Most Over-rated Composers

[m]

This has probably been done before...

[indutrial]

Any person who comes and says "Oh, that may well be, but all audiences across history were wrong" makes a fool out of himself.

Erm...yes, but if nobody ever had a different opinion than the popular consensus, or as you're putting it, if nobody dared to be a 'fool' once in a while, then there would be no barometer for over-rated/under-rated, an important critical function which allows music appreciators to exercise their opinions and comment on perceived disparities in the recording industry. The real problem I see with most listeners is their thoughtless (or thought out) submission to the notion that audiences are and ever were a qualitative tool to measure art that is not highly concerned with money.

While the evolutionary theory makes sense in and of itself, I see no intellectual value in grafting it to my own interaction with music and music history.

[cloches_de_geneve]

Erm...yes, but if nobody ever had a different opinion than the popular consensus, or as you're putting it, if nobody dared to be a 'fool' once in a while, then there would be no barometer for over-rated/under-rated, an important critical function which allows music appreciators to exercise their opinions and comment on perceived disparities in the recording industry. The real problem I see with most listeners is their thoughtless (or thought out) submission to the notion that audiences are and ever were a qualitative tool to measure art that is not highly concerned with money.

While the evolutionary theory makes sense in and of itself, I see no intellectual value in grafting it to my own interaction with music and music history.

I do not disagree on this point. I guess my comments were more directed towards mindless statements of "over-ratement" than statements of "under-ratement". The are some interesting examples of a temporary underrating, like Schubert and Mahler for a while (imagine that Schumann had to dig out Schubert's 9th symphony from a dusty closet a dozen years after his death; in these long years a flooding, a fire, or simply a distracted maid could have deleted this masterwork from the globe). But then they made it back. Therefore, 100 years is a reliable demarcation line imo, but 150 is better of course. In this light, the verdict on Rachmaninoff is still out  

[lontano]

It's been nearly 30 years since I first discovered on-line forums, and right from the get-go posts like this one always incite "flame wars", and I certainly won't stoop to this level. Nothing but time and emotion is wasted in senseless arguments like these.

I learned long ago that similar arguments are equally pointless as in:
A. Religion
B. Politics
C. Music

(Anyone else want to add to this list, be my guest, but these 3 are at the top.)

I can ask people to ignore this sort of thing, but I doubt it will make a difference. C'est la vie...  Now get back to practicing people!

Lontano

[Bob]

It's been nearly 30 years since I first discovered on-line forums,

Umm.... 1980?  Online forums in 1980?  The internet in 1980? 

I guess it's possible.  I'm just wondering what it was back then.

[lontano]

Umm.... 1980?  Online forums in 1980?  The internet in 1980? 

I guess it's possible.  I'm just wondering what it was back then.

Actually, I believe Usenet has been around even before 1980, and while colleges (I was working as a music librarian in a local college) and universities didn't connect directly via the instantaneous means we have today, we still were able to use email and post messages to forums, both on Usenet, and with the early home computers of the time. A little research on the internet at that time will help you understand how amazing it was to us then, and how primitive it seems today. By the early-mid 80's small computers were being set up as BBS systems accessed by 300 baud modems, and forums of all sorts evolved rapidly from then on. So yes, this has been going on long before some of you were born, and I'm showing my age (nearly 60!).

Lontano

[transitional]

How has there been so much talk about Sorabji when no one has complained about Satie yet?

[piabanoch]

Satie and Mozart are the most overrated and Gould wrote a book criticizing Mozart