# Relationship between accessability and quality (aka greatness ;) of works



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

Do you think that accessibility and quality of works are directly proportional, inversely proportional, or totally unrelated?

I know that some elitists (not only in classical music, but also in rock music, in poetry, literature, etc...) tend to think that most hermetic and inaccessible works are the greatest.

I tend to disagree.

When it comes to literature, my favorite novel, (so far) is Brothers Karamazov, but I find the style of writing used in it as extremely simple, clear and accessible. What makes it great is not its complexity but the importance of questions asked, the way it makes you think about certain things, etc...

In music some of the greatest compositions are extremely accessible, like Beethoven's symphonies, for example. Like, on the very first listening, Betthoven's Fifth will blow you away, it's extremely accessible. Other symphonies require perhaps a bit more listening to sink in, but they are still quite accessible. 9th symphony is also very accessible, and so far I have listened to it at least 10 times, and it's still fresh to me. But not as fresh as it used to be. But it's still my no. 1 favorite work of all classical music.

Most of Bach's works are also very accessible, especially Brandenburg concertos, Goldberg variations, etc... Vivaldi's Four seasons are also love on first listening, and surprisingly they remain quite fresh to me, but I know of people who are already sick of them.

I can understand why a bit of hermeticism can be a good thing. If a work is too clear and straightforward, perhaps it can age quicker for you and become boring. You can spoil it quicker with repeated listenings.

Also there can be a certain pleasure in trying to penetrate into mysteries of a more difficult work, solving it as a puzzle, or letting it slowly reveal itself to you, over time.

So what's your take on it?

Also perhaps you can list some of your favorite accessible and favorite inaccessible works?


----------



## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Unrelated. 

Accessible and great: Dvorak symphony 9
Accessible and not great: Raff symphony 3
Inaccessible and not great: Artur Schnabel symphony 2
Inaccessible and great: Schoenberg Pelleas and Melisande. Of course, over time becomes more and more accessible to the open ear.


----------



## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

I like complex things where you have to struggle to access them and enjoy the reward - wether we are talking science (making many years of effort to understand quantum mechanics), or reading complex literature (The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Master and Margarita, Man Without Qualities, Process, Ulysses, Magic Mountain) or listening to complex music. The easy things are easily obtained, but leave no lasting mark. 
Classical music in itself is inaccessible to many people, because it requires effort. They prefer the junk music that they are being fed on the radio.
An example from within classical music? Hindemith is certainly not easily accessible, but totally worth the effort.


----------



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

> reading complex literature (The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Master and Margarita, Man Without Qualities, Process, Ulysses, Magic Mountain)


Of those that you mentioned I have read The Brothers Karamazov, Magic Mountain and Process.
The first two books I found very easy read and accessible, even though they deal with complex and important issues, but I found Process very inaccessible and confusing, much more difficult than Karamazovs or Magic Mountain.


----------



## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

ZJovicic said:


> Of those that you mentioned I have read The Brothers Karamazov, Magic Mountain and Process.
> The first two books I found very easy read and accessible, even though they deal with complex and important issues, but I found Process very inaccessible and confusing, much more difficult than Karamazovs or Magic Mountain.


The hardest book to read from the list above is Ulysses, but that is primarily because of its experimental writing style than because of some intrinsic depth. So you have a difficult book without depth. On the other hand Master and Margarita is deceptively easy to read, but hard to get its real meaning. So you have an easy book with great depth. So yes, difficulty and depth (greatness) are unrelated. And Magic Mountain is definitely not an easy novel. It might be an easy read, but it is a hell to interpret because of its ambiguity and multilayered symbolism.


----------



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

Maybe it's deceptively easy, as you said, easy on surface...

But generally, at least when it comes to literature I think clarity is a virtue, and I believe that you can ask profound questions and present profound situations, characters, etc, with a very clear language.

In music on the other hand, I think clarity is good too, but I don't mind a bit of hermeticism/inaccessibility, because with music I will usually listen to one thing multiple times and difficulty of work can make it more rewarding in long term.
Novels, on the other hand I usually read just once, with some exceptions of course.


----------



## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

some things are inaccessible and not worth the bother - Finnegans Wake in literature, some atonal works in music


----------



## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Completely unrelated. Certain accessible works will be touted as the greatest, no doubt, by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart when there is way more works by others that are at least equally great. Favourites considered "inaccessible": Prokofiev Sonata 6, Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion Celesta, String Quartet 5. Varese Hyperprism, Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms. I can't personally imagine these taking a back seat in quality to the best by anyone. Favourite accessible: Mozart Don Giovanni, Victoria Requiem, Beethoven Piano Sonata 26, Debussy Prelude to Afternoon..., Ravel String Quartet.


----------



## ZJovicic (Feb 26, 2017)

BTW my favorite work that's considered inaccessible is Grosse Fuge, by far.

Most of my other favorites are more or less accessible.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The greatest works are generally quite accessible, assuming some familiarity with the language or idiom in which they're composed. That doesn't mean that they're easily understood, but only that they have qualities that draw people to them. It's a defining quality of great art that it embraces different levels of meaning, and this manifests in a variety of surface qualities which speak to people of varied viewpoints and degrees of sophistication.


----------



## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

An interesting point raised in the OP about whether and how accessible works become tiresome through hearing them too many times. Perhaps the more knowledgeable musical specialists can shed some light here. In my case, for example, Scheherazade, the Dvořák 9th, and the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures are dead to me, yet nothing by Rachmaninoff, heard just as often in the past and very much still heard, fails to continue to offer me great pleasure, though they surely can felt to be equally hackneyed. Are the melodies in the first lot more trite, more predictable than those of R? Or, more likely, is it merely an idiosyncrasy?


----------



## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I was thinking more about this. Inaccessible music can't be perceived being great to us. It has to be accessible to recognize its greatness. So the word has more to do with our perception of the accessibleness to others. Much of Classical is not that accessible to the pop fan, the most accessible you can tell by the number of requests on Classical.fm. Modern is less accessible than traditional common practice, getting little to no requests.

Bach is not that much requested in my station, not as much as Dvorak, he only wrote one lollipop! (Air)


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> An interesting point raised in the OP about whether and how accessible works become tiresome through hearing them too many times. Perhaps the more knowledgeable musical specialists can shed some light here. In my case, for example, Scheherazade, the Dvořák 9th, and the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures are dead to me, yet nothing by Rachmaninoff, heard just as often in the past and very much still heard, fails to continue to offer me great pleasure, though they surely can felt to be equally hackneyed. Are the melodies in the first lot more trite, more predictable than those of R? Or, more likely, is it merely an idiosyncrasy?


I think what we tire of is mostly a personal matter, as well as a matter of overexposure. But it's interesting that I have similar reactions to some of the music you mention, except that I have to add Rach's 2nd concerto to the works that no longer do much for me (his other works remain more affecting). Bringing this back to the thread topic, it may be that some works are just _too_ accessible: very appealing on the surface, but lacking depth that would reward us over time (I definitely feel that way about Scheherezade, which now bores me thoroughly). I'd say, for example, that Rach's 3rd and 4th concerti (and probably even the 1st, which he later revised) are less obvious in their material and construction than the 2nd. I'd also say that almost anything by Rachmaninoff has more depth of emotion than almost anything by Rimsky Korsakov! But I suppose that too much listening could wear the other concertos out as well. (Isle of the Dead? Never! )


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

ZJovicic said:


> but I found Process very inaccessible and confusing, much more difficult than Karamazovs or Magic Mountain.


Well there's the snowstorm and what it means, and what Mynheer Peeperkorn's wisdom consists in, not to mention the details of the argument between Setembrini and Naphta. With Karamazov, I never worked out who did the murder!

kafka's hard because of the links to Judaism, you may have to be a jew to get it, all that stuff about the law.


----------



## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> I was thinking more about this. Inaccessible music can't be perceived being great to us. It has to be accessible to recognize its greatness. So the word has more to do with our perception of the accessibleness to others. Much of Classical is not that accessible to the pop fan ...


I think this quote has something. If by accessible we mean "able to enjoy" or something like that then accessibility will be correlated with greatness (I assume greatness is ultimately about the power to move us in some significant or "deep" way). But this is at least partly about our knowing the language of the piece so that it speaks to us - and "complex" music is music we don't (yet) know how to "hear" - but we can't make the idea of complexity disappear like that.

Looking at the music we know, some still seems more complex than others. But what is this complexity? Some music sounds simple (Mozart, for example) but can be very difficult to bring to life (implying a sort of hidden complexity?), for example. And are Bach fugues complex or simple? They follow rules so they can't be that complex, can they? I'm trying to think of a piece that I "understand" but that is very complex and right now I can't. So it can _seem _like a piece's complexity is just a matter of not knowing it very well. No: I think complexity must be a technical musicological idea (and therefore one I am poorly equipped to identify).

In literature, as well, complexity must be more than "hard to read". I'm reading Ford Maddox Ford's _The Good Soldier_ at the moment and initially found it hard to read. But, once I got to understand that the narrator is not entirely honest and misrepresents events and feelings before telling us the truth, it became a lot easier to read with pleasure.


----------

