For the past fortnight, the classical music critic of the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, has been engaged in a curious task: determining the top-10 composers of all time. With the help of readers' comments, he has now completed the job. Perhaps it's no surprise that the names are all of white European men who died before the end of the 20th century; but the howls of protest from fans of Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Strauss are audible across the Atlantic.
In descending order of greatness, then, the list is this: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Stravinksy, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, Bartok.
For me, the immediate intakes of breath concern Debussy's prominence and Verdi's outrunning Wagner. It's also a predictable fact that there are no composers here from the second half of the 20th century or beyond. (Would an equivalent list of visual artists dare to venture beyond Picasso, Duchamp?).
Any list of this sort – whether it's the "top" films or novels or poems – is of course fatuous in itself (and yes, I know the Guardian likes to run the odd list of this kind). But it interesting in two ways: in the discussion it provokes; and as a rough-and-ready indicator of prevailing musical tastes and aesthetic fashions. What would happen if you intersected this list with knowledge of the programmmes of major east coast American orchestras over the past decade, for example? (Which we can do courtesy of Tom Service's piece over on his site – not up and running at the time of writing, but on its way.) That this list was created partly through the interventions of Times readers is fascinating – would a list informed by Guardian readers be any different? I'd like to think that we could be just a little bit more radical...
