John Kirk writes:
I believe the artists (architects) benefit from exposure to as many ideas as possible. Louis Armstrong grew up in New Orleans listening to Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden, and is a contemporary of Sidney Bechet.I've been thinking about this since you posted. What would be better for a young Satchmo, looking for exposure to the music of N'Awlins? He could either have a numerical rank of best performers of NOLA or just a list of the ten or twenty important acts he should see? Say you give Louis the numerical ranked list. As a young kid, his goal is to be the best. If Jelly Roll Morton is ranked No. 1 and Buddy Bolden is ranked No. 2, then to be the best he will have to be at least slightly better than Morton. Would there be any point in paying any attention to Bolden?
If instead he got a list of the ten or twenty great performers from around the Big Easy, it is more likely Louis will want to check out all the important acts, to see what he can get from each. His goal would not be the copy any one single act, but to learn what he could from each. To be the best now, he will take stuff from many acts and create something original. And that is how art moves forward.
We could come up with a list of the 10-20 best musician in history. There will be slight variations, depending on taste, but a large enough sample size could come up with a list of 20 musicians that had a significant impact on music. But why rank them? Isn't the priority of those important musicians then just a matter of taste? Most would agree Mozart and Hank Williams belong on the list of important musicians. A preference between the two only comes down to taste in music. It makes no sense to create a list that says Hank Williams is better than Mozart or visa versa.
I think the same is true in golf. If we say Pine Valley is the best golf course in the world, a young architect will decide to be the best he needs to build a course similar to Pine Valley and figure he can ignore other great courses. If you give that aspiring architect a list of a dozen courses they should check out, than you have a better chance of coming up with something unique.
To me a Michelin-style system is a good response to many of the issues currently addressed by this thread, without the dangers. There are perhaps a dozen courses everyone that cares about course architect should see (three-star courses), and then perhaps a couple dozen more that have taken some of those dozen courses ideas and expanded on them, often improving on them (two-star courses), and then perhaps 50-60 other great, but less important for an education, courses (one-star courses).
Cheers,
Dan King
There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
--Louis Armstrong