worked unbelievably hard.

*At least, nothing I've heard so far does! . . . though Brandenburg 6's first movement sounds rather too Telemanny for my liking.

I submit to to you that Bel

Danny Elfman.. Nightmare before Christmas.. what amazing themes or hooks , lyrics, melodies, orchestration.. I love all his work, but this score in perticular stands out as legendary composition to me.

Before I wrote about 2 of the most influential composers, not really in my opinon are they the best composers. When I think of the best composer, I think of Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Composing to me has 100% to do with the melody, and all of these years I have heard the most creative melodies from so many composers, many some of you have probably never heard of. I've listened to much in my life, yet I'm only 18 years old, so I could not have listened to everything by now of course. That's impossible. Because I can only say who is the best composer of all time in my opinion, the merit has to go to Johann Sebastian Bach. Simply, it's all in the melody. Listen to his melodies- they are the utmost joy and viruosity in my opinion. He is a wonderful composer and I believe his music is underrated by a quantity that don't understand. There are composers who strive to be heard, even by themselves, and they use cheap catchy tricks. I can tell who is the fake, who is the genius.

My influence and reasoning has nothing to do with the above post. I just happened to notice that Bach was chosen after I had already made my decision.

You should study counterpoint...

Not to debate, but I would like to point out a small oversight by several people. the words "everything X wrote" have been thrown around. I would like to point out that while everything that X may have written and that has LASTED may be what you are pointing out, but for all of their compositions it is simple untrue. just because a composer is great like Bach or Mozart, doesn't mean that every time they sat on the chamber pot they laid a golden egg. sometimes they ended up with crap, to finish the metaphor. plenty of Bach etc.'s pieces have been tossed into history's trash bin. What we hear now has been reduced down, so we get all the best flavor without it being watered down. sometimes circumstances matter. For instance Bach had to turn out a different piece every week. in all honesty, some of those had to have been utter crud, but he had to produce, or he wouldn't get paid/be able to feed the hundreds of offspring he hand his wife had produced.

I own all Bach's (surviving) cantatas on CD, numbering about half those originally produced. None of them so far have failed to move me; none yet have been 'crud'. In fact, none were worse than the best Telemann, in my opinion. :P The works of his oeuvre which have survived have not done so because they were better or worse than others; fate is a blind selector. I don't mean to argue with you; I agree that a 'selection' of a composer's output is generally all people have to base their opinions upon, but I think that Bach and Mozart fall outside such trammelling. You can, for example, find comercial recordings of both composers' entire surviving output, in a way that you cannot for most other similarly prolific composers. This, I think, tells us something about the value of their oeuvre as a whole.

The St Matthew and St John Passions happen to be work of genius. Unfortunately, we'll never know if his other passions were better, because they no longer survive.

I think one of the things that turns people off Bach is the conception that he was some old, stout Protestant bore who terrified children with his overtly intellectual music. It's worth bearing in mind that there was a stage when he was young, dapper and leading an exciting career. He wrote Brandenburg 3 when he was in his 30s. He also regularly got into fights with rival musicians.

If I find some crud amidst my CDs of Bach, I'll let you know. ;)

Simply because he through strife rose to become the greatest composer of all time....and because he made the largest symphony in the history of man...and the most emotional:sadtears:

I think one of the things that turns people off Bach is the conception that he was some old, stout Protestant bore who terrified children with his overtly intellectual music. It's worth bearing in mind that there was a stage when he was young, dapper and leading an exciting career. He wrote Brandenburg 3 when he was in his 30s. He also regularly got into fights with rival musicians.

Wasn't it Bach who threatened to throw a woman out a window?

Please try to respect the rules of this post.

Simply because he through strife rose to become the greatest composer of all time....and because he made the largest symphony in the history of man...and the most emotional:sadtears:

true true...i witnessed firsthand the final movement of 9 make half an audience cry at the boston symphony in 07

I would say that Beethoven was the greatest composer of all of current musical time.

1.) The romantic era was born out of Beethoven. Composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler would not have been able to push musical boundaries if it hadn't been for Beethoven, who did it first. Franz Liszt had his life changed by Beethoven at a very young age. Brahms revered Beethoven and used him as an influence throughout his career. Dvorak's symphonies are very similar in structure to Beethoven's symphonies.

2.) Each and every one of Beethoven's major works sounds different. Each piece has a different energy and emotion relating to it. For example, Beethoven's third infuses happiness, glory, sadness, love, and hate into the mind of the audience. Beethoven's seventh symphony's individual movements are very lyrical and give hope to the audience.

3.) Beethoven's life was dramatic in every way possible. The man was basically living a shakespearean drama.

That's why Beethoven is the best composer of all time. Note that his deafness was not one of my reasons.

Sorry.

In my crazy opinion? Chopin - to me, music is to be emotive. No other music's tension and release gets me like Chopin's does.

I say Anton Webern,because every moment in his music is eternal ,and exists in eternity.There is my terse answer,totally in keeping with the spirit of the composer.

PDQ Bach, only because he doesn't exist, and the greatest composer doesn't exist.

Suffice to say, there are composers that are certainly not as good as The Mozart's Beethoven's etc. For example, none here are a valid greatest ever, (Not yet at least - and if you think you are, you need to wake up out of your dream and everyone else's nightmare).

Why do people completely miss the point of this one?

This is not a valid talk, nor an opportunity for debate. This is half drunk company of (however many members YC has) that go about "Hey111 *hips* who is the greatest composer? We'll take turns: Mine is blah / - Mine is bloh!" etc, etc...

My overall favourite composer of all time has to be J.S.Bach. His extensive collection of work shows incredible intellect due to its complexity. When reading through a set of Bach's scores, Mozart once stated "finally, a composer one can learn from". His works have changed music, and greatly influenced most musicians; most well-known composers have studied the Well Tempered Clavier.

In my view there is no close runner-up; Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy, etc. The work of Bach was admired by even these great composers.

true true...i witnessed firsthand the final movement of 9 make half an audience cry at the boston symphony in 07

I fell asleep somewhere during the eighteen hours the entire thing took. I guess I must be made of stone~

Wasn't it Bach who threatened to throw a woman out a window?

Really? That's awesome, where did you hear this? If it wasn't him, who was it? I'm all for threatening to throw women out windows, so to speak.

I find the structural and harmonic intracasies of his works simply amazing. I find his counterpoint intreaging, and his music never gets old to me.

In my view there is no close runner-up; Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy, etc. The work of Bach was admired by even these great composers.