# Why oh why?



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Our common wisdom usually sets Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven above all others, though we may place those three worthies in varying orders. We may, sometimes, include Haydn or, nodding to Beethoven, Handel. Regardless, this seems to imply that the West’s greatest music was written before 1830 (even if Schubert is generously included).

If their music is superior to all music written in the close to 200 years since then, it’s inescapable that all music written since then is inferior to theirs. What happened? Were people smarter then? Were audiences better able to encourage excellence? Were other factors in play? Or was it just dumb luck?

So what went wrong?


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## BachIsBest (Feb 17, 2018)

Coming from a math background rather than a music background this isn't overly extraordinary statistically. Assuming that the great composers will appear after the development of non-monophonic music around 1200AD (I chose this number because it's roughly accurate and because of the information available on this website: https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/). The number of people that have been alive since then is roughly 35 billion. Thus assuming the only composers on the level of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in this time period are the three forementioned composers we get that the probability any one person will be as great as one of the big three is about 1 in 12 billion. The number of people that have been alive since 1850 is roughly 15 billion. Thus the probability of a great composer not appearing during the time period (1850-2017) is (after a simple probability calculation) about 29%. Certainly a very probable outcome.

However, there may be something more to this than chance. It appears, to me at least, that certain societal conditions produce great artist of certain types. Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach were all bunched up and from the same culture (Germanic). The same thing occurred in painting with Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael all able to meet in the same room in Italy during their time. However, I have no hard ideas for what exactly these 'societal conditions' would be, other than, perhaps, religion.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

If Beethoven had the distraction of an iPhone, AppleTV and a BMW, he might have only written Für Elise and forgotten to include the bridge.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Nothing went wrong. I do not accept the tenet that music written before 1830 is superior to everything that came after. Mozart may have been a tremendous child genius, but let's not forget Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn, and by no means least Erich Korngold who were no less astonishing in their own display of genius. As new methods of composition took hold, both theoretically and in terms of practice, that is the technology of music (ie instruments), composers had new ways to express themselves. After years of experimentation composers learned how to write for larger ensembles in a brilliant way that a Mozart could not have even imagined. I will never concede that earlier composers were inherently "better" than later composers. Just different in trying to answer the question, "what is the purpose of music?" In terms of composing skill there are many composers after 1830 who are easily the equal of those hallowed few. 

Now I will say this: composers today are horribly deficient compared to those of earlier eras. There is no debate about this. And their teachers no doubt are just as inept. Go read biographies of older conductors or composers who wanted to be admitted to a school such as the Vienna Academy or the Royal Academy in London. The prerequisites and the entry examination are astonishing. Students were expected to do things that most of today's music students couldn't begin to do. At most American universities, composition majors no longer have to study counterpoint. Orchestration is taught by people whose own work pales compared to composers of 100 years ago. Writing a tune, much less a fugue, seems a lost art. Form? Hah! Things indeed did go wrong in the last 50-70 years. Will it ever get back on track? Doubtful, since there's no public really interested in new music. 

What went wrong? I don't know - the general dumbing down of the population? Look at TV, magazines, movies, newspapers, college degrees. Can anyone seriously argue that a college degree today is as demanding as one 60 years ago? As we've dumbed down the entire culture, why would classical music get off scot free?


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)

You have clearly never heard of Johannes Brahms.


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

KenOC said:


> What happened? Were people smarter then?


folks were smarter back then.


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

mbhaub said:


> I do not accept the tenet that music written before 1830 is superior to everything that came after.


how could they be not superior since they are the closest to the age of enlightenment where most progress occurred?


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

People like music that is simple, at least on the surface.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I wouldn't say that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were greater geniuses than all other composers (although they may have been), but that the language of Western music - its tonal system and the expressive forms based on it - attained a clarity and a potential for both structural elaboration and expressive specificity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which those composers were able to use to maximal effect and with extraordinary craft. 

The combination of superior quality and fecundity in art depends on the existence of an understood vocabulary of formal and expressive elements which the artist can purposefully exploit and over which he can attain mastery. Once the tonal system had solidified and given rise to certain basic and fertile formal concepts - sonata form being the most fertile - conditions were ripe for the creation of works of great complexity, formal clarity, varied expressiveness, and universal appeal. But as the vocabulary of music continued to expand in the Romantic era, the challenges in utilizing its resources became increasingly complex, aesthetic goals became diversified and mutually exclusive, and mastery of all the elements was no longer possible. A composer like Brahms achieved mastery by working within self-imposed limits, resisting the lure of harmonic and orchestral complexity, and upholding ideals inherited from Classicism. His opposite, Wagner, achieved mastery by dint of his power of absorption and sheer personal vision, in the realization of which he greatly expanded the language of music (in this sense he was a truer heir of Beethoven than was Brahms). By the end of the Romantic era an effectively universal musical language had given way to an infinite number of personal languages, composers were confronted not so much with mastering a language as creating their own, and the principles by which musical greatness had traditionally been judged had become difficult or impossible to apply.

I think the special status of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven was as much a matter of being in the right place and the right time, in relation to the development of music and culture, as of individual genius.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

This is quite a paradox as we have had in the last 40 years more musicians and composers trained at the highest level than any comparable period in history. Eras seem to have produced 2-3 great composers all the way to 1975 when Shostakovitch died but there doesnt seem to be anyone of his stature since that time, unless I have missed something. 

Could it be that there are Mozart's Beethoven's and Bachs among the thousands of composers who live in todays world? And as Woodduck suggested - they are just simply in the wrong place at the wrong time - saddled as they are by the necessity to go beyond established forms, tonalities and melody driven music. 

Or were those composers of the past simply better than anybody else?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

I do think that those three are the greatest ever. But they are closely followed by many more - Haydn and Handel, yes, but also Brahms and Wagner and Schubert and Schumann and Mahler and Sibelius and Verdi and Bartok and Stravinsky and Britten and no doubt one or two others who are too recent to be conclusive about. And, then, just behind them are many many more. I think the difference in "quality" or "value" between the "three greatest" and all of those I list is not at all great (it might be more to do with range than "quality"). And I wouldn't really argue with anyone who wanted to include all of these in a list of "equal firsts".


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## LezLee (Feb 21, 2014)

stomanek said:


> This is quite a paradox as we have had in the last 40 years more musicians and composers trained at the highest level than any comparable period in history. Eras seem to have produced 2-3 great composers all the way to 1975 when Shostakovitch died but there doesnt seem to be anyone of his stature since that time, unless I have missed something.
> 
> Could it be that there are Mozart's Beethoven's and Bachs among the thousands of composers who live in todays world? And as Woodduck suggested - they are just simply in the wrong place at the wrong time - saddled as they are by the necessity to go beyond established forms, tonalities and melody driven music.
> 
> Or were those composers of the past simply better than anybody else?


Perhaps the 20th and 21st centuries didn't produce many good teachers?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

joen_cph said:


> People like music that is simple, at least on the surface.


I also think this is the answer. Also people generally like to here triads more than tritones, and you can build elaborately on triads, like what those three had done.

I think Liszt, Prokofiev, Debussy, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and some others at their best were no less great or inferior than the approachable big 3.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

LezLee said:


> Perhaps the 20th and 21st centuries didn't produce many good teachers?


Maybe - or perhaps we were just lucky that, for example, Mozart lived the turbulent but stimulating life he did. His dad was no great composer but no doubt passed on to his son all his knowledge - in addition to that he took Wolfgang all over Europe at a very young age exposing him to a wide range of styles etc. And he was continually learning music to the exclusion, it seems - of any other kind of study except perhaps languages. This would not be possible today - not even in China. Even Lang Lang had to do the curriculum. In addition - his skills were put to the test at a professional level at an incredibly young age - he was being paid to write music as a child - had a huge operatic success in Italy at just 14 and was employed in Salzburg to compose dozens of liturgical pieces that were performed regularly. I would contend that nobody in history had those advantages.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

One problem for composers today is that there is little to be done that has not already been done. Interesting that one of the best composers of the day - John Williams - writes music for films, maybe as you can write conventional and get away with it. What has killed composition is the lack of tools provided in much of modern education. Not just music. You can get a qualification in English these days without hardly being able to write! There is a definite dumbing down. And yet we should also add a definite lack of genius coming forward


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

DavidA said:


> One problem for composers today is that there is little to be done that has not already been done. Interesting that one of the best composers of the day - John Williams - writes music for films, maybe as you can write conventional and get away with it. What has killed composition is the lack of tools provided in much of modern education. Not just music. *You can get a qualification in English these days without hardly being able to write!* There is a definite dumbing down. And yet we should also add a definite lack of genius coming forward


If I were you I would study the actual meaning of what you wrote in this statement.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Later composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner are also regarded highly but then they didn't contribute masterpieces to a variety of genres like Bach. In general, art is getting worse. Not just in painting, but also in music as well.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

hammeredklavier said:


> Later composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner are also regarded highly but then they didn't contribute masterpieces to a variety of genres like Bach. In general, art is getting worse. Not just in painting, but also in music as well.


Interesting - I have to respect him for externalising his views.

Objective standards in art? I wonder what the board thinks as we tend to be moving away from a conception of this toward aesthetic relativism.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

mbhaub said:


> At most American universities, composition majors no longer have to study counterpoint.


Lots of goofy stuff in this thread, but this line really stood out. Where do you all get these ideas?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

stomanek said:


> This is quite a paradox as we have had in the last 40 years more musicians and composers trained at the highest level than any comparable period in history. Eras seem to have produced 2-3 great composers all the way to 1975 when Shostakovitch died but there doesnt seem to be anyone of his stature since that time, unless I have missed something.


I don't want to start something but it does seem that you have missed an enormous amount! It could be that you are talking of an era that you cannot access because it is too new.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

stomanek said:


> Interesting - I have to respect him for externalising his views.
> 
> Objective standards in art? I wonder what the board thinks as we tend to be moving away from a conception of this toward aesthetic relativism.


I suppose I should have guess that this thread would end up as another one whereby lots of members jump on, shaking their heads as they do so, all contemporary music as lacking.

As for that awful and grossly opinionated clip, let's not go there again. We have already discussed in once a few months ago and please please please do not go there again. The clip cannot be taken seriously and is certainly not the scholarship in pretends to be. Getting jerked back to the same old arguments can make the forum totally tedious.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

I'm not part of the common wisdom cited in the OP. This hierarchical ranking thing is tedious and I don't subscribe to a three great geniuses view. I think Woodduck nailed it in #9: Why has no one discovered a new continent for centuries?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

^^^ I am partly a part of that wisdom. And my method of measuring is "what the music does to me" (I am the instrument for measuring). You can say that unconsciously my perception is influenced by the myth of the greatness of those three and I can only reply that it doesn't _seem _that way to me. Many other composers do similar things to me but not for such a wide range of types of music. And I do ascribe more greatness to music that I never get tired of. I always find I can return again and again and again to the music of the composers (more than three) who I think of as being the greatest.

But I agree that ranking is tedious and that what I am reporting is what the music of those three (or the wider set of those I consider "truly greats") does to _me _- so it is a totally subjective view but interestingly it is one that many seem to share.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

isorhythm said:


> Lots of goofy stuff in this thread, but this line really stood out. Where do you all get these ideas?


From reading, talking to students, professors, performance majors, attending a lot of university sponsored activities...I probably shouldn't have used the term "most", but "many" is accurate. Upper-echelon schools, conservatories and such might still require counterpoint, and many lesser schools offer it, but not too many students take it anymore. In some universities, counterpoint has been put into a composition or "special topics" course. Talk to professors and they'll tell you that for modern composition and the need of contemporary students, the centuries old subject is no longer needed. Even music history has been watered down and students are just as likely to take a world music course, or Ethnomusicology.

Many schools no longer require music history as they've given in to kids who want History of Rock and Roll, Broadway Theater, Jazz History. Music students used to take four semesters of theory and ear training. Some schools have cut that to two. Music educators used to have to take two semesters each of brass, woodwinds, percussion, strings. In many places that's been cut in half, and one university I know of has completely eliminated those vital instrumental methods courses. They're optional electives. Last week I was perusing the bulletin board at a local state college. The number of courses on "how to be a DJ", recording technology, Music Notation on the Computer, the music business and marketing, and other non-musical subjects is astounding, and quite discouraging. You can now graduate with a degree from a music department and know nothing about the music discussed on this board. If you think it's goofy, sorry. But open your mind and browse the music departments of schools all over the country and see what they now require. It's sad.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

I think that one shouldn't conclude that characteristics of one area/region are universal. I doubt classical scholarship has gone rock bottom say at German, Austrian and better English or French institutes, for example. One certainly has the impression of the US currently going down in some respects, but that's another story.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2018)

KenOC said:


> Our common wisdom usually sets Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven above all others, though we may place those three worthies in varying orders. We may, sometimes, include Haydn or, nodding to Beethoven, Handel. Regardless, this seems to imply that the West's greatest music was written before 1830 (even if Schubert is generously included).
> 
> If their music is superior to all music written in the close to 200 years since then, it's inescapable that all music written since then is inferior to theirs. What happened? Were people smarter then? Were audiences better able to encourage excellence? Were other factors in play? Or was it just dumb luck?
> 
> So what went wrong?


No, and nothing went wrong.

Newton may have made the greatest single advance in physics, at least in the physics that is comprehensible to the general public, but that doesn't mean that something went wrong after Newton.


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

Woodduck said:


> I wouldn't say that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were greater geniuses than all other composers (although they may have been), but that the language of Western music - its tonal system and the expressive forms based on it - attained a clarity and a potential for both structural elaboration and expressive specificity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which those composers were able to use to maximal effect and with extraordinary craft.


I think this is right. Leonard Bernstein says more or less the same in his Harvard lectures, that Bach to Beethoven took advantage of an extremely stable harmonic system which was but a brief moment in the evolution of music.


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## PlaySalieri (Jun 3, 2012)

Baron Scarpia said:


> No, and nothing went wrong.
> 
> *Newton may have made the greatest single advance in physics,* at least in the physics that is comprehensible to the general public, but that doesn't mean that something went wrong after Newton.


Yes but countless scientists have updated all Newton's thinking and refined it to the extent where we can say we are in a better position today - having more accurate knowledge of physics and maths - than Newton did.

But it seems the 18th and 19thC masters are regarded by and large as having composed better music than we hear being composed today or even in the last 100 years.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

stomanek said:


> Yes but countless scientists have updated all Newton's thinking and refined it to the extent where we can say we are in a better position today - having more accurate knowledge of physics and maths - than Newton did.
> 
> But it seems the 18th and 19thC masters are regarded by and large as having composed better music than we hear being composed today or even in the last 100 years.


It's easier to grasp, for sure.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

DavidA said:


> One problem for composers today is that there is little to be done that has not already been done. Interesting that one of the best composers of the day - John Williams - writes music for films, maybe as you can write conventional and get away with it. What has killed composition is the lack of tools provided in much of modern education. Not just music. You can get a qualification in English these days without hardly being able to write! There is a definite dumbing down. And yet we should also add a definite lack of genius coming forward


Although i dont agree with ALL of this summation the first part is certainly true. It's all been done. The only option is to make a tuneless racket or find (or invent) some new, strange instrument / sound device. The possibilities of all the instruments we know have been largely explored by generations of hipsters.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

If we visualize "classical music" as a cornucopia, a horn with a reasonably clear sense of a beginning; and then we see that horn's diameter (the range of what is compositionally possible) expands exponentially as we progress through time toward the present day. Simultaneously, the volume of space within the horn (the past accumulation of composers and works) also increases exponentially. This analogy or metaphor illustrates why it is easier to identify a few fecund composers as giants relatively early in the evolving history of CM--there are far fewer competitors at play; the population is small--and, equally important, the volume of previously composed music with which to compare the output of the giants is much smaller. Contrast the worlds of Bach, and, later, Mozart and Beethoven, with the world of, say, Martinů or any other later composers: it's now centuries since Bach. Enormous quantities of music have been composed since, in a dizzying array of styles and genres, by an exploding population of composers, living and dead. It's going to be always much harder to single out cases of universally agreed-upon genius under those conditions. The best that can be hoped for, similar to science, is to identify examples of genius within carefully defined boundaries.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

mbhaub said:


> From reading, talking to students, professors, performance majors, attending a lot of university sponsored activities...I probably shouldn't have used the term "most", but "many" is accurate. Upper-echelon schools, conservatories and such might still require counterpoint, and many lesser schools offer it, but not too many students take it anymore. In some universities, counterpoint has been put into a composition or "special topics" course. Talk to professors and they'll tell you that for modern composition and the need of contemporary students, the centuries old subject is no longer needed. Even music history has been watered down and students are just as likely to take a world music course, or Ethnomusicology.
> 
> Many schools no longer require music history as they've given in to kids who want History of Rock and Roll, Broadway Theater, Jazz History. Music students used to take four semesters of theory and ear training. Some schools have cut that to two. Music educators used to have to take two semesters each of brass, woodwinds, percussion, strings. In many places that's been cut in half, and one university I know of has completely eliminated those vital instrumental methods courses. They're optional electives. Last week I was perusing the bulletin board at a local state college. The number of courses on "how to be a DJ", recording technology, Music Notation on the Computer, the music business and marketing, and other non-musical subjects is astounding, and quite discouraging. You can now graduate with a degree from a music department and know nothing about the music discussed on this board. If you think it's goofy, sorry. But open your mind and browse the music departments of schools all over the country and see what they now require. It's sad.


That's interesting and I admit I don't have first-hand knowledge, but it doesn't match up with the experience of composition students I've known personally. It sounds like you might be conflating a bunch of different kinds of music education programs, though? I'm thinking of people who've chosen to pursue a classical composition track. Of course there are other tracks you can choose; classical music is not the entire world of music, and shouldn't be.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> ... By the end of the Romantic era an effectively universal musical language had given way to an infinite number of personal languages, composers were confronted not so much with mastering a language as creating their own, and the principles by which musical greatness had traditionally been judged had become difficult or impossible to apply.


Well put. And it explains why we now have a situation where composers with legitimate talent stand side-by-side with those whose output is nothing short of effluent. In the 'olden' days, while there were less successful composers alongside the more successful, they all had to have a certain level of talent and education in addition (in most cases) to getting income primarily or secondarily from their compositions in order to be called composers.


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

also the 'peruke centuries' were a point in history of mankind at which something extraordinary went on.

they wore those wigs for a reason, and clearly this was not some fashion trend but a *disguise*.

what did they hide under wigs?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Zhdanov said:


> also the 'peruke centuries' were a point in history of mankind at which something extraordinary went on.
> 
> they wore those wigs for a reason, and clearly this was not some fashion trend but a *disguise*.
> 
> what did they hide under wigs?


Okay, I give up. What did they hide under those wigs?


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

EdwardBast said:


> Okay, I give up. What did they hide under those wigs?


composers and other non-members of elites had nothing to hide, of course, they wore perukes to support the code, but elites might wanted to conceal the unusual, maybe alien-like, shape of their skulls etc.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

I think it's more likely that they just had bad hair.


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## Zhdanov (Feb 16, 2016)

eugeneonagain said:


> I think it's more likely that they just had bad hair.


headwear would be suffice in that case.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

The men with receding hairlines never had to worry about being bald in public and their male dignity might not have suffered in the presence of the king or at court.  For what anyone truly knows, Bach and Haydn might have been as bare as billiard balls. The women too! Lol. Fortunately, during that courtly era, the great composers were able to write right on cue!


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

And I thought this was a thread about Bernstein.


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