Best 20th century composer?

[monkspider]

I don't know how I forgot Rachmaninov, and I will concede that Gershwin and a few others should have been included.

[The Andy-Man]

Frank Zappa!!!!

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Lennon and McCartney?

They get my vote. They changed the face of music and its impact on society.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

U2 :doitnow:

[Buck Birdseed]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
Williams should be considered out of sheer prolificness, popularity and recognizeability.

By that account Cliff Richards is the greatest pop star who ever lived.

Let's face it, John Williams did one brilliant score in Jaws and has since done a lot of damage to bring down film scores from their high point in the seventies by helping usher back constant music based on soaring strings.

[mactbone]

Frank Zappa is great.

I'm also all about Eliot Del Borgo, Harry Greggson-Williams, Robert Smith, David Holsinger, Nuobo Uematsu, but... I don't know I'd probably give it to Duke Ellington just because I've played so much of his stuff and thought it was good.

[monolith94]

Buck - did you even for one SECOND listen to his work in "Catch Me If You Can"? I think that it is Williams' best work yet!

[MattyBoy]

Don Walker (of Cold Chisel)

[Straybow]

I voted for Berg. Nobody would actually think he's best of anything, so obviously a vote for him is in place of the missing "banana" option.

Everyone I could think of wasn't really 20th century, such as Dvorak (who died in 1904 but probably didn't write or publish anything major in the 20th century).

Gershwin would get my vote. UAL used Rhapsody in Blue on commercials that played ceaselessly on the news channels. I never tired of it, but rather hungered for more than the bleeding, 30-second chunk cut from the flesh nearest the heart.

Ask next week it could be somebody else, but Gershwin is ear candy.

[Sloth]

Roger Waters

[Sikander]

I voted for Prokofiev. Not because I am willing to argue that he is the best composer of the century, but he's my favorite of those listed.

[Buck Birdseed]

Now, now, don't mention Songwriters. They're in a different, and much higher, category than mere composers.

[Boris Godunov]

Yeah, I'm sure 100 years from now, people will be buying Roger Waters albums in droves and no one will know who Mozart is...

[Buck Birdseed]

Hey, if there was a device to wipe out Roger Waters from everyone's collective memory right now, I'd be right there repeatedly bashing the "go" button with my fist.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Straybow
Ask next week it could be somebody else, but Gershwin is ear candy.

Gershwin can't be dismissed as mere ear candy. Porgy and Bess is a wonderful opera, and his music is quite well crafted. Just because he uses the jazz idiom doesn't make his music less intelligent.

If anything, Berg is far too intellectualized. He was quite dismayed to discover that his carefully-crafted atonalism, which was build on incredibly complex systems, was audibly indistinguishable from completely randomized atonal music.

That's why Schoenberg, the founding father of atonalism, abandoned it, declaring it a dead end.