
Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors? - benbreen
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/deus-ex-musica
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yardie
"Classical" orchestral music is in a death spiral. And I'm not sure how it can
be avoided except through government endowments. Most orchestral nonprofits
live and die on donations. The donors are moneyed and old. And they want to
hear Beethoven. The next generation of potential patrons are not so young and
not moneyed. And have a different taste in music.

~~~
sveme
A counterpoint. You're describing the American situation. Most (central?)
European orchestras are at least partially publicly funded and therefore
relatively stable. As they do not rely solely on donation (by old farts as you
imply), they are able to experiment far more and also provide a stage for new
composers, new works. Same for opera houses. As they are modernizing the
interpretations of symphonies and especially the screenplay in operas, they
become politically and socially relevant again. There is little worse than
enduring a ballet in the style of the 19th century, but watching a modern
piece can be a really great experience.

So government endowments enable orchestras to experiment and hence stay
relevant. Without those your analysis is spot on.

~~~
yardie
Here is this seasons concert line up for the 2 operas[1] (Garnier and
Bastille) in Paris:

Rachmaninov, Schubert, Schonberg, Brahms, Beethoven (x6!), Mahler, Herrman,
Barber, Mozart, Rota, Dvorak, Lekeu, Chausson, DeBussy

I'm not familiar with some of the names. I think Rota is a modern composer.
But most of those names are composers who have been buried.

[1] [http://www.operadeparis.fr/en](http://www.operadeparis.fr/en)

~~~
masklinn
Barber, Copland, Rota and Herrman are more modern than the others, but still
buried.

The Beethoven situation is a bit of an exception as they're doing a series
with all 9 symphonies in a row. And I see a few more composers in
[http://www.operadeparis.fr/en/saison-2014-2015/concert--
reci...](http://www.operadeparis.fr/en/saison-2014-2015/concert--recital)

* Barber (1910-1981)

* Beethoven (1770-1827)

* Brahms (1833-1897)

* Chausson (1855-1899)

* Copland (1900-1990)

* Dvořák (1841-1904)

* Herrman (1911-1975)

* Lekeu (1870-1894)

* Mahler (1860-1911)

* Mozart (1756-1791)

* Praetorius (1571-1621)

* Prokofiev (1891-1953)

* Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

* Ravel (1875-1937)

* Rota (1911-1979)

* Schubert (1797-1828)

* Schönberg (1875-1951)

* Spohr (1784-1859)

* Strauss (1864-1949)

* Suk (1874-1935)

* Susato (1500-1561)

* Tarrega (1852-1909)

* Verdi (1813-1901)

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rpenm
The title here is a canard. The article does not explore the question of
Beethoven's impact on his successors, it is taken for granted. This piece
reviews a bunch of recent books about Beethoven (mostly concerning his
personal, political and artistic life, not his legacy).

~~~
leoc
Especially since the influence of Beethoven probably dominates classical music
much less now, after the enthronement of Bach, the rediscovery of Vivaldi and
the whole Baroque and early-music revival, than it did in the nineteenth
century when classical music was still (and maybe increasingly?) a popular and
commercial hit.

------
Tycho
Why there are no Bachs, Mozarts or Beethovens of today is to me one of the
world's greatest mysteries.

~~~
crazygringo
Nobody writes in that style of music anymore. It's "already been done". Even
if someone wrote something as good as Beethoven's 5th, nobody would care. The
classical music world has been there, done that. Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler
aren't remembered just for their music on its own, but the fact that their
music pushed the envelope, invented new forms of expression. They didn't just
_do_ it, they _came up_ with it.

Classical composition moved in a kind of academic, atonal direction in the
20th century which was completely inaccessible to most of the public, and
essentially died, in terms of a popular artistic movement. After Stravinsky,
there just wasn't really much left to do. (Composers still write movie scores,
but these basically just rehash what was already done in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.)

Instead, the world moved towards rock, pop, hip-hop... and there's a lot of
exciting stuff there. Unfortunately, it's mostly based around 5-min songs,
which limits its complexity. No matter how genius something like Brian
Burton's "The Gray Album" might be, or certain Led Zeppelin songs, the format
doesn't allow for even 5% of the kind of complexity that a symphony can
embody.

So the Bach's, Mozart's and Beethoven's are surely out there -- but they're
not doing the same kind of music, and they're harder to recognize as
equivalents because we've abandoned musical structural complexity for sonic
complexity instead (it's more about the sound or flavor or texture of a track,
its hooks, and so on).

~~~
julespitt
It's weird and false to imply that classical composition no longer exists.
Classical was one of the first fields of art to retreat from mid-century
modernist experimentation and get back to basics. Minimalism reintroduced such
essential elements as rhythm and melody as early as the 1960s. While there's
still a large avant-garde contingent, most successful living composers walk a
very interesting line between the new, complex and accessible.

It's not a popular music story at all - pop/folk music has always been doing
it's own thing.

~~~
crazygringo
Oh it definitely exists -- heck, I sang in a New York premiere of a Jennifer
Higdon piece this spring. But it's not _popular_. It's incredibly niche.
There's isn't nearly enough general interest in it for there to be another
Beethoven equivalent today, as a figure in society in general.

~~~
julespitt
Got it, your language was a tad to declaritive.

It's certainly niche, and painfully so. I think there is some potential for
growth, given the absurdity of my aging friends forcing themselves to continue
to engage with music written predominantly for teenagers and college students.

------
msluyter
_Yet the idolatry has had a stifling effect on subsequent generations of
composers, who must compete on a playing field that was designed to prolong
Beethoven’s glory._

Odd that the article doesn't leverage much evidence to support this point.
However, we do have some excellent examples, notably Brahms, who wrote to a
friend:

 _" I shall never compose a Symphony! You have no conception of how the likes
of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us."_

("Him" being Beethoven.) And indeed, he didn't complete his first symphony
until age 40.

------
donatj
I would argue Philip Glass as being as important as Beethoven to music but I'm
probably in the minority here.

~~~
visarga
They are important even with limited public success.

There is a lot of interesting contemporary classical music, but much of it
requires a formed ear to appreciate. More accessible classical music usually
comes from composers dead 100+ years ago in the Classical and Romantic
periods. All styles: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern and Contemporary
bring something to the table, but some of them are too elevated for the
general public, just like not the finer points of functional programming not
being every developer's cup of tea. I wouldn't want advanced programming
paradigms or exotic new math stop being produced just because the general
public doesn't have a taste for them.

------
quarterwave
In south Indian classical (Carnatic) music the greatest modern composer is
Tyagaraja (1767-1847), who interestingly was a contemporary of Beethoven.
Tyagaraja was prolific in a form of composition called a _kriti_ , at once
both structured as well as intense.

The kriti eventually led to the modern Carnatic concert format, in the early
twentieth century. Where concerts once used to be night-long expositions of
virtuosity in rural temple festivals, the modern concert became a brisk 2 hour
affair that catered to urban schedules. A couple of 'heavy' abstract pieces,
then a few kritis serving as anchor, rounded off with several light blitz
pieces (usually scorned by the cognoscenti).

