What is considered the greatest symphony ever written?
Beethoven's thrilling, electrifying Eroica, a piece of music originally dedicated to Napoleon and celebrating the revolutionary spirit sweeping Europe, has been named the greatest symphony of all time by the world's greatest conductors.
Figure 1: Classical Music vs Intelligence. Data from the US General Social Survey from 1993 shows a strong correlation between classical music preference and intelligence. Individuals who liked classical music the most had a significantly higher IQ than those who did not like classical music.
absolute music, abstract music, pure music - Absolute music (abstract music, pure music) is music for its own sake—concerned only with structure, melody, harmony, and rhythm. See also related terms for melody.
“Hurrian Hymn No. 6” is considered the world's earliest melody, but the oldest musical composition to have survived in its entirety is a first century A.D. Greek tune known as the “Seikilos Epitaph.” The song was found engraved on an ancient marble column used to mark a woman's gravesite in Turkey.
#1. Sufjan Stevens – ''The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!
Echoing this, a study by Dr Kevin Labar says that music does have the power to improve intellectual performance and cognitive function, but not by raising the IQ. What actually happens is that the calming effect induced by classical music releases dopamine to spike pleasure.
The result was that students who scored higher in intelligence were associated with an ear for wordless music genres like big band, classical, and ambient or chill electronica.
Beethoven, by comparison, fell in the middle of the pack, with a score between 135 and 140, or smart enough to join Mensa. Still, I calculated the correlation between estimated IQ and eminence for just these 11 composers to be . 54.
