Talk:List of 20th-century classical composers by name

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Latest comment: 18 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

If "modern classical music" is going to be defined as "music written in the 20th century and beyond" (as the article says), why not just call the article "20th century classical music"? As it stands, we have some composers who technically fit the description of "modern" we have on the page, but who would not be thought of as "modern" by most people (Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Leos Janacek, for example). --Camembert

But there are a few composers alive today who have written music since 2000, so these are 21st century composers. :-) User:David Martland

Well, that's true, but it still doesn't make Mahler a "modern" composer :-) See my idea for the page below --Camembert

I think people are reading too much into the word "classical" which is just a name of a genre of music. There is nothing stopping a contemorary composer from creating a symphany in the classical style just as there is nothing stopping an archituect from creating a building in classical Roman style. --mav

The word "classical" means being of the classical period. "List of 20th centru classical composers" is an utter contradition in terms. It rather like "list of 19th century mediaeval poets"! A contemporary composer who creates a symphony in the classical style is a neo-classicist. This is a specific term as doesn't simply refer to any old orchestral music written in the 20th century. I suggest that this list be renamed List of 20th century composers - they are certainly not classical. 80.255 03:50, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

No, "classical" in this sense has a double meaning: one, as you say, is music of a certain style from (roughly) the second half of the 18th century (the Classical music era); the other, looser, sense is any so-called "serious" music (as opposed to pop or folk music), and in this looser sense "classical music" is still being written today. A page called "List of 20th century composers", as you suggest, could include modern pop songwriters and so on, which is fine, but not what the page is intended to be about. The title of the article is fine. --Camembert

I'd have to agree. If the page were renamed as suggested then this list would have to include anybody from the 20th century who wrote anything remotely musical. To the wider public "classical music" is anything that isn't pop/rock/country/etc or anything with an orchestra. Mfearby 07:59, 24 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Surely this page contains largely a duplication of material also in the Composer list. It's OK to have it here, but the material should be consistent where possible. User:David Martland

The composer page is somewhat of a mess. In particular, the "modern" section is far too large and far too wide-ranging to be useful. I've been meaning to split it up by style more to try and sort this problem out; as it stands, we have Gustav Mahler and Steve Reich under the same heading, which is misleading and not very useful.

But whatever happens, the composer page will probably remain a bare list of composers and their dates. I'd like to think that eventually this page could become a counterpart to baroque music, classical music era, romantic music and so on, by providing a guide to developments in classical music in the 20th century. This would require the page to be moved to 20th century classical music. What do people think? I think that would be a good deal more useful than the page we have here now. --Camembert

There are some interesting technical and other issues here. Firstly, it appears to me that it would be easier if we had some form of "subroutine" or "macro" facility to handle lists. Then it occurred to me that what we really need are routines for handling list structures.

The problem with lists (not only of composers, but also others ...) is what entries should be in them. For example, Ronald Binge - should he be in the composer list? Maybe - he is a composer. But should he be in the 20th Century list? Maybe - again - he was alive then. But he should not be in the Modern Music list - surely! If we had "set theory" software we could perhaps handle this - though in the end it might just come down to a relational data base.

Where the lists are long, it can be quite a pain having several near duplicate lists, trying to keep them synchronised - but that doesn't mean that such lists actually have to be identical, because they may serve different purposes. -- User:David Martland

Well, I don't know about technical problems - all that stuff goes over my head. But it seems to me that we don't really know what we mean when we say "modern". The article says "Modern classical music is music written in the 20th century and beyond", but your comments makes it clear that "modern" is not equivalent to "20th century". I doubt, in fact, that we could agree on what constitutes "modern" music: to me, it implies a kind of stylistic modernism - I wouldn't have a big problem calling Charles Ives modern, but I certainly wouldn't call Andrew Lloyd Webber modern, even though he's of a later generation. So something needs doing, I think. And to me, just moving the page to "20th century classical music" is the most obvious thing to do. --Camembert

I have put an asterisk next to the major names. I know there will not be universal agreement on who is "major" but a bare list with no indication of a musician's importance is, when this long, self-defeating. -- Tad Boniecki

I'm sorry, but I'm going to take the asterisks out. It's very speculative to say who is the "most important", and isn't NPOV (if I was marking the list, for example, I would have starred Webern, Boulez, Xenakis, Kagel and lots of others, and not done Hovhannes and some others, and everyone else will feel differently). However, I agree that the list is too long to be very useful at the moment, and here's what I plan to do to improve the situation: I want to break the list up into styles and trends and give a brief commentary on each together with a bit on trends as they've developed through the 20th century as a whole. Within that prose we can mention composers regarded to be more significant and (importantly) explain what makes them so significant. --Camembert

"Classical music" has become a larger description of genres-past: baroque, renaissance, classical, romantic... While some 20th century composers, like Rachmaninoff and Gershwin have been considered classical composers, the term "20th century" is becoming outdated, as we passed Y2K without a significant culture shift. Why not just call them all "orchestral" instead of "classical?" That would take alot of the genre guesswork out of it, and be more specific as to what type of ensemble one would hear.

Orchestronics

Because an "orchestral composer" would be somebody who wrote music for orchestra - not all composers thought of as classical are known for their orchstral music (Chopin is one example - not 20th century, I know, but you see what I mean). Also, orchestras are used in all sorts of contexts which are pretty clearly not classical (pop records, jazz, lounge etc). A list of orchestral composers would be possible, but it would have to be in addition to this article (and list of composers and whatever other similar lists there are), not a replacement for it. --Camembert

True. Many composers use orchestral sounds in various genres. What then, makes it "classical." I generally look for things like counterpoint, structure (something beyond chorus and verse), and rhythms that don't necessarily involve percussion. That's just the tip of the iceberg, but the definition of "classical" seems to be altered with every generation.

Perhaps, in 150-years, music historians will lump Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, McCartney and Zappa together as 20th Century composers, and call the whole pie classical.

Orchestronics

Yes, it's difficult to define exactly what classical music is, and there isn't a universally accepted definition. This seems to be more a question for classical music to deal with, however, than this page (there is already a bit of discussion there, I think). --Camembert

Hi, I just wandered into List of 20th century classical composers for the first time today, spent about 30 minutes entering birth/death dates for many of my favorites, then after saving, realized I was wasting my time: this list is basically just a subset of the "Modern classical era" section of List of classical music composers. To revive the above discussion between Camembert and all, can't we have the list in just one of the two places? The redundancy is silly. Harris7 18:25, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it is a bit silly. I'll merge the list at list of classical music composers into here - it could go at either location, but as you say, better for it to be at one than both (incidentally, just for the record, most of the above discussion happened while this page was at 20th century classical music). --Camembert

OK, I've done a quick(ish) merge, but I've not worried too much about things like formatting - for example, sometimes composers' dates are linked, sometimes they're not, whereas really they should be either all linked or none linked (I'd prefer none linked, for reason I won't go into, but it's a matter of taste). So the list needs work, but at least there is now only one list. --Camembert

Copyright stuff. I just found this page http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-20th-century-classical-composers which looks to me as though it has been copied from Wikipedia. Is that OK? I don't mind contributing to a "free" volume which remains free, but I rather object to having our collective work "ripped off" by other sites - maybe it doesn't really matter, but does Wikipedia have a view on this?

There are shades of grey here - as obviously most articles are based on others, but I think it's bad form to have lifted articles which don't at least mention where they were lifted from. The argument that lists of composers will tend to be similar doesn't wash completely, as some of the entries are very unusual, and appear also in the nationmaster.com list. David Martland 09:43, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Nationmaster does, in fact, credit the Wikipedia - at the bottom of that page, in invisibly small writing, it says "The Wikipedia article included on this page is licensed under the GFDL" - but there are other problems with it. You might want to check out Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content (Nationmaster is classed as having a medium degree of compliance). --Camembert

Is Frank Zappa considered a classical music composer? --65.73.0.137

I think he could be considered that, yeah. He made two albums of stuff with the London Symphony Orchestra and The Yellow Shark (played by the Ensemble Moderne) is also in a classical idiom, as well as other bits and bobs dotted around various places. So it wasn't the only thing he did, but composing what is usually called "classical" music was part of his work, yes. --Camembert

As for including Mascagni

How much did he write after 1910? I believe that's our baseline here. (Admittedly Reger - and Debussy at that- only sneak in when considered that way despite the 'modern' sound of their music, but they do sneak in nonetheless... Liszt doesn't despite his late works, nor Wagner, despite their influence on music ever since...) Schissel - bowl listen 15:23, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

He did write some stuff — I had to look it up though. Operas include Il piccolo Marat in 1921, and Nerone in 1935 (which the Grove calls "an unconsciously ironic tribute to Mussolini.") There's also some songs and some other miscellaneous music. Literally he's a 20th century classical composer, so it's ok with me if he's on this list, even though it's a little jarring to see his name here since the music for which he is renowned is all 19th century. Antandrus 16:13, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't bother me either, was just wondering. (Even recall a review of the first of those two from Fanfare, I think... not at all sure the issue date, reviewer, though, or the label/conductor/singers. *baps self* Just got myself Oxford Concise and it had the same answers now that I actually look at it, very sorry about that!!) Schissel - bowl listen 16:34, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

Dylan?

I noticed that Bob Dylan is on this list of 20th century classical composers. But nowhere in Dylan's fairly extensive article do I find any reference to his composition of "classical" (i.e. Western art) music. Certainly Dylan is an extremely talented songwriter, but does he actually belong on this page of classical composers? I'm not familiar enough with Dylan's work to immediately make the change and remove him from this list, but someone please let me know if he in fact did write some classical music. If not, I don't believe he should be kept on this list. It probably wouldn't hurt to scour this list for other similar musicians/songwriters being classified as classical composers, I'm sure there's a list where they all belong but this may not be it. Bobhobbit 06:55, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There's a fairly extensive article on him in the New Grove, and there's not a single mention of any "classical" work. The nearest approach he seems to have made to "classical" music was his receipt of an honorary doctorate in music from Princeton in 1990. I'm taking him off of this list. Antandrus (talk) 14:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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