04-02-2017, 06:59 PM
(04-02-2017, 06:17 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I think movie music and Broadway music often qualifies as "modern classical". Think Webber and Williams.
Webber is watered down. Williams writes interesting music, including the appropriate new national anthem for the USA should it become the Evil Empire (the Imperial March motif from Star Wars). But when I hear Williams -- I typically hear what someone else wrote -- Prokofiev here, Nielsen there. If you hear The King and I, I hear Grieg more than I hear Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Of course we need to remember what a treasure of great music that we have. Monteverdi, Telemann, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, J S Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak... these fellows were incredibly prolific. Nobody could compete with them in their styles. In 35 years of his life, Mozart may have used more paper for writing than any novelist ever used -- and he wasted little paper when he wrote music. That's before I mention medieval counterpoint. Reputedly the Vatican has some house composers whose works are never played elsewhere. OK, Shostakovich string quartets seem like sequels to those of Beethoven and wrote some preludes and fugues for piano, and in a way I find them even more interesting than those of Bach -- but he has been dead for forty years. Mahler wrote some symphonies, some on operatic scale, but published little else.
It takes time to recognize the artistic geniuses in our midst. Just think of painting: Impressionist painting used to be a great bargain. Except for the great Renaissance masters, the Impressionist masters draw the highest prices at auction of any paintings today. How do we know that there is no great composer in Slovakia or Slovenia who will one day be spoken of in the same sentence as some other great?
I'm guessing that some of the greatest creativity is now in jazz.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.