> RISD-trained painter
Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2].
Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2].
If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a lot of stupid arguments.
It's important to understand, there's a cost to being unconventional. I think pg understands this better than most. Sometimes that cost is worth it. A lot of times though, it isn't.
(I don't mean to pick on Paul Graham, but it's kind of hard to resist with all the essays.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)
Some people put Mozart and Beethoven up there (I think he was better at his best and I believe more prolific generally, but YMMV).
The point is, though, that almost no one in history has rivaled Bach for his compositional feats, yet it took a hundred years after his death before people really started to realize that.
If that was true for him, I question whether it's realistic to count on human ability to recognize accomplishments as a useful metric.
I believe his church was disappointed that they didn't get Purcell, when he was first hired. I may well have that wrong - it's a vague memory.
My point was that experts don't necessarily do a good job of recognizing which other experts are great quickly. It can take a long, long time for the best to rise to the top.
Right idea, some details wrong. It was Telemann they wanted, and it wasn't his first job but his last, at Leipzig.
Bach was actually their third choice, after Telemann and Christoph Graupner. (Who? I've never heard any of his music either. I hear tell it's actually rather good.)
(Also relevant: they weren't exactly hiring a composer; they needed someone to compose and conduct and teach and organize. Telemann was in fact a very fine composer, but it's entirely possible that that wasn't why they wanted him more than they wanted Bach: they may e.g. have thought he would be easier to get on with, and they may have been right.)