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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2012 - 6:08 AM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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So, the fella that wrote Guide for the Married Man can displace the fella that wrote the first American opera (viz., Vanessa), the Adagio for Strings, and the Hermit Songs? I'm speaking about the Adagio for Strings that has been performed numerous times by the Berliner Philharmoniker, under HVK no-less, and the Wiener Philharmoniker.
Try objectively rationalizing that one to the Music Gods...
That would be the ubiquitous Adagio for Strings... I do love that piece, but I'm afraid it's the only Barber work with which I'm familiar (which is my failing). I tend as a result to view him as a one-trick pony and perhaps as a result didn't include him in my earlier thoughts at all.
Of course, writing the first American opera is only an achievement if it's any good... and despite being interested in a wide range of serious music for almost 40 years I haven't come across this to the best of my knowledge.
TG
ps The Bart in me is coming out reading your post - Wiener Philharmoniker, heh heh. In this context, calling it Vienna would have been perfectly ok!
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2012 - 6:15 AM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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For me, John Williams is comfortably in with a shout for this. Over a very long period of time he's garnered so many honours, worked with so many fantastic musicians, and collaborated with some of the most lauded film directors that by any objective measure he has to be in competition with the composers I mentioned in the other thread.
Do try to look at this not in terms of favourites, but on as objective a basis as possible.
Tall Guy asks us to be objective as possible. Fair enough. But, in trying to be not subjective, I find myself unable to contribute to this discussion except by focusing in on these "objective measures".
To wit:
the bestowing of awards
professional relationships with talented musicians
collaborations with celebrated film directors
To receive an award - to get along well with people - to collaborate: these are all social functions. TG's objective measures are more applicable to a career in music more so than the music itself.
Maybe this is why I'm not able to respond within TG's parameters.
We could as well discuss a highly-regarded political figure or a much-loved religious leader by similar criteria, such as one's status in a community, name recognition, popular opinion, achievements in life, etc.
Consider American composer Roger Sessions and his impact as an educator and mentor.
Some students of Sessions include Hugo Weisgall, Andrew Imbrie, & Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (to name only a few contemporary classical composers) as well as Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Rosenman & Paul Glass.
The name & music of Roger Sessions, though, possesses little-to-no significance to Mr. John Q. Public.
Consider another pupil of Sessions whose name is Milton Babbitt. Babbitt spearheaded in the U.S.A. the post-WW II revival of dodecaphony, which became absolute music's ipso facto compositional vocabulary in academia during the 1950s & '60s. A person such as Babbitt who was crucial in the proliferation of an artistic movement can be legitimately named as a "great", but only by and for certain circles (not the overall public).
Listen to a work such as Morton Feldman's "Intersection I" from 1951 and one can observe that Feldman was also a prime mover of an alternative artistic movement which prefigured formal Minimalism by some 17 years or so.
For those so inclined, read more about it here: http://americansublime.tumblr.com/post/6146165975/less-is-less-morton-feldmans-minimalism-by-thomas
The aleatoric music (music of chance) of John Cage is yet another example of an American fostering an artistic movement.
In summary, I think greatness in (and of) music is best represented by its schools of thought, not who wins the most awards nor whose name achieves highest recognition nor whomever's diplomatic tact helps him or her interact successfully with others, etc.
There's always one.
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Frontrunners for me personally mixing up genres I know in no particular order:
Harry Partch
Samuel Barber
Charles Ives
Bernard Herrmann
Aaron Copland
George Chadwick
John Adams
Elliot Carter
Morton Feldman
George Gershwin
Richard Rodgers
Robert Ashley
Jerome Moross
Stephen Sondheim
Jerome Kern
La Monte Young
Alex North
For me personally a tie between Herrmann and Partch -- both are supremely important in my life.
I know music by all the other composers, but never listened to a note by Partch. What would you recommend from his oeuvre?
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Charles Ives
Bernard Herrmann
Aaron Copland
Jerome Moross
Jerry Goldsmith
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Charles Ives
Bernard Herrmann
Aaron Copland
Jerome Moross
Jerry Goldsmith
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Many years ago to consider any film composer as the greatest USA composer would have been considered heresy. I remember when I was a kid in high school in the late 1950s when I argued that American composers were great, I was considered nuts.
Anyway, I love a lot of American composers.
Now for something really different (oooh here it comes). I consider John Williams one of the greatest composers in the world! Up there with Bach, Debussy, Bartok, Beethoven.) This is not to preclude any others but this is just my opinion.
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I'll just add this, for what it's worth: Jerry Goldsmith is surely the most dynamic composer in U.S.--if not world--history. The breadth of his work is truly incredible. He had a signature voice that he could adapt to any style of writing. Add to that the critical and relative mass popularity of his music, as well as his superlative, innovative film.scoring philosophy, and he has to be considered a viable candidate for any such honor.
Nevertheless, does anybody really doubt that John Williams would get it? Gotta love vanilla! :/
Dan
I love chocolate and coffee but Williams is all that and more.
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2012 - 11:20 AM
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By: |
Ron Pulliam
(Member)
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I'll just add this, for what it's worth: Jerry Goldsmith is surely the most dynamic composer in U.S.--if not world--history. The breadth of his work is truly incredible. He had a signature voice that he could adapt to any style of writing. Add to that the critical and relative mass popularity of his music, as well as his superlative, innovative film.scoring philosophy, and he has to be considered a viable candidate for any such honor.
Nevertheless, does anybody really doubt that John Williams would get it? Gotta love vanilla! :/
Dan
I love chocolate and coffee but Williams is all that and more.
He's just the most visible because of the good fortune he's had. He's a safe, easy choice. He's also still alive, so passing him over for somebody else would be somewhat awkward for those who interact with him. (Plus, it helps people feel like they're privy to something historically-great.)
Dan
Well, gosh, Dan! MAYBE he's the most visible BECAUSE he's also the most talented, the most well-rounded and the composer that SPEAKS to more people than any other composer has SPOKEN to others on an emotional level.
It doesn't hurt that his movie scores have reached many more millions than a symphony of some less well-known classical composer, true. But why does his overwhelming popularity equate to safe or easy? I think there's far more than good fortune at work here...there's an enormous talent at work...and one that was able to step away from mainstream film composing for approximately a decade to conduct a pops orchestra and still resumed full-time scoring at the top of the heap/top of his game.
(I guess it helps you to feel like you're privy to knowing better?)
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Posted: |
Sep 14, 2012 - 2:28 PM
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By: |
Dan Hobgood
(Member)
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I'll just add this, for what it's worth: Jerry Goldsmith is surely the most dynamic composer in U.S.--if not world--history. The breadth of his work is truly incredible. He had a signature voice that he could adapt to any style of writing. Add to that the critical and relative mass popularity of his music, as well as his superlative, innovative film.scoring philosophy, and he has to be considered a viable candidate for any such honor.
Nevertheless, does anybody really doubt that John Williams would get it? Gotta love vanilla! :/
Dan
I love chocolate and coffee but Williams is all that and more.
He's just the most visible because of the good fortune he's had. He's a safe, easy choice. He's also still alive, so passing him over for somebody else would be somewhat awkward for those who interact with him. (Plus, it helps people feel like they're privy to something historically-great.)
Dan
Well, gosh, Dan! MAYBE he's the most visible BECAUSE he's also the most talented, the most well-rounded and the composer that SPEAKS to more people than any other composer has SPOKEN to others on an emotional level.
It doesn't hurt that his movie scores have reached many more millions than a symphony of some less well-known classical composer, true. But why does his overwhelming popularity equate to safe or easy? I think there's far more than good fortune at work here...there's an enormous talent at work...and one that was able to step away from mainstream film composing for approximately a decade to conduct a pops orchestra and still resumed full-time scoring at the top of the heap/top of his game.
(I guess it helps you to feel like you're privy to knowing better?)
It doesn't hurt that his movie scores have reached many more millions than a symphony of some less well-known classical composer, true. But why does his overwhelming popularity equate to safe or easy? I think there's far more than good fortune at work here...there's an enormous talent at work...and one that was able to step away from mainstream film composing for approximately a decade to conduct a pops orchestra and still resumed full-time scoring at the top of the heap/top of his game.
(I guess it helps you to feel like you're privy to knowing better?)
It's a two-way street, for sure, and I'm not denying that Williams is talented, but I'd say that Williams has benefitted at least as much from Spielberg and Lucas as the two filmmakers benefitted from him. It cannot be denied that Williams had tremendous good fortune no other film composer before or since has had. (If I need to explain that, I suppose I'm willing--but hopefully even you would acknowledge that Williams, regardless of talent, is the goddamn-luckiest film composer in history.)
Surely, you agree that Williams wouldn't be half as popular as he is if he'd scored indie pictures instead of "Indy" pictures. No film composer has been as widely popular as Henry Mancini, but despite that, barely anybody outside of our niche group has a clue about what he's missing in Lifeforce--because that killer score was wasted on that shit movie few people wanted to see and even fewer people didn't live to regret seeing (Mathilda May notwithstanding). That led me to describe what I've called "The Lifeforce Principle," by which, for popularity's or notoriety's sake, it doesn't matter how outstanding a score is if only a few people hear it.
Williams is a talented composer, but he's one among many. As somebody who thinks at least a few of his peers undeservedly spent a career obscured by his shadow (and one peer in particular), it's just frustrating that a great many people--equally as oblivious to the competition as they are to Lifeforce--would presume John Williams is the best there is out there.
Dan
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While I am thinking of it, I wanted to thank Mr. Haineshisway for a Varese CD that he must have produced which I love -- it pairs the Roy Harris Symphony No. 6 with Copland's Songs on Poems of Emily Dickinson (sung by Marni Nixon). Quite lovely and luminous in all ways.
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Posted: |
Sep 15, 2012 - 12:19 AM
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By: |
RM Eastman
(Member)
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There is no way this topic will ever be settled???
I settled it, Williams is passe, a mediorce composer who happened to land the biggest box office blockbusters. He is a tad better than Conti. As far as musical genius no one can top or approach JERRY GOLDSMITH.
I love Goldsmith's music, but...the USA's greatest ever composer? What's that funny stuff you're smokin' there? If we were looking only at America's greatest FILM composer, I'd still have to rate Alex North, Hugo Friedhofer and a couple others (including John Williams and perhaps David Raksin, maybe also Bernard Herrmann) ahead of JG. And at least as far as Alex North is concerned, Goldsmith would have certainly agreed with me. With all due respect to henry, Bill Conti is not IMO in the discussion.
What are you smokin?? North, Friedhofer, Raksin(Most boring composer ever), JW, BH ahead of JG??? My foot.
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