Kevin Sutton writes in reply to: Bob Dubois

>Oh please!  OK, some composers, yes even many composers had great gifts.
>For music.  This nonsense about the near-god status of composers has to go!
>Beethoven wrote great tunes, but he couldn't multiply.  Einstein wrote
>great physics.  Dickens wrote great books.  Salk wrote great medicine and
>Agassi writes great tennis!  They're humans, with highly refined skills
>in a specific field.  They are not deities.  They are not objects to be
>worshipped.  Miles Davis was a great musician for whom I have no respect
>as a person.  He was rude, crude, antisocial and just plain awful to
>women.Let's put these fellas into some proper perspective here!

Kevin is a man after my own heart.  All the people he mentions are vastly
overrated in my view they're still great, but very human and many other
greats get no credit.

There's a sort of right time right placeness about many so called geniuses.
For instance take Beethoven, if he hadn't been there then someone like
Weber would have taken up the mantle.  There is a certain inevitability
about some developments in human evolution.

Take the example of Murray Gell-Mann and his quarks.  Another physicist
Weis (I think) was working on identical ideas at the same time.  This
example suggests to me not that ideas exist in space waiting to be grasped
but rather that they are the culmination of development by many people.
Hence it is ludicruos that we heap so much credit on a few people.

Back to Beethoven and the degree to which his ideas rest on Haydn is clear
to hear (by me anyway).  And, just to show no bias I can see in turn how
Haydn built on the various schools of influence before him.

Bob Draper