Playing Fast And Loose With Genius

Robert Commanday, senior editor of the Web publication, San Francisco Classical Voice, asks in today's front page editorial: "What's in a Word?"

Terminology can be such a bugbear in writing or talking about music. Not the principal and established musical terms — rondo, scherzo, andante, and the like — but the terms used and abused in defining quality. The word "masterpiece" is so carelessly thrown about, it's burned out. A colleague occasionally calls a work a "minor masterpiece," which in my book, is a crashing oxymoron. "Virtuoso" isn't so bad because it really just describes technical command without implying greatness as a musician with all the completeness the term "great" implies.

[...]

What triggered these ruminations, this ruing today, is the term and concept of "genius." How can that word be held apart, protected, kept applicable only to individuals of supreme capacities. How can it be kept from being tossed about like the word "masterpiece" and applied irresponsibly to persons not conceivably in the same firmament as Beethoven, Einstein, Shakespeare?

How indeed.

Mr. Commanday then follows with another question: "John Philip Sousa, a Genius?", and writes:

Without in any way depreciating the March King's greatness, originality, and craft, or diminishing the treasure that he created and left — music that is as imperishable as any composed in this hemisphere, that in its genre is unmatched, that played a crucial role in establishing a band tradition in America that has no peer world wide — can that be considered genius?

Perhaps I might suggest to Mr. Commanday a way out of the dilemma. In the case of John Philip Sousa, a composer I consider America's peculiarly American answer to, and the equal of, Johann Strauss the Younger, I think it fair to say Sousa was a composer with a genius for the march, just as Johann Strauss the Younger was a composer with a genius for the waltz.

That about says what needs to be said about these two, um, first-rate composers as composers, and says it without so much as a trace of overstatement or misapplied superlative.