Here at the takimag blog, regarding Stove's just published--by ISI Books--A Student's Guide to Music History: A Worthwhile Book
quote:
Among those cultural questions this guide engages, the most important one comes at the beginning, where Rob explains that often his “judgment on a specific recent creator defies today’s consensus.” He then goes on to note that musical judgments have been far from constant: “A hundred and fifty years ago, such currently obscure figures as Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halevy stood unchallenged among composition’s supreme immortals. During the same period, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Louis Spohr were widely thought to surpass Beethoven.” All of this rings true, but it might also be asked whether Meyerbeer or Hummel was as inferior to Beethoven or Mozart as today’s pop music composers or producers of atonal esoterica are to Meyerbeer and Hummel. The great musical tradition in earlier centuries combined high levels of technical accomplishment with melodic themes drawn from a still vibrant folk culture. Such music also often reflected and incorporated religious sensibility, even in the cases of composers who were not personally devout. But what does one do when the communal context that nurtured earlier composition, written for the ages, no longer exists?
