bagong

I'm surprised this has gotten to page 2 without anyone mentioning the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. It's hard to point to one person as the most influential in 20th century music, but he's certainly up there.

Hawkingfan

Yes, I agree about the English. My favorite post-Britten English composer is William Walton. His second symphony is up there with the Prokofiev 5 and Shostakovith 5, 10, (any number really). Vaughn-Williams 4 is good too.
But I think Gershwin's harmony certainly isn't as complex as someone as say, Debussy. In fact, the truly inventive composer (yes, I call him a "composer") who took Debussian harmony and African-American music and applied it to his creations in jazz (and even wrote "classical" music) was Duke Ellington.
I don't think too many people played Mahler back in the 60's. Probably because Bernstein was still in the process of bringing him to the forefront. That was probably Bernstein's greatest contribution to classical music--the re-discovery (or really "discovery") of Mahler.

Deacon Doubtmonger

How about the greatest contributors of musical wreckage: Todd Storz and Gordon McClendon (sp?), who invented the Top 40 radio format. Rumor has it they got the idea when they saw a jilted woman in some diner in the Deep South put the same record on the jukebox 40 consecutive times. So some woman copes with a broken heart, S & M [!] capitalize, and as a result we have today's mind-numbingly repetitive, banal, asinine radio landscape. Grrrrrrr ...

Deacon Doubtmonger

Friar Bellows

You do realise that you're making a purely subjective judgement involving a thoroughly emotional activity: listening to music. She likes Elvis, and he likes the Beatles ... both think the other's favourite music is "banal" and "asinine". Recently I've come to realise that there is no good or bad music (same goes for all art); there is no objective way to judge the quality of a piece of music. All we can say is that some music affects us differently than other music. And each of us is affected differently. No use getting "Grrrrrrr ... " about it.

Deacon Doubtmonger

It's not the music itself I'm calling banal/asinine and "Grrrr"-ing at here, but the business practices in broadcasting it. For example, I can remember when KDKB in Phoenix was a genuine underground progressive station; it was the first place I ever heard Roxy Music, the Mothers of Invention, King Crimson, and many other progressive rock stalwarts, and it showed tremendous respect for the musical intelligence of its listeners. (No "morning zoo" crap, either!) Regrettably, they eventually changed ownership and began doing the Top 40 aural treadmill/hamster wheel bit, shoving the same tired old chestnuts repeatedly down the ears.

To be fair, this doesn't happen only in rock radio; here's Frank Zappa on why classical music performance is also chestnut-driven:

When the people in the Secret Office Where They Run Everything From found out about Debbie, they were thrilled.... She was immediately chosen to become the Archetypal Imaginary Pop Music Consumer & Ultimate Arbiter of Musical Taste for the Entire Nation ... Since Debbie prefers only short songs with lyrics about boy-girl relationships, sung by persons of indeterminate sex, wearing S&M clothing, and because there is Large Money involved, the major record companies (which a few years ago occasionally risked investment in recordings of new works) have all but shut down their classical divisions, seldom recording new music....

There is another reason for the popularity of Dead Person Music.... By performing pieces that the orchestra members have hacked their way through since conservatory days, the rehearsal costs are minimized -- players go into jukebox mode, and spew off 'the classics' with ease -- and the expensive guest conductor, unencumbered by a score with 'problems' in it, gets to thrash around in mock ecstasy for the benefit of the committee ladies (who wish he didn't have any pants on).

I know personal musical taste varies widely, but Storz & McClendon are the biggest dink-wits in first putting forth the idea that listeners are a bunch of dumbasses who can't or won't appreciate anything unusual or musically challenging, but will instead passively absorb cliche factory pop rock repeated endlessly so that the advertisers can glue them to the radio for the commercials. The entire American musical culture has suffered greatly for it.

Deacon Doubtmonger

Friar Bellows

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what the listeners want? I mean, a radio station is a business. They must have done their market research and found that people wanted "the same tired old chestnuts". So they played them. And while I love the metaphor ("Top 40 aural treadmill/hamster wheel" ), isn't that a perfect example of a subjective judgement? The Zappa quote is more of the same, although he does make some good points about production costs for classical music.

But weren't they proved right? I don't mean that listeners are "dumbasses", but they do seem to prefer certain types of music over others. And those types are what you're hearing predominantly on the radio.

TomboyMom

Scott Joplin.
Louis Armstrong.

Aretha Franklin
And anyone who takes issue with the last one has me to contend with.

Rene

Graeme

James Brown
Bill Laswell
Les Paul
Rakim
George Clinton

Deacon Doubtmonger

This begs the question: Do radio stations play crap because people want it, or do people want it because radio stations give them nothing else, so they learn not to want anything better?

Also keep in mind the flaws in the sampling method: (1) Audience samples are notoriously small; I don't know what the base is for the Arbitron radio ratings these days, but the Nielsen TV ratings supposedly represent the viewing tastes of 260-some million Americans based on a sample of only 1,250 homes. (2) Probably Arbitron does its sampling online now, but when I was in college, they did it by paper diaries, which of course the listener can make mistakes in, or falsify outright. I know of no radio equivalent to the Nielsen Audimeter, which accurately records what channel was selected and when.
Granted. I'll gladly admit to a strong subjective bias: I am a musician trained in both classical and jazz, and have a good enough ear, and enough grounding in music theory, to know not only what music I like but why. My favorite composers are the ones who were free to break musical rules (such as no parallel fifths or octaves, no unresolved sevenths, no disagreement between the chord in the bass and the chord of the melody, and absolutely no discord at all, ever, under any circumstances). Mozart followed all of these (except in the opening of the "Dissonance" Quartet), and as a result, I can hear one of his pieces for the first time and pretty much know exactly where it's going to go -- nothing interesting or surprising. This is why I can't stand him, but you're right -- that is my subjective judgment.

The economics of rock recording figure in as well. For an excellent musicological explanation of how and why, I strongly recommend Mark Hunter's article "The Beat Goes Off: How Technology Has Gummed Up Rock's Groove" in the May 1987 issue of Harper's (I couldn't find it reproduced online).

Deacon Doubtmonger

Immaculate Deception

Actually, that was a remake. The original was by Five Man Electric Band. Consider yourself lucky that you haven't heard the original.