Y'see, I'm different. I don't like the baroque stuff - too many notes
- but I do like some 19th Century music. Particularly Beethoven, but also some Mahler and even Wagner. And there was another composer whose work I once heard and was completely blown away by, but I can't remember his name now
Stravinsky and Sibelius are my favourite composers - both very different, but both prepared to experiment with sound, and capable of creating deeply moving pieces.
If they had thought there was nothing more to achieve after Beethoven (and I could see how that might have seemed the case at the time), then we would never have had Firebird, the Swan of Tuonela, Finlandia, or Le Sacre de Printemps.
Now, do I say that Heaven 17 can stand comparison with these composers? Well, yes, I do. As can Leadbelly, Lennon & McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Bernard Bonvoisin, KT Tunstall and many others.
As with music, so with literature. Can there be a greater piece than Notes from Underground, or a more complete novel than The Brothers Karamazov? Maybe so, but they would not have been written if Les Miserables had been regarded as the pinnacle. And that would not have been created if Hugo had decided Don Quixote had encapsulated all that could be said.
And yet it goes on. The Trial, Portrait of the Artist, Our Lady Of The Flowers, The Famished Road.
There is so much to human experience that there is always something more to say until we are dead.