The comment thread on that page gets into Newton and Neumann, but I think artistic/scientific achievements are apples/oranges. Doesn't make sense to compare the two, because the standard of quality is so different.
Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.
Comparison is the thief of joy - better to just envision a "hall of fame", where once reached, it doesn't matter where you place.
Comparing others is a source of joy, people love gossiping or just talking about who is better etc. Comparison is only a thief of joy when you compare yourself to others, but comparing Newton to Einstein etc is an endless source of fun, many people have enjoyed these discussions over the years.
Yeah, but those are people who are nowhere near that level of excellence at all.
Gossip for those people is often just a mechanism to increase their self esteem in front of bigger than life artists who truly changed the world. It is a bit like music lovers who have strong opinions about everything, while not being able to play a single note on any instrument. For them comparing the great musicians on that level makes them feel important too – if they can't walk the walk they at least try to talk the talk. Meanwhile most actual musicians are usually far more tolerant about the types of music they would consider interesting, because for them everything new they hear is something that can be used as an influence for creation.
So if someone asks whether Bach or thee greates Jazz musicians on the height of their game were the greater artists, any musician with half a brain cell would reject the question, because the question doesn't even make sense. Both things are absolutely masterful within the ideas they tried to explore. And those were different ideas.
That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral. They are from different times, have been created in different societies, with different goals in mind with a different knowledge base, etc. Any comparison that would be worth anything would have to account for all these different factors and then land at a result that would be highly subjective anyways (which is not a bad thing if you are interested in using that comparison to increase your own self worth in front of the architects who planned those – but futile otherwise).
> Yeah, but those are people who are nowhere near that level of excellence at all.
Why does this matter?
> That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral.
That sounds really fun! Those two are both massive structures that need to support a lot of weight, they are more similar than you might think. I can see a video looking into that getting many millions of views.
I think you really underestimate how much fun people derive just from learning things from these discussions. It isn't about feeling superior to Bach or Gauss or Newton etc, its just fun discussions about the world.
I, as a practical person that does things have learned that very often that the layperson has a completely non-existent image of what any art or craft entails. They are then still allowed to have opinions, I just don't value them as much. My experience is also that the layperson is very often correct about their feelings, but rarely correct when they propose solutions to what they believe will fix it for them.
I agree that your proposed comparison would be interesting, and I whole-heartedly agree with your point about learning things feom discussions. However, we discussed comparing which is better, not how different things are made. I could imagine a ironic version of a "who is the best"-discussion to be quite entertaining, but we were talking about deadpan serious "who is better"-comparisons here.
Comparisons like these make sense if you compare similar things or if you try to compare them on the same merit, e.g. would an early top athlete in a sport be able to compete with a top athlete in the same sport today if they had the same training, material etc.
Some activities are typically associated with folks that adopt toxic traits (gossip), while others who are fairly positive avoid them as it doesn’t contribute to overall well-being.
It’s a personal choice whether you are gossipy or not, but that decision is guided by subconscious factors.
If earth suddenly had to be evacuated and I was limited to grabbing the ten best people to save, [Bill] Watterson would definitely be in there. There is a point where you stop rating people — you just rate them among the best. Can I say that Mozart is better than the Beatles? I can’t. I can just say that they both have gone above the cloud layer and are up there near the sun. They both are on that short list of things that are essential. Watterson is an essential.
— Brad Bird, Academy Award-winning director of Ratatouille and The Incredibles
I'm a Xennial and I love the Beatles. I can't think of anyone I know my age who doesn't. My kids love them. Even if the Boomers were peak Beatles they aren't going anywhere for a while.
They're a bunch of nice pop songs that came from an era where strong label control meant little creativity. Sure they defeated this system, but it's not like this is some grand revolution.
Take Led Zeppelin, who basically spawned an entire subgenre of rock and roll. What genre did the Beatles spawn? What new vibe or style did they introduce? Just a bunch of pop songs. Even their druggie stuff really isn't that great.
In terms of sophistication, is it any of the classical masters? No. It was remarkable given the desert of creativity it appeared in. Are they better than Jazz masters or the like? I'd say no.
Were the Beatles at the forefront of leading a cultural revolution, a fundamental political shift? Sure they were part of the hippy culture, but are the associated with strident antiwar, communal living, or extreme free love? There are many other 60s acts you can point to as more influential.
Christ, even U2 has a more coherent origin story and central focus around antiwar and activism, as bubble gum as their variant is.
The tension in the band isn't even interesting. Just people making bank from pop success and arguing over attribution. The schisms were bland, not even really about ideology. Just ... credit.
When I hear them now on the radio, when I hear them on the radio, it's not like I change the station, but I don't turn up the volume. In the end, they are a pop band that sold a lot of records. Ok, maybe I turn it up for Elenor Rigby, but just a bit.
I've never loved this aphorism. Comparison is a crucial component of knowledge discovery. It would be more apt to say that ranking is the thief of joy.
> DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.
DaVinci had really bad technique and couldn't help but endlessly fiddle with his paintings. Many of his paintings never saw the light of day because he ruining them and never finished them.
The Last Supper that we know and love was actually a superior copy made by one of his proteges because his original fresco fell apart after a few years owing to his "innovative techniques" - he painted on dry plaster because he took way too long on it.
DaVinci was wonderfully imaginative and a very unique artist, but I don't think his reputation has been fully earned by his achievements.
Around the year 2000, amongst the other things that were going on, it was also the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Someone at the record label Teldec got the bright idea to release the entirely of Bach's work, and so a 153-disc box set was produced:
Edit: Somewhat related, is the All of Bach project:
> All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society with the aim to perform and record all of Bach's works and share them online with the world for free. With the finest recordings, performed at special locations and with great attention to image and sound. Don't want to miss a recording of All of Bach? Then subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you would like to help us complete All of Bach, please consider a donation.
It’s probably my favorite gift I have ever received, even though I did have to rearrange my office to store it properly lol. The curation is incredible, as is the sound quality, the packaging… everything.
The Netherlands Bach Society (which sounds like an organization for people who are into Bach, but it's an ensemble, though one that has been in existence for more than 100 years) is fantastic. Some of my favourite Bach performances are by them [1].
Another Dutch "complete Bach" project from recent years that I enjoyed: Leusink's complete set of recordings of Bach's sacred cantatas with the Holland Boy's Choir and Netherlands Bach Collegium (1999-2000), recorded over the span of just 15 months. A year ago I listened to the entire thing, which took me three months.
(It's quite good. But in my opinion, this haste is reflected in the performances a little bit; they are very competent, to be sure, but they lack some nuance, perhaps especially in the sound mix. For whatever reason, I much prefer the NBS recordings of most of these cantatas. (I don't really like Sytse Buwalda's voice, either.) Compare their BWV 21 [2] with NBS [3]. The beautiful interplay between first violin and oboe in the NBS recording is rather lost in the Leusink version, and the sound muddier. Admittedly the NBS version appears to replace the organ with some extra strings, but to me it just sounds crisper and more carefully performed. This really extends to everything. I hope NBS will one day release a complete cantata box set.)
I don't think this is correct. Bach was seeking a position of court composer (like Handel) and even sent his 6 Brandenburg Concertos to Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721. He didn't get the position. Brandenburg Concertos are some of his best works and I can't imagine how much top-quality secular music he could have written if he got the position.
Also, why on earth would this metric be important? Failure is a fact of life; one needs to experience it many, many times on the road to grandmastery. I’m pretty sure Bach had. It makes more sense to cherish than deplore it.
10 of his 20 children and his first wife died. That's enough setback for most of us. He was imprisoned over quitting his appointment, if you want to add some. It really is a weird criterium.
I'm not affiliated or anything but The Great Courses' "Bach and the High Baroque" [0] course is a great Series on Bach (Robert Greenbert's courses are great overall).
I feel like I have to channel my old math teacher.
It was Euler.
He also lived without electricity, and went blind too. And yet he figured out a huge amount of interesting stuff, roughly corresponding with high school math. Euler also moved across countries.
The saying we had in my uni is that most math discoveries are named after the second person to publish them, because we can’t name everything after Euler.
Math-wise Euler was more about establishing standard approaches than anything else. In addition to that, his contributions to graph theory and topology were substantial if not defining.
His contributions in physics were truly groundbreaking, a lot of traditional theoretical mechanics is coming from him mostly.
And not even all of his works in Latin were translated yet...
I thought Bach was relatively obscure till Mendelssohn promoted his music to a new generation?
Anyhow, there are many many great composers from different genres, and if you consider the aim to be communication (rather than the quality of the music itself) who would argue against the Beatles, or Taylor Swift as the greatest achievers of all time in music?
Well, between Bach and Mendelssohn, baroque music had been out of fashion for a century. Mendelssohn revived interest in Bach's music. Doesn't mean Bach wasn't renowned in his own time.
Yes, that's a good point. It's hard to remember how long ago he was writing, until you think about stuff like the well tempered clavier, where being able to play in all keys on the same instrument is seen as a modern marvel. We are now so used to equal temperament that the compromised intervals sound normal to us, whilst they would have sounded wrong to them.
Define better; Bach wasn’t appreciated that much when he was alive. Only later we decided that his works are the bees knees.
“Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities.”
Bach's work would have been lost to obscurity were it not for Mendelssohns rediscovery and promotion of his work about 50y after J.S. Bach's death, and causing a revival that kept the work alive. I'm trying to find good sources for the story as it's part of an example how someone trying to assimilate into european society (Mendelssohn was a jewish convert to christianity, likely to find work) was responsible for defnining one of its pillars just by appreciating it. J.S. Bach's son, J.C. apparently tutored a very young Mozart in London as well, so we can see how the seed of J.S. Bach's work propagated.
The piece I'm missing is that J.S. Bach's work contains several homages to Vivaldi, and there was something transmitted between them that is an understanding not just of counterpoint, but about symmetry and form that is fun to pursue in spare moments.
This is partly true. Mendelssohn brought back the great religious works of Bach into the public consciousness (79 years after Bach's death, not 50 years). However, Bach was by no means unknown among the professional musicians, though his fame was of course eclipsed by his sons. If there was anyone who surveyed the breadth of music in the late 18th century, it was Burney, and he gave a very sympathetic treatment of Bach in his General History of Music. The young Beethoven was famous partly for being able to play the entire Well-Tempered Keyboard from memory, and his Op 120 variations were unmistakably composed with Bach's Goldberg variations in mind.
Mozart, who was himself a great master of counterpoint, was understandably delighted by the Bach fugues that Baron Van Swieten showed him. Mozart was of course very heavily indebted to Johann Christian, but several pieces were clearly homages to the elder Bach; the subject from the K. 394 fugue was clearly derived from the first of the WTK, and the K. 574 Gigue (composed in Leipzig, no less) is obviously Bachian pastiche. The armoured men chorus from the Magic Flute sets a protestant chorale (often used by Bach) in a Bachian setting. That's not to mention the string quartet arrangements of Bach's fugues that Mozart made.
The obscure Baroque composer Christoph Graupner possibly has more compositions surviving to the present day than his contemporary Bach, though admittedly a lot of Bach's work is now lost. Another notable composer from the same period was Georg Philip Telemann.
He definitely achieved a lot, but its not useful to undermine others or say he achieved more (and therefore they are beneath him) since it's not really that kind of competition.
These people pushed forward human civilization. They are all an inspiration to us.
Bach played organ, harpsichord, flute, oboe, viola, violin, and bass. He probably played brass instruments too. He was so good he could sightread Bach but he could also improvise counterpoint in more than four voices simultaneously.
a surprising thing i learned about bach is that on november 6, 01717, he was imprisoned due to a dispute with the authorities, so i try to celebrate november 6 as bach day
possibly being among the greatest achievers of all time is not compatible with being perfectly obedient
i'm not sure how tyler cowen doesn't consider this a 'true defeat or setback', except in the sense that today only bach scholars remember the name of the guy who imprisoned him
Clearly not since neither the list of metrics nor theire relative importance nor even the assessment within a metric is anywhere close to being solid enough to allow measuring the known information (and then there is also a lot we don't know about the past).
Also,
> 8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.
how does greatness prevent you from learning from others? For example, don't greatest athletes continue to benefit from coaches?
It really does depend on your definition - "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes." might be apocryphal but metrics of success are so weird to apply to an individual externally, everyone is going to have their own slightly different definition.
Not cheating, but there isn't a good argument from the given criteria:
1. Quality of work.
2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.
3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.
4. Quantity of work.
5. Peaks.
6. Consistency of work and achievement.
7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement.
8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.
9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback.
There's a reasonable case to be made that Yeshua bin Yusuf was one of the more successful apocalyptic prophets in that time and place considering how much of his teaching comes down to us. I'd say there's a good case for checking off 1 and 2, but that's about it.
I meam Aristotle is a strong candidate for "greatest achiever of all time", being a true polymath who arguably contributed to or invented every school of intellectual thought in existence at the time his contributions were valued for centuries. But in between the seminal stuff on logic and ethics, his writings on the metabolism were a right load of old nonsense. And I bet his HN account would be an absolute riot!
Indeed. Due to their deep understanding of a wide range of subjects, some HN commenters amassed such an extraordinary amount of likes that puts Bach to shame.
A great achiever (much more than Bach IMHO) was Émile Littrè, the French author of several massive works but better known as the author of Dictionnaire de la langue française.
History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.
Without dismissing Bach's work (or the others named in the discussion, I would had picked Leonardo with my shallow default knowledge on the topic) we should acknowledge how biased is what we know. Not just because how we select what we should focus on, but how partial is the information that managed to reach us today.
No it isn't, history is written by people looking at old documents. Losers write a lot of history as well since it isn't like the victors go and kill all the losers or burn down all their documents.
> The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.
Yes, the history taught to us depends on where we live, not who won back then. If you are in country A they will say their glorius wars conquered B, if you are in country B they will say the tyranny when ruled A was a horrible time. History wasn't written by A, both sides gets to write most of the time.
> No it isn't, history is written by people looking at old documents.
Perhaps in very recent history but the old documents have been written by contemporary and there are many clear cases when the history has been rewritten by a tyrants e.g. politicians. I even know at least one large country based on multiple historical lies they tell to themselves and try to force upon others.
Defacing old sculptures and paintings to erase people from the history is another clearest example of this practice.
> Not just because how we select what we should focus on, but how partial is the information that managed to reach us today.
Maybe for some really old stuff, but musical production at the time of Bach's is something entirely different. There's no other genius like him out there, and that's a fact.
> History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.
I know you imagine that this is a profound observation but unfortunately it isn't. We all have it in our teens and twenties then we realise (decades later if we're unlucky) that it means much less than we thought.
We imagine that the work that reaches us now is so incomplete as to render present judgements about the past invalid or so inaccurate as to be misleading or useless. But culture and civilisation, are in a real sense, defined as what _endures_.
When it comes to the values that endure, it is more likely than not that humans pass along "the best things". Culture, after all, is downstream of genes and evolution.
There is no "better culture" hiding somewhere but hidden by our biases or by a conspiracy of victors. There are no better artists lost to the past who were so good that had they not been lost our knowledge and appreciation of art today would be far different and superior to what it is now.
"Acknowledging how biased is what we know" is similarly not as valuable an idea as it sounds because acknowledging bias doesn't actually reveal better information. The worst that bias can do is impede arriving at rational logical conclusions, and that is easily corrected by debate amongst enough people over a long enough period.
Another way to say this is we are always collectively evaluating stuff in the past based on the best information we have available now. To acknowledge a putative bias doesn't take you _outside_ of the sphere of our knowledge of the past in which we are making judgements because even the fact that you can think and utter that statement is a result of the cultural values that were given to you and are thus already a part of the culture.
The irony is you are posting this on an article about Bach. For about 200 years if people said Bach they meant C.P.E., not J.S. It wasn't until Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion that people began to reevaluate their attitudes and Bach assumed the place in the pantheon of composers.
How we evaluate music is deeply subjective. The complex harmonic and counterpunctal vocabulary of the Baroque was passe by the time Bach died, replaced by the simplicity of the Classical period. And then romanticism kept the harmony, but created sweeping emotion rather than deep craft. Then look at jazz where the relationships of chords are entirely changed. So yes, there are works that people overlook and reevaluate.
> I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:
>
> 1. Quality of work.
It’s like Cowen can’t help himself at this point. The world would be better served if he spent more time reviewing ethnic restaurants than publishing thoughtfarts like this. I guess it’s a better use of Koch Brothers money than their usual pursuits, at least.
Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.
Comparison is the thief of joy - better to just envision a "hall of fame", where once reached, it doesn't matter where you place.