Monday (6/27) on the NPR blog Deceptive Cadence, Anastasia Tsioulcas and Tom Huizenga report, “This intriguing question floated across the Twitter transom to us last Friday morning from Kara-Lis Coverdale (@kliscoverdale): Who is the most badass composer there ever was? #drugs #sex #guts #politics. We loved Kara-Lis’ question so much that we immediately threw it open to our fans and friends across Twitter and Facebook, a question to be pondered if not for the ages, at least over the course of a weekend. And boy, did you all respond. … One composer who found many advocates on Twitter for his general badassery is Carlo Gesualdo. As Christian Hertzog (@hertzogsays) noted succinctly, the Italian composer/nobleman ‘killed his wife and [her] lover and wrote crazy music.’ Oh, and he put the corpses in a display case. … Ultimately, Dmitri Shostakovich topped our informal poll—we can only imagine on the grounds of politics, since he was not exactly known for other, shall we say, proclivities. … The unnamed Twitter scribe from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (@OSLMusic) went for Romantic overload, citing Franz Liszt: ‘You can’t beat literally destroying so many pianos that a stronger one was invented!’ ”
Posted June 28, 2011
