Talk:List of composers by nationality

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Wow, this looks like it could be really great really fast. Yanksox 22:06, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Czech names

I had noticed that every name except Smetana's were written with diacritical marks (First name Bedřich)—with permission especially of the article's creator, I would like to change that and a few other minor changes. (Such as link dates of births and deaths to the articles about those years.) —CliffHarris (-T|C-) 17:25, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I had copied each name from a different page in order to avoid retyping. Feel free to change anything you see necessary; also, I will look on some other pages to make sure this style is consistent (i.e. the lists by era: Classical, Romantic, etc.) Also, I would suggest only one link per year to be necessary; I have seen this done on other pages. Dafoeberezin3494 21:06, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bold?

Are only the names of major composers bolded? If so, Rachmaninov should also be—we wrote the 20th century's most famous piano concerto. —$ΡЯΙNGεrαgђ (-C|ε|L|T|♪-) 16:30, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

  • The bolding of certain names is complete POV and should be deleted. Why is Ravel bolded and not Fauré? Why isn't Alban Berg bolded? Why is Johann Strauss bolded and not Schubert? The list is much too limitative. And there's not ONE single woman composer....Well, I'm going to add Tailleferre AND I'm going to bold her name. Musikfabrik 08:26, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
    • If we can come up with an objective reason for bolding names than I would like to keep it. Otherwise people are simply going to bold whoever their favorite composer is and the bold will have no meaning (as it seems right now). Also, when the list gets longer it makes it easier to navigate and find the most influential composers. I've got no ideas for an objective way to do this though. Any thoughts? Dafoeberezin3494 13:32, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Music history is completely subjective and based on such things as gender bias, nationalism, economic issues and personal tastes. There is no way to factor these issues out of the equation completely.
        • However, if this is a list of composers by nationality, then how these composers are seen in their nations should be one of approaching this. Clara Schumann used to be on the German 100 mark note, so obviously she has a certain importance for Germans. Germaine Tailleferre was on a postage stamp in France, received one of the first French government commissions and has streets and schools named after her in France. Both of these women have importance in these countries. Obviously, their names should be bold, if this is about composers relating to their nationalities. That's one way of looking at it, anyway. Musikfabrik 15:00, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of Dead White Guys

I've added some more women and I've bolded some of the few people of color (notably Joplin - he wrote an pretty important opera.... and William Grant Still). This list needs to get to be more inclusive if it's to have any meaning. Although, I personally could do without the composer of the theme music from the Simpsons....

  • The information nuggets are all pretty useless too. You can't reduce a musical career into one line and make it have any meaning...Maybe all of the comments should be deleted, since pretty much everybody already knows that Pachebel wrote the Pachelbel Canon....Musikfabrik 09:21, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
    • Without the annotations, the list becomes nothing better than a category. If we can standardize this as well, maybe by using only compositions or tablifying, again I'm not sure. But if we delete the annotations then we might as well delete the whole article because it will be the exact same as a category. Also, sorry if the list was mostly white men. Being a student of European classical music, that is who wrote most of the music. Dafoeberezin3494 13:37, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
      • Being a scholar of European classical music, I can tell you catagorically that the reason that the names of dead white guys keep coming up is not because women and people of other cultures didn't write important music, it's because the scholarship is slanted that way. If you start scratching the surface, the reality is extremely different. The Fondation Adkins-Chiti Donne in Musica in Rome [1] has a library of over 10,000 works and having contributed some of them through my scholarship, I can tell you that there are some masterpieces there. There are other archives around the World that have holding for people of all cultures. The trend these days is towards opening music scholarship towards a rethinking of the "Dead White Men" position and reassessing the position of European art music in the World Music Tradition. I'm not saying that we should ax all the Germans on the list: I'm simply saying that there should be room for composers from Azerbaidjan (one of my specialities), Korea, Canada (Violet Archer, for example....), Mexico, Cuba and other places like that. YOU might not know who they are, but there ARE important composers (some of them women) from these places who have become major national figures. It seems to me that the job of an encyclopedia is to document this information.
    • As it stands, most of the information here simply falls into the catagory of "information nuggets". While they might provoke enough interest for someone to click a link and find out more, they have no real meaning other than being the information that one is "supposed to know" about these people. None of them add anything really to the page, so perhaps it is not terribly useful? Musikfabrik 13:55, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Definition of Composer

  • Merriam-Webster = [2]

one that composes; especially : a person who writes music

  • Cambridge Dictionary of American English = [3] A person who writes music

There is no distinction bectween the person writing and what is written. So, someone who writes symphonies and someone who writes songs are both composers.

  • That said, if Britney doesn't have a place on this list, then why does Cole Porter, Irving Berlin (who only wrote songs), Danny Elfman, Frank Zappa etc? Is it because she's a woman?
  • Rethinking hierarchies such as "Classical" verses "popular", redefining gender bias and looking to describe things without making value judgements are all part of the encylopedic process. Isn't saying that Britney isn't as good a composer as, for example, Danny Elfman creating a hierarchy and expressing a non-neutral point of view? Since more people listen to Britney than listen to Arnold Schoenberg, doesn't she have cultural importance strictly from the amount of listeners she has?
  • The point that this entry makes is that the idea of "composer" is not the property of the classical musical establishment and popular artists such as Spears can be thought of as "composers" according to the dictionary definition of the word. Musikfabrik 08:42, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
It's pretty obvious that in normal usage, "composer" is short for "classical music composer" and "song writer" is used for the composers of popular modern music. I think it's quite silly that every entry on this list repeats the word "composer" in the description for each person, too. :) It's not a very useful list.--Danny Rathjens 20:51, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Albinoni

I see the list of Italian composers is a long one. Still I think Albinoni deserves a spot on the main list, as his Adagio is very famous. 88.90.82.166 17:26, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cuba?

I was just wondering why there aren't any Cuban composers on this list. Antonio Machín, Beny Moré, Ernesto Lecuona, Leo Brouwer, Silvio Rodriguez or Pablo Milanés would be good representatives. 148.240.106.164 21:43, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why is GB split up?

GB is split up into entities like England and Scotland, but more federal countries like the US are not. I have great affinity for Scotland, but unless we bear flags for each Australian state, Chinese province, Mexican estado, and Russian oblast, etc. it is simply unequal to divide up only GB. Readers that need to know whether a particular composer was Scottish or English may follow the composer's link to do so. BTW, if we divided up every UN member state or similar, we should include the Northern Irish, and probably the Cornish, the Manx, and the Welsh. :)--Thecurran (talk) 01:09, 29 March 2008 (UTC)