Yeah. It’s insane.
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Remastered in case you didn’t see that:
This thread was fun already, but that’s a bonus. I hadn’t seen the remaster. He’s just amazing.
I kid you not, this was pretty verbatim what I thought when Mozart was first mentioned.
Noah C.,
I have not read what others said – just your post. You gave all the answers to the questions yourself. It is easy today to find superb wines from almost any wine producing area to fair prices. There is no need to focus on the cult labels which are a speculator item these days. If you love wine you are living in the best era. Don´t worry.
I appreciate your correction on the other thread.
Please read the post that I put up and recognize that I didn’t try to name the GOAT for musicians. This isn’t a thtread about the GOAT for wine, it’s a thread about whether wines and being a wine enthusiast now is better than wines and being a wine enthusiast back in the day, whichever day was your “day”.
I compared two phenomenal talents from different eras, who IMO share some creative similarities. There was no mention of who was “best”, nor was there any implication whatsoever that these two musicians were better than Bach.
And as you were having the same thought as Adam, then you also answered why no one uses Bach for comaprisons. As Chris Thile said, “in the discussion of greatest musicians, there’s Bach, and then the arguing starts.
So it would be stupid to compare anyone to Bach as an example that great musical talents come in many eras and many places. And who knows, maybe one day a musical talent will come along that is worth making a comparison to Bach.
Well, if a small thread drift is allowed, I’d want to bring attention to Jacob Collier.
I’m not really a fan of his music - especially his singing voice is something I can’t stand - but he has been many times compared to Bach (by people who really understand music), and justly so.
Not only is this guy a virtuoso level musician with virtually every instrument he lays his hands on, his understanding and command of music theory is simply phenomenal. It seems the way he treats harmony is something even beyond Bach - this dude can modulate by singing to micro-intervals just by ear - and it seems he can bend rhythms to his will like no other. Only time will tell whether his compositional skills are on the same level as Bach’s but as far as musical talents come, I think this musical prodigy might be one of the few that can challenge Bach. If one understands even a little bit of music theory, his educational videos on the subject are simply dumbfounding.
So I really wish he started to make music that would appeal to me! Because I am simply in awe of his musical mastery but his music really does nothing to me. Yet.
How stupid were those people worrying about whether wine was better or worse than in the 1980s while people are dying from an illness rather than being vaccinated and wearing masks. They will probably call this the dark ages.
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“Study Bach, there you will find everything.”
― Johannes Brahms
Marcus,
There does seem to be a strong correlation between cooking and winemaking abilities.
I see that Nathan Myrhvold and his research posse are putting out a four volume series on pizza in October. They have done all sorts of scientific research on how pizza actually cooks .
I am not sure if i am ready to drop around $300 for it, but I heard him interviewed on a show called The Splendid Table and it was fascinating. I am waiting for his series on cooking dinosaurs.
As for engineering, your whole system of processing fruit is engineered by somebody, probably you. You might use clonal material that originally came from France, via OSU and Prof Bernard at Dijon. Science?? You cannot take the time to measure everything but you do measure many things and
I always thought that the seat of pants knowledge one gains over the years was something insuring a long career. I hope I am correct here.
Johann Sebastian, Wolfang, Ludwig and other classical composers may have been “Wineberserkers” !
Or maybe just drunks, but I love their music anyway.
And why Prince? Thelonious Monk was writing world-changing modern music before Prince was even born. And for all the praise Prince gets, Monk has influenced and shaped countless musicians (probably including Prince) and likely will continue to do so for as long as there is jazz.
We will all have been cancelled by then, for being guilty of some lack of enlightenment.
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Totally off topic of course (but that ship sailed a long time ago), but this is a worthy point and speaks to the recency bias inherent in throwing names like Prince, or Monk (or Armstrong or McCartney or Miles or Dylan or Ellington, etc. around). Just look at Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart. That is four people, yet they were born over a span of (not quite) 150 years. Think of how many other musicians you are excluding, and over how broad a time span, by listing them as the “greatest” of that era.
So to compare fairly to someone from the modern era, it’s not enough for the person in question to have been top of the heap at some point in his or her career, or even to have been the best of a particular decade - we’re talking about the handful of the very best of the best over a period from those making music today going back to approximately Tchaikovsky. Now, there are more people in the English speaking world (which seems to be the relevant comparison on the modern end) now than there were in all of Europe (which seems to be the relevant comparison on that end) in Bach et al.'s time, so you have to adjust for that, but you can’t pick 1 or 2 per decade and get anything similar to the same level of standing out from the crowd. So you include Tchaikovsky and Armstrong and you’re already down to having only 6-8 slots left. Stravinsky? Joplin? Morton? Bird? Robert Johnson? Hendrix? One of the others listed above?
It reminds me of the baseball argument when people say things like “How can you say that Williams or Musial or Bonds or Trout (etc.) wouldn’t make the starting nine of the all-time baseball all-star team?” It’s not to take away from them, it’s just you can only put 3 outfielders in the starting nine and Ruth, Aaron, and Mays also played OF, so there you go.
Now maybe you still put Prince on your personal list, but IMO you have to be thinking of a list that short over a period of time that long for the relevant comparison to be the handful of greatest composers from the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries.
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Dave,
Thanks for your excellent comment. I also wonder how much the impression of “greatness” is confused with creating a successful “fame.” Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus got tossed out as garbage in this thread, but clearly they are great at what they do (generate fame). I wonder when I ever would have heard of Prince if he had not put out Purple Rain and a girlfriend dragged me to go see it. Given my age, I found Apollonia Six by far the most interesting part of the movie. What I did not get was why people were fussing over Prince. But by age 14, I had been exposed to Jeff Beck, Alex Lifeson, Steve Howe, Al Dimeola, Robert Fripp, and Frank Zappa, so I failed to understand why people thought he was such an amazing guitar player. And I still don’t. Would Prince really have received all the attention he did if he had not put out a catchy movie, been glamorous/flamboyant,whatever, and sucked up the attention of the Pop world by changing his name to a silly symbol? In other words, how much greatness has gone undiscovered or largely overlooked due to “poor marketing.”
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I’m mostly agreeing with you but it’s more than just “generating fame”.
Justice served. 
Fairly said. They obviously both have an inherent talent to begin with. And they have mastered marketing that talent. Meanwhile, spend a few hours on Youtube and you will find dozens of guitarist (or any other instrument) that will absolutely crush the famous contemporary “greats.” They just don’t have the fame or successful marketing or a “patron.”
I don’t know how that bolded part could be proven or disproven, but I don’t believe it and I don’t think you really believe it, either. That is to say, I would be shocked if we brought a Wheaties box back in the Tardis to Michelangelo and he held it in artistic awe and regarded it as achieving what he set out to do in his own art - and that holds true regardless whether you presented it to him free of context or whispered in his ear that in the 20th century we invented machines that could take accurate color photographs and reproduce them in mass quantities with the push of a button. Actually, maybe I conceded too much by saying I don’t know how the claim could be disproven, because now that I think about it, it seems fairly easily disproven by the fact that we have artists now who don’t regard a Wheaties box as fine art, and it isn’t because realism isn’t considered art anymore - photographers still rank among the fine artists! But not all photographs are fine art notwithstanding the fact that they’re all (well, except the out-of-focus ones) more-or-less equally good at reproducing their subjects realistically. Speaking of Hockney, here’s a cool interview where he kinda dunks on photography because painters representing a scene see things and bring out things that photographers do not. And here’s a cool vid from “Great Art Explained” about the Mona Lisa. What’s notable for present purposes is maybe like a third of the video is dedicated to praising the techniques for the realism of the rendering. The rest is talking about choices made and techniques used in the composition that have nothing to do with realism and couldn’t be reproduced by having a Mona Lisa lookalike sit for a photograph. I realize this is a different ninja turtle. Regardless, I don’t think what Michelangelo and his contemporaries thought they were doing or were “aiming” to do could be accomplished by your average or even your especially skilled sports or portraiture photographer. Given the era, I understand that it also had a lot to do with the sanctification of God and all that woo-woo none of us can relate to anymore, but I’m still pretty sure that accomplishing this to a Renaissance master’s satisfaction required quite a bit more deliberation in the composition than is factored into a snapshot of Mary Lou Retton dismounting the uneven parallel bars.
I don’t think much more needs to be said about the separate side-discussion about Prince on which some very fine posts have been made, other than that 1) I wonder if there is a classical music forum somewhere on the internet where people are talking about how of course it would be ridiculous to put Prince at the level of Bach but Meiomi pinot noir is just as good as the greatest burgundies and on what ground could anyone say otherwise, 2) that goddam video of Prince shredding the guitar solo in While My Guitar Gently Weeps is practically the new Godwin’s law of the Internet, the probability of its surfacing as one’s social media feed unspools approaching 1. Facebook posts of it are taking up more computational power than Bitcoin. You people can stop. We’ve all seen it. He plays the notes really fast and then throws the guitar up in the air. It’s not that I don’t like it - I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to invoke Samuel Johnson’s response to a virtuosic violin performance, though there is something about it bringing to mind the Monk quote about remembering to play the rests - but for my tastes David Gilmour can get more beauty out of one note than Prince can get out of 50. Ditto Mozart and Bach.
Not to distract from the content, but I had Dr. Who, the Ninja Turtles, Mary Lou Retton, Monk, and Pink Floyd all in a line on my bingo card so I’d like my first prize bottle of 2018 Macdonald cab, please. ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
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