10 greatest composers

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I wonder if anyone agrees with my long thought out list.

1. J.S. Bach
2. Beethoven
3. Mozart
4. J. Haydn
5. Schubert
6. Handel
7. Brahms
8. Tchaikovsky
9. Liszt
10. Clementi

I have to say Bach is no. 1 because his music is so perfect. I keep looking at it and keep thinking he was using some kind of mathematics to compose it. Mozart wrote perfect music but it just came to him and he obliged by writing it down. He was gifted but I ponder whether he asked himself why he could write such pieces. Beethoven mainly took one simple yet ingenious motif and composed whole movements around it. That was his genius. Haydn took music out of the baroque and into the classical era. My inclusion of Clementi might not appear on many people's list but he did a lot for music that goes unnoticed. He wrote many piano sonatas and the vast Gradus ad Parnassum which is a quite incredible set of 100 studies. He had some influence on Beethoven. Taught John Field who wrote the nocturnes that inspired Chopin and Liszt. He also taught other fine romantic composers such as Cramer and Moscheles. He was called the 'Father of the Pianoforte' as he wrote the first virtuosic music for the instrument. He developed the piano through his own company and was an acclaimed publisher and editor. He lived mainly in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Hello, I'm Harry,
Just wanted to say I agree with you mostly, although I'd put them in their respective periods if it was me,
Like for instance my top 3 for each would be:
Baroque:
J.S Bach
Scarlatti
Corelli
Classical:
Beethoven (I know he crosses over )
Mozart
Haydn
Romantic:
Chopin
Liszt
Brahms

What do you think?

You have a pretty good list. I wonder if Wagner should be on that list. Yeah, he was mean when it came to influencing people to forget about Jewish musicians like Mendelssohn, but his operas and influence can't be denied. Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen and others reflected that. Hell, his reach outside of music into Hitler's consciousness is well known. I'm sure his book "On Conducting" is still influential till this day. I personally don't care for the man's politics, but 'Tannhauser' is such a powerful piece of music to me that I named my music publishing company after it.

Well I think that greatest is a subjective term open to interpretation. So who someone thinks is the greatest will vary person to person! In the end a lot of it boils down to personal preference.

Overall I think your list looks pretty good, but if I was making my own I'd make a few changes myself! I personally do think Clementi is an odd choice, I'd replace him with Monteverdi. Monteverdi was such a huge innovator and really helped bring about the Baroque style. And Liszt was good, but I don't really see him as being that 'great' of a composer. I'd put either Debussy or Ravel there, for their unique styles. And Haydn I'd probably swap with Mahler, just because I'm a total Mahler fan and I don't like Haydn at all lol, he always sounded so generic to me.

1.Trent Reznor
2. Doesn't matter.

I'm 100% in agreement in terms of listing Bach first. For the rest of it, I don't really have much opinion as to the exact order, but based on my gut feelings I do think (1) Schubert, Clementi and possibly Liszt should be discarded; (2) Chopin should be included in the Top 5 at least. (3) Agreeing with a previous poster, I would include Wagner somewhere.

I think Chopin should be close to the heart of anyone who loves Bach, because despite the differing styles, they share one very important quality: they are able to constantly surprise you by their chord progressions, without trying to "reinvent" the whole tonal system through unnatural artifices.

In my opinion, Bach's foremost greatness is in the richness of his chord progressions. Chord progressions are the true internal "guts" of any piece of Western music, whereas melody is more of a surface characteristic. All the composers on your Top 10 list have great melodies, but only Bach also consistently backs up these melodies with powerful and original chord progressions. This is what gives his music its meaty flavor. Chopin shares this quality somewhat. Schubert and Clementi are in my opinion the opposite.

The previous paragraph is of course an oversimplification, for two main reasons. First of all melody is actually part of a chord progression. Secondly, Bach has the added genius of frequently interweaving several melodies at once; when he does so, the concepts of melody and chord progression become blurred artistically, and in a sense it becomes hard to draw the line between them. The genius of one becomes the genius of the other. Still, in a technical sense, one can always define and separate the concept of chord progression: i.e. one can state the sequence of chords that are being used in any tonal (i.e. based on traditional Western scales) piece of music.

Your observations about Clementi are interesting, maybe I ought to revisit him, but one thing I can say is that his music strikes me as boring. Also, my understanding is that he did not write Gradus Ad Parnassum, which was a book by one Josef Fux, although Fux may well have quoted musical excerpts from Clementi in his book.

[CORRECTION - I added this later. I confused Clementi with someone else! You are right. There are two separate works by Fux and Clementi, both called Gradus ad Parnassum! And I am not sure anymore whether Clementi should be discarded from this list! Apologies for the confusion]