• Photos
  • Bio
  • Contact Ian

Ian Sidden

Subscribe

  • Email
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Craft
  • My News
  • About the Music
  • The Rest of Life

10 Greatest Composers

January 8, 2011 By Ian Sidden

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”

–Richard Strauss

At the New York Times, music critic Anthony Tommasini is compiling a list of the ten greatest composers. He acknowledges that:

…the resulting list would not be the point. But the process of coming up with such a list might be clarifying and instructive, as well as exasperating and fun.

Mr. Tommasini’s basic guidelines are that the composers be from the late Baroque and before our lifetime. So neither Josquin nor Barber could be considered. As justification, he says in the comments:

I find it almost possible to compare the achievements of, say, Schumann and Beethoven. How do you compare Schumann and Dufay?

If composers before Bach could be considered, I’d find room for Monteverdi definitely and possibly Josquin and Palestrina. But then we do get into a mess because you could make a good case for Phillipe de Vitry, Leonin, Machaut, Dufay, and Perotin. Hmmm.

The limitation is essential for this.

How to Decide

So what would be your list? And more importantly, what would you use to decide?

I would have to balance quality and influence. Of course, then you would have to decide what having “quality” means (see Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) and how to measure influence. Is it influence on myself or on other people regardless of my feelings about that composer’s music?

Mr. Tommasini’s starting point is J.S. Bach. Certainly most of us could agree on that, yes?

Then we begin stating obvious choices…Mozart…Beethoven…Haydn? Handel? Brahms? Where is Wagner, Verdi, and Schubert? How about Berlioz and Gluck? Does Debussy stand on his own? How about Ravel? And the Russians, where are they? How about pianists like Chopin and Liszt? Does the vast output of Telemann put him in this league?

My Current List

So here’s my – if you had a gun up to my head – 10 Greatest list. This is not necessarily in any order either:

  • J.S Bach
  • Mozart
  • Beethoven
  • Wagner
  • Schubert
  • Debussy
  • Brahms
  • Verdi
  • Haydn
  • Tchaikovsky

I defined quality through a mixture of conscious understanding of technique and my own emotional reaction to these composers’ music. I’ve picked pretty obvious composers – I believe – so their influence is understood if not totally fleshed out here. Since I’m a singer, I am biased toward vocal music composers.

My analytical brain really questions Tchaikovsky, but I’m not sure who would replace him (Mahler maybe? Schumann?). Besides, I just love listening to his stuff.

It is unfortunate that there are no English (Britten and Purcell are both disqualified) nor American composers nor any women. Most come from the Germanic countries and Vienna in particular. I don’t know what to do about this though. If Mahler and Schumann were added, then this skew would be further exaggerated. Alas.

I would love love love to know if you’re putting together your own list and how you would do it. Let me know what you decide.

Filed Under: About the Music Tagged With: Anthony Tommasini, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Franz Schubert, Haydn, Mahler, Mozart, New York Times, Samuel Barber, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner

Decluttering through Digitization: Possibilities and Danger

August 23, 2010 By Ian Sidden

 

A plaque at the Lilly Library

To accomplish my recent cross-country move (NM to PA), I reduced my possessions by a great percentage and stuffed everything into the bed of my pickup truck. In so doing, I have had to think deeply about the objects that come into our lives and how best to deal with them.

The subject of decluttering is especially relevant now that digital versions of traditionally physical objects become commonplace. Pictures, recordings, and texts are all becoming digitized, and we’re crazy if we think there’s no loss in that. Sure, there are enormous benefits from space savings and easy access, but we should be aware of the consequences of our choices.

Digitization: Scan and Shred

Before my move, I’d been reading http://unclutterer.com and http://zenhabits.net. There’s something romantic about living with fewer physical possessions. Before my move, I had accumulated excess stuff, and I had to make fast choices about what needed to be trashed, donated, or sold. Or digitized.

On top of that, bills and other documents just became mountains of sensitive personal information that had to be treated like toxic waste. I wanted the information, but the paper itself needed to be trashed.

So my guiding principle was that the “information” was important while the vehicle was not. IE, a picture of a receipt is just as useful as the actual receipt unless it was for a really expensive item. I signed up for Carbonite online backup and scheduled backups to an external hard drive. There was very little danger that all the information I collected would suddenly vanish.

For the month before my move I used my scanner with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and my girlfriend’s digital camera to take pictures of receipts, forms, photographs and other odds and ends. I then arranged them in folders on the hard drive with obvious names so that I could easily search for them. If the item was sensitive clutter, I shredded it. I also looked at e-book versions of books that I owned and donated or sold many of my physcial books.

I scanned, shredded and donated to my heart’s content. It was and is magical to be able to just click the Windows button on the keyboard, type a keyword in the search box, and have files pop up. For many items, there was no more digging around in boxes or file folders to find them. If I scan the receipt there’s no more fading of the text.

As I purged, I felt mental clutter vanish along with the physical. It was exhilarating.

The Wonders of the Lilly Library

During the move, I visited the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. There I was shown amazing artifacts that existed because someone decided that they were worth saving. George Washington’s hair. A Haydn piano sonata manuscript. Mexican Gregorian chant found in Guatemala.

clip_image004

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The caption below it explains that it was only preserved because people thought it was a divine relic. Thanks to them and the Lilly, the text is available for performance and has been performed by early music musicians at IU.

The library is full of things like that. There are several manuscripts of famous books there that contain the handwritten edits of the authors. There are rare and interesting bindings that all reveal the love that somebody had for that particular book. There are multiple copies of the same text but housed in bizarre and wonderful ways (The Book of Common Prayer being a prime example). It became clear that the value of some books was not only housed within the information but also within the physical form of the book itself.

After I had left the library, I realized that there were a few things that I had regretted shredding, and I was grateful that I hadn’t shredded everything that I had digitized.

What is worth preserving?

There were a few things that I photographed or scanned and couldn’t bear to destroy. Letters from my grandparents and my journals were prime examples. I scanned one journal and got the “information”, but it wasn’t the same. The look and feel of the thing conveys much of its information, and at least for now, I’m not a good enough photographer to capture it adequately. So I kept it.

But on the other hand, we as human beings cannot continually collect without some sort of reckoning at some point. Either we:

  1. Invest an increasing amounts of time and money to store and take care of things
  2. Or sell them
  3. Or give them away
  4. Or throw them away
  5. Or have them slowly rot away to be ruined
  6. Or die and leave stuff to people who will have to make this choice for us

The person who started the Lilly library was very wealthy and could choose option one for his collection. But the rest of us? We have lives to lead, and many of us don’t know where we’ll be from one year to the next. To maintain an ever increasing library of worthy physical objects is simply untenable without major personal sacrifice. Decluttering can feel like a moral objective.

The Choice: Decluttering vs Preservation

We have an amazing opportunity for new ways of organization and storage of “possessions” in digital forms. We also have so much inflow that it becomes important to deal with it in some responsible manner.

But I think we should make thoughtful choices in our decluttering about what we destroy or toss out even if we make digital versions. Those treasured objects at the Lilly are the result of many people making choices about what was worth keeping. The person who decided that Washington was a great man kept that lock of his hair and preserved it. That was a choice. Seeing a digital photo is not the same as seeing it preserved.

Dangers

To illustrate a great loss: Henri Duparc went through a major purge where he destroyed many of his compositions, which included an entire opera. We now have a body of seventeen art songs of his and a few other works. What did the musical world lose when he did that? We may think that our digital information is immortal, but if everything that we write nowadays is hidden behind a password protected vault, then does it exist if we suddenly pass away?

But even if there are digital versions of scores and books that are easily accessible, by keeping everything digital we remove the possibility that future generations will understand how we edited something. That Haydn score at the Lilly had alternative passages to what is presented as the accepted version. If he had just created it in Sibelius, tinkered until he was happy and then printed it, we would not see his creative process or have alternative options for performance. The same can be said of countless other manuscripts within the library.

Possibilities

One could argue that this is not as important. With recordings we have access to performance practice information in ways we can only dream of with music of Haydn and Mozart’s time. This is valuable and may counteract the loss of hand-written edits. Plus, our software is becoming more advanced, and many now offer “versioning” of files that preserve older edits so that we can review our overall process.

Furthermore, as we become more digitally savvy, we might create new outlets for creativity that simply leave the older paradigms behind. How about ebooks with animation or books laid out like video games? Or perhaps we’ll invent something completely new. We just don’t know where our shared creativity will take us.

So I can’t come up with any hard and fast rules, but I think it’s a discussion worth having with ourselves and each other. As much of our information becomes reduced to ones and zeros, we need to question our values when it comes to preservation.

What is worth preserving in a physical form?

Further Reading:

Often the comments are as valuable as the articles themselves.

  • Digitize Everything by Mike Elgan
  • From Lifehacker
    • The Step-by-Step Guide to Digitizing Your Life Adam Dachis
    • What Physical “Stuff” Can’t You Bring Yourself to Leave for Digital Counterparts? from Adam Pash
  • Trend spotting: Tech-savvy minimalism by Erin at Unclutterer
  • The Wastefulness of Deccluttering; or How to Make Less Count for More by Leo Babauta at Zen Habits
  • Books Have Many Futures by Linton Weeks at NPR.
  • And just in: Seth Godin will no longer publish traditional books.

Filed Under: The Rest of Life Tagged With: Chant, Decluttering, Digitization, Duparc, Haydn, Lilly Library, Moving

About Ian

Ian Sidden is currently a baritone member of the Theater Dortmund Opera chorus. Read More…

Latest Posts

Premiere: Fernand Cortez

Tonight we premiere our production of Gaspare Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête du Mexique at Opernhaus Dortmund. This is after a two year delay; originally we were to have premiered this in 2020, but history intervened. There are many versions of this opera floating around, and we are doing a version that has – […]

Premiere: Frédégonde

Here’s one I’ve been looking forward to for awhile. Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering Frédegonde for the first time in Germany. It’s a work inspired from the early history of the Merovingians in what is now France and the ongoing feud between two of the queens, Brunhild and Frédegonde. The work was composed by […]

“Ständchen” by Schubert, Guitar and Voice Arrangement

Here is a performance of my self accompanied guitar arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen”.

PREMIERE: Tosca

Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering our “Tosca”, which is the first premiere including the chorus since March 13, 2020.

A chart showing the seven day average new cases in Dortmund

One Year Later

On March 13, 2020, we had our last large premiere at Theater Dortmund with the chorus onstage. We performed “Die Stumme von Portici” to a nearly empty auditorium, a so-called Geisterpremiere. We nevertheless, of course, gave it our all. There have been other premieres since then as the lockdowns have come and gone, but so […]

Copyright © 2022 · WordPress