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20 March 2006: Someone protested to me that de Hooch and Vermeer should certainly be on Murray's list of illumagery greats. "Who is this Murray?" he asked. So I should point out that Murray isn't wholly at fault, for he's a reporter, not a would-be authority. He's only pointing out the results of a search of the principal mainstream reference books on World Painting and Sculpture such as Jannson. Where he goes wrong, I think, is in justifying their mechademicism and in not hunting for a better way to decide whom to put on his list. I also find him in error for considering craftsmen--Vermeer and de Hooch as well as most of the illumagists in his top twenty--to be as culturally important as the great writers and composers; obviously, my reader doesn't. Don't get me wrong, folks--Ilove the paintings of both these guys--but only slightly more than I love certain gloriously well-fashioned chairs or cabinets or porches.
One thing Murray might have tried was doing a reference-book-based list on illumagists who flourished after 1850. It would be interesting to compare the order of names on it to the order of post-1850 names on Murray's "inventory."
Murray's list of the top twenty Western composers is similar to the other two I've quoted: Beethoven, Mozart (a tie), Bach, Wagner, Haydn, Handel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Bewrlioz, Schoenberg, Brahms, Chopin, Monteverdi, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Weber, Gluck. The standard names, in the expected order. I consider Mozart extremely over-rated, and don't think that much of Bach, but think the list better than the others. That is probably due to the fact that music has to be an art. But I'm sure it severely underrates later composers.
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