# Composers who were NOT "ahead of their time"



## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Are there any composers you love who, to your knowledge, were _not_ the first to employ some clever musical device, were _not_ ostracized in their own time as being too difficult or too strange, and/or whose pieces tend _not_ deviate from conventional forms?

I ask because I'm curious how important being ahead of one's time is to musical tastes and preferences. I notice that this is often one of the first things mentioned whenever it comes to promote or defend a composer. Do we ever praise composers for epitomizing their time rather than transcending it? I'm also wondering if, for just about any composer one could name, it is possible to concoct _some_ way in which they were ahead of their time.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

It's no fun picking on small fry, so I'll go with Shostakovich.


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## regressivetransphobe (May 16, 2011)

that finnish guy


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Rachmaninoff. Dowland. Denis Gaultier. Louis Couperin.


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## appoggiatura (Feb 6, 2012)

Rachmaninoff. I love his music. He was considered as being too traditional so I'd go for him.
However, I think the brilliant way of using harmonies and almost jazzy chords makes him stand out. I don't think he is traditional at all in this aspect.


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Most English composers.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

It is usually possible to find some progressive traits in almost any composer, but I agree that Rachmaninov seems to have been consistently conservative among those we tend to remember these days. 
Composers like Arensky, Grechaninov, Rodrigo, Siegfried Wagner at least also come to mind.


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, Ippolitov-Ivanov and I like them all.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

S-Saens was perhaps not that uniformly conservative; the Carnival of the Animals (albeit he supressed it) shows great innovation; his experiments with exoticism and unusual instrumentation (the Septet) also reveal some looking forward.

Ippolitov also did some experiments in exotic instrumentation and promoted Caucasian folk music, but overall he was not very progressive, I agree.


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## Mephistopheles (Sep 3, 2012)

I think it's difficult to know what is really meant by being ahead of the time. After all, no matter what their style, every composer had a unique way of writing, so by what standard do we judge unique compositional techniques as either ahead of the time or just mundane? I prefer not to think of composers in terms of artistic conservatism and radicalism - especially because our perception of these traits is often skewed by our convenient overviews of history which they did not have - but instead in terms of influence, and even that isn't very helpful.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Had he not been murdered by marauding Uhlans in 1914 while defending his property Frenchman Alberic Magnard probably wouldn't have cared if time had actually stood still in 1890. No La Belle Epoque-style fripperies for him - his music owed more to Franck in its construction, Brahms in its specific gravity and Berlioz in its seriousness and what I've heard of it is actually rather good, especially the four symphonies.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

elgars ghost said:


> Had he not been murdered by marauding Uhlans in 1914 while defending his property Frenchman Alberic Magnard probably wouldn't have cared if time had actually stood still in 1890. No La Belle Epoque-style fripperies for him - his music owed more to Franck in its construction, Brahms in its specific gravity and Berlioz in its seriousness and what I've heard of it is actually rather good, especially the four symphonies.


This is the first time in 40 years I've actually ever heard someone else mention him. I've always liked the recording of the Third that Ansermet made with the Philharmonia that Decca/London promoted as Ansermet's last recording. (I've also always thought it a better symphony than Franck's.)

George


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

I agree with your overall point; yet Magnard´s cello sonata is said to move through almost all keys, heralding 20th century musical developments. 
And his political views were partly left-wing, his 3rd Symphony dedicated to feminism, the orchestral "Hymne a la Justice" to Dreyfus, and he left the army in protest of the government´s Dreyfus trial. He likewise chose a publisher who was promoting the cause of communism and socialism.


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## Ramako (Apr 28, 2012)

Saying 'ahead of their time' suggests some sort of inexorable musical development.

Surely what is more accurate is that each composer is unique, and subsequent composers then take good ideas from the good composers and adopt them as standard practice, thus assimilating what was once unique into the standard vocabulary. Thus the first composer who was merely original is labelled as ahead of their time. He probably had many other ideas that were not adopted, either because they were bad or unadaptable, and worse composers may also have been original. The 'progress' of history is defined in retrospect.


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## Guest (Sep 12, 2012)

"An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs." --Edgard Varese


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Mephistopheles said:


> I think it's difficult to know what is really meant by being ahead of the time. After all, no matter what their style, every composer had a unique way of writing


It is quite difficult, yes. I've suggested three criteria in my original post, but they are by no means exhaustive nor, someone can surely argue, accurate.



Mephistopheles said:


> I prefer not to think of composers in terms of artistic conservatism and radicalism


I also prefer not to do that, and I'm guessing most people here would, if pressed, say the same. And yet it's interesting how often we do it anyway--thinking of composers in terms of conservatism and radicalism, that is--when no one is explicitly bringing the issue to the forefront.



Ramako said:


> The 'progress' of history is defined in retrospect.


Agreed, and when you put it that way, then another way of asking my question is this: how consciously or unconsciously do you adhere to this retrospective definition when you evaluate composers?


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

3 b's: bach, brahms, barber


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## Mephistopheles (Sep 3, 2012)

It's perhaps worth noting as well that the innovative novelty of all but the most recent pieces is lost on us modern listeners. When we hear _The Rite of Spring_, even for the first time, we're not hearing it in the same context as those in 1913, and the effect it had then will never be the same. To really understand the novelties of a piece of music, we have to research what was new about it at the time, and try to put ourselves in the shoes of the first audience. I often read about a piece of music - say by Mozart or Mendelssohn or whoever - and find that a certain aspect of it was new for its time, and think, "Well I'd never have guessed that."


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

norman bates said:


> 3 b's: bach, brahms, barber


I always thought the "Three B's" referred to Byrd, Bartók, and Britten. But when I asked a friend about it he politely chided me for being so ignorant of classical music and set me aright with the _true_ holy trinity of B's: Boulez, Babbitt, Berio.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

It's fascinating some people nominated Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.

People influenced by *Glazunov*. 

If there was a man even _behind_ his time, it would be him. <3


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> The _true_ holy trinity of B's: Boulez, Babbitt, Berio.


I'm not sure how "holy" that trinity is.


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## drpraetorus (Aug 9, 2012)

Bach was the culmination of his times. Brahms was no where near being ahead of his times. Michael Praetorius was also the culmination of his times.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Most composers still in the repertoire combined tradition with innovation (innovations either of their own, or taken/refined from others). So I'd say Bach, Sibelius and Rachmaninov definitely innovated, but they also more than 'tipped their hat' to tradition.

For me though, the 'conservative' versus 'traditionalist' divide is mostly not that important. I've grown out of being more the 'hard core' type modernist, not only as it prevented me from enjoying a lot more music, but also because I realised I had a kind of out of proportion focus on one type of innovation (hint: the obvious, blatant, maybe 'wierd' kind, which you can spot from a mile away).

A famous anecdote is this - after humming a tune from Sibelius' 5th symphony, Morton Feldman said:

_...The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical... _

http://www.talkclassical.com/14431-conservatives-radicals-all.html

But some other composers that where kind of behind their time:

Max Bruch

Rued Langgaard (but he had a few/couple of innovative works, eg. 'Music of the Spheres')

Quite a few Australian composers before 1945 (or even later than that), we really didn't begin to 'write our own tunes' till after the war, until then most where too busy copying European music (but Percy Grainger was a bit of an exception, and Alfred Hill had some more interesting works but also ones that where like rehash of stuff going on in 1850). . .


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> It's fascinating some people nominated Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff.
> 
> People influenced by *Glazunov*.
> 
> If there was a man even _behind_ his time, it would be him. <3


A little bit of modernity is found in his early interest and inspiration from Wagner (symphonic poem "The Sea", late 1880s) and his slightly jazzy saxophone music (1930s).


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## Guest (Sep 13, 2012)

Most of my favorite composers were not ahead of their times. No sense rushing forward and trying desperately to be original - a doorbell symphony perhaps? Better to make music that sounds good or otherwise has merit.

Of course some people want to listen to fingers-on-a-chalkboard music. So even the zaniest avant garde composer may find an audience. For every pot there's a lid, as they say. I'm happy with mine.


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## hocket (Feb 21, 2010)

You should probably distinguish between composers being inventive and those who are actually avant-garde. For instance someone like Mozart composed and no doubt was often innovative in the course of his craft whereas Beethoven was consciously trying to do something 'new', and you could say much the same of Monteverdi. If you take people like JS Bach or Gesualdo they were positively reactionary, but that doesn't prevent them from doing things that were novel -even though they were very far from being on the 'cutting edge' of music in their day.


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## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

Mendelssohn was a fairly traditional composer from what I understand. So, not ahead of his time. It's not important for me for a composer to be ahead of their time. If music is pleasing to my ear, I like it. Plain and simple


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

Writing music isn't about "being ahead of your time" or behind your time or typical of your times. Its about expressing yourself the way you want through sound, no matter what techniques that requires. I would argue that listeners are for the most part quite behind the times in that most listeners have a very narrow range of things they accept in music, whereas artists tend to grasp far more of the vast range of sonic possibilities. Music is probably the only artform where criticism has hardly advanced since 1900.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

BurningDesire said:


> Writing music isn't about "being ahead of your time" or behind your time or typical of your times. Its about expressing yourself the way you want through sound, no matter what techniques that requires. I would argue that listeners are for the most part quite behind the times in that most listeners have a very narrow range of things they accept in music, whereas artists tend to grasp far more of the vast range of sonic possibilities. Music is probably the only artform where criticism has hardly advanced since 1900.


I agree that listeners are, in general, behind the times. I'm not sure most classical music listeners have a very narrow range of things they accept in music. I think most like some Baroque, Classical, Early and Late Romantic. That's a rather wide range of styles.

In the _What is the point of Atonal music?_ thread, some briefly discussed whether music differed from literature and painting in the acceptance of modern "art". I agree with your point here. Certainly there are many museums of modern art where significant resources have been allocated to displaying modern visual art. As far as I know, modern fiction is quite popular even amongst those who adore the classics. There are some authors (James Joyce was suggested) who are rather difficult reads, but these are, I believe, rare. Music does seem to stand out among modern art forms as leaving significant patrons behind. I'm not really sure why that is.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

mmsbls said:


> I agree that listeners are, in general, behind the times. I'm not sure most classical music listeners have a very narrow range of things they accept in music. I think most like some Baroque, Classical, Early and Late Romantic. That's a rather wide range of styles.
> 
> In the _What is the point of Atonal music?_ thread, some briefly discussed whether music differed from literature and painting in the acceptance of modern "art". I agree with your point here. Certainly there are many museums of modern art where significant resources have been allocated to displaying modern visual art. As far as I know, modern fiction is quite popular even amongst those who adore the classics. There are some authors (James Joyce was suggested) who are rather difficult reads, but these are, I believe, rare. Music does seem to stand out among modern art forms as leaving significant patrons behind. I'm not really sure why that is.


I think the 'behindness' is related to _@BurningDesire_'s phrase "vast range of sonic possibilities". We troglodytes tend to follow the logical premise that music is sound, but sound may not be music.


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## waldvogel (Jul 10, 2011)

Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born eight years after Beethoven in 1778, and died in 1837 - after the first performances of _Symphonie Fantastique_ and _Carnaval_. I can't hear any of Beethoven's influence in Hummel's music - he never left the musical world of Mozart and Haydn.

Despite all this, I rather like Hummel's music, at least what I've managed to hear of it. Besides writing the other famous trumpet concerto, the chamber music that I've heard is definitely worth listening to.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

waldvogel said:


> Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born eight years after Beethoven in 1778, and died in 1837 - after the first performances of _Symphonie Fantastique_ and _Carnaval_. I can't hear any of Beethoven's influence in Hummel's music - he never left the musical world of Mozart and Haydn.
> 
> Despite all this, I rather like Hummel's music, at least what I've managed to hear of it. Besides writing the other famous trumpet concerto, the chamber music that I've heard is definitely worth listening to.


Yeah, I too like a lot of Hummel's chamber/garden music. My highly non-musicological take is that he incorporated ideas from Mozart and Haydn into the Gallant, a synthesis that results in music that makes a pleasing sheepshank kind of connection.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Fantastic - nobody said Mozart. I'll just go and have a cup of tea.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Re Mendelssohn he did innovate in his own ways, but was not as high octane an innovator as say Liszt or Berlioz (his contemporaries). I mean like Liszt's piano concertos, Mendelssohn's 2 numbered ones go without a break between the movements. They were written around the similar time to Liszt's two, and I doubt they knew what eachother where simultaneously doing in these works. There are other examples like this in Mendelssohn's music (not to mention his pivotal role in bringing Bach back into the spotlight, not an innovation in music, but important in terms of things like musicology and deeper understanding of Bach and the Baroque in general).

Re Hummel, he was said to influence Liszt and Chopin. There's this operatic flair in his piano concertos which does look ahead to that song like quality in much of Chopin's piano writing. Chopin loved opera, but of course never wrote one, but his solo piano works do come across to me as often being quite song like and 'operatic.' The first concerto that Liszt performed in public as a boy was one of Hummel's, his parents even approached Hummel to teach him, but he declined as he did not think highly of child prodigies.

So I think that all composers who are still in the performance repertoire (even on the edge of it) contributed at least something to music. It can be big or small or in between. Finding out about these things is harder than the high octane innovators such as Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg and so on. Its because things like the uninterrupted concerto format quickly became imitated and cliche. So the 'originals' who did this like Liszt and Mendelssohn kind of become that too, even though in their time they where doing new things.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

waldvogel said:


> Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born eight years after Beethoven in 1778, and died in 1837 - after the first performances of _Symphonie Fantastique_ and _Carnaval_. I can't hear any of Beethoven's influence in Hummel's music - he never left the musical world of Mozart and Haydn.
> 
> Despite all this, I rather like Hummel's music, at least what I've managed to hear of it. Besides writing the other famous trumpet concerto, the chamber music that I've heard is definitely worth listening to.


I only ever heard his pc no 3 - and I thought I could hear Beethoven's influence there. It's a decent concerto.


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

> I ask because I'm curious how important being ahead of one's time is to musical tastes and preferences. I notice that this is often one of the first things mentioned whenever it comes to promote or defend a composer. Do we ever praise composers for epitomizing their time rather than transcending it? I'm also wondering if, for just about any composer one could name, it is possible to concoct some way in which they were ahead of their time.


In the spirit of this thread, questioning the presumptions of linear time, I've chosen to ignore every reply subsequently posted, and employ some important new devices of my own:

øæpå銅有那把!'àéç§1!


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

Hmm. So that fell flat. 

Culturally, it is the innovative; the ground-breaking; the avant-garde which draws on mass effect of sensationalism, akin to the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon. 

I do like contemporary music (particularly the Polish avant-garde), however being 'ahead' of one's time is probably one of the worse overrated forms of hype in my view. 

For instance, if we waited just a few more years, then those who are 'ahead of their time' lose their appeal. 

That is - their music is not timeless. It is very much a part of its own (avant-garde) era: dated; and worse yet, embryonic or malformed in a precocious manner. Those who come after the innovators, come with more distillation of technique; more concision; more fluency in application, since they can draw on the embryonic forms of those who were ahead of their time. 

The whole nature of 'being ahead of its time' pretty much leads me to think this is why 'pop' or popular music sells so well. The classical music lovers amongst us, prefer music which defies this logic insofar, as classical music is timeless. Thus, period baroque music; romanticism; all forms of classical music can hold its timeless appeal. The most skilled of all baroque music writers, JS Bach, was probably not ahead of his time; he spent so much time, in the moment of the baroque era, making music of his time. The irony .... is that this very acceptance of the limit of time, creates the music's timelessness.


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## tommaso (Sep 11, 2012)

drpraetorus said:


> Bach was the culmination of his times. Brahms was no where near being ahead of his times. Michael Praetorius was also the culmination of his times.


Bach was both, beyond and ahead of his time.

He was considered to be old fashioned even by his sons who already composed in the more elegant style which Mozart so perfectly represents. In fact, Bach was almost immediately forgotten after his death.

Today we consider the Baroque-area to end with his death.

On the other hand, he was far far ahead of his time. The Well Tempered Clavier was the first masterpiece to make use of the special "well-tempered" tuning invented by Werckmeister in 1681. And in terms of structure and harmony there was nothing close to the Partitas for solo violine for more than the next hundred years, what´s more, there is nothing even close to the Art of the Fugue to this very day. And no lesser composer than Beethoven himself took the challenge to write the "better Goldberg Variations" by composing the Diabelli Variations.

So Bach really was the culmination of polyphony and fugue and very influential for the creation of some modern musical styles.


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

> In fact, Bach was almost immediately forgotten after his death.


T'is a terrible way to end.

Now, we are all forgotten before our death


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

joen_cph said:


> A little bit of modernity is found in his early interest and inspiration from Wagner (symphonic poem "The Sea", late 1880s) and his slightly jazzy saxophone music (1930s).


That is a point. Glazunov's tone poem the Sea uses flute flutter tonguing and trombone glisses, and this was before Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel ever got into either. Makes you wonder sometimes... huh... was he really _that_ "narrow-minded"? He even orchestrated saxophones into his 2nd symphony when he was 20-ish (it was taken out later because of its oddness and improbability of getting saxophone players for it). It's one thing to be narrow-minded, and another thing to actually _choose_ not to be so modern. The Sea is a work from what I call Glazunov's Enfante Terrible period. It lasted not as long as Prokofiev's but it was definitely there, this weird "uncharacteristically barbaric" imprint in Glazunov's oeuvre roughly between 1885-1890.  And yet, it disappeared with his op. 31 and beyond. He made a distinct choice saying, "I'm not going to sound overtly bombastic or even that nationalist anymore, I'm going to take a new step, in the style of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and beyond." So, he had his time being a rebel, but he got bored and went on to other things.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> That is a point. Glazunov's tone poem the Sea uses flute flutter tonguing and trombone glisses, and this was before Richard Strauss and Maurice Ravel ever got into either. Makes you wonder sometimes... huh... was he really _that_ "narrow-minded"? He even orchestrated saxophones into his 2nd symphony when he was 20-ish (it was taken out later because of its oddness and improbability of getting saxophone players for it). It's one thing to be narrow-minded, and another thing to actually _choose_ not to be so modern. The Sea is a work from what I call Glazunov's Enfante Terrible period. It lasted not as long as Prokofiev's but it was definitely there, this weird "uncharacteristically barbaric" imprint in Glazunov's oeuvre roughly between 1885-1890.  And yet, it disappeared with his op. 31 and beyond. He made a distinct choice saying, "I'm not going to sound overtly bombastic or even that nationalist anymore, I'm going to take a new step, in the style of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and beyond." So, he had his time being a rebel, but he got bored and went on to other things.


Excellent post !


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

joen_cph said:


> Excellent post !


It's why I want to be a musicologist for Glazunov, even if just self-professed.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

I'm not ahead of my time...yet.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

violadude said:


> I'm not ahead of my time...yet.


Playing that kind of music and eating meat... will never, you'll never be able to see my aura then.


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