Most underrated composer of 20th Century?

I try to stay away from threads like this, as a professional musician, however I can't resist commenting that Philip Glass will NOT be considered underrated. He is very likely to be considered highly overrated, in fact he is so now by a great many. I like to call him the Andy Warhol of music - pop art at best. Minimalism in music is almost the same thing as Warhol's pop art, except Warhol had to work harder, because he actually drew each part of those paintings over and over again. All Glass has to do is come up with a few different chords and textures, and that's it. Pretty much anyone with basic compositional training could write that stuff. Most of his music would be intolerable, because of its length, without films that go with it. Some go as far as to call minimalism in general an intellectual cop-out. In the case of Glass in particular, I would agree. There are a couple of minimalists who have written some interesting stuff - Steve Reich is the best of them.

If Philip Glass becomes underrated, I think the world is in some deep doo doo.

Learsfool, you are no fool. I could not agree with you more and you put it perfectly.

Lesarsfool, actually, Andy didn't have to draw those over and over. He just picked a photo or drew the image once, had a photo film made, and then had had his studio assistants make silkscreens. Those were then able to be screen printed as fast as he could tell his studio assistants how to mix the ink. So I'm not so sure he had to work harder than Glass ;-)

Arguing the merits of minimalism (both visual and musical) is a zero sum game, no one ever convincingly gains the upper hand. So, how can we reduce the elements of a worthwhile aesthetic experience to the minimum without becoming so reductive that the experience is without meaning?

Easy, I bet 9 out of 10 people would just proclaim it nonsense out of hand.