Tom Godell wrote:

>TIME Magazine is conducting an on-line vote for "Person of the Century."
Only three "musicians" are among the top 20 vote getters:  Elvis Presley,
Madonna, and John Lennon.

That's pretty shamefully skewed toward the latter half isn't it...  i.e.
figures whom the most coveted target demographic will remember (16-29 year
olds IIRC) (and as a 29 year old I am ecstatic at being about to exit that
niche!).  Elvis...  yes, can't argue there.  Madonna...  as someone pointed
out, for extra-musical reasons she does belong.  Lennon should be replaced
by the Beatles as a group and Dylan should certainly be added.  In terms
of objective "importance", Mahler, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg ought to
represent the composers I suppose, but in my warped fantasy world it would
be Mahler, Sibelius and Debussy instead (I don't think there's a note of
20th c.  music I enjoy that can't be traced to one or a combo of that
crucial trio).  Also, I'm really surprised they didn't include a pianist.
A lot of their readers would recognize Gould or Richter and both would make
for good copy.  But we all know who it would be if they included a
classical interpreter.  PR bulldozer from beyond the grave...

And now a tirade:  the omission of Miles Davis should actually be
prosecutable in a court of law...  no other 20th century composer or
musician produced such a wide range of innovations, and amazingly he
did it mostly by just selecting the right people and pointing them in the
right direction, not by micro-managing every note...  anyway you've got
the eerie orchestral "Sketches of Spain" period with Gil Evans, then the
harmonically/metrically exploded small-ensemble of the 60's, then the first
electric experiment, "In A Silent Way", which constitutes its own genre
altogether and suggests a potentially fascinating future for electric jazz
that never happened at all...  then Bitches' Brew, again sui generis and
again a promise unfulfilled...  finally the On The Corner period where his
avowed purpose was to "combine Stockhausen with Sly and the Family Stone"
and which even after years of electric outrages managed to make the critics
feel insulted all over again.  That's 5 unmistakable and discrete
soundworlds the guy birthed.  Give him a bone for god's sake.

and Don Satz wrote:

>If TIME were conducting a vote for "classical music person of the century",
>I would opt for a tie between Harnoncourt and Schoeberg.  I believe
>Harnoncourt was the "wheel" for the "HIP" movement and made it so easy for
>folks like Gardiner, Norrington, and Herreweghe to succeed.  Schoenberg
>represents the "wheel" for non-traditional tonal and atonal compositions...

I say throw in Gould too, for spearheading the CM interpreter's
"liberation", in the sense that theater directors have always felt "at
liberty" to do whatever they please, sometimes to extreme degree, with
the stage directions and even the text of the play they're staging.  This
approach and the HIP approach have generated two very interesting poles of
performance, and I think both, when they pay off, can be wonderful.  Of
course both can result in horrific embarrasment as well...

How about Messiaen to represent the totally omnivorous absorbtion of
everything, and processing of same via a completely personal set of methods
(which, though they're precisely quantifiable and explicable, no one else
can seem to use use without simply sounding like Messiaen?) He's a good
figurehead, I think, for an exhilarating late 20th c.  combination of total
eclecticism welded to a fiercely personal "make-your-own-way" approach,
where obsessions are followed up unashamedly and dogmas are generated for
one's own use only.  I'm thinking Kurtag, Rautavaraa, Ligeti, Crumb, and--
admit it-- Nyman.  Each of 'em seems to follow the "genre of oneself" model
which I think is the only "school" that can still be valid at this
post-everything point...

Jon Lewis, American Cartoonist
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