61–70 of 107 posts
Why is that a criteria? Most setbacks aren't really something the person can control (Although, in Napoleon's case, he probably could have).
Also, failure is going to happen in life. You just need to accept it.
History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture. Without dismissing Bach's work (or the others named in the discussion, I would had picked Leonardo with my shallow default knowledge on the topic) we should acknowledge how biased is what we know. Not just because how we select what…
> History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture. I know you imagine that this is a profound observation but unfortunately it isn't. We all have it in our teens and twenties then we realise (decades later if we're unlucky) that it means much less than we thought. We imagine that…
How we evaluate music is deeply subjective. The complex harmonic and counterpunctal vocabulary of the Baroque was passe by the time Bach died, replaced by the simplicity of the Classical period. And then romanticism kept the harmony, but created sweeping emotion rather than deep craft. Then look at jazz where the relationships of chords are entirely changed. So yes, there are works that people overlook and reevaluate.
> How much better he was than his contemporaries. Define better; Bach wasn’t appreciated that much when he was alive. Only later we decided that his works are the bees knees. “Throughout the 18th century, Bach was primarily valued as an organist, while his keyboard music, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, was appreciated for its didactic qualities.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Sebastian_Bach
Do you remember being instructed not to cite wikipedia as a source?
These people pushed forward human civilization. They are all an inspiration to us.
The comment thread on that page gets into Newton and Neumann, but I think artistic/scientific achievements are apples/oranges. Doesn't make sense to compare the two, because the standard of quality is so different. Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticul…
> Comparison is the thief of joy Comparing others is a source of joy, people love gossiping or just talking about who is better etc. Comparison is only a thief of joy when you compare yourself to others, but comparing Newton to Einstein etc is an endless source of fun, many people have enjoyed these discussions over the years.
Gossip for those people is often just a mechanism to increase their self esteem in front of bigger than life artists who truly changed the world. It is a bit like music lovers who have strong opinions about everything, while not being able to play a single note on any instrument. For them comparing the great musicians on that level makes them feel important too – if they can't walk the walk they at least try to talk the talk. Meanwhile most actual musicians are usually far more tolerant about the types of music they would consider interesting, because for them everything new they hear is something that can be used as an influence for creation.
So if someone asks whether Bach or thee greates Jazz musicians on the height of their game were the greater artists, any musician with half a brain cell would reject the question, because the question doesn't even make sense. Both things are absolutely masterful within the ideas they tried to explore. And those were different ideas.
That would be like comparing a masterfully built modern bridge to gothic cathedral. They are from different times, have been created in different societies, with different goals in mind with a different knowledge base, etc. Any comparison that would be worth anything would have to account for all these different factors and then land at a result that would be highly subjective anyways (which is not a bad thing if you are interested in using that comparison to increase your own self worth in front of the architects who planned those – but futile otherwise).
The piece I'm missing is that J.S. Bach's work contains several homages to Vivaldi, and there was something transmitted between them that is an understanding not just of counterpoint, but about symmetry and form that is fun to pursue in spare moments.
The comment thread on that page gets into Newton and Neumann, but I think artistic/scientific achievements are apples/oranges. Doesn't make sense to compare the two, because the standard of quality is so different. Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticul…
I've never loved this aphorism. Comparison is a crucial component of knowledge discovery. It would be more apt to say that ranking is the thief of joy.
Around the year 2000, amongst the other things that were going on, it was also the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Someone at the record label Teldec got the bright idea to release the entirely of Bach's work, and so a 153-disc box set was produced: * https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/the-complete-b... * https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Apr13/B... * https://www.amazon.com/Bach-2000-…