I think this is probably a request to be pointed towards some reading material as much as anything. It's this business, which appears to be commmonly accepted currency, about their being a trap, which we should assidously avoid falling into, of describing anyone as a 'great composer'.
I will admit I hadn't previously felt much embarrassment about using the term since, once it is accepted that some composers seem to be better at it than others, it would seem harmless enough to use 'great composer' as a term to describe someone whom I considered to be one of the ... really jolly spiffingly good ones.
Mutatis mutandis: 'great boxer', 'great shot putter', 'great defence advocate', 'great comedian' or whatever. But there must obviously be more to it than that and there is some accepted wisdom, presumably about the hidden implications contained within the term, that I have failed to pick up on. I assume someone (cultural theorist? political theorist? post-modern linguist?) has done such an effective hatchet job on the term that it is no longer usable in polite circles. Could someone kindly add yet further to my ever expanding R3OK reading list
with a pointer or two?
I don't know of a particular text exclusively concentrating on the construction of the 'great composer', but the issue is certainly touched upon in a wide range of writings. It is often tied in with discussion of the 'work concept', which loosely refers to a relatively autonomous work designed as much for posterity as the immediate moment, a construction which is argued to have really come into its own only from Beethoven onwards. The cult of the 'great composer' is tied into that of 'great works'. The best book I could recommend on that subject (and one I think you will appreciate) is Lydia Goehr,
The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Otherwise, much of the 'great composer' critique has come from feminist musicology, often in a rather chippy way; the argument is usually to suggest that women musicians (especially popular ones, not least Madonna) somehow express some type of more collectivist subjectivity, as opposed to the alienated masculine individualism of 'great composers'. Plenty on that can be found in the usual suspects: McClary
Feminine Endings,
Conventional Wisdom and the essay 'Terminal Prestige' in particular, and various essays in Ruth Solie (ed),
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Marcia Citron's
Gender and the Musical Canon criticises supposedly masculine conceptions of greatness upon which the canon is formed. Tia DeNora's
Beethoven and the Construction of Genius tries to suggest that Beethoven's greatness was mostly on the whim of the Viennese aristocracy of his time, and had little to do with the music (for a scathing critique of this, see Rosen's essay on the book in
Critical Entertainments). Other attacks on the 'great composer' come from those who wish to play it off against other type of collectivist music-making; there's stuff on this in Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh,
Western Music and its Others and Tia DeNora,
Music in Everyday Life, I think. Hope this helps.
