I just took a satirical whack at this elsewhere but couldn’t resist briefly pointing it out here where someone might read and enjoy it. Thanks to Topix.net’s classical music feed I found a UPI story about J.S. Bach’s failure to make it into the top 30 of Classic FM’s top-300 poll. Here are the choice quotes:
The 18th-century German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach failed to place any of his music in the Top 30 favorites of 67,328 listeners who voted in Classic FM’s 11th annual poll….
I love the way they put it–”Bach failed to place any of his music…” You can imagine how the failure just killed the poor guy. For some reason it makes me think of the philosopher’s soccer game from Monty Python.
Darren Henley of Classic FM, said Bach’s music just wasn’t catchy enough.
“He’s the fifth most popular composer overall, with 10 works in our Top 300, but he maybe hasn’t got any of those seminal works that people are passionate about,” Henley said….
The number one was Vaughn Williams’s Lark Ascending.
Somehow, for me at least, the utter banality of it puts the Joshua Bell story in perspective (and I mean this story in particular, though the poll itself is plenty stupid). The way it comes up on moldova.org adds another layer of absurdity. They have those ads that pop up when the mouse passes over certain phrases, like “Violin Concerto” (“Compare and Save at Shopping.com”). Isn’t this one of the signs of the apocalypse?







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