So the question is: why do we make lists of best, excellent but not quite best, good but not quite excellent, and so on down the hierarchy?
I taught literature from 1976 to 2013, during the years of complaint against the literary "canon." Why do we make canons?
Personal answer: because we are mortal. No matter how long we live, how voluminously we read, how omnivorously we listen, we won't read or hear everything. So we have to make choices, and to discover some pragmatic way of guiding our choice.
We try an author or a composer and are smitten, so we come back for more. We try an author or a composer and can't connect, so we don't.
Moreover, we change: what thrills at 20 may seem jejeune at 50, and what said nothing to us at 20 may suddenly resonate at 50. So we go back from time to time to see if we respond differently now. Moreover, as we build up a wider range of comparison and an historical sense of what came when, we begin to understand music (or literature) that we didn't have adequate context for when we started out.
We start with those who have been acclaimed by consensus as great: Bach or Beethoven, Dante or Shakespeare. But the consensus changes too. When I was 20, music before Bach was mostly left to specialists; now we give Tallis, Byrd, Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schütz, and many others as much attention as those who came after them.
Personal canon-making involves much trial and error, and a certain amount of blind contingency. We try something, evaluate it, and on that basis try the next thing, and over the years, we arrive at a list--always subject to revision--like Dieter's.
Thank you for taking part in the MusicWeb International Forum.
Len Mullenger - Founder of MusicWeb