 | | | Subject: Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?
Posted Apr 16, 2012 by quotes
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  | | >>there was a period in the early 1970's when certain rock'n'roll musicians started to get above themselves and thought they were playing Important Music.
Prog?
A few years ago some people thought (and still seem to think, it seems) that certain rock'n'roll musicians started to get above themselves in that period. However, it's surely irrelevant what the musicians were thinking, it's how much people enjoy the music that's important, and indeed while prog was was once sanctimoniously condemned by certain taste-fascists, it remained popular, and indeed is now enjoying a renaissance.
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| | | Subject: Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?
Posted Apr 16, 2012 by  Solnushka (Foundation)
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| | Perspective is a wonderful thing. For example, my least favourite composer ever is John Tavener, but this is because I played a piece of his called the Protecting Veil once and it is 45 minutes of the basses doing vibrato on one low note, which is a) boring and b) physically painful after the first five minutes. My tendons have barely recovered even now. The copy of music we had had a doodle of a bass player covered in cobwebs in it from a previous concert too. Dredful man.
On the other hand, I heard it from the front (so to speak) not so long ago, and aside from a slight twinge in my left arm, I decided it's not bad. There's a point to the bass section's agony. However, the jury is still out until I get around to working out if all his pieces are bass player hell or not. You cant respect a composer who can;t write good bass parts some of the time at least.
Blur (incidentally) were a terrible live band. I can say this with quiet confidence as I kept seeing them, for one reason or another. I can never decide if this is what makes them overrated (their albums aren't bad). For example, some of the 70s and 80s Russian bands are excellent musicians and fabulous live. On the other hand, they are none of them cutting edge, musically speaking. So where does that leave them?
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| | | Subject: Which famous musicians are seriously over-rated?
Posted Apr 16, 2012 by Solnushka (Foundation)
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| | Oh and the most overrated piece I've ever played was this thing by a modern composer called something like Lutoslowskii (I think he's Polish). The score was unnecessarily full of time changes for the hell of it and whole pages of weird notations which effectively forced everyone to busk, which would have been fine except that in fact we weren't supposed to be busking, but doing something complex in interlocking and definitely structured, so actually writing the damn notes down rather than circles, hyroglyphs and improving quotations would have been helpful. The amount of effort which had to go in for what came out was not worth it.
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