# If you could be any composer...



## Brad (Mar 27, 2014)

If you could choose to have lived life in the shoes of any composer in history, who would it be?

Personally, I would go for Haydn. He had a great life, had a consistent job, got to retire, enjoyed fame in Europe, knew Mozart, and taught Beethoven. Doesn't get much better than that.

EDIT: on the contrary, who would you least want to be and why??


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

I guess the best choice would be a composer like Glass or Reich who have become about as popular and economically successful in their own lives as a composer probably could, in the richest country in the world too (for now).


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## Antiquarian (Apr 29, 2014)

My choice would be Vaughan Williams. He, like Bax, had independent means, and could compose what he liked without the constant pressure of debts hanging over his head.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I certainly wouldn't swap my marriage for Haydn's, or VW's first, or... how many has Glass been through?


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## Brad (Mar 27, 2014)

Actually I suppose I might want to live in a world with penicillin...


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

Jean Sibelius so I could compose the 8th symphony and some concertos.


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

If I could live with my conscience for, amongst other things, helping to make other people's lives a misery then maybe Tikhon Khrennikov - he didn't just survive during the vicious Stalinist cultural backlashes but actually thrived once his cronyism with the likes of Zhdanov paid off and was offered the post of Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1948 while only in his mid-30s. There wasn't even any disgrace awaiting him in the post-Stalin era - he appeared to be just as influential afterwards. The icing on the cake was that Khrennikov lived until he was 94 with his 'official' reputation as composer, political ideologist and administrator still untarnished, laden with honours (and presumably the trappings that went with them) and still holding the same top musical job until his death in 2007. Teflon-coated doesn't even begin to describe him.


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

Schubert...and an alarming supply of 21st century penicillin. Yeah baby!


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I'd be the next _really big one_, like we've been waiting for since Beethoven.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

I'd pick Nikolai Medtner. He lived a decent life, and wrote some great music for the piano, my favorite instrument :tiphat:


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Leonard Bernstein. Healthy, reasonably long-lived--and all those parties!


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## Celloman (Sep 30, 2006)

I'd be Wagner, minus the anti-semitism, minus the selfish personality, minus the debts, minus the affairs.


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## Brad (Mar 27, 2014)

Couac Addict said:


> Schubert...and an alarming supply of 21st century penicillin. Yeah baby!


And perhaps a cure for typhoid fever/syphilis..


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Celloman said:


> I'd be Wagner, minus the anti-semitism, minus the selfish personality, minus the debts, minus the affairs.


Then you would not be Wagner!


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

Probably Ian Fraser Kilmister, he's awesome!

/ptr


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Probably Schoenberg, and then I would stop composing atonal music and change the course of 20th century music. Write more tonal music to make 20th century much more accessible for listeners.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

ptr said:


> Probably Ian Fraser Kilmister, he's awesome!
> 
> /ptr


I'd take his name, at least.


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## dgee (Sep 26, 2013)

ArtMusic said:


> Probably Schoenberg, and then I would stop composing atonal music and change the course of 20th century music. Write more tonal music to make 20th century much more accessible for listeners.


lololololololol - someone else would have done it, they were anyway. You could have been Hans Pfitzner perhaps


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

I think Ockeghem's cool. He got to hang out in some great cathedrals and great cities of the time and with Charles VII and Lous XI, which meant nice trips and probably great food, and he remained popular and productive in his old age, and the next generation of hotshot composers wrote lamentations on his death.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

I'm no dummy. I too would pick a 20th-21st century composer when prozac, aspirin and antibiotics were in full supply.

Make me William Schuman!!

Have to go. Lenny's at the door to discuss with me the performance of my 8th Symphony for the opening of Avery Fisher Hall on Friday.


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## Tieb (Apr 30, 2014)

Frans Liszt!!! or even brahms..


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## QuietGuy (Mar 1, 2014)

I'd choose to be Ravel. I'd so enjoy having that mastery of form, orchestration and technique.

I'd hate to have been Mozart. True, he was a genius, but he worked like a dog and starved for his efforts.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

J.S. Bach, of course.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Sir Edward Elgar. I'd leave a clue somewhere for posterity as to the nature of the alleged hidden Enigma Variation.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Weston said:


> Sir Edward Elgar. I'd leave a clue somewhere for posterity as to the nature of the alleged hidden Enigma Variation.


uh, undoing the fact it is an Enigma? Better leave a new title for the piece along with that clue.


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## Dustin (Mar 30, 2012)

Lope de Aguirre said:


> J.S. Bach, of course.


Same here. Possibly the greatest ever AND all those women!? I'll take it!


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## Brad (Mar 27, 2014)

Lope de Aguirre said:


> J.S. Bach, of course.


Then you could put the Art of Fugue higher on your To Do List!


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## Brad (Mar 27, 2014)

Cziffra had one of the roughest lives of any composer that I know of, worse than Mozart's, I would think.


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

Mendelssohn

Important and wealthy family...
Successfull from his early age...
Surrounded by the most prominent intellectuals...
"discoverer" of J.S. Bach...

Last but not least: married to a very beautiful woman:










Just a pity to die at 38, but you cannot have everything in life...


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## Bas (Jul 24, 2012)

GioCar said:


> Mendelssohn
> 
> Important and wealthy family...
> Successfull from his early age...
> ...


I can agree with you.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Regardless of era, I would have to say I would want to be Robert Schumann, so I could have the torrid love affair with Clara, my dream of the perfect woman, however brief. It would be worth it! Unforgettable, I'm sure!


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

hpowders said:


> Regardless of era, I would have to say I would want to be Robert Schumann, so I could have the torrid love affair with Clara, my dream of the perfect woman, however brief. It would be worth it! Unforgettable, I'm sure!


I hope you'd be more encouraging of her compositional aspirations, hpowders.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Blancrocher said:


> I hope you'd be more encouraging of her compositional aspirations, hpowders.


I'm actually pretty good at saying "Yes, Dear."


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## fairbanks (Jun 25, 2014)

JS Bach, of course!


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

Dustin said:


> Same here. Possibly the greatest ever AND all those women!? I'll take it!


Is two women a lot for some people?

That, plus his parents dying at a young age, and spending a lifetime living in crowded conditions and working hours every day for (and butting heads with) musically ignorant and self important people. Sounds wonderful.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Any composer who has won the Grawemeyer award! I envy all of them!!!


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

If I could be any composer?

Well, I wouldn't want to be one who's already dead!, and at my age ... I'll ask: who's the _youngest _composer out there? That's whom I'd want to be.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Liszt and Wagner are the ones that I feel the closest kinship with. Beethoven too but he suffered so much! But right now I have a Liszt hairstyle, so let it be him!


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

I'd be Stravinsky so I could live to be a cantankerous old man at the top of my game, and yet still have an empty feeling in my heart... :devil:

No, actually since I'm a woman, I'd be more inclined to thinking of this question not so much as who's life I'd want to live (I don't really want to live a man's life unless I could completely replicate their life as a woman), but more like who's life I'd want to live _alongside_, perhaps be a major influence in their life too. But, I might as well not go into that answer here...


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

I'd be me, because I AM going to become a great composer


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Ravel, but without all the disgusting nationalism.


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