Schubert at 200

[frank@clark.net]

I am sending this a day late.

This is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Franz Seraph Peter
Schubert. Let me indulge in some dubious metaphysics in
celebration: Schubert's music is not essential to Western music
(the only kind), in a way that the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, and Brahms are. Western music would be essential
different without them. But Schubert's music is a glorious bonus,
even though it is a fact that the value of his music exceeds that of
the combined artistic productions of all non-Western civilizations.
Music, and I mean the deliberate contrivance of a extended
microcosm without external purpose, unlike chanting to induce
hypnosis in religious services, music that just accompanies a
story, or music too trivial to be an extended microcosm (folk
music), is the last of the arts and has been achieved by only one
civilization, the Western, and only really got going about 1700
with the music of Bach, albeit with precursors dating back a
century or so. (I am thinking of the Counter-Reformation music
of Palestrina, but Bach wrote purely instrumental microcosms.) A
lot of people say that Bach represents the culmination of a
tradition and was not a radical innovator. What he did was to
produce master microcosms of a perfection far beyond that of,
say, Buxtehude. So, Bach is the first composer but Schubert,
though also among the dozen greats, is not be essential to the
development of music. All this is dubious metaphysics, but I
think I have communicated something that rings true, certainly
for me. So how can I render these poetic statements into
something more respectable by way of scientific metaphysics?