# Composers most ahead of their time, composers most traditional, and one more option



## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

The third option is, composers like the first group who may be brilliant, but never had an influence of followers that similar to themselves.

Or to word these three in a different way:

Most representative composers ahead of their time
Most representative composers ahead the past especially
Most representative composers most different to most music

If you could put equal talents into each, who would you say are the most representative 5 or so for each category? or just one most representative.


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## christomacin (Oct 21, 2017)

Here another category: The Looniest Composer.

Harry Partch might have that all sown up. Who were some other Loons? Moondog, perhaps?


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

Beethoven was ahead of his time.


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

christomacin said:


> Here another category: The Looniest Composer.
> 
> Harry Partch might have that all sown up. Who were some other Loons? Moondog, perhaps?


I really enjoy Partch's music....very entrancing, meditative....I don't regard it as "loony"...


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

No composer is ahead of his time. 

A composer is obviously of his time, no different than anyone else. He is expressing his music, his ideas, all coming from life around him - the same environment everyone experiences. But he may be living parallel to social expectations because he doesn't involve himself in mainstream conventional thinking.

It is the time which is behind the composer.


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## Skakner (Oct 8, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> *No composer is ahead of his time.*
> 
> A composer is obviously of his time, no different than anyone else. He is expressing his music, his ideas, all coming from life around him - the same environment everyone experiences.


I totally agree with that but, if I had to name a composer who'd make us think otherwise, that would be Stravinsky with Rite of Spring.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The notion of music being ahead of its time is curious. We speak as if doing something before it becomes common practice is some sort of anachronism, as if it somehow doesn't belong in the time during which it occurs. But our perception tends to be based simplistically on what subsequent composers do, and not necessarily with any attention paid to why any of the composers in question do what they do when they do it. When Gesualdo in 1600 uses a lot of chromatic harmony, we think of Wagner or some other late Romantic or modern composer and call Gesualdo "ahead of his time." Why? Why wasn't 1600 exactly the right time for chromatic harmony? Merely because, for a time, other composers used less of it?

The truest sense in which a composer can be ahead of his time is in the lag time between the introduction of a work and the appreciation of audiences. But, contrary to the popular myth of the Misunderstood Artist, the lag is generally not very long when people actually have access to the work in performance. There are various reasons why composers and their music may not be understood or liked early on, and "well, he's just ahead of his time" may be a convenient excuse for failure.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Woodduck said:


> The truest sense in which a composer can be ahead of his time is in the lag time between the introduction of a work and the appreciation of audiences. But, contrary to the popular myth of the Misunderstood Artist, the lag is generally not very long when people actually have access to the work in performance.


Yes. The metaphor "ahead of one's time" is usually misleading. I think what is meant is rather that a composer's work is stunningly original *for its time *so that it is appreciated by a particular section of the audience that is (or deems itself to be) very sophisticated and at the vanguard of taste. 
Then a piece can seem highly modern and a paradigm for the future (so it is expected to be "ahead" or can in retrospect be judged as being ahead because it served as a model). But it does not need to be a model.. A lot of Beethoven feels still fresh or strange and it must have been much more so about 200 years ago but a lot of these works were not really serving as paradigms. The 5th and 6th symphony were, but hardly the Eroica despite/because being more daring in some ways, neither the Waldstein sonata and many others.
Or "Le Sacre du Printemps". Sure, it was a "liberation of rhythm" and there is the Scythian suite and some other "barbaric" works but it was a short-lived fad overall. The dry neoclassicism of "L'histoire du Soldat" was much more influential for longer, I'd say.


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## progmatist (Apr 3, 2021)

Wagner utilized atonality in Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, decades before Schoenberg made atonality a thing.



Captainnumber36 said:


> Beethoven was ahead of his time.


His late quartets sound like they could've been written 2 weeks ago.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

Skakner said:


> I totally agree with that but, if I had to name a composer who'd make us think otherwise, that would be Stravinsky with Rite of Spring.


Rebel, Les Elemens, Chaos

Beethoven, String Quartet no. 13
Piano Sonata no. 29, 32

Berlioz Symphonie Fantasitique


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

progmatist said:


> His late quartets sound like they could've been written 2 weeks ago.


I disagree-- they were "only" roughly a hundred years ahead of their time


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