Who's the Best?

Musical reputations, and why, have been a source of innocent fascination to Stanford University's violin-playing Psychologist Paul Randolph Farnsworth. Last week he released the results of a poll he had taken of two very different groups of U.S. citizens: 1) 500 Stanford students, 2) learned members of the American Musicological Society. The question: "Who, named in order, are the greatest composers in the history of music?" The answers showed striking agreement as to the first four names--and then chaos:

Stanford Musicologists

1) Beethoven 1) Bach

2) Bach 2) Beethoven.

3) Wagner 3) Wagner

4) Mozart 4) Mozart

5) Gershwin 5) Palestrina

6) Tchaikovsky 6) Haydn

7) Schubert 7) Brahms

8) Brahms 8) Monteverdi

9) Chopin 9) Debussy

10) Debussy 10) Schubert

11) Mendelssohn 11) Handel

12) Liszt 12) Chopin

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.