# Blog 5



## Edward Elgar (Mar 22, 2006)

I was thinking about the musicological canon today (as always!) and considering the ratio of radical to non-radical composers in it.

Brahms is the only conservative who is taken really seriously by academics (as seriously as, say, Haydn). I think there are a number of reasons for this.

1 - His music is of a consistently high standard. (He destroyed works he deemed sub-par.)

2 - He completes the "3 Bs". (Plus he is a white German male which helps!)

3 - Schoenberg said that Brahms was his favorite composer. (This gives him credibility now that Schoenberg is safely in the canon.)

It's interesting how one can be a conservative and still be part of the canon. They often get left by the wayside (apart from the crafty ones like Diabelli!)


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## Air (Jul 19, 2008)

I don't think one can always definite conservatism so easily. Mendelssohn and Brahms I'll admit are quite clear-cut conservatives. But Bach was also considered a conservative in his time, only because a lot of his music was so radical that for almost a century very few could come to terms with it. Just look at the f-minor fugue from the WTC Book 1 - it's an old-fashioned ricercar fugue but at the same time the subject strikes one almost like a twelve-tone row!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

I don't want to assume anyone else's views on this, but I find it slightly _bemusing_ that the academic establishment should deem originality and progressiveness as so important that calling someone musically conservative is basically an insult.

It reminds me of a conversation I saw on one of the televised BBC Proms last year or the year before. The concert programme was Mendelssohn and Schumann, the pieces being 'typical warhorses' (as the high-brow critics said in a pejorative tone!), and a little debate was prompted by the interviewer of a critic and composer by saying that: "both of these composers were really quite conservative, weren't they?" I was sat staring at the screen in frustration, thinking, "just what is wrong with conservatism!?", and then I heard a, "well, actually..." from the composer being interviewed, and I thought: "Great! This is guy is going to say that a conservative composer can still be a genius, as originality is a modern obsession", but he just piped up about neither Mendelssohn nor Schumann were really that conservative, so we needn't look down on them.


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## Edward Elgar (Mar 22, 2006)

Bach would have seemed conservative in his day. His public face would have been simple choral pieces, but in his private world, experimentation that would lead to the Second Viennese School.

I think originality and progressiveness are so highly regarded these days because it seems like a free pass into the canon. Look at the amount of literature on John Cage, it's quite staggering! The battle in my mind is this: when music gets so radical it can be pushed no further, the focus of contemporary music will change, but where to? One option is conservatism.

I love your anecdote Polednice. The guy was saying, "let's try to look for the radical elements in composers of pleasant-sounding music so they no longer become guilty pleasures and start to mean something more". Here's another mind-battle: which is the more worthy pursuit, to reach for pinnacles of human expression or to simply entertain?


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I think Rachmaninov said something like "pleasure is the only law." 

Suits me.


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## Chi_townPhilly (Apr 21, 2007)

@ *science*:

The quote's from Debussy...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Ok, good. Thanks!


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