[2log] The Bottom 10 Composers

For the past two weeks, Anthony Tommasini, classical music critic at the New York Times, has been blogging about the "Top 10 Composers" of classical music. It's a pointless exercise, as he acknowledges, but it has been fun and interesting to read his thoughts as he pares down his list. (The videos are well worth watching as well.) For the record, I can guarantee that my list* would be different from his, including more twentieth-century composers at the expense of Mozart and Schubert.

Thinking about the top ten composers made me consider who would be The Ten Worst Composers of All Time. Using the same rules as Tommasini (the composers must have written western classical music in roughly the last 300 years and must be somewhat remembered today, with living people excluded) but without doing research or straining my brain too hard, I've come up with the following list:

Antonio Vivaldi: From what I can tell, Vivaldi's amazing productivity was matched only by his mastery of a small group of cliches. Every piece sounds pretty much the same.
Georg Philipp Telemann: Telemann is the poor man's Vivaldi.
Arnold Schoenberg: Schoenberg's twelve-tone music expresses a vast spectrum of moods, from angst to crushing angst, plus the tunes are great.
Carl Czerny: He wrote literally thousands of pieces, only a handful of which are ever played, easily winning him the title of waster of the most ink and paper in musical history.
Tikhon Khrennikov: He makes the list for his persecution of vastly more talented composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich while leader of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Michael Kamen: Even Richard Dreyfuss could have done better than Kamen's "music" for "Mr. Holland's Opus."
Benjamin Franklin: There's a reason he is remembered for flying a key during a lightning storm; he certainly didn't discover the secret of electricity in his String Quartet.
Count Franz von Walsegg: Like an eighteenth-century Carlos Mencia, he would commission pieces from better composers, such as Mozart's Requiem, then pass them off as his own.
Carl Orff: His "Carmina Burana" is catchy and kitschy, but Orff makes the list for his cooperation with the Nazi regime.
PDQ Bach: The music by Johann Sebastian's forgotten son is often laughably bad. It's like he doesn't even give a Schickele.

*My (unranked) top ten list would include Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Franck, Messiaen, Prokofiev, Schumann, Stravinsky, and Wagner.