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Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, if you read The Beatles Anthology they make the case that they were so good _because_ they had little else to do.

When we talk great composers, you might argue about Beethoven vs. Mozart vs. Bach... but would you throw anyone from the last 100 years into the mix?

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"would you throw anyone from the last 100 years into the mix?"

Carl Orff, John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer.

For more individual achievements, Zack Hemsey for "Mind Heist" (aka the song from Inception) and Clint Mansell for "Lux Aeterna" (aka the Requiem for a Dream song).

Sergei Rachmaninoff should be added to this list since I've yet to encounter any pianist who didn't have a glowing reaction to any of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos. Especially Piano Concerto #2 which ranks up there as being one of my top 10 favorite pieces of music.

Not to mention an incredible array of composers from the non-Western world.

<cough> Stravinsky?

<doublecough>Copland, Barber, Ned Rorem, James MacMillan, Britten, George Crumb, Joseph Schwantner, John Adams, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Dominick Argento, Charles Ives, ...

There's a lot more to modern composition than film music and Carmina Burana.

scanning through the text, your name jumps out at me, which makes me ask myself what kind of HN consumer would call themselves that... to which the answer is, one with high average points karma

For me, the track "Time" from the Inception soundtrack is mind-blowing.

Listen to it with good quality earphones and tell me it doesn't send chills down your spine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8

EDIT: link

Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Bartok, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Janacek, Elgar, Mahler, Manuel de Falla, Sibelius, Gershwin, just to mention some of the major ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_20th-century_classical_...

Absolutely. I might name a dozen or more musicians still alive today who have produced extraordinarily compelling works which speak to the heart and soul as effectively as the classical masters.

There are what, seven times as many people alive today as were in 1800? It's pure silliness to propose that the geniuses of art and science are dead. To the contrary, as it is so effortless today to produce art, works of incredible beauty are common enough to no longer be particularly notable. Of course that could be good or bad depending on your perspective... But I'm gonna say good.

Interesting point. Also the economic surplus is much greater today-- far fewer people in the past had the luxury time to pursue the artistic.

Yes. But there are so many of them from so many different genres of music that being as skilled as Beethoven isn't as rare as it used to be. If it looks like nobody stands above the rest as clearly as Mozart or Beethoven once did, it is because the top end has become crowded, not because it was depopulated.

If you're talking in terms of technical skill, sure. If you're talking in terms of quantity of quality output, that's not quite so indisputable. You're not suggesting we're awash in 'Fur Elise's, are you?

If you'd said "Symphony #9", I might have granted you the point. But "Fur Elise" isn't particularly more complicated than a well-written rock or pop song, and yes, I'd suggest we are indeed awash with those. (Even if they only represent 0.01% of the music in those fields...)

To misquote Bob Dylan, "Beethoven could have written Mr. Tambourine Man. Dylan could not have written Fur Elise".

No, Beethoven could not have written Tambourine Man. Beethoven was a man of his time, and music was bound by strict rules that controlled what was acceptable in terms of harmonies, and physically bound in what instrumentation he could write. Beethoven pushed out the rules a little bit but he was not anywhere near where Tambourine Man is; the very concept of the modern I-V-IV progression would be enough to give musicians of the time the vapors.

Part of the reason the classical musicians were so voluminous in their output is that their rules were so constraining that once you wrote down the melody, half the work was already done for you; there were a very limited number of choices left to you. I enjoy Mozart a lot, but at the same time listening to him with modern ears it is obvious that he has a very strong signature style, and that he could simply crank out the tunes using that style in a manner not entirely dissimilar from how one cranks out autotuned pop hits using standard harmonies and singers that can't actually sing. Mozart's results were better but there's more method overlap than you might think.

I think when people say that all the good composers are in the past, they are really just socially signalling. It's not actually true. Plenty of spectacularly good people are around today, and like I said before, if they seem less unique it's because the top end has become crowded, not depopulated.

Despite having no physical limitations of relevance, Mozart would never have written even The Flight of the Valkaries or much of anything else Wagner did, let alone Debussy, or Gershwin. All the classical musicians, geniuses though they were, were also very very confined in their style. They did not exhaust the space of good music; they only took the first hill of what we'd call modern music. It is a disservice to the many that have come after them to pretend they were uniquely virtuous; they were merely uniquely first.

Thanks for missing the point.

I didn't. I actually disagree with the entire premise of your quote, fundamentally.

Actually, I think you took the quote far too literally. Dylan was merely trying to say that Beethoven was the better composer, not that he would have literally written "Tambourine Man" or something similar.

Where does complicated come into it? Didn't Beethoven write his Fifth just to show that complicated was utterly beside the point?

Béla Bartók

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