Sometimes history moves slowly. During his life, Bach was best known as an organist; sure, later composers studied and loved his work, but it wasn't until the mid 19th century that he started to get the reputation that he has now.
I thought someone would mention that. I think it's different. Schoenberg et al. were famous while they were alive. Their works were performed publicly, and adored by the cogniscenti, for decades. Bach grew into public favor. Schoenberg fell out of public favor. He had every chance the music establishment could give him, and still fell out of favor.
(BTW, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all made special studies of Bach's music in the 18th century; so I'm skeptical of the "Bach had no reputation as a composer" argument.)
Also note that the time between when Bach wrote the St. Matthew Passion in 1727, and when Mendelssohn "revived" it in 1829, was only 102 years. We've already had 100 years of Schoenberg.
Also note that Bach is always brought up in this context because he is such a notable exception in that way
However, I think there's another factor at play here - "art music" experienced the same academization and post-modernization that we saw in the visual arts. Serialism, musicque concrete, aleatory composition - all these things pushed the boundaries of what "music" actually meant, going against popular sensibilities in ways that (and I could be wrong here) the "art music" of previous centuries did not.
I agree completely.
Schoenberg et al. were famous while they were alive. Their works were performed publicly, and adored by the cogniscenti, for decades.
And this is still the case! There's been no "falling out of favor". On the one hand, you have elite musicians, who mostly admire Schoenberg; on the other hand, you have musical laypeople, who mostly don't. Same as it's always been!
You've already demonstrated before that you don't know what's going on in music today. Why do you keep making authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the matter?
...(BTW, Haydn, Mozart
Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?