# 'I am large; I contain multitudes.'



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, *I am large, I contain multitudes*.' - Walt Whitman

Which classical composer (or musical work) in your view best fits the italicised quotations?
Why / what reasons do you have for your opinion?
If you'd like to, give two or three examples of the 'multitudes' / contradictions.

Thanks in advance for any replies. :tiphat:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit: Any observation that applies Whitman's quotation to the sphere of classical music will be relevant, and welcome. Which singer - which instrument - which musical genre - 'contains multitudes' etc etc.
Be creative!


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## Guest (Jul 23, 2015)

Unless Mr Whitman was both obese and suffered from dissociative identity disorder, I think I am need of some clarification 




:tiphat:


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

dogen said:


> Unless Mr Whitman was both obese and suffered from dissociative identity disorder, I think I am need of some clarification
> 
> 
> 
> :tiphat:


:tiphat: It's not really about Whitman. It's about composers that you think contain multitudes - of styles, meanings, genres, whatever. 
But have a nice day!


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## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

dogen said:


> Unless Mr Whitman was both obese and suffered from dissociative identity disorder, I think I am need of some clarification
> 
> 
> 
> :tiphat:


No one has ever told _me_ that I contain multitudes.


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## PierreN (Aug 4, 2013)

Richard Strauss had been accused of betraying modernity. To this criticism, he replied:

'Modern? What does "modern" mean? Give the word a different significance! Have ideas like Beethoven's, write contrapuntally like Bach, orchestrate like Mozart, and be genuine and true children of your own times, then you will be modern!'

Quoted from _Richard Strauss, Man, Musician, Enigma_, Michael Kennedy


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Lord Lance said:


> No one has ever told _me_ that I contain multitudes.


_There's time yet - *for your character to develop depth & multiple sources of interest. *
_

*Haydn is my candidate. He was prolific - his style evolved - his works have depth and magnitude - and he wrote many different kinds of music, secular & sacred: concertos, masses, operas, symphonies, and music for piano trios, solo piano, string quartets, baryton trios (from the Wiki entry).

He is a person that one could spend years exploring and still find something new.

Although he is one of music's mega-stars, his cheerful persona and easy talent mean that he is somehow underrated by the world in general.

In short, he is large; he contains multitudes. :tiphat: Haydn bears the clock!*


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## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

Ingélou said:


> There's time yet...
> 
> Haydn is my candidate. He was prolific - his style evolved - his works have depth and magnitude - and he wrote many different kinds of music, secular & sacred: concertos, masses, operas, symphonies, and music for piano trios, solo piano, string quartets, baryton trios (from the Wiki entry).
> 
> ...


Not really. If I get any fatter, I might become eligible to join the Asian Sumo Wrestling Federation.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Handel may not necessarily contain multitudes (or contradictions of style), but certainly a large and varied range - Opera, sacred cantatas, court music,keyboard works and may excellent and memorable tunes.

Ombra mai fu - the largo from Xerxes

Zadok the Priest 

even translated into a different idiom

Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (In Galway Bay)

The Messiah

The Harmonious Blacksmith

And we still haven't mentioned the Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks, The Concerti Grossi or the Chandos Anthems. 

Multitudes indeed.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Argh. Your post forces me into the appearance of sycophancy (in this case praising temporal authority). Not only do I agree with the sentiments expressed, the mere mention of _Ombra mai fu_ calls forth 'sense memories' of The Greatest Contralto's recording. I estimate being a year away from listening to it again - don't want to risk over-familiarity. But hey, the Messiah I can do; _He Was Despised_ is only a little dangerous.


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

When I read the thread title, my first thought was to

_Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
__Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!_


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

Ukko said:


> Argh. Your post forces me into the appearance of sycophancy (in this case praising temporal authority). Not only do I agree with the sentiments expressed, the mere mention of _Ombra mai fu_ calls forth 'sense memories' of The Greatest Contralto's recording. I estimate being a year away from listening to it again - don't want to risk over-familiarity. But hey, the Messiah I can do; _He Was Despised_ is only a little dangerous.


'I am large'- 'the greatest contralto'- Clara Butt? Hers was a voice that 'contained multitudes', from the booming, masculine low notes to the more conventionally feminine top.






Sorry it's a bit off topic...


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Figleaf said:


> 'I am large'- 'the greatest contralto'- Clara Butt? Hers was a voice that 'contained multitudes', from the booming, masculine low notes to the more conventionally feminine top.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Off target too. There was Ferrier, and then the rest of them.


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## Gaspard de la Nuit (Oct 20, 2014)

I think many really great composers will be especially complex people who are able to draw on a wide spectrum of possibilities within the human psyche as well as varied experiences......

That's what I thought of when I heard the Walt Whitman quote.


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## Guest (Jul 23, 2015)

Stockhausen. And 15 characters.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I'm inclined to think of a composer like Leonard Bernstein, who embraced both "high" and "low" art in his music.

And hey! His daughter Jamie agrees with me!
(from "A Talk Before "Mass"")


> Let me start with the contradictions. On the one hand, he was the most extroverted guy you could ever meet. How he loved people! All kinds of people. He loved playing the piano at parties till the wee hours; all-night talk sessions with students; noisy dinners with family and friends. This was the Lenny that became a conductor and a teacher, the communicator extraordinaire, on the podium and on television.
> On the other hand, Leonard Bernstein was a composer: an introverted, lonely dreamer who stayed up all night working, chain-smoking cigarettes and staring down his demons.
> Within Bernstein the composer, there were yet more contradictions. He wrote for the concert hall, but he also wrote for the Broadway stage. He was a classically trained musician, but he loved the popular music he heard on the radio as he grew up in the 1920's, 30' and 40's. His conducting mentor, Serge Koussevitsky, strongly advised his young pupil to stop writing for the Broadway stage; Koussevitsky thought it was low-class, insignificant music. Luckily, Leonard Bernstein didn't follow his teacher's advice - an early example of his lifelong impulse to buck authority.
> Eventually, my father found ways to cross-pollenate the two kinds of music he loved best, creating a perfect bridge between the concert stage and the Broadway pit. Leonard Bernstein's orchestral music is joyous, full of tunes, and bursting with catchy rhythms -- while his Broadway scores are as elegantly constructed as a Beethoven symphony. MASS combines all of these elements, and more, into a single, passionate expression of my father's own multifarious personality.


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## Dr Johnson (Jun 26, 2015)

Mahler?

He put all sorts of things into his symphonies and from what I've read had a complex personality.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Stockhausen's LICHT is a mighty good example for me.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Figleaf said:


> 'I am large'- 'the greatest contralto'- Clara Butt? Hers was a voice that 'contained multitudes', from the booming, masculine low notes to the more conventionally feminine top.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Not at all off topic - a creative (and music-related) response to the thread title/ quotation: just what I was hoping for! :tiphat:

Thanks, amigos, for all the interesting replies about music so far.


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## Vesteralen (Jul 14, 2011)

Well, to be rather obvious, Beethoven comes to mind.

But, I prefer to think of this more in terms of - 'which composers fascinate me to the extent that I want to hear *everything* they composed, in *every* genre?' The composer herself/himself may have written in many different styles and genres [sic], but it has no meaning to me if my experience doesn't lead me to explore them all.

As examples of prolific composers who wrote in many styles and genres that I do not feel compelled to explore in a universal way - J S Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. I think some people might make an argument about all of these that they fit the Whitman quote to some degree.

On the other hand - Haydn, Schumann, Brahms, Nielsen, Barber - these are examples of those who fit the quote for me.

(I would also include Monteverdi, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Beach and Vaughan Williams in my list, but I don't think they fit the quote as well.

OTOH, it's entirely possible that, as usual, I missed the whole point of the thread. If so, accept my humble apologies.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

You didn't miss the point, Vesteralen - thanks for your perceptive post.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Orlando de Lassus may fit in that category, a man of conradicting widness. He not only wrote exquisite polyphony for the church but also explored (albeit briefly) the extreme chromatic madrigalisms that were later expressed in Gesualdo. But more to the point, he wrote music that ranged from embarrassingly bawdy to, later in life, torturedly pentinent. In his case, the multitudes were demons, operating both for and against him. 

An interesting observation about Philip Glass comes from Peter Shickele, his classmate at Julliard, who noted that Philip could write music in any composer's style and be spot on. But in his case, the multitudes were there but never came out.


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## Guest (Jul 23, 2015)

Albert7 said:


> Stockhausen's LICHT is a mighty good example for me.


And yet, it's only one era of composition! Between that and Kontakte, Gruppen, Momente, Stimmen, Kurzwellen, Aus Den Sieben Tagen, Inori, Tierkreis, KLANG.... multitudes indeed.


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

I think I will go with Mahler. The Symphony of a Thousand - that is quite a multitude.


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## Heliogabo (Dec 29, 2014)

Charles Ives really


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Whitman almost seems to be paraphrasing "My name is Legion: for we are many." 

So if we're talking about demons, Beethoven had a few personal ones to battle. He was also larger than life if diminutive physically. Plus his 9th symphony alone contains multitudes of themes and motifs, all given a thorough working over, and if not quite to Mahler's mass assemblages, requiring multitudes to perform. So I'll choose Beethoven, standing at the very crossroads of music history.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Weston said:


> Whitman almost seems to be paraphrasing "My name is Legion: for we are many."
> 
> So if we're talking about demons, Beethoven had a few personal ones to battle. He was also larger than life if diminutive physically. Plus his 9th symphony alone contains multitudes of themes and motifs, all given a thorough working over, and if not quite to Mahler's mass assemblages, requiring multitudes to perform. So I'll choose Beethoven, standing at the very crossroads of music history.


Beethoven is my first choice as well. Who else composed 32 piano sonatas and made virtually every one of them a new experience? From the earthy to the sublime, from the populist to the esoteric - sometimes all within a single work - Beethoven never stopped taking music to unknown places. And the multitudes he contained surely had not all emerged by the time of his death.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

What about Schubert? Who wrote such a large output of songs - a veritable multitude!


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## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

But all those songs are quite intimate. Schubert likes to talk to you one on one - just you and him.


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## MrTortoise (Dec 25, 2008)

Heliogabo said:


> Charles Ives really


Agreed, first composer to come to my mind as well.


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