Who is the Greatest (Not Favourite) Composer

Hey, where is Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy and Varese?

Originally Posted by jujimufu

Hey, where is Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy and Varese?

And Mingus, Monk, Coleman, Coltrane, Shorter?!

And Isto?!

Originally Posted by Nik Mikas

Bach never slid into obscurity; his popularity has always been more or less the same, which is to say that those who know, know. . . . but Bach's "popularity" has spiked over the last hundred years particularly.

I think I agree; my wording was fairly ambiguous. Bach was known (even to Mozart and Beethoven) through only a handful of works, most of which were considered academic rather than musical. The tales about Mozart obsessing over DWK are almost certainly apocryphal - his study of baroque counterpoint was short, consuming and intense, but owed a great deal more to Fux than to Bach. It was really only Bach's keyboard works that were regularly performed after his death, and his sons' fame and influence far exceeded his own - right until the 19th-century. If any Bach was Mozart's hero, it was J.C. Bach; of this there is a wealth of surviving evidence.

Anyway. All this totally irrelevant, but it's interesting.

Originally Posted by jujimufu

Hey, where is Schoenberg, Webern, Debussy and Varese?

No modernist/avant garde composers? I would have voted for Varese or Debussy. Oh well, I guess this is limited to those common practice composers.

Why is there no Debussy or Ravel? What do you have against the Impressionist period? I don't understand how you can have a serious list of possible greatest composers and include people like Haydn and Mendelssohn yet not include even one person from the Impressionist era.

Also, I find this whole subject rather silly. How can there be a greatest composer without any kind of personal bias? Maybe I'm simplifying things a bit but I generally associate "good" with stuff I like. No one purposely likes anything that they think is awful...at least, I hope not. So wouldn't someone's favorite composer also be the one they think is greatest? But let's say someone can get past their personal bias, what exactly defines "greatness"? Is it popularity? Is it how many composers after that they influenced? Is it their musical innovations? I really don't understand any of this.

You don't have to understand this, because it's just a silly poll on an internet forum.
No need to take it so seriously.
Vote whomever you like out of those and just write down his name and add several exclamation marks just like everyone else here

I voted for Haydn just to be non-coformist.

Originally Posted by Daniel

I think you got mixed up with J Lee's rhetoric there.

"there was literally nothing he ever attempted - nothing - that he was not the undisputed master of."

The nothing is just repeated for emphasis. The sentence without that reads:

"there was literally nothing he ever attempted that he was not the undisputed master of."


(p.s. exactly )

As great as Mozart was, Bach will always be the king of Harmony/Counterpoint.

I never understand Beethoven, I cant stand the symphonies I've heard by him. Can someone give me a suggestion of where I should start.