If you write for Vice, you know that you are going to have to deal with the inevitable comparisons to Radio 3 at some point. It’s unavoidable. Radio 3 and Vice have been going after the same audience for more years than any of us care to remember. If we does a piece on a previously unheard gem from boutique classical label Biddulph Recordings, you can bet Radio 3 will be diving in there to rip us off all over their third-rate station. Here, to fan the flames of this profound media rivalry, are ten of the finest composers of classical music. As chosen by Vice, not Radio 3.
10. Benjamin BrittenBenjamin Britten is like the navy: he’s known for liking the sea and being really patriotic, but he’s basically about desperate, discreet gay love. His famous opera Peter Grimes can and must be read as Britten’s anguished confession of homosexual love for a local fisherman who was, at the time, married to his aunt. The relationship was left unconsummated, and many scholars have gone as far to say that the fisherman found out about Britten’s infatuation and taunted him, throwing old fish bones and the like at him. But amidst the pain there was salvation, for Britten always had his cello, and in later years he came to love it, and lived with it in sin, as a man lives with a fisherman.
9. Oliphant ChuckerbuttyIn fact his full name was Soorjo Alexander William Langobard Oliphant Chuckerbutty. And he was an organist at the Angel cinema in Islington.
8. Karlheinz StockhausenWhen I went and saw Stockhausen play, along with about 300 other people, he told the audience that there were only 15 people in the world who understood what he did. We’re talking about a man who scored a piece of music for a string quartet, four video cameras, and four helicopters, so he had a point. I mainly just kept on thinking about who those 15 people might be. Concert pianist Alfred Brendel? Classical guitar Australian John Williams? The helicopter teacher at Stockhausen’s local flight school? I guess it’ll remain a mystery forever. Unless he wrote their names down somewhere…
7. Claude DebussyIf you say you like a little jazz played nicely on the piano, I’ll say to you: "Shut the fuck up, you like Debussy." For without that little (I don’t know how big he was; physical descriptions of him are so abundant that checking them seems ridiculous) French maestro’s solo piano nodding, we would never have had the beatnik musings of Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett or Thom Yorke. That’s right, Thom, your great “troubled genius” eco-sensitive guy-rock is nothing more than a clumsily rewritten version of Clair de Lune.
6. Pyotr Ilyich TchaikovskyWhen he was ten years old, Tchaikovsky was sent 800 miles from his home to a boarding school because, at ten years old, he was too young to go to Civil Service camp (Imperial School of Jurisprudence), which started at 12. Once he got to Civil Service camp, he was delighted to find that lessons on bureaucracy and taking meetings were interspersed with vigorous bouts of lovemaking with other boys. Every piece of music he wrote from this point on was an evocation of those stolen moments at his St. Petersburg school, a desperate longing cry for simpler, merrier times, when bears danced and the handwriting was neat. Plagued by his inability to entirely capture his lost youth, the Russian giant drank a bucketful of cholera-ridden water and writhed his way to a painful death.
5. Henry PurcellThe 17th century English composer beloved by Pete Townshend (who nicked Purcell’s stuff on a bunch of tunes, particularly “Pinball Wizard”) was known for his carousing. After a high-spirited night out at the theatre in which Purcell challenged a local actor to an “organ joust” (basically, a contest to see who can play organ faster), the composer came winding his way home to find that his wife had locked him out. The “baroque badger”, as he was known to friends, stumbled out into Dean’s Yard, next to his home in Westminster, and died of exposure (although others say it was tuberculosis).
4. Johann Sebastian BachAre you into endlessly rising and falling scales? Are you a fan of precision and repetition so mathematically tight it would confuse even the guys who play car designers in adverts? Are you a fan of a Clavier that is well tempered? Then you’ll be a fan of Bach, first of the musical professors, a man who put his “roaming gypsy” rivals into a box marked “not relevant anymore”.
3. Josh GrobanYou don’t need to write music to be a composer. You simply need to be Groban. Now go home, throw on “You Raise Me Up” and cry. For the beauty of mankind, for the lost cities of the Incas and for the gift of Groban.
2. Wolfgang Amadeus MozartDon’t we all wish Amadeus could "rock" us? Falco may be Austria’s greatest living musical genius, but Mozart is its greatest dead musical genius. He was the punk of the 18th century European Royal Family, performing classical monkey court scenes, dealing out perfectly harmonised musical balls of truth to The Man, before he succumbed to a mysterious illness that almost certainly wasn’t (but could perhaps have been caused by) the abhorrent sexual relationship he did (but almost certainly did not) have with his sister Nannerl. Incest-induced syphilis aside, Mozart made the famously good-natured Salieri jealous of his musical prowess, so he must have been pretty great. Also, his music is so pleasing. Many are the times I’ve nearly drowned as a result of listening to Mozart in the bath. A watery grave – you can’t ask a composer for much more than that.
1. Ludwig Van BeethovenOr can you? According to all the highbrow people who are highbrow about classical music, you can. If listening to Mozart is like sucking a pleasing, soporific sweet, then listening to Beethoven is like eating a challenging steak. Would crucially important 20th century philosopher Theodor Adorno have written his book Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music about Mozart? No. He would have called it Mozart: The Philosophy of Music. And he wouldn’t have bothered. Because he knew that while Mozart is for putting farmyard animals into a trance and making unborn children cleverer, Beethoven is for tackling the vital questions of life and death, such as: Who are we? What is life? Where are my Mozart CDs? Beethoven is the deaf prophet bringing back musical tablets of wisdom from a Mount Sinai made of pianos and hearing aids. He is the golden hunter coming home with a pair of prize winning musical deer strapped to his shoulder. He is the German Kele from Bloc Party.
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