Holst - still third-rate. “Has a handful of pieces which are pleasant enough and have become well-known” pretty much defines that category 
John Williams - not a chance. I’ve been pushing Mahler, Shostakovich etc. because of their widespread influence. One aspect of which has been providing Mr Williams with endless material to crib.
I think you need to define your criteria before you can make a call here. Otherwise you’re going to have the influence people at odds with the popularity people at odds with heaven knows what other criteria.
Personally, I think popularity and longevity are absolutely valid criteria for this kind of judgment. I guess part of it comes down to whether you consider music written pretty much solely for other musicians/highly educated listeners is more important than music that reaches and possibly influences millions if not billions of less knowledgable listeners over many decades/centuries.
Absolutely not. My emphasis on influential composers is that these are the ones who have an effect even on those listeners who never get to hear a note that they wrote.
Actually, Lewis Lockwood, in his Beethoven biography, dispels the notion that Bach was “rediscovered”.
I’m not at all sure I agree, particularly in the latter centuries. How much influence does a Mahler or a Prokofiev have beyond the rather narrow world of rather esoteric Serious Music? I’ll tell you what; play Mahler’s 4th and Tchaicovsky (oh, god, I’ve botched the spelling there, I’m sure)'s 1812 Overture. Most Serious Students of Classical Music have considered the latter junk for years, but which will really reach people and make them feel? Here’s a hint if you’re too educated to judge: it ain’t gonna be the Mahler.
Of course, they’re only the great unwashed, and may be irrelevant. That seems to be the case in most art these days, including music. Actually producing something that an average person can understand and appreciate without having done graduate work is not only not important, it seems to be downright frowned upon.
Sorry, I ended up on a hobby horse of mine. Carry on and ignore this post please.
My god, you’re really claiming that if I play the last movement of Mahler 4 to people, it’ll leave most of them cold? You must know different people to me…(and the poor attempt at inverted-snobbery anti-intellectualism doesn’t help your argument)
And yes, Mahler in particular is hugely influential, if anything even more so once you start to include crossover influences into things like soundtracks.
Actually, I’m not anti-intellectual per se. I am simply tired of having accessibility to normal folks being a disqualification for being taken seriously, whether we’re talking music, visual art, literature, or film. I’ve been sick of it for decades. So, sweetheart, I’m not making an attempt (poor or otherwise) at anything. I’m saying what I believe.
I’m sorry, it’s been a couple of decades or more since I’ve heard Mahler’s 4th (last movement); I chose Mahler because he’s by and large not a particularly accessible composer IMHO. But I DO know how much many people who aren’t attuned to or educated in classical music get off on the 1812 Overture. The very fact of its enduring popularity speaks to its ability to reach people. I’m not talking the movie *du jour * here - momentary popularity is irrelevant, based on many things other than the object itself. But this bugger has been popular for pretty much as long as it’s been around, which is over a hundred years. To me that indicates that it has something that seriously reaches people over time.
Of course, I’m also of the opinion that Stephen King will be considered the literary equivalent of Dickens in a century or so, so take my opinions for what they’re worth…
A somewhat tongue-in-cheek book of music history I once read had this to say about Vivaldi [very paraphrased]:
“Some critics have said that Vivaldi wrote one violin concerto 450 times. This is a highly unfair characterisation, and one which I would like to take this opportunity to correct. Vivaldi in fact wrote two violin concertos 225 times each.”
Did I say it should be?
Doesn’t make Tchaikovsky a great, important or influential composer. Or, if it does, Pachelbel ranks just as highly. Not a pleasant thought.
Will do …
If we’re going to rank composers, I’d vote for doing it on the basis of who is terrific. We could do this on the basis of long-term reputation, number of concert performances, album sales, critics’ appraisal etc. Some of these provide objective measures.
By any of them, Mahler is dangling precariously from the 4th or 5th tier.*
*For practical purposes, “not accessible” and “lousy” verge on the synonymous. 
OK, Jackmannii - Mahler scores highly on reputation, number of performances (allowing for logistics!), and quite probably album sales as well, if we’re comparing like-for-like and not just Three Tenors nonsense. And sure, there’s a minority of critics who have a problem. What knocks him down as far as the fifth tier?
I’d want to see cites for any of these assertions (“reputation” is tough to document, the others less so). Another criterion is performance on classical music stations - not much Mahler played on the ones I’ve listened to, especially during public station fund drives (probably related to that ol’ accessibility thing).
I’d rank Mahler similarly to one of his contemporaries, Richard Strauss, who was honest about his place in music. Strauss once said:
“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”
Your criteria are moving from not-really-objective to thoroughly-biased-and-subjective. The fact alone that the OP specified the widest possible context eliminates any Austro-Hungarian-heavy radio station.
For an enjoyable sarcastic appraisal of Mahler’s achievements, we turn to Tom Lehrer, who once did a song (“Alma”) about a woman who married and/or cavorted with numerous semi-celebrities of her era, Mahler being one of them. From the live performance of “Alma”, listing her lovers:
*…One of the leading composers of the day: Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics, one of the leading architects: Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus school of design, and one of the leading writers: Franz Werfel, author of the Song of Bernadette and other masterpieces. it’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.
"The first one she married was Mahler,
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav.
And each time he saw her he’d holler:
Ach, that is the fraulein I moost have!
Their marriage, however, was murder.
He’d scream to the heavens above,
I’m writing Das Lied von der Erde,
And she only wants to make love!"*
Well, both of these aren’t that bad as far as reaching for an “accessibility” measure goes.
However, public stations have a clientele they need to reach as well which can skew their programming just like private stations. Just as private stations tend to program toward the stupid and young (or, to a lesser extent, the mediocre and middle-aged), which is where the advertising dollars are, public stations tend to program toward the rich and middle-aged and old because that’s who sends in the money. Measuring what’s played when they are reaching toward their sponsorship base is as meaningless as claiming that everyone in America loves Reality TV because that’s all that’s on nowadays on commercial TV.
Me, I’d love to see a station, whether public TV or public classical radio, lean more toward diversity and less toward spamming me with endless “Collectible/Renovation” shows and tired mid-20th century HIT music :rolleyes: on the one hand for TV and endless best-of late-Classical, Romantic-era and Opera on the other hand. (I also don’t particularly like their undue love for 20th century piano music either but I can’t complain that it’s particularly overexposed in pop culture, either.)
It seems hard to designate any audience as suitable for adjudicating canonic rankings. Musicologists and classical music aficionados are niche consumers, judging by average sales (in Canada, 300 copies on average) and exposure of classical music outside this group is relegated to a few dozen clichés.
That said, the Classical Music Navigator offers a list of the ‘111 Most Influential Composers’ compiled using the following methodology: The information provided at this site was statistically arrived at; i.e., decisions as to which composers and which of their works should be included were based on objective criteria, not subjective preferences. The particular 444 composers selected scored highest on a combination of weighted variables including (but not limited to): (1) number of available recordings of their music as listed in several standard music recordings catalogs (Schwann, Gramophone, etc.); (2) number of items on and by the composers held by participating institutions in the OCLC “WorldCat” database (the combined holdings of over 20,000 libraries); and (3) overall size/length of entries on the composers in about a dozen standard reference works. In all, some two dozen variables were collected and integrated, including secondary information on recent trends of increase and decrease in the production of composer-related materials (e.g., number of recordings of their music, and books and theses written about them). (The 111 list is a result of further tweaking).
Are you new here on the Board?
Interesting, but bizarre.
It’s nice to see Rossini crack the top 20, but Arnold Schoenberg at #8? 19 slots higher than Handel and 28 above Schubert? Who are they kidding? And Salieri over Copland and Elgar? Nutso.
On the other hand, it’s good that Karlheinz Stockhausen wound up dead last, even with various critics falling over themselves to find something of significance in his work. They’ve haven’t created a tier for that guy yet.
Schoenberg at no. 8 sounds fair enough to me. The absence of anything pre-1500 is more troubling, as it means the whole development of a unique and identifiable western musical culture is taken for granted.
Not to mention:
#13. Richard Strauss
#23. Gus Mahler