Underrated/Overrated/Misunderstood American Composers

 This is obviously a great use of my time...

Let's play a little game called 'overrated/underrated/misunderstood.' In another group I belong to, somebody shared a 1980s New York Times article yesterday from the august music critic Tim Page, of whom we're somehow lucky enough that he belongs to this group, in which he asked 20 musical luminaries which composers were overrated and which were underrated. This is an interesting if not particularly meaningful game to play with oneself about which musicians deserve more attention, and which deserve less. But then there are the musicians who receive lots of attention, but the attention does them no justice. How does one talk about them? The result is that as inevitably happens when one asks who's overated and who's underrated, a number of respondees in the article picked the same composer for overrated and underrated.

Let's confine ourselves to American music, and let's confine ourselves to composers, and in doing so, perhaps fashion what a more functional American musical canon might look like. By no means is this exhaustive. I just wanted to stick to clasical and to a lesser extent (but not enough) jazz. No rock or folk or bluegrass, very few songwriters of any genre. Not because I don't value them, but because this post can only be so long before anyone tires of it, most of all the writer. So...

Ahem...

Underrated - Henry Cowell: The greatest of all US composers. Music influenced by the whole world that expresses the whole world as America always should, and in his piano music, goes so far to express the world beyond our world. There is no greater in America, and while the 20th century has equals to him, there is quite possibly no superior.

Overrated - Aaron Copland: He deserves a place in the pantheon, but so do so many others. He is supposedly what American music sounds like, but he's Stravinsky in American dross, a musical politician who consciously prevented the advancement of still greater composers than he by casting aspersions at their amateurishness. Coplad is what happens to talent when it's exquisitely trained, but Ives, Cowell, Gershwin, Revueltas, they are all genius in the wild, and achieve more with no training than Copland did with all the training in the world.

Misunderstood - Charles Ives: The 'primitive' was perhaps the greatest musical genius of American classical music. This music is the cacophony of democracy in music. Did you expect it to be orderly? Did you expect it to sound merely pretty? It is music of an overwhelming spiritual noise.

Underrated - Lukas Foss: an actual European, but eclectically American and always evolving to include new musical DNA into his body of work. He is one of our greatest composers and in dire need of rediscovery.

Overrated - Samuel Barber: He was supposedly a 'properly European' sounding composer, but his greatest achievement was how well he imitated European composers. There is very little besides his place of origin that seems American or attachment to America except for a song about parents on porches.

Misunderstood - Lou Harrison: Not just California's 'Composer Laureate', he is the music of the American West. Influenced by California's open landscape, but also by Asian and Hispanic immigration, by alternative spirituality. Barber was keeping music in the 19th century, Harrison was opening it to the 21st.

Underrated - Conlon Nancarrow: The sophistication of his ideas must have taken forever to put in practice. No one else has or could make a piano sound like that.

Overrated - John Cage: Avant-garde and full of shit.

Misunderstood - Harry Partch: We should all be inventing our own instruments and creating our own worlds. Whether you get the music or not, Partch's achievements took the ultimate musical courage, and the evidence is how few people followed his example.

Underrated - Victor Herbert: The forgotten contribution to light opera. America's Offenbach, our Johann Strauss, our Gilbert & Sullivan

Overrated - Stephen Foster: Do I really need to go over it?

Misunderstood - Leonard Bernstein: Our greatest theater composer sadly did not write much for the theater. The price of Gustav Mahler was Leonard Bernstein.

Underrated - Sidney Bechet: The way Bechet plays with standards has no equal or peer.

Overrated - Benny Goodman: he plays clarinet good...

Misunderstood - Louis Armstrong: Whatever celebrity he later was, Pops IS American music. Everything we love, everything we value. It is music to accompany us in every state of a life's journey.

Underrated - W.C. Handy: Like Pops, the real America: exuberant yet sad, democratic music in recordings set in stone, free yet in prison.

Overrated - John Philip Sousa: the music of US imperialism.

Misunderstood - Scott Joplin: He is our American Bach. It all comes from him.

Underrated - Morton Gould: One of the great geniuses of American music, underrated because of his crossover excursions. Most of his 'long hair' compositions should be standard repertoire. His music is what American music should be when it engages with the wider world - which it almost always should do.

Overrated - Gunther Schuller: Asshole.

Misunderstood - Andre Previn: It's a shame he became such a mediocre conductor. He was one of our great jazz pianists and movie composers.

Underrated - Charles Mingus: Alright, so he's pretty well known. Why should that matter when we still don't recognize Black Saint and Sinner Lady and Ah-Um as two of the greatest compositions ever written by an American - harmonic and rhythmic innovations by the truckload. As Mingus screamed to talkers during one of his sets: "ISAAC STERN DOESN'T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!"

Overrated - Charlie Parker: We don't know how Bird would have evolved over time. What's clear is that he basically had one idea in the time he had, admittedly an idea powerful enough to move the earth. It's excusable that Bird hadn't adapted Miles and Coltrane's way of playing through the changes by 1955, but it also means that we basically have a lot of recordings of Charlie Parker basically doing one thing to every standard. It's immensely effective for what it does, but it cleanses the American musical palate for the patinas which more demonstrably inventive musicians like Miles, Coltrane, and Mingus apply.

Misunderstood - Miles Davis: We're still catching up with Miles. Like Stravinsky, a genius who evolved at light speed. Is the later stuff quite as great as the stuff from the stuff pre 64? Well, no. But it's still fascinating. Kind of Blue was, in many ways, the least interesting thing he ever did.

Underrated - John Lewis: The leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet was one of those who could pack more innovation and influences into three minutes than better known composers could into an hour. His music is now in danger of footnote status to American cultural history that should be a chapter unto itself.

Overrated - Keith Jarrett: I guess it's impressive that he makes his compositions up on the spot? I still think the Köln concert sounds scarily close to Yanni.

Misunderstood - Duke Ellington: The greatest music transcends genre. Is his classical music dressed up popular music? Does his popular music put a figleaf on classical? What difference does it make. Ellington IS music, and no composer ever wrote more great music on American soil.

Misunderstood and Underrated - George Crumb & Pauline Oliveros: Two of America's greatest composers, Crumb still going at 90 after Glass and Reich overtook his position as generation leader 50 years ago. Black Angels is his only repertory piece now. His music is the transcendence people say Feldman is. Oliveros has a similarly awesome spiritual charge. It cannot to be listened to in chunks to truly understand, it has to be experienced over quantities of time. Like Feldman, it is meditative music meant for contemplation. Unlike Feldman, there is constant motion and constant events.

Overrated: Morton Feldman - It's slow, it's quiet. Come on you schnorrer DO SOMETHING!

Underrated: Karel Husa - What makes Karel Husa great is that he embodies the world of European expressionism, but he transfers it to a language Americans understand. It's one of the strangest stories in American music. A Czech who lived through the Second World War, assimilated all the techniques of a proper European composer from Paris studies with Honegger and Boulanger, becomes a composer of microtonality, polyrhythm, and outside the box effects of instrumental color, using it all to create music that conveys ultralofty truths about the agony of mankind, and more often than not, these howls for the plight of the world are scored for concert band. You'd think all those small town high school bands would run away screaming, but they eat it up! Husa is the most played band composer since John Philip Sousa!

Overrated: Elliott Carter - Somehow we allowed the most orderly WASP in the world to bombard our concert halls with chaos for sixty years. A rich heir with a rent-controlled apartment overlooking Central Park wrote music of a darkness he never experienced, and it shows. French-trained music of such cosmopolitan refinement and intellectual supercomplexity that nobody appreciated it but the people who programmed it. There is no question of the intelligence and fortitude it takes to write a century's worth of Elliott Carter music, the question however remains whether or not this music which gives so much appearance of loftiness and sophistication is in fact nothing but a con job.

Misunderstood: Arnold Schoenberg - Schoenberg is the opposite of a cold, sterile composer. He is a composer who expresses so intensely that tonality cannot contain his emotional urgency. Like Stravinsky, Schoenberg remade himself over and over again. Perhaps he did not absorb the whole world wihtin his music the way true genius does, but even if Schoenberg was not quite a genius of composition, he had such powerful emotions to express that he was always searching for a technique that would be a strong enough vessel to contain it.

Overrated: Philip Glass - He has real achievemnts, but mostly as a young man and since then can't go a single day without farting out a new composition that sounds just like the last 500.

Underrated: Easley Blackwood - We are just beginning to understand the beauties of microtonal music. When we do, Blackwood will be appreciated as one of the immortals of his generation.

Misunderstood: Terry Riley - Hippie he may be, but he's so much more than just In C and the founder of minimalism. There's a whole catalogue. In some ways he's the founder of electronic music as we understand it today too. Start with Rainbow in Curved Air.

Underrated: Adolphus Hailstork - Consensus seems to suddenly pick George Walker as the great African-American composer of recent musical history. I think that's a mistake, personally I don't understand what distinguishes Walker's music. Except for the suddenly oft-performed Lyric for Strings, what I've heard of Walker is standard issue for his generation: academic Schoenberg-influenced angst, not as good as Karel Husa and not all that different from Leon Kirchner or George Rochberg. Adolphus Hailstork, on the other hand, that's greatness. This is music that sounds like nobody else's music. It's not just that Hailstork is from the generation that marks a return to tonality, it's because Hailstork is a composer of free-flowing evolution. It's not just exuberant and joyful and luminously beautiful, each is distinct within the Hailstork model, with a different palate of influences which renders each score with a vividness that is practically physical. Compare the jazz overtones of An American Port of Call with the modal harmonies of the Songs of Love and Justice with the exuberant antiphonality of Seven Songs of the Rubiyat. This is the real thing, a composer of the deepest individuality and uniqueness for whom deep listening may pay limitless rewards.

Overrated: Samuel Coleridge Taylor - Sadly there's of course still no truly such thing as an overrated African-American composer. But Samuel Coleridge Taylor must be counted easily the most successful and performed African-American composer of all time thanks to his trilogy of cantatas based on Longfellow's the Song of Haiawatha, but the ufnortunate truth is it's just another bloated Victorian choral monstrosity. Like Amy Beach, the triumph is that a person from an excluded demographic was allowed to purvey the same generic music as everybody else.

Misunderstood: William Grant Still - This is one of the Great American Composers. His music sounds like absolutely no one else's because on the one hand it's brined in gospel and blues, and on the other, so deeply engrained in the 19th century grand tradition. It sounds a bit like if Brahms learned the Blues. He is mostly known for his first symphony: the Afro-American Symphony, but the output is enormous and the quality is staggering. The plurality is vocal music - more than thirty works for chorus and eight whole operas. Hopefully, Still's time has finally come, and we will be making acquaintance with a giant treasure trove of unheard music quite shortly.

Underrated: Ruth Crawford Seeger - Not just because she's Pete Seeger's mother, her music is some of the most innovative ever written on American soil. Ultra-modern, sharp as a tack, incorporating every conceivable musical technique circa-1930, however small her output, she is one of the greatest of all American composers.

Overrated: Amy Beach - There are 100 19th century American composers who wrote generic music that is a copy of European models. Without the means for individuality, which hardly any American composer exhibited at that point in history, what is the point in playing just another American composer whose music isn't particularly distinctive?

Misunderstood: Florence Price - We're now finally hearing a couple works by African-American composer Florence Price in the concert hall, but there is so much more music by her for smaller settings. The true triumph will not be when Florence Price finally gets her symphonies played, but when her enormous chamber output becomes a regular presence in the recital hall.

Underrated: Michael Daugherty - infuses orchestral scores with badly needed doses of pop culture. Whatever the practices of his personal life, he's never not inventive, never not clever, always skirting the tragicomic line where great music lives.

Overrated: Christopher Rouse - The de facto Composer Laureate to American orchestras, 35 years of orchestral angst, what did he have to be angsty about? He was practically the only American getting performances.

Misunderstood: John Adams - yeah he's the minimalist who watered down minimalism, and his output alternates greatness with shit pretty consistently. But the reason Adams is Adams is because unlike Glass, he knows exactly how to write for the orchestra. He truly loves the long orchestral tradition, and even as he revolutionizes it, he preserves it. I doubt I ever need to hear another Adams theatrical work ever again, but orchestral compositions like Harmonielehre and Fearful Symmetries and Dharma at Big Sur are the equal of any orchestral works in my lifetime.

Underrated: Miklos Rosza - No composer worked in more sophisticated harmonies or orchestral effects into mainstream Hollywood pictures. When you hear Rosza, you're watching Peck and Heston act to music that could be Bartok.

Overrated: John Williams - A truly great movie composer whose works lose all their potency of their context in a concert hall, where THEY REALLY DO ALL SOUND THE SAME.

Misunderstood: Bernard Hermann - an all around musical genius who wrote great work in nearly all genres who just happened to fall into movies and become the greatest of all movie composers.

Underrated: Ernest Bloch - the forgotten emigre genius with a somehow forgotten catalogue. No immigrant composer wrote more great music in America. Start with the String Quartets.

Overrated: Igor Stravinsky - a genius whose genius experienced diminishing returns piece by piece his whole career. By the time he got to America, the composer of the Rite of Spring was just another great composer.

Misunderstood: Kurt Weill - He's not just Threepenny Opera and Seven Deadly Sins. His music stayed every bit as potent after he came to America. Listen to Street Scene, the opera he composed with Langston Hughes as his librettist.

Underrated: Dominick Argento - Unlike Rorem, the songs have actual character, actual forward motion, innovative effects, original harmonic progressions.

Overrated: Ned Rorem - exquisite chord progressions set to famous poems do not make a great song.

Misunderstood: George Gershwin - his greatest genius was for songs. There are only a few orchestral pieces, but the song catalogue is endless and deathless. You can reach the end of Gershwin the orchestral composer, you can never reach the end of Gershwin the vocal composer.

Underrated: Alan Hovhaness - I have no idea which symphony is the greatest ever written in America, but I'm reasonably sure it's either by Hovhaness or Howard Hanson. Present within Hovhaness is a spirituality that is entirely American. It can seem entirely pleasant sub-Vaughan Williams, then suddenly comes the avant-garde effects of our nightmares. Do not be fooled. The beauty in Hovhaness is not kitsch, it is earned through a spiritual presence that is very much aware of life's dark side.

Overrated: Roy Harris - The Third Symphony is generally called the 'Great American Symphony.' It's basically a Nebraska cornfield set to music.

Misunderstood: Howard Hanson - The much more interesting of Nebraska's somehow two famous symphonists. Hanson is a true American original from the heartland who both radiates the earnestness of a football playing farmhand and at the same time has the absolute gravity of dense musical ideas.

Underrated: Bohuslav Martinu - Of the three great emigré neoclassicists to park in the US's long-term lot, Martinu is the most obviously unsung. It took me a little while to find the emotional core of Martinu, but unlike Prokofiev, this is the music of a great soul. Opus after opus by the hundred of music that seems to combine the piquancy of Stravinsky with the warmth of Dvorak. Martinu never aspires to the heavens, he just writes work after work of human-sized music in every genre. Masterpiece after masterpiece of its own size and shape, and if nothing in it is an overwhelming statement like the Resurrection Symphony, who cares?

Overrated: Sergei Prokofiev - The identity of the composer is never mistaken, the problem is what the identity displays. There is something genuinely unpleasant about Prokofiev's music. It's like being trapped inside the mind of a person whom you know means ill. There is so much flash and noise, there is so much irony and cynicism, I do sometimes wonder if Prokofiev ever wrote a note that wasn't calculated for effect.

Misunderstood: Paul Hindemith - There is definitely something of the pedant in Hindemith, trying to exhaust the complete possibilities of every musical form, every harmonic theory, every instrument. Though he is the tropics compared to Prokofiev, Hindemith's expressive temperature is a little cold, but nevertheless Hindemith proves definitively that pedantry and fun go hand in hand. His music is so exciting, so ingeniously clever, so event-filled and enjoyable, that you don't generally miss the emotional angst of so many other Germans. Hindemith may have been a little overrated in his own day - Bartok he is not, but he most certainly deserves more airtime than he currently gets.

Underrated: George Antheill - This is true modernism, and Antheil shows how true innovation comes about. He freely derives ideas from composers who came before him. It is only by assimilating those previous ideas that you can develop a personal language that carries the discoveries of previous composers into new dimensions.

Overrated: Roger Sessions - False modernism. Is there a single piece by Roger Sessions that isn't atrociously ugly?

Misunderstood: Edgard Varese - When Messiaen first heard Varese, he declared that he'd found a musical soulmate. Varese did for cities and noise what Messiaen did for birdsong and the silence of nature. Varese is not noise, he is noise organized into music fifty years before 'STOMP' (remember that thing?...). Yes, Varese is noise, but what Varese's music is about is the meaning of noise, which is absolutely omnipresent in our lives, and something we so take for granted that we're still catching up to Varese's realization.

Underrated: Bud Powell - That groaning nut was a genius. Next to Joplin this is the great American piano composer. There are chord progressions never dreamed of by Debussy and Ravel, there is funereal tragedy in his piano never found by Chopin or Mahler. And there is more invention in his pinky finger than in the whole output of...

Overrated: Thelonious Monk - God help me, I just don't get it. I never got it. Whatever is there that everybody else hears, I've just never heard it.

Misunderstood: Art Tatum - Duke is arguably America's greatest composer, but Art Tatum is, without a doubt, America's greatest pianist. In any field. Period. Just listen. To anything. Vladimir Horowitz said of Tatum that if he decided to play classical music, every other pianist would have to quit.

Underrated: Meredith Monk: Choral music has an unfortunate problem. It hasn't really changed its formal model since before the Enlightenment, and therefore is still tied to sacred worship. Musical instruments are a less personal instrument and therefore can be used more easily for abstract mental contemplation. But the human voice is so personal that it can almost never be used for anything but contemplation of the sacred, or celebration of the profane. In many ways, the alternative and nearly pagan spirituality of Meredith Monk finds a way of incorporating both to sometimes extraordinary effect.

Overrate: Morton Lauridsen - Hey look! I can write a chorus full of ninth chords!

Misunderstood: William Dawson - William L. Dawson is known far best known as an arranger of spirituals for chorus. The arrangements are wonderful and have served God alone knows how many choirs in both worship services and concert for well over fifty years, but it is a far cry from the glory his talent promised from the Negro Folk Symphony. Never again for the last 55 years of his life did he attempt another work of such ambition. The loss is music's, America's, and posterity's. William Dawson was clearly one of the most talented composers to ever come from the US.