Well, just because music peaked with Beethoven (specifically with the Sixth, of course) doesn't mean it's "gone downhill from there." It could have fluctuated up and down from there, without having yet again reached the heights in any one composer as consistently as Beethoven reached.

I think I can see where you're coming from with that remark but it reminds me of why in general I don't agree with many Objectivist anti-rock/modern instrumentation arguements.

I'm going to have to use a comic book analogy here and I hope people can follow it without knowing too much about the particulars but it's hard to come up with a better one. The medium in its modern form was basically founded early in the 20th century and reached it's early peaks around the time of WWII and the 1960's (golden and silver ages respectivly).

Two of the men who shaped the dirrection of where this medium went in it's most formative times were Will Eisner and Jack Kirby. Will Eisner specialized in highly original cinematic storytelling page layouts and more mature stories, while Kirby specialized in bold dynamic pages and character designs within the super-hero genre. Every person who took comics-as-narrative seriously learned from Eisner, and Jack Kirby's style became the gold standard by which super-hero artists were judged.

This was several decades ago. Every artist working today had the ENTIRITY of each of these artists' work to use as a begining point when studying their craft. And in many cases the best among new cartoonists learn what it took these men a lifetime to develop in a few years of heavy study and approach this as a starting point to which they add their own skills. As a result you have artists who know every specific skill each of these men spent a lifetime developing and on top of it they also know every insight they've personally developed in the fields these masters worked in. To top it off they can draw more realiztically and are just more skilled in general.

These new artists may never achieve the level of innovation that Kirby and Eisner achieved but they are OBJECTIVELY better than either of them because they had all of their acheivments to use as a starting point in their own development.

This applies to all things especially art.

Without Fritz Lang or Orsen Wells, the work of men like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanly Kubrick would not be posible.

This also applies to music. Which is why the idea of OBJECTIVLY better composers not existing after Beethoven bothers me. Progress means development.

I however can agree on the sentiment expressed on your views of film scores, however I've always been taken in by the melodic hook of the Star Wars films myself.

---Landon

Inking is sexy.

http://www.angelfire.com/comics/wickedlakes

I wasn't trying to make any sort of encyclopedic exposition above, just trying to explicate the idea of musical genres (and the works within them) as being able to be seen as existing in a "multi-dimensional music-space" for the purposes of musical criticism. The peaks achieved in classical music far outreach those in ragtime, those in rock might far exceed those in show tunes. This was meant as an heuristic, not a definitive declaration of fact or a revelation of platonic forms. I am suggesting a "tool" here, not a terminal diagnosis.

Imagine, if you will, a water covered planet. At first a few volcanoes pop up above the waves - ethnic folk songs and then plainsong. As more genres rise above the waves we get great broad continents like classical music, jazz, and R&B with their satellite archipelagos of opera and movie themes, bebop and fusion, hip-hop and thrash. Subcontinents of Gospel and show-tunes. Some continents like classical music form their Himalayan heights. Popular music develops its Rockies. Continents drift and change and we get isolated seamounts like ragtime and barbershop quartets. Some continents are flat like Australia, with a few peaks around their edges - like disco with "Saturday Night Fever." Others as varied in terrain as North America - like Rock with the Beatles, Floyd and Zepellin forming their own mountain ranges, and broad plains or deep valleys like hair-bands and KISS.

I was explaining the principles of a possible geography of musical criticism, not trying to map every island or claim to have sailed up every river. And just as some prefer the Alps, and others the tropics, to each his own. Should I actually have meant to deride or insult an artwork, an art-form or a specific poster on this list, there'd've been absolutely no ambiguity or doubt in anyone's mind. There's no need to read an insult to film-scores into my words above. I've made no claims to omniscience here, I simply think that my spatial analogy, worked out one night talking to a non-objectivist musician, will allow those who care to rank and compare musical works to do so with a little more subtlety than using a "top ten list." We can each decide for ourselves whether Mont Blanc, or Kilimanjaro, or Kilauea, or Roirama, or Everest is our favorite. Sometimes a little variety is refreshing.

Ted Keer, 14 October, 2006, NYC

Well, just because music peaked with Beethoven (specifically with the Sixth, of course) doesn't mean it's "gone downhill from there." It could have fluctuated up and down from there, without having yet again reached the heights in any one composer as consistently as Beethoven reached.

As for the best film music scores, I'd say that they're precisely the ones that can be listened to on their own merits -- music that can be listened to and enjoyed without even ever having seen the movie.

On that basis, the scores for Star Wars can be judged exactly for what they are: pretty good, but not especially notable outside of the fact that they were used in very popular movies. OTOH, lesser-appreciated (by the general public) works like the Warsaw Concerto or Herrmann's "A Night Piece for Saxaphone and Orchestra" take on a life of their own because they're excellent pieces of music. I've never seen the movie Dangerous Moonlight, and I have a hard time imagining all that many movies that could live up to a score like that anyway.

Well, I'm tempted to say that the category of Best 100 Rock Album Covers wasn't even mentioned, so this discussion sucks. But I fear being perceived as uncharitable.

I like what Linz mentioned as far as "optional vs. arbitrary." He's right. A= 440 MHz is important, for example, but it's not worth killing anyone over.

What might be worth killing over, however, is any extended discussion of punk. We have The Clash, some Gang of Four, some Black Flag. Isn't that about it? The critically-acclaimed Sex Pistols weren't even musical, were they? The Clash were by far the superior band -- but then after their first album, they pursued quite a bit more than punk, did they they not?

I now return to loading more Maria Callas on my iPod: business trip coming up.

Oh, and but for Linz's unfortunate choice of pronoun, I concur with his standard of "greatest" as well.

The serious answer is that one must specify one's criteria & demonstrate that they've been met. But many of these criteria are entirely optional. Optional, note, not arbitrary. There is nothing with life-or-death implications making a stance morally mandatory in whether one does or does not regard pitch-perfection, for instance, as a necessary component of being the greatest singer.

The even-more-serious answer is that the greatest is whatever I say it is. Pay attention!

So in you're opinion music peaked 2-3 centuries ago and Since Beethoven is gone it's all downhill from here?

I do agree on your stance on film-scores. I think lumping the entire genre into mediocrity is falling for the Art/Commerce dichotomy. Just because a piece was created to fill a specific need within another art form does not make it invalid based on its own merits.

---Landon

Inking is sexy.

http://www.angelfire.com/comics/wickedlakes

I love seeing Linz sound off against various forms of headbanging caterwauling -- not merely because we seem to have very similar ideas about what makes for superior music, but because I think it's true. Many of these inferior styles of music do not speak to the best or highest within us, and neither are they even intended to do so.

I hear that so-called death metal can be a very technical sub-genre of "music," but so is a ton of the cacophany that passes for contemporary "classical" music. Very well-orchestrated and technically-refined nastiness. I know that Porcupine Tree has been likened to death-metal outfit Opeth (in part because PT's frontman Steven Wilson did some producing for a few Opeth albums that supposedly had influence in metal-ing up PT's style), but I hear Opeth and other death metal acts, and the vocals alone come off as searingly mean-spirited and malevolent. So it's legitimate to ask: what are people seeking in listening to such style of music? And is it really intended for folks who've grown beyond their morbid teen years?

From what I've been able to gather so far, punk literally revels in being an obnoxious, simplistic "art" form. In fact, it feeds into a kind of valid circular reasoning: if it's not base and simplistic, then it's progressed beyond punk into some other kind of genre. So it's basically by self-enclosed necessity that every thing that I've heard so far that's been tagged predominantly as "punk" is a thorough waste of aural time for someone like myself who thinks that Beethoven's Sixth better epitomizes what great music souunds like. In other words, "sophisticated punk" is a contradiction in terms. (Whether there are certain aspects of punk that require some kind of technical virtuosity, hardly affects the point stated similarly above about the very technical aspects of death metal or modernist cacophany. In this case, it's technical virtuosity in the service of obnoxious, loud, base, and simplistic "music.")

That said, I'm perplexed by Ted's lumping (all?) movie-soundtrack classical in with the other mediocrity-enshrining genres he names. How many effing times do I need to link Morricone on YouTube already? Anyway, I'd be in basic agreement that great, truly memorable and truly romantic movie soundtracks are few and far between.

As far as NYC tap water goes, I think it was in Joe Pistone's (a.k.a. Donnie Brasco) book where he notes that satellite gangster operations in other parts of the country would want NYC tap water shipped to them because nothing tastes like the bread that is made in NYC, made with that water.

Letsee . . . the answer as to who is the greatest composer . . . well, to whom, and for what? There are objective answers, but they're also by that same token context-dependent.

Okay, so it's Beethoven. (Whoever fails to be blown away by his Sixth should be excommunicated forthwith.) I thought that was a given, though, the relevant question being who's the greatest after him.

Most often, I see people say Beethoven or Bach, with the acknowledgment that Mozart had his own form of perfection that he reached from time to time. (Doesn't Eine Kleine Nachtmusik reach a kind of perfection as "light" music?) But Beethoven didn't want to be "perfect"; he wanted to be great. I'm not tuned into Bach, but I see Morricone producing beautiful melodies about as consistently and repeatedly as anyone, and he cites Bach as a chief influence. So maybe Bach will click with me at some point. That Whatever-and-Fugue, originally meant for organ, is astounding to my ears when done by a string orchestra.

After Beethoven, the question becomes more specialized, i.e., to whom and for what? Mahler fits a certain bill for some (cacophanous symphonies that have a profound meaning buried in there somewhere, that hits the listener as some kind of revelation at some point in middle age, supposedly). Wagner for others. At least we can point to what these composers have that so many predecessors don't have in nearly as much quantity: romantic dramatism. Rich dramatism is reached only a few times in Mozart's music, for instance, such moments showing up in Amadeus. (The Don Giovanni finale is high KASS, yes?)

I would look at musical genres as being axes in a multidimensional space, with the distance from the origin being the level of excellence achieved in that particular genre or combination of genres. In the early middle ages (of Europe) there were basically two axes, folk and chant. Polyphonic choral music with instrumental accompaniment lead to the exploration of a new axis, classical music. Bach moved further along that axis than any other composer before him, with other baroque composers occasionally reaching such zeniths as Pachelbel's Canon. Mozart, and the Beethoven (generally my favorite) surpassed Bach along that axis. Then popular music, mostly derived from folk, but using the tools of notation and the instruments of the orchestra as well as folk-song developed as an accompaniment to the stage. Thus were born show tunes and the popular music of such composers as Foster. Chant had long ago broadened into the rapturous religious classical works of composers like Rossini and Handel. Negro spiritual then created new axes, which developed into Gospel going in one direction, and the blues in another. Jazz arose from the fusion of these American elements, ragtime, gospel and blues, and with Gershwin’s' synthesis and the rise of the Classical Jazz artists like Duke Elliot the popular axis was both subdivided and pushed further from the origin.

Certain genres such as classical, which were at their broadest in the 1800's, seem to have explored the borders of the multi-dimensional space open to them. F. Strauss, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Ravel have no well known succesors. The available spaces between Mahler, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and so on have been explored, but the longitudes and latitudes of the classical space and its heights have not been (to my limited knowledge) exceeded since the world wars. What can the post war world offer of novelty? Perhaps Orff's Carmina Burana is something new. Meanwhile it is popular music, along its own axes which has flourished most in the post war period. Jazz developed in many ways on its own axes. I am not an expert there, so will remain silent, but would point to Miles Davis and David Brubeck as envelope pushers. The advent of Rock/Pop/Soul has seen the highest forms achieved in the last fifty years. The latter Beatles, Sabbath and Zepellin, Floyd, Rush and Yes pushed the boundaries of Rock to its heights. There is little in Punk that was not achieved (and surpassed) in the White Album. Funk and Disco have their merits and novelties.

But by the 80's there was little boundary pushing and again, mostly just the filling in of interstices of a space already largely defined by the late 1960's. New Wave was new, with perhaps the early Eurhythmics as their best embodiment. But such formal works like Tubular Bells were nothing compared to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. With Thrash Metal, Grunge and the Seattle Sound, rock has reached its own present creative boundaries. For the large part, Hip Hop (with the limited and defective, if not sometimes powerful vocal form of Rap) is also barren, but there are still accomplishments there such as Outkast's Bombs over Baghdad and The Mis-education of Lauryn Hill. Erykah Badu is original.

For the most part the history of music seems to have been the periodic discovery of new genres, new axes in multidimensional-music-space, often pushed to their heights at their origins, with later artists in the same genre filling in the unexplored gaps, but not venturing beyond the established boundaries. Is all the greatest music already discovered? If fruitful new axes are discovered, new heights will be reached. But such forms as punk, boy bands, contemporary "achey-brakey heart" country, movie-soundtrack classical, and (need one mention) non-music like Phillip Glass are exploring the depths, not the uplands. The "end of science" and the "end of history" were proclaimed at the turns of both the 20th & 21st centuries, and both claims have been premature. Music is so dependent upon human creativity and contingency that making predictions in its realm is a much more dangerous pastime than any prognostications the mundane realms of statecraft and the physical sciences could ever be.

Ted Keer, 14 October, 2006, NYC

Why that's me of course!

www.adambuker.com

Sorry about the tangent, but is a matter of taste.

(Penn and Teller exposed this in an episode of “BULLSHIT!”, pouring refreshing tap water for unsuspecting snobs who thought they were drinking only the finest of bottled waters. Evian=Naive.)

New York City tap water is better than any bottled water I've ever had anywhere. Here is Southern California even rain water stinks. If someone bottled New York City tap water and shipped it out here I wouldn't drink (at least when drinking non-alcoholic stuff) anything else.

Though I did notice one instance of a generous benefit of the doubt.

Even a punk musician strives to be the best punk musician (but this, of course, required by the twisted logic of punk, led to the “least of all possible worlds.”)

I think to make this statement is to misunderstand largely the nature of the "logic" of punk. Punk rock is by far the most egalitarian form of music. The style is based around the idea of eliminating the amount of time and effort spent on developing the skill involved in being a musician and skipping straight from "fan" to "musician" in as few steps and as little time as possible. Quality is considered a bougois commercial "illusion" by most involved anyway.

These are people who take pride in not seeing why they should be in any way elevated above the people who paid to see them perform (I've heard people tell me that they refuse to play on stages that physically elevate them from the fans) and often times brag about how low their musical skill level actually is.

But the weird thing about this seems that they're not in competition to see who can move farthest from the "commercial" standard. They don't brag that "I'm the farthest from what 'They' (who 'they' are is rarely defined) want me to be" but "We're as far along as any one ever should be, and if someone tries to say they've gone further they're lying to you."

I think Punk is "The Divine Right of Stagnation" made real. It's like a disease that's helped to infect a large degree of the cultural humanities and I'm really starting to think it needs treated as such. Which puts me in a weird position because I have a fair amount of punk music in my collection and I've played in a few punk bands

As to the best, you're right. I will add one exception, however. I see nothing wrong with developing a criteria for a "Best" entry of any given time. The title is not permanent or invincible but I think it is necessary to trace the development of any of the humanities.

We need to be objectively aware of what achievements in any era were the greatest that era had to offer and in doing so made achievements which later came to pass possible. Tracing the lineage of these achievements could likely tell humanity a lot about the nature of progress and innovation.

But this is just my opinion

---Landon

Inking is sexy.

http://www.angelfire.com/comics/wickedlakes