* Much like this year’s Oscars, blacks have (almost entirely) boycotted Murray’s data set: only 5 entries out of 4000.
* Beethoven being tied with Mozart, and Bach a close third, does sound about right, but I do have difficulties believing Wagner was a close fourth at 80/100 (even if I do love his music).
* Remember the Saturday Night Live 1970s sketch, “What if Napoleon had had a B-52 at the battle of Waterloo?” At the end of that we were promised an exposition of the question, “What if God and Superman had a fight?”
Unfortunately, many of the reviews of Human Accomplishment tended to focus on the relative merit of the top 10 or 20 picks. Human Accomplishment introduced (to me at least) the idea of the Lottke Curve; that even high competence is rare, but the supreme competence of certain individuals (e.g., Jack Nicklaus in golf) borders on the superhuman.
* Right: these lists are useful for providing you with fairly unbiased lists for coming up with new hypotheses. For example, going down Murray’s composer list and reading their biographies on Wikipedia, I noticed that a large fraction of the top composers who weren’t the sons of musicians (Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, etc.) were slated by their families to study either law (Wagner, Stravinsky, etc.) or medicine (Berlioz etc.). It makes sense now that I think about it: a large fraction of top composers came from upper middle class backgrounds (Haydn was a rare exception); and down through the centuries, doctor and lawyer were the most common professions to study for. So, a common event in the lives of great composers when young men is the struggle with their families over whether or not they’d give up this music nonsense and buckle down to studying law / medicine.
(But Wagner really is a giant comparable in influence to Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach, although the earlier composers are less long-winded and thus less daunting these days.)
* The angels play Bach for God and Mozart for themselves.
* That’s clever, but about backwards theologically, if one is speaking of the God who experienced the pathos of the cross. Bach’s almost all Easter and very little Good Friday. Mozart’s Requiem is all about Mark 15:34.
* It’s just a matter of time before some commenter says it’s David Bowie.
* Chaim Amalek: “Angels playing Bach? Mozart? What have Bach and Mozart to do with Yiddishkeit? Nothing. For real Yidden, the sound of the cantor singing prayers that were given to Moshe Rabenu on Mt. Sinai is the sweetest music possible. Bach and Mozart are for goyim.”
* Murray concludes that the rate of individual achievement was highest in the period 1600-1900 and declined after 1900. It is couterintuitive but it is what he gets from his data.
* A 20-year old German student was killed after being pushed in front of a train in the Berlin underground. Killer is a 28-year old Iranian refugee who had already stabbed a man at age 14. Unfortunately he’s been in Germany a while so not a Merkeljugend, but if any good comes out of the tragedy it’s that more and more eyes are being opened.
