Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, uses historiometry (toting up lists of who music experts consider worth mentioning and discussing) to try to rank various figures while accounting for the most obvious problems like recency bias.
In Western music there are 522 figures who make a certain cut (the bottom 5 of those 522: Thomas Simpson, John Hothby, Marbrianus Orto, Joannes Gallus, Mattheus le Maistre). The top figures in order: Beethoven & Mozart, Bach, Wager, Haydn, Handel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Schoenberg, Brahms, Chopin, Monteverdi, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Weber, and Gluck.
I’m not a music person, but the only name I recall here as belonging to the 21st or 20th centuries would be Schoenberg.
(Murray, incidentally, tried to rank Chinese music, but found too little survived—little but the names of whom contemporaries considered great musicians, but not their actual compositions etc.)
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770-1827
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756-1791
Johann Sebastian Bach 1685-1750
Richard Wagner 1813-1883
Joseph Haydn 1732-1809
George Frideric Handel 1685-1759
Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971
Claude Debussy 1862-1918
Franz Liszt 1811-1886
Franz Schubert 1797-1828
Robert Schumann 1810-1856
Hector Berlioz 1803-1869
Arnold Schoenberg 1874-1951
Johannes Brahms 1833-1897
Frédéric Chopin 1810-1849
Claudio Monteverdi 1567-1643
Giuseppe Verdi 1813-1901
Felix Mendelssohn 1809-1847
Carl Maria von Weber 1786-1826
Christoph Willibald Gluck 1714-1787
---
Thomas Simpson 1710-1761
John Hothby 1410-1487
Marbrianus de Orto 1460-1529
Joannes Gallus fl. 15xx
Mattheus le Maistre 1505-1577
Here are the decades during which three or more top-20 composers lived. The
number of hash marks shows how many top-20 composers were alive at some point
in that decade.
Is there a relatively simple explanation for the predominance of Germans and Austrians in this period? Obviously you couldn’t expect many great Norwegian or Mongolian composers, because of demographical or logistical reasons, but for example I see no Britons and few Frenchmen in the list. Which differences in musical education and culture could have brought relatively similar countries to have such vastly dissimilar results?
Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented
people working on related problems. Genes count for
little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not
enough to compensate for having been born near Milan
instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great
work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots:
the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker,
Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Xerox Parc.
Edited to add: Maybe there were specific things about
Germany and Austria that caused them to have clusters of
heavy hitters, but maybe there are alternate timelines where
Great Britain or France lucked into being home to such a
cluster.
Right—my question was about what exactly those specific things were. For example, one reason Florence became a greater centre of art than Milan was that it was ruled by a family of socialite bankers (the Medici) whose power came from wealth and prestige, rather than upjumped warlords (the Sforza) who acquired it through skill at arms and dynastic marriages. Another is that Florence had much better access to the marble mines of Carrara, and so on.
Now Mozart, Bach and Beethoven all had two generations of musicians behind them, but consider, say, Haydn. He was the son of villagers who never played an instrument in their lives—yet they recognised his talent so early that at the age of six years they managed to have him apprenticed with the choirmaster. Had he been switched as an infant with a random Marseillais or Londoner boy, his chances of receiving such an early training would have probably dropped like a rock. Was that because France and England had fewer choirs and choirmasters, both to beget little Mozarts and spot little Haydns? Because violins and spinets were more expensive? Because music was considered more of a discipline for older boys, or for girls?
Except that there were a lot French and Western Europe composers at this time. They were using a different model entirely however (Schenkerian Analysis only covers the German model). It didn’t put as much emphasis on the bass as german music does. The German model just seems better (from my standpoint, it seems to actually focus on what the ear naturally focuses on), which made their music better, so they lasted the test of time. The German model then spread to the Western Europe and subsumed everything because their stuff was better.
Is there a relatively simple explanation for the predominance of Germans and Austrians in this period?
Yes. The period itself is essentially defined that way. That is, Germans and Austrians (and those influenced by them) wrote the history of music, and defined the “core period” as precisely that period when they happened to dominate the scene.
That is, Germans and Austrians (and those influenced by them) wrote the history of music
This is, of course, a fully general counter-argument: any time someone points to a cluster, you can say ‘well those and those influenced by them wrote the history so of course we see a cluster’.
For those who don’t accept this fully general counter-argument, Murray considered precisely this national/linguistic argument about bias and examined sources written in a foreign language—eg. what did the Japanese textbooks have to say about German music? He found that this corrective did change rankings and scores… for literature. pg 486:
Histories and biographical dictionaries of Western literature are much more affected by the language of the author than are sources for Western music art and visual art, and for an obvious reason. To repeat the point made in Chapter 5: A German can listen to a work by Vivaldi as easily as he can listen to one by Bach, and an Englishman can look at a painting by Monet as easily as one by Constable. The same cannot be said of literature, because of the language barrier. German historians of literature give markedly more attention to German authors than others, English historians to English authors, and so on. It is not just a matter of national chauvinism. Spanish historians of literature give more attention to New World literature written in Spanish than do historians of other nationalities.
To quote his longer discussion in chapter 5:
National chauvinism within the West remains a problem. Works purporting to cover all of the Western world are skewed toward the nationality of the author. For example, British art historians tend to give more space to Constable and Turner than Italian art historians do, and French historians of philosophy tend to include French thinkers that hardly anyone else mentions.
An examination of these tendencies reveals that the effect of chauvinistic tendencies is minor to begin with and eliminated if the sources come from a mix of nations. Therefore the inventories for the West (visual arts, music, literature, and philosophy) employ sources that have been balanced among the major European nations (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) plus the United States and a scattering of other nations ( Japan, Argentina, Denmark). A number of the compilations are also the product of multinational teams. Examination revealed that the effect of chauvinistic tendencies for most of the inventories were minor to begin with and eliminated by using sources from a mix of nations. The exception was literature. A German can listen to a work byVivaldi as easily as he can listen to one by Bach, and an Englishman can look at a painting by Monet as easily as one by Constable. The same cannot be said of literature, because of the language barrier. German historians of literature give disproportionate attention to German and Austrian authors, English historians to English and American authors, and so on. The selection of significant figures and computation of their index scores were therefore based exclusively on sources not written in the language of the author in question (e.g., Thackeray’s selection as a significant figure and his index score are based exclusively on sources not written in English).
To be clear, my argument wasn’t directed against Murray, but at his sources. I don’t doubt that Murray more or less correctly measured what he was trying to measure (whether or not that measurement has whatever significance he attributes to it, I don’t know; I haven’t read his book).
My real interest is in “debunking” the notion of the “common-practice period”; I would instead prefer to call the period in question the “Germanic period” or something similar. It isn’t really a question of quality: personally, I happen to agree that there is something special about Viennese classicism (i.e. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) but I wouldn’t assign a similar specialness to Pachelbel and Reger while leaving out Gesualdo and Boulez.
ETA: Also, to be clear, my claim isn’t that German-and-Austrian-influenced historians unfairly leave out or devalue other composers from the period 1600-1900; it’s that they elevate that particular period itself to an unjustifiably high status relative to other periods (which in my view has hindered the development of music theory).
(Murray, incidentally, tried to rank Chinese music, but found too little survived—little but the names of whom contemporaries considered great musicians, but not their actual compositions etc.)
Hm, could this be due to a difference in composition writing and publishing practices? That is, did older European compositions survive longer because they were copied more frequently, or (somewhat equivalently) were easier to copy for some reason?
I think much of it may just be relative age combined with poorly developed notation. The golden age of Chinese music was much further back than the golden age of European music—easier to survive 500 years than 2000.
(I don’t think Murray draws the connection, but he discusses problems with ranking Greek music: the surviving music tends to simplistic melodies by a single instrument, distinctly unimpressive—yet writers like Plato describe music as one of the most powerful forces in society. Either Plato et al had very low musical standards or what has survived is extremely incomplete/unrepresentative.)
Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, uses historiometry (toting up lists of who music experts consider worth mentioning and discussing) to try to rank various figures while accounting for the most obvious problems like recency bias.
In Western music there are 522 figures who make a certain cut (the bottom 5 of those 522: Thomas Simpson, John Hothby, Marbrianus Orto, Joannes Gallus, Mattheus le Maistre). The top figures in order: Beethoven & Mozart, Bach, Wager, Haydn, Handel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Schoenberg, Brahms, Chopin, Monteverdi, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Weber, and Gluck.
I’m not a music person, but the only name I recall here as belonging to the 21st or 20th centuries would be Schoenberg.
(Murray, incidentally, tried to rank Chinese music, but found too little survived—little but the names of whom contemporaries considered great musicians, but not their actual compositions etc.)
Here are the decades during which three or more top-20 composers lived. The number of hash marks shows how many top-20 composers were alive at some point in that decade.
Is there a relatively simple explanation for the predominance of Germans and Austrians in this period? Obviously you couldn’t expect many great Norwegian or Mongolian composers, because of demographical or logistical reasons, but for example I see no Britons and few Frenchmen in the list. Which differences in musical education and culture could have brought relatively similar countries to have such vastly dissimilar results?
My guess is clustering caused by positive feedback, a.k.a, the Milanese Leonardo effect:
Edited to add: Maybe there were specific things about Germany and Austria that caused them to have clusters of heavy hitters, but maybe there are alternate timelines where Great Britain or France lucked into being home to such a cluster.
Right—my question was about what exactly those specific things were. For example, one reason Florence became a greater centre of art than Milan was that it was ruled by a family of socialite bankers (the Medici) whose power came from wealth and prestige, rather than upjumped warlords (the Sforza) who acquired it through skill at arms and dynastic marriages. Another is that Florence had much better access to the marble mines of Carrara, and so on.
Now Mozart, Bach and Beethoven all had two generations of musicians behind them, but consider, say, Haydn. He was the son of villagers who never played an instrument in their lives—yet they recognised his talent so early that at the age of six years they managed to have him apprenticed with the choirmaster. Had he been switched as an infant with a random Marseillais or Londoner boy, his chances of receiving such an early training would have probably dropped like a rock. Was that because France and England had fewer choirs and choirmasters, both to beget little Mozarts and spot little Haydns? Because violins and spinets were more expensive? Because music was considered more of a discipline for older boys, or for girls?
I would agree partially with komponisto.
Except that there were a lot French and Western Europe composers at this time. They were using a different model entirely however (Schenkerian Analysis only covers the German model). It didn’t put as much emphasis on the bass as german music does. The German model just seems better (from my standpoint, it seems to actually focus on what the ear naturally focuses on), which made their music better, so they lasted the test of time. The German model then spread to the Western Europe and subsumed everything because their stuff was better.
Yes. The period itself is essentially defined that way. That is, Germans and Austrians (and those influenced by them) wrote the history of music, and defined the “core period” as precisely that period when they happened to dominate the scene.
This is, of course, a fully general counter-argument: any time someone points to a cluster, you can say ‘well those and those influenced by them wrote the history so of course we see a cluster’.
For those who don’t accept this fully general counter-argument, Murray considered precisely this national/linguistic argument about bias and examined sources written in a foreign language—eg. what did the Japanese textbooks have to say about German music? He found that this corrective did change rankings and scores… for literature. pg 486:
To quote his longer discussion in chapter 5:
To be clear, my argument wasn’t directed against Murray, but at his sources. I don’t doubt that Murray more or less correctly measured what he was trying to measure (whether or not that measurement has whatever significance he attributes to it, I don’t know; I haven’t read his book).
My real interest is in “debunking” the notion of the “common-practice period”; I would instead prefer to call the period in question the “Germanic period” or something similar. It isn’t really a question of quality: personally, I happen to agree that there is something special about Viennese classicism (i.e. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) but I wouldn’t assign a similar specialness to Pachelbel and Reger while leaving out Gesualdo and Boulez.
ETA: Also, to be clear, my claim isn’t that German-and-Austrian-influenced historians unfairly leave out or devalue other composers from the period 1600-1900; it’s that they elevate that particular period itself to an unjustifiably high status relative to other periods (which in my view has hindered the development of music theory).
Well, why did non-German historians go along with it, then?
Hm, could this be due to a difference in composition writing and publishing practices? That is, did older European compositions survive longer because they were copied more frequently, or (somewhat equivalently) were easier to copy for some reason?
I think much of it may just be relative age combined with poorly developed notation. The golden age of Chinese music was much further back than the golden age of European music—easier to survive 500 years than 2000.
(I don’t think Murray draws the connection, but he discusses problems with ranking Greek music: the surviving music tends to simplistic melodies by a single instrument, distinctly unimpressive—yet writers like Plato describe music as one of the most powerful forces in society. Either Plato et al had very low musical standards or what has survived is extremely incomplete/unrepresentative.)