Guitar Player devoted a special issue to Zappa in 1992, and asked on the cover "Is FZ America's Best Kept Musical Secret?" Editor Don Menn remarked that the issue was about "The most important composer to come out of modern popular music".
Yet these interactive inventions may someday put composers out of business, at least those who cling to the quaint idea that composing means one person in private putting notes and sounds together for later public performance.
Regarding the number of edges, we find that they are becoming increasingly concentrated between the top-degree nodes: The top 1% of the nodes in 1990 (8 composers out of 882) account for 20.3% of all the degrees, while in 2009 the top 1% (139 composers of 13,981) account for 57.1%.
He worked closely with the composer, who was allowed out of the USSR for the occasion, and the two musicians got on well together.
Since Celan's death, his collected poetry has become not only a book of almost biblical stature for scholars and explicators but a rich source for composers, especially for composers coming out of the tradition of German Expressionism, composers for whom Celan's words provide a way of voicing a shriek.
We also have access to correspondence in which composers single out performances of their own music that they like best.
Michael Brown, a pianist and composer fresh out of the Juilliard School, has made a strong impression in recent seasons in chamber music and as a concerto soloist.
Dispatched to New York, he is compelled to read a long speech denouncing his idol, Stravinsky, and then further shamed by the smug grandstanding of Nicolas Nabokov (Vladimir's cousin), an émigré composer comfortably out of Stalin's reach.
One can only imagine Cocker's chuffedness when he winkled film composer John Barry out of the hollow in his piano bench to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a selection of his classic works.
So he played Prokofiev when the composer was out of favor, but he also played at Stalin's funeral, where he was more disturbed by aesthetic crudities than anything else.
