Musings on Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism (Warner Classics)

Of all the giants in the classical music recording business Warner Classics is by far the best. Warner Classics leaves Decca and Deutsche Grammophon in its dust. 

Recently I picked up a copy of Warner's Carl Maria von Weber box set, Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism. The box set celebrates the 200th anniversary of Weber’s death.

I am not going to talk about the quality of the music making. Many of the recordings, which date from 1908 to 1996, have gotten good reviews in the late great Penguin Guides to classical music and in Classical Music: The Listener’s Companion, an American counterpart to the Penguin Guides, a guide I generally prefer to the Penguins. What I want to talk about instead is the choice Warner Classics made of what to and what not to put into this box set.

I have no problems with the items that are in the box set whether the recordings of the symphonies, the concertos, the chamber music, the lieder, or the operas. I am not sure about the discs of works after Weber, meaning taking off from Weber, or the transcriptions and arrangements of Weber’s work. They are probably not necessary but I suppose they are nice to have.

What would have been nice, however, is if Warner included even more performances of Weber’s actual work. While the Harnoncourt recording of Der Freischutz is nice to have why wasn’t the EMI Kelberth recording of the opera not included as as part of the multi-disc historical recordings discs or as a standalone? And why wasn’t the Virgin Pay and OAE recording of the two clarinet concertos and the clarinet concertino not included to give us an idea of what Weber sounds like in a historically informed performance with original instruments? After all both EMI and Virgin are part of the Warner’s stable now.

As with the recent Bizet box set Warner has given us another wonderful box set. At the same time, however, the box set could have and should have been better. But then beggars can’t be choosers I suppose and it priced for beggars like me.

 

The Music of My Life: Georges Bizet Edition

 

I have been listening to music since the mid-1960s. Memory is fuzzy here but I think I have been listening to art music or classical music since the 1960s as well. I probably heard it first in films and cartoons, specifically Looney Tunes cartoons, and fell in love with it. I have never looked back.

I have been buying classical records since the early 1970s. The first one I bought, if memory serves, is the 1970s Bohm performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.

At the time I started buying classical records the big boys included the late lamented Philips Classics, which was my favourite since they had the glorious Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon (DG), and EMI. At the time all these giants of the industry seemed to have been run by people who actually liked classical music and who, while they saw it as a commodity, did not, as the people who run these labels seem today, to see it as little more than something similar to a Serta bed or a Cadbury’s candy bar. 

Between the 1960s and the early 2000s these labels released tonnes of great, good, and adequate performances of classical music, mostly the hits: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and all that jazz. Today, Philips is gone. It was gobbled up by Decca, who, like Philips and DG,  was gobbled up by the megacorporation Universal. EMI went belly up and is now part of that other bureaucratic giant of the classical music industry, Warner Classics. Today DG and Decca don’t release much in the way of art music. Presumably, it isn’t a big enough seller for them to warrant the release of new performances unless of course, a performance is given to them by some conductor or symphony orchestra and they don’t have to pay for the recordings. They are releasing old music, much of it in the form of monster conductor boxes like those of Herbert von Karajan, the pride of DG and perhaps the best known conductor, along with Bernstein, of the 1970s and 1980s. 

The action in classical music these days is with the independents though even those are getting gobbled up by the big boys. The wonderful English independent Hyperion was recently purchased by Universal making its future an open book. The wonderful Swedish independent label BIS recently got gobbled up by Apple making their future open and raising the question what does Apple want with a label that has recorded tonnes of Scandinavian music? We still have Naxos and other independents like Brilliant Classics, thank god. Naxos and Brilliant are perhaps the most interesting labels today given how much interesting music, including art music outside the mainstream, they record and release.  

Of the big boys my favourite label at the moment is Warner Classics. I love to buy composer box sets and recently Warner Classics has been releasing a number of interesting one. I have their wonderful Mendelssohn and Prokofiev box sets, for instance. But the box sets I love the most from Warner are those of French composers. Erato and EMI France, which are now part of Warner, have recorded some wonderful French art music over the years, and Warner is slowly but surely collecting it, collating it, and putting it in box sets for release. I have their Berlioz, Dukas, Faure, Franck, Pierne, Poulenc, and Saint-Saens box sets, all of which are wonderful. I recently purchased their Bizet box set.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the Bizet box set. It contains some wonderful stuff in good and very good performances. However, it does not contain several EMI and Erato recordings of Bizet that should be in the box. The box contains two performances of Carmen: the Pretre/Callas and the Rattle, both of which are good (I actually preferred the “original” edition conducted by Rattle to the Pretre). It doesn’t, though it should have, contain the Beecham, Mazel, Plasson, and Burgos performances of the opera, an opera that is one of the most popular in the repertory. It has the Pretre Pearl Fishers but not the Cluytens. It has some of the Plasson Bizet but should have it all. The Plasson performance of the L’Arlesienne incidental music is complete unlike the Gardiner in the box set making one wonder why the curators of the set chose the Gardiner instead of the wonderful Plasson. It has no Martinon Bizet but should. As for the concern that this might be too much repetition in the set, I say the more the merrier.

I hope Warner keeps releasing box sets and particularly French classical music box sets. I am praying for uch needed Chabrier and a Chausson box sets from then. Here’s hoping.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: David Hurwitz and the Church of the Anti-HIP Mind

I grew up listening to and even playing, until an injury, classical music. I have been buying classical albums and CDs since at least the 1970s quite regularly and have accumulated, as I have moved along the life cycle from teenage years to growing old age, a mountain of CDs that are increasingly becoming difficult for increasingly sickly me to deal with. I have also been reading classical record and CD reviews since the 1970s. I was thus quite happy to see that David Hurwitz, currently executive editor of and self-professed spokemodel for Classics Today, with his backdrop of mountains of CDs, had begun producing videos during the pandemic on YouTube with him as the star critic of these self-produced and self-directed, one assumes, mini-"documentaries".

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy, for the most part Hurwitz's reviews of Mahler, Shostakovich, Beethoven, the underrated Nielsen, and Martinu, you name it on YouTube. That said, he is not the only reviewer I read. I tend to be as catholic in the reviewers I read just as I am in the various type of performances I listen to and frankly enjoy. What I have grown increasingly weary of, however, is Hurwitz's seemingly never ending obsession--that is what auteurists would call it--with the presumed evils--historical (the omnipresent mention of vibrato), ethical, moral, aesthetic, etc.--of Historically Informed Performance or HIP, performance practises that began to emerge after the 1970s. Increasingly, in the face of Hurwitz's almost constant jeremiads on the deviltries of HIP, I have come to think of him as the high priest of a cult and his obsessions as at the heart of a cultic religion constructed around the evil of some profane phenomenon, in this case the aforementioned unhip HIP. 

Hurwitz's priestly rants against HIP reached a fever pitch recently with his YouTube video entitled "Music Chat: Period Performance is Killing the Classics". In that talk Hurwitz seemed to assert that one of the reasons if not the major reason for the decline of contemporary classical music is the cookie cutter idiocies of the HIP crowd. Putting aside the issue of whether the classical music industry is in decline or whether the action has shifted from the once Big Boy godfathers of the industry to companies like Naxos, which also distributes a bevy of smaller labels, and BIS, to choose two of many increasingly significant players in the classical music industry, and putting aside the health of digital media like Naxos Radio, I found myself puzzled by what seemed to me Hurwitz's rather reductive argument.

I was taken aback because generally speaking, in my experience and in my research, I learned that one can easily recognise the fact that a variety of factors influence everything and everyone including the classical music industry. There's economics, for instance. With respect to the classical music industry, the music industry, the media, and corporations, all of these have been impacted by, whatever you want to call it--I will call it neo-liberalism or revitalised laissez-faire liberalism with its dogma that the market is rational--an empirically ludicrous notion--and always right--an even more vacuum packed empirically ludicrous notion--and neo-liberal corporate oriented globalisation (a globalisation that allows corporations and monies free movement but not labour). There's politics. Political bureaucracies, dominated as they are by neo-liberal ideologies and economic elites, have allowed the theology of neo-liberalism to become uncritical dogma in their minds and they bow before it and give obeisance to it as if it was a sacred rite and a holy god. There's demographics. With regard to the classical music industry, we might want to ask whether there demographic shifts going on in classical music listening? How have these intersected with important cultural factors such as class? race? gender? status? cultural capital? social capital? the rise of moronic dumbed down populist elitism and give rich people their freedom populist movements? There's geography. Here we might want to think about the issue of whether geographical patterns of classical music listening and practise have shifted. Are there variations in these across space? Then there is the big one, culture. Here we might want to reflect upon whether performance practises have previously changed across space and time before and whether they will they continue to do so in the future given the nature of consumerism, public relations, and advertising propaganda. Is the cult of the fad of the moment built into consumer capitalism? Is the neoliberal media in general dominated by a cookie cutter formulaic approach (see Hollywood paint by the genre numbers "adolescent" blockbusters with their mania for anti-realism and anti-naturalism) for economic reasons and is that what the masses really want (bread and circuses)? If it is, isn't it thus silly to blame HIP, a mirror and reflection (a dependent variable) rather than a cause (independent variable), for the current status of the classical music industry? And what about the socialised eyes of the beholder?

Anyway, all of this is a short way of saying I prefer multifactorial approaches which recognise that economics, politics, culture, demography, and geography all impact human life, including the classical music industry and its bureaucracies and practises, to those that are more reductive and reductionist. I have to admit, however, that I have increasingly grown not to expect little more than Spanish inquisitions from the many cults of the emotionally fevered poison minds out there in the normative determines descriptive, political and ideological correctness determines reality, lalaland. Let me end this post by noting that I didn't expect a kind of Spanish inquisition, one milder in form to be sure, from the clearly intelligent, knowledgeable, learned, and studied David Hurwitz's of the world. But I think that is what I got.

One further note before I go: Hurwitz is yet another one of those blokes who whinges and whines about wokeness and cancel culture while engaging in both regularly. He apparently is on a mission from god to awaken those who use social media about the historical mistakes of historically informed practise (vibrato) and he censors posts on his site that critique or add to his politically and ideologically correct rants, itself a long historically informed practise.

 

 

Me, My Memory, and Beethoven's Ninth: Musings on Social and Cultural Memory

I remember fairly vividly the day I first discovered, consciously at least, that I had heard classical music every time I watched a Looney Tunes cartoon when I was young. I also remember the da I consciously discovered the joys of classical music. It occurred on that day in 1972 that I first went to see Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopian/utopian novel A Clockwork Orange in a cinema near the Ball State University campus in Muncie, Indiana. Kubrick, by the way, who, by the time A Clockwork Orange was released, had, thanks to his 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, become known for his use of classical music to create moods, tones, and irony in his films.

One of the pieces of classical music that figures prominently in both the literary and film versions of A Clockwork Orange is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824). Of all the pieces of classical music Kubrick used in Clockwork it was Beethoven’s Ninth more than any other that stood out to me at the time I first saw the film (though I also recall being amused, fascinated, and intrigued by Kubrick's use of what I discovered was the overture to Rossini's La gazza ladra to choreograph the fight between Alex and his droggies and Billy Boy and his droggies). Both Burgess and Kubrick use Beethoven’s Ninth on several occasions to express Alex’s--Alex is the protagonist in both book and film--emotional highs and emotional lows. Kubrick also uses what Alex calls “the Glorious Ninth” to wryly counterpoint, as James Naremore notes in his 2008 monograph On Kubrick, Alex’s good old ultraviolence to Beethoven’s grand Enlightenment notion of brotherhood as represented in the fourth movement, the choral movement, the "Ode to Joy" movement, of the Ninth Symphony.

The Ninth made such an impression on me that, as I remember it now through the mists of time past, a few days later I made the twenty or so mile pilgrimage from my home in Hartford City, Indiana to the Musicland in the Muncie Mall in order to buy a copy of the symphony.

I did not know at the time that the version of Beethoven’s Ninth Kubrick used in A Clockwork Orange was, or apparently was, a performance conducted by the well-known Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958, a performance now regarded as legendary by some. I did know, from a lucky glance at the title credits, if memory serves, that the performance of the Ninth Kubrick used was on Deutsche Grammophon Records, one of the major classical music labels at the time, as I soon discovered. When I got to Musicland, the only music store within miles of Hartford City where you could buy classical music, I found a copy of Karl Bohm’s 1972 recording of the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon records and bought it.

When I took my double album of Bohm’s Ninth home I played it over and over on my stereo, one of my prized possessions at the time. Over time Bohm’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth became so embedded and sedimented in my memory--I knew almost every note, dynamic, and tempo of his performance--that it became and still remains the standard by which I judge every other performance of Beethoven’s Ninth by.

My memories of how Karl Bohm’s Beethoven’s Ninth came to be a part of my memory may seem unimportant but this seemingly small process reveals a lot about how memory and culture work in human beings. I have, of course, listened to other interpretations of Beethoven's Ninth since that day in 1972 that I discovered Beethoven's Ninth. I judge them all by Bohm's. I found and find Fricsay's, Leinsdorf's, and Kubelik's excellent, but then they are cut from the same cloth as Bohm's. I found and find Mackerras's and Zinman's too fast. But then they have been impacted by a revolution in thinking about Beethoven's symphonies, one which views Beethoven's metronome markings as sacred, a revolution that occurred after my introduction to Beethoven's Ninth through Bohm. I found and find Abbado's Sony version and Harnoncourt's reading OK but nothing to write home about. Of the period versions I was lukewarm about Hogwood's and Norrington's interpretations. I liked Gardiner's, the least like a period performance and very much in the classical interpretive mode of conductors before the period instrument revolution, and Goodman's.

The moral of this little tale? Culture, over time, becomes embedded and sedimented in our memories and in our bodies. Once it becomes part of us through embededness and sedimentation, as Bohm's Beethoven's Ninth did in mine, it has an enormous impact on our lives and our thought forever afterward. It can and often does help create our reality for us once it has become part of us.

No Well Trodden Path for You...

Throughout most of my life and throughout most of my intellectual and academic life (they are different species, by the way) I have almost always strayed off the beaten path. I have never been a yes man, I have never wanted to be a yes man, and I have almost always been forthright throughout my life. I was, after all, raised in Anabaptist country. I suspect that all of this is why almost all bureaucracies I have had the fortune and misfortune to interact with, including educational ones, have not really provided me with a "career" (a good bourgeois term if ever there was one) path.

So how now have I strayed off the beaten academic path? When I was a Religious Studies student I strayed away from Biblical Studies in the direction of Hermeneutics and Social Theory. When I was an American Studies student I strayed away from the well trod path of academic primary source analysis into the thick and beautiful forests of ideological analysis. When I was a Sociology student I strayed from sociological statistics into Social Theory and Comparative History. Max Weber was my guide. When I was a Cultural Anthropology student I strayed into Sociological Theory and Comparative History and had little interest in finding my own little Trobriand Island that I could exploit for career advancement. And when I was a History student I left the hermetic confines of primary source analysis and area specialisation for interdisciplinary Social Theory and Comparative Analysis both highly suspect in the inherently conservative "discipline" of History.

My taste in music has reflected my penchant for straying off well trodden paths as well. I am, after all, one of the 2% or so of Americans who really love classical music. While most casual listeners of art music rarely venture beyond the classics like Mozart and Beethoven I began to explore minor Soviet and Russian composers, composers like Borodin, Balakirev, Gliere, Vainberg, Glinka, Glazunov, Popov, Kabalevsky, Lyapunov, and Liadov. Recently I have been listening to a number of "minor" Nordic, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish composers, composers like Gade, Svendsen, Atterberg, and Nielsen (assuming that the sadly far too little known Nielsen is a "minor" composer), and I have to say that I find them much more interesting, in general, than most of the Russian and Soviet composers beyond the Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky pantheon I had been exploring earlier (exploring is the key metaphor in my life, by the way; I have always been an explorer of things intellectual). I really enjoyed Atterberg's Cello and Violin Concerti. I loved Svendsen's two symphonies. I loved Gade's and Nielsen's wonderful choral works. I adored Nielsen's symphonies and concerti.

After listening to a number of wonderful works by little known Nordic composers, the Nordic classical music tradition, by the way, a tradition is one of the most vibrant today, I have to say I am glad, at least in part, that I have not chosen to meander along the less well trodden paths most people never venture off. I wouldn't have wanted to miss Nielsen, Atterberg, Svensen, and others. So thank you to whoever and whatever (the Sixties?) made me into the "weirdo" I am today.

Musings on the History of Hermeneutics: Reading Classical Music Reviews

I was a Biblical Studies major when I started my undergraduate college career at Indiana University in beautiful Bloomington. At the time I expected to continue doing Biblical Studies through my postgraduate academic career. But events do have a habit of sending one in directions you never imagined. It was thanks to an undergraduate seminar on the book of Exodus which I took with James Ackerman at IU that I developed an obsession with and an appreciation of something that continues to impact my intellectual life today, hermeneutics.

One thing that really struck me after taking Ackerman's seminar was the varying interpretations of the biblical text brought to Exodus by a range of Catholics of various stripes, Protestants of various stripes, Jews of various stripes, and even agnostics and atheists of various stripes. Listening and thinking about the various interpretations of the biblical text I and my student colleagues offered while analysising selected "pericopes" of the Book of Exodus foregrounded something for me that I had not entirely recognised up to that point and have never forgotten since: ideology and culture play and important role in how we interpret the Bible and how we "read" human life and our place in the world around us in general.

While I didn't continue my pursuit of a degree in Biblical Studies (too many languages to study and too few jobs) I have never lost this appreciation for how we humans read "texts", broadly defined, through cultural and ideological mental eyes. After leaving Biblical Studies I became more and more interested in the hermeneutics of social and cultural life and so began to study Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Semiology/Semiotics, History, Film Studies, and, most recently, Television Studies since all of these "disciplines" addressed, in some way, shape, or form, the ways we humans read the world we live in and our place in it. Roland Barthes became my guide through the intellectual corridors of the history and structure of language and the semiotics of language and culture. Max Weber, who carried on the hermeneutic work of Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, the fathers of hermeneutics, became my guide through the mental world of ideologically grounded cultural interpretations of society and their relationship to the wider social, political, and economic worlds they inhabited.

One of my favourite excursions to take in my spare time is into the realm of the ideologies underlying classical music reviews. As J. Robert Oppenheimer was able to bring together his love of physics and the New Mexico desert in the Manhattan Project I enjoy being able to bring together my love for classical music and cultural studies in my excursions into the hemeneutics of classical music recordings and performances.

I recently finally got around to buying the well known Eugene Ormandy and Philadelphia Orchestra set of Rachmaninov Symphonies recorded in stereo in the 1950s and 1960s (Sony, SB2K63257). Ormandy knew Sergei Rachmaninov and conducted recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos 1 and 4 with the maestro giving his interpretations a special authority at least in the minds of some music critics, because of his special relationship to the master who, these critics presumably assume, passed onto Ormandy orally just how his music should be played.

So how do some music critics read Ormandy's performances of Rachmaninov's Symphonies. The well-known critics who put together the well-known Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music 2008 (Penguin, 2007), the Brits Ivan March, Edward Greenfield, and Robert Layton, give Ormandy's readings of Rachmaninov's Symphonies (and the instrumental version of the Vocalise) four stars out of four claiming that Ormandy's interpretations of the three symphonies, including the first of Rachmaninov's symphonies to be recorded in stereo, Symphony 1, remain, "in many ways...unsurpassed". March, Greenfield, and Layton go on to describe the recent and, they claim improved, Sony transfer, as something "not to be missed" even if listeners already have more "modern versions"of Rachmaninov's symphonies" and that Ormandy's interpretations, along with those of Mikhail Pletnev, Evgeny Svetlanov, and Vladimir Ashkenazy, all Russians (essentialism?), have "special claims in this repertoire" (because they are Russians or knew Rachmaninov?). Stephen Chakwin reviewing Rachmaninov's orchestral music in Classical Music: The Listeners Companion (edited by Alexander Morin in 2002, Backbeat Books), on the other hand, writes that Ormandy's stereo Rachmaninov Symphonies set is disappointing. Ormandy's and the Philadelphia's performances, he claims, lack intensity, are perfunctory, and are inattentive to the score as compared to Ormandy's recordings of Rachmaninov's piano concertos.

So here we have several different critics with two different views of the quality of Ormandy's performances of Rachmaninov's Symphonies. And while many readers of classical music reviews would, I suspect, raise the question of which set of critics is right, the real question we analysts of hermeneutics should ask is why different individuals each, presumably, with a significant knowledge of classical music, classical music performance, and classical music recordings, came to different conclusions and what social and cultural forces may have helped construct these two violently different readings of Ormandy's Rachmaninov Symphonies set. This is, of course, one of the questions historians of interpretation attempt to or should attempt to answer.

Another question the study of the hermeneutics of reading should be able to answer is the question that has been at the heart of that eternal and far too abstract aesthetic question that we were all introduced to in Philosophy 101: is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is it universal? As the radically different interpretations of Ormandy's recordings of Rachmaninov's Symphonies shows, beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder, the social and cultural eyes of the beholder.

A Blog Full of Cliches: Reviewing Smetana's Complete Orchestra Music

I have been listening (cliche one) to the Brilliant Smetana Complete Orchestral Works box set (Brilliant, 93634) recently. This three disc set contains some of Smetana's best known orchestral work, such as the omnipresent Ma Vlast (cliche two) and the overture to Smetana's opera The Bartered Bride, along with lesser known works like the symphonic poems Wallenstein's Camp, Hakon Jarl, Richard III, Doktor Faust, the Festive Overtures in C major and D major, the three dances to The Bartered Bride, the two polkas Venkovanka and Nasim Devam, and the two marches the March of the National guard and the Shakespeare Festival March. All of these works are conducted by Theodor Kuchar, who made a name for himself in the international recording world by conducting a number of works on that other major bargain label, Naxos, and played by the Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra of Ostrava, Czech Republic.

So how did I like this set? I liked it very much (cliche three). In fact I liked it more than the well known two set disc of Smetana pieces conducted by Rafael Kubelik and James Levine on Deutsche Gramophon (cliche four). While the Janacek Philharmonic may not be Kubelik's Boston Symphony Orchestra or Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks or Levine's Wiener Philharmoniker, it plays very well (cliche six) and Kuchar's conducting is excellent (cliche six).

I highly recommend Brilliant's bargain priced Smetana set (cliche seven). So whether you are a lover of Czech nationalist music, a lover Smetana, or simply a lover of Brilliant's inexpensive box sets (I am all three), don't hesitate to pick it up (cliches eight, nine, and ten). After all much of the music on discs two and three, while rarely heard outside of the Czech Republic, is always interesting and, at least for me, oftentimes quite enjoyable (cliche eleven). I give Brilliant Classics's Smetana boxset 4.75 stars out of 5 (cliche twelve). It is my bargain disc of the week (cliche thirteen).

And the winners are...

I recently took a look at Anthony Tommasini's musings on which twentieth century composers might make a list of the greatest composers ever in the ArtsBeat section of the online New York Times. Earlier Tommasini discussed the four great Viennese composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert), the Romantics (Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms), Verdi, Wagner, and female composers and whether any of these great composers deserve to be on a list of the world's greatest composers (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/author/anthony-tommasini/).

Such lists, of course, usually end up telling us more about the person doing the list than the people on the list but hey, let me give it a shot.

For me modern composers like Shostakovich, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov definitely deserve consideration as being among the ten greatest composers of all time. If I had to put a British composer on the list it would be Vaughan Williams rather than Britten who Tommasini mentions. For me contemporary composers are too contemporary to be put on the list at the moment. I do, however, like Part and Gorecki very much. I am not a huge fan of Stockhausen, who Tommasini mentions, though I find "Stimmung" fascinating.

So would any of these modern composers make my list of the greatest composers ever? At the moment (these lists are to some extent always of the moment) I would put Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, Ravel, and Shostakovich on my top ten list. At the very top would be Ravel. So yes a couple of twentieth century composers would make my list.

The toughest thing, by the way, about being limited to a top ten list of the world's greatest composers is leaving off artists like Berlioz, Chopin, Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky. Oh, hell, I am going to take Monteverdi off the list and replace him with Chopin. And let me take Vivaldi off the list and replace him with Dvorak. Gotta stop or else I may never get up from my chair again.

Bibliography:
Anthony Tomasini, The Top Ten Composers: Which Twentieth Century Masters Will Make the Cut?, 12 January 2011, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/top-10-composers-which-20th-century-masters-will-make-the-cut/?hp#preview