Wes Crone replies to me replying to Norman Schwartz:

>>>I feel a composer is "Great" if he/she gets their message across
>>>(appeals) to the largest numbers and variety of listeners.  By variety I
>>>mean to include the so-called "man in the street" as well as professional
>>>performing musicians, musicologists, composers and those holding graduate
>>>degrees in music.
>>
>>By those standards, no classical music composer is great.  The man in the
>>street would rather suck exhaust fumes from the tailpipe of a bus (only
>>slightly overstating here) than listen to classical music.
>
>I don't think Norman was being so concrete as you seem to think he was.
>I have been finding, more and more often, that there is little room for
>hyperbole on this list.

The problem really is that people take advantage of shifting definitions.
If you use a phrase like "professional" and "man in the street," what
does this really mean? It certainly sounds as if you're calling for
near-universal appeal - a very attractive notion and one that would argue
very forcibly for greatness.  We may like to think that the art we like
appeals to nearly everybody, because then we think we can say that there's
a natural law (like a biological law, rather than a physical one) of good
taste, and this gives us the comfortable feeling that our tastes are
somehow not arbitrary.  However, what one probably means by "man in the
street" is either "the tyro to classical music" or "me and people like me."
Stated either way, I don't see why this kind of appeal is a criterion for
greatness.  It seems to me more on target to say that a composer's musical
persistence argues for its value to the culture.  Persistence is in some
cases achieved by numbers, in others by the intensity of a minority.
Xenakis, a composer I don't personally care for, may well be a great
composer by this definition, since he has loyal partisans.  I hesitate to
assert they're each and every one of them crazy or deaf.

>A small suggestion which hints at ideas is often taken far too literally
>to the extreme.  I agree with Norman that a "great" composer might have a
>more wide-ranging appeal than a lesser composer.  Of course, I am really
>against calling any composer "lesser" even though I do have my own ranked
>list of preferences.

Same here.  In my case, it's because so many composers have distinct
artistic profiles.  Grieg gives me something other than Bach does.
Overall, I may prefer Bach to Grieg or like more pieces by Bach than
pieces by Grieg, but I don't dismiss Grieg because of it.  To me, Grieg
*is* great, independent of whom else he appeals to.  But I probably mean
something different by the word "great." I mean, "I like it a lot, more
than most other music." In other words, like yours, my taste is my taste
and not necessarily anyone else's.  I would make no claims at all for the
objective greatness of any composer, including Bach - a composer who must
be at least considered for that quality.  However, there are composers I
consider Bach's equal in their crude impact upon me, Josquin undoubtedly
one of them.  I might take some comfort in noting the fact that certain
composers are still performed, because that keeps them from disappearing,
and I want others to share my enthusiasms.

Beyond that, I find the concept of artistic greatness almost without
aesthetic interest and, in many ways, downright harmful.  Once you call an
artist great, what have you learned about hm or her? It's far more fruitful
to ask what distinguishes this artist from other artists.  Where's the
harm? The harm comes from the extent to which this solidifies a canon of
greatness - what I've called The Temple of Art syndrome.  I find too many
classical-music fans unwilling to look outside the doors, to take a chance
on something they haven't heard before.  I admit self-interest here.  The
Temple of Art is usually a device that exists to reduce the element of
audience risk.  But risk is a given of the aesthetic experience.  Composers
risk wasting their time and energy to create a dud.  The audience risks
wasting its (considerably less) time and energy with something unworthy.
The composer's reward is the piece that realizes the beauty imagined
(beauty broadly defined).  The audience's reward is the discovery of
something new and wonderful.

>I might say that I consider Bach, for instance, a "greater" composer than
>Messiaen because I think Bach is more universally accepted a a master and
>a favorite than the latter.  However, there may be many more Messiaen fans
>than I realize.

This comes down to crude numbers, and you're nowhere close to granting
universal suffrage.  Again, it's a shifting definition of who's actually
listening.  Obviously, not everyone gets a vote because in that case Bach
might not show up at all on the aesthetic radar.  Most people probably
haven't heard Bach or even heard of him.  I forget what the percentage of
the population the classical-music audience takes up, but I don't believe
it's a lot, and then we've got to even loosely define classical music,
since the recording industry includes such things as classical crossover,
Charlotte Church, performer star turns like the Three Tenors, and Michael
Bolton doing Puccini.  I would say that hard-core classical fans usually
have something else in mind, although they may like one or the other of the
foregoing.  Once we figure out what we mean by classical music and the
audience to whom it appeals, we are probably a long way from "universally
accepted." Consequently, greatness, beyond the circle of our own likes and
dislikes and any dispensation we care to grant to music we don't like,
can't depend on such criteria.

Steve Schwartz