Top ten musicians of all time

[visualnickmos]

Beef Oven

"EUSSR" Priceless!!!!!!

[Beef Oven!]

Beef Oven

"EUSSR" Priceless!!!!!!

Priceless? IT COSTS BRITAIN £55,000,000 PER DAY!!!!!!

[EdgeleyRob]

I suspect ERob didn't take composers into account, or else R Vaughan Williams Esq would have occupied at least the top 3 spots

Tried not to include composers.
Couldn't resist with Alkan,seems he was an amazing piano player.
The thought of Liszt and Chopin sitting together in the audience listening to Alkan playing Alkan,well it makes my spine tingle.

[ahinton]

Umghh (the caveperson who first thought it might be a good idea to adapt the sounds of communication into aesthetic pleasing stand-alone "pieces")

Vlarrg (the neolithic person from a thousand years later who had the idea of "joining-in" with another person indulging in Music by adding complementary rhyhms o played by knocking pebbles together. A tragic case: s/he was stoned for his/her pains - and boy/girl were there pains! - setting the trend for rock Musicians ever since).

Charon and Ptraci (the Egyptian Musicians who together discovered that humans could control the different sounds that were produced by conches and reeds).

The nipper from Nippur who (2000 years BCE) first had the idea that sounds could be represented by graphic symbols

Pythagoras

Bertrand de Scunthorpe (who accidentally invented the Canon when he misunderstood someone when they told him "it's your round")

Guido of Arezzo

Bach

Elisha Grey

You forgot Baron Ferneyhough of Coventry!

[LeMartinPecheur]

No vote for Eric Morecambe??

[MrGongGong]

No vote for Eric Morecambe??

and the great Les Dawson ?

[Zucchini]

No vote for Eric Morecambe??

Or Sparky?

[cloughie]

No vote for Eric Morecambe??

Yes he was OK but he did get the notes in the wrong order!

[Beef Oven!]

Yes he was OK but he did get the notes in the wrong order!

Not so much as in the wrong order as 'not necessarily in the right order'.

[cloughie]

Not so much as in the wrong order as 'not necessarily in the right order'.

Spin it how you want - they were wrong!

[Tony Halstead]

An impossible task.

For myself, I can only name ten outstanding musicians that I have been priviledged to encounter during my own professional career. I have listed them in alphabetical order:

Julian Bream (Guitar)
Ida Haendel (Violin)
Ernest Hall (Trumpet and Professor at RCM)
Anthony Halstead (Horn Player, Keyboard player, Conductor)
Jascha Horenstein (Conductor and Terrorist!)
Julius Katchen (Pianist)
Cleo Laine (Supreme vocalist embracing all kinds of musical performance)
Yehudi Menuhim (Violinist, Conductor and Teacher)
Mistislav Rostropovitch (Cellist and Conductor)
Dr Bruno Walter (Conductor, Friend of Mahler)

As I wrote above, an impossible thread to answer but, reading through the posts so far, it does give us all an awarenes of the musical preferences, tastes and loathings of our fellow message boarders so should help us not to cause offence to others.

Hs

Surely you have omitted Dennis Brain , HS?
Plus maybe his father Aubrey and also his uncle Alfred, the major part of whose career was in the USA.

[Andrew Preview]

Spin it how you want - they were wrong!

Ah yes, but his mastery of orchestral balance was second to none...

[Hornspieler]

Surely you have omitted Dennis Brain , HS?
Plus maybe his father Aubrey and also his uncle Alfred, the major part of whose career was in the USA.

Too close to home to be strictly objective, Tony.

The Brain Dynasty started with Arthur Brain, who was 4th horn in the famous LSO quartet, led by the great Adolf Borsdorf.

Known as "God's own quartet" it set a standard of performance which is the foundation of horn playing in Britain to this very day.

Arthur Brain had two sons:

Alfred (the elder) played briefly in London before moving to Holywood to join the emerging film industry when talkies (and therefore music) was required and there was plenty of employment. He eventually became Chairman of the Holywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. (See picture below)

Adolf Borsdorf also had two horn playing sons:

Francis, who changed his surname to Bradley during the War years and Emil, who also changed his name but reverted to Borsdoff after 1945.
I played a lot with both Francis and Emil with the BBC Light Music Unit in the fifties and learnt a lot about the development of horn playing through these two very different sources.

To return to Aubrey:

Principal Horn with the BBC Symphony Orchestra until a tragic accident during the blackout of 1943, he turned to teaching and his pupils all gained success in the London orchestral scene.
But I would say that Aubrey was not a technical teacher - he was inspirational. He taught me awareness - to listen to myself, to feel the music and be inspired by it. All about phrasing, dynamics, rubato .... "you must always be your own sternest critic," he would say "because you are the only person in the world who hears every note that you play."
He didn't teach technique. He used to say "... if you know in your head how you want a piece to sound and endeavour to put it through the instrument, the technique to do it will naturally follow. But you can practise technical exercises all day long and it will not of itself make you play musically"

Dennis was an inspiration and I gained much from him. He was supportive of all horn players, both amateur and professional.

Always ready to talk. His concentration when playing was absolute. But when he finished, it was over. He could relax. Forget it ever happened.

Father and son, both great musicians in different ways, but I was too involved to be objective.

Was Dennis the greatest hornplayer? He was the inspiration for the many top quality players we have in this country today.

Sadly missed by those of us who knew them both for their different attributes.

Hs

Holywood Bowl Concert Hall

[Beef Oven!]

Too close to home to be strictly objective, Tony.................Father and son, both great musicians in different ways, but I was too involved to be objective.

Must be hard.

The good news is that we don't need to be even remotely objective, never mind strictly objective

[Serial_Apologist]

Monteverdi
J S Bach
Beethoven
Schoenberg
Bartok
Duke Ellington
Charlie Parker
John Coltrane
Miles Davis
Stockhausen