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RE: His Top 10 are certainly not mine

The NY Times list is an interesting one. While ultimately these type of lists are perhaps silly, they are lots of fun. I have, at two different times in my career, done a huge survey of my fellow musicians on this very topic. Each time, I had over 100 respondents, so it was a fairly decent sample.

First, as to the critic's list. I am always surprised when others are surprised at Bartok's inclusion. He is quite simply one of the greatest composers in the history of music, judged particularly by sheer compositional craft, the art of writing music. He was easily in the top ten in both of my large surveys, and he would be in my personal top five as well. I know very few musicians indeed that do not consider him one of the greatest.

The biggest surprises to me are the extremely high rankings of Schubert and Debussy. These two of course are great, and ranked pretty high in my own surveys, but Schubert was just outside the top ten in both, and Debussy a little farther down. Usually only vocalists had Schubert in their top ten, even though many of us, myself included, like listening to his song cycles.

Otherwise, the critic's list is quite close to how my two large surveys turned out, certainly as regards the top three, though Mozart came first and second in my surveys. Composers from my surveys that would replace Schubert and Debussy in the top ten would be Richard Strauss (by far the most surprising omission to any musician, especially a horn player like myself!) Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, and since my surveys were slightly brass heavy, Bruckner was also very close, edging out Verdi. Pianists of course always included Chopin, as did many others.

I don't have the surveys in front of me, but could dig them out if any are interested. My own personal list would go something like this:

For me, the top five, not necessarily in this order, are Mozart, Wagner, Bach, Stravinsky, and Bartok. Then would follow Beethoven, Strauss, and Mahler. The other two change all the time, but include Bruckner, Haydn, Brahms, and my two favorite non-standard inclusions would be Gesualdo and Ives.

This has inspired me to do another survey of my fellow musicians - though it will take some time, if I do it I will certainly post the results here.


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  • RE: His Top 10 are certainly not mine - learsfool 01/26/1106:44:32 01/26/11 (1)

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