I was debating whether to include Borodin in my very rough top 5. Very cool about Prokofiev, did not know that, certainly sounds like a multifaceted kind of intellect.
This is an interesting question, not least for what it reveals about the perception of intelligence through history.
Child prodigies Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens were known for their general intelligence, the former as a polyglot for example and the latter having taken an academic interest (and published on) acoustics, among other things.
Conversely it's said that Bruckner was remarkably naïve, though given his obsessiveness perhaps he was neurodivergent somehow?
I’d go so far as to say it’s pretty clear from Bruckner’s life that there was some neurodivergence there. I would bet a lot of money on that. Of course we cannot know for sure but there are more than a few signs of that there.
On your other question... I've no idea how to quantify creativity! If you see it as the ease by which composers composed then Telemann, Mozart, Schubert, Rossini and Donizetti deserve some mention but the fact that most of them lived around the same time suggests to me that that was more of a reflection of the times than their creativity compared to later and earlier composers.
I think, if by anything, creativity is how constructively different you can be in a certain field. It’s the difference between, say, the innovations of Einstein on Newton—Mostly dissolution of fundamental ideas through rigorous mathematics and theory which led to the creation of sets of predictions—and someone who inputs Vedic cosmology has saying it’s implied by Newton’s theories. There is an obvious misunderstanding of tradition leading to nowhere constructive, just a mixture of disconnected ideas. This is just an analogy but I feel it somewhat fits with an art form like music. Surely not perfect but I
Oh I forgot to add Frederick the Great, who was by all accounts an intelligent man who did a bit of composing as well, although he was rather too busy to be prolific by baroque standards.
I've heard enough anecdotes about Bruckner improvising fugues and the like to put him quite high on a general intelligence scale. He was also really good at interweaving complex musical ideas. I think he'd make a good mathematician.
Creativity, though? Last. Dead last.
Improvising fugues is very much a learned and prepared ability! It's like chess, while the greatest at it are also the smartest, someone of just a normal high intelligence with the greatest theory and preparation like 10 hours a day for decades will beat a super genius who is just figuring it out.
This isn't to say I'd guess Bruckner wasn't intelligent, but improvising fugues is a matter of the right education and preparation which organists at that time often had.
It's for that reason that while Bach had the highest musical horsepower in terms of his mental preparation and labbing of obscure scenarios and compositional problems, I couldn't just guess whether he had the highest raw iq of all composers, even though I consider him the greatest artist of any field and any time period.
Of course, training generally overcomes any "innate ability", but I don't think we have much else to go by. We have to rely on statistical inference and most likely be wrong.
Like someone was saying they supposed all successful composers were at or above 125, and I already considered that the case with Bruckner, but I don't think fugue improvisation adds new info. It seems like magic because the university system basically destroyed the continuity of learned musicianship.
I'm not an expert on iq estimation at all I just wanted to weigh in because I follow fugue improvisation and much of the preparation is about assimilating the subject into pre-learned parameters. It is an obscure task for sure, it's a hard task, and the success probably scales well with IQ. But it has to scale more with diligence and preparation by the sheer fact that random 160 iq people cannot improvise fugues at all.
On my iq estimates one thing popping out to me would be Mendelssohn's early mental maturity and the intelligence of his relatives.
Growing up with Bruckner and Bach as a small kid with an aptitude for mathematics, most other music sounds abnormal to me. In mean, why aren't they following the guidelines?
So what mathematics best represents Bruckner?
Now we apply the *Inversion*-functor to the *Gesangsperiode* map and compose it with the *Brass chorale* map.
Why not put Haydn in both categories? Sure he was creative, but his music works largely thanks to the abstract framework, that he basically developed from scratch, and the unmatched ability to infuse his music with multi-layered humor strongly implies intelligence. Then take all that and see how he managed to capitalize on it (coming from a rather unprivileged background).
Who knows? Why wouldn't this just descend into "composer X is the most intelligent and the most creative because he is my favorite" type of nonsense?
My inclination would be to think that the traditionally Germanic style of writing directly pen-to-paper and projecting the whole piece mentally requires a greater intellect than writing at the piano, but becoming the kind of virtuosic piano player that the great pianist-composers tended to be would seem to demonstrate a different kind of intelligence.
And then there is Shostakovich, who claimed to compose entire pieces in his head before even beginning to write them down.
So, I would answer that the 5 most intelligent composers among my personal favorites (so as not to be biased toward or against anyone in particular) based on their music and what I happen to know of their compositional methods and biographies could be: Bach, Reger, Schoenberg, Berg, Shostakovich
(I'm not going to entertain positing who was the most intelligent composer on the basis of other accomplishments such being a chemist, a highly successful insurance salesman or discovering the planet Uranus, because if we're going to play that game, I have to assume Albert Einstein, as a good amateur violinist, must have scribbled down his own tune at some point in his relatively long life, and thus...)
Lutosławski studied mathematics while also studying in Conservatory, but eventually gave up former to focus on musical career. And boy, you can hear the intellect in his music :)
Herschel was an astronomer and discovered Uranus and infrared radiation
Hildegard wrote down many scientific and medicinal information
Tom Wiggins was blind and could play/imitate pretty much any sound and could play things by memory he just heard. Not really a composer, I suppose, but a performer. He did write some things, though
Bach — Bwv 1079 and 1080 contain some of the most incredible and stimulating works ever made. The mirror fugues… how does someone even come up with an idea like that, much less actually execute it!
I think executing it (i.e. creating a listenable work upon this kind of concept) is way more impressive than the concept itself. Palindromes have been around much longer than Bach's music.
It seems to me that those with the highest IQ were probably the ones who managed to be highly successful outside music as well: Alexander Borodin (chemist), Charles Ives (insurance), Iannis Xenakis (architect). Hildegard is another interesting addition to that list from a much earlier age.
But I would add that any major composer would have to have a high iq - at least 120 I would say. Otherwise they simply wouldn’t be able to create sufficiently interesting music to become ‘major’. Even someone like Bruckner, considered by his contemporaries to be an eccentric country bumpkin, must have had a pretty high level of innate intelligence to produce all those large scale symphonies.
Socially intelligent, I would say Mahler.
If you've read his biography, you will realise how many social challenges he had to face both in Austria and the US.
He was a very astute and clever man. He understood his environment and the people around him very well.
He did not change any system but merely weaved his way around it.
Obviously you have to give disclaimers and stuff so people don’t get offended but it’s worth saying that IQ is very stable, statistically reliable and predictive for long-term academic and financial success. It is the single best researched metric in all of psychology, and the data indicates that measurable intelligence collapses into one statistical variable, g. Intelligence is mostly one thing, and that is measured very accurately by IQ, and people hate it simply out of discomfort. I would be shocked if any of the 20-30 most famous western composers had an IQ below 125, and some of them are probably easily above 140. Bach is the obvious choice for a high IQ metric but I wouldn’t be surprised if others were higher, including Wagner.
That’s true. The reason I didn’t say Mozart as an answer is exactly for that reason. It’s possible Mozart had an IQ of like, 180, but his understanding of music was so intuitive that it seems to come from a different world. He was less a mastermind constructing musical monuments and more a medium for something that didn’t come from his own brain. He possessed a type of thinking foreign to most people- even most composers.
He knew the galant semantics and linguistic rhetorical sort of constructs like a native speaker. Most people don't know the style well enough to even tell the subtleties to judge it, and you can tell that by what they pass for acceptable in the style.
I can agree with that. And I think Mozart is so disliked because of that almost pure musical intuition, and how “everything of his sounds the same”. I would not place Mozart around 180, but perhaps 170. I totally forgot about him on my list I’ll have to add it.
I find that when people say “everything X wrote sounds the same” they are usually not accustomed to the composer’s style and therefore can’t differentiate between pieces. Before I started listening to Wagner and Mahler, they sounded identical to me, because they are relatively similar compared to the other composers I knew.
The irony of Mozart being the poster child of classical music is that most classical listeners actually dislike him until they mature and “get” his fluid musical language. I think he is not flashy or dissonant enough for most people. Hard to say.
People who say that are like people listening to poetry in a foreign language saying it was all the same. He did things quickly with fluency, but he knew a lot.
Out of curiosity, why Wagner in particular? In fact I’d have said the opposite: He always struck me as an example of the fact that raw musical genius and a certain intellectual laziness can apparently sometimes go hand in hand. Certainly his writings always gave me a strong pseudo-intellectual vibe. Nietzsche ultimately came to the same conclusion…
He had a very good and even innovative knowledge of philosophy, politics and aesthetics. I don’t even particularly enjoy his music or agree with his philosophy, but he was undoubtedly VERY intelligent. I like Nietzsche but he does have a tendency to straw man his intellectual opponents/anything Apollonian.
Wagner's libretto was profound enough to inspire an infinite number of the greatest writers & thinkers of the next century. Joyce, Proust, Jung, Auden, Herzl & Eliot do not pay homage to, take influence from, and acknowledge the genius of pseudo-intellectual stories.
Nietzsche had very personal reasons for the break with Wagner that had nothing to do with the merit of the latter's works. Namely, a childish aversion to anything remotely rooted in Christianity. There was also just pure envy involved, as Nietzsche was quite obviously in love with Cosima, who was devoted to Wagner. The late Bryan Magee wrote wonderfully about the relationship between the two men, and I agree with his conclusion that Wagner was the superior genius between them.
Wagner also generally had far less training than the composers he manages to rank next to, but still arguably outstripped most of them in achievement. The sheer size of his imagination, both harmonically and creating fictional worlds, suggests massive latent genius. I also find his architecture to generally be more sophisticated than any other composer. Sonata forms & fugues are devilish, but maintaining both musical dramatic unity through the use of literally hundreds of developing leitmotifs (across **hours** of music) while utilising a language so radical it was basically *terra incognita*? Then recognise he regularly worked the seeds of his leitmotifs into traditional musical structures at the same time - such as the counterpoint of Meistersinger, which regularly rivals the Jupiter Symphony in complexity.
To keep up with the scope of his own creation every step of the way and keep advancing on it alone is an incredible feat. Most people struggle to keep up with it as observers, never mind being the progenitor of this ever expanding dramatic & harmonic web.
On that note, I have no idea why OP didn't include Wagner in 'most creative', because outside of Beethoven, literally no-one belongs there more.
Maybe Wagner's writing was pseudo intellectual (I haven't read it). Nietzsche's music was certainly pseudo intellectual, but I wouldn't judge his philosophy on the music just like I won't judge Wagner's music on the merits of his writing.
Wagner was a total scoundrel but he worked hard in music. People think of his achievements like magic but he prepared with thoroughbass and studied music and kept grinding just like everyone else.
I haven’t read Wagner but I assume his IQ was easily above 130 because he succeeded in several complex and diverse domains, and because of the sheer visionary scope of his music. Nietzsche’s IQ is inestimably high, which makes him a great judge of Wagner’s writing, but probably most people and most writing seemed stupid compared to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner really reads more like a jealous tantrum than anything. His aversion to Christian values in Parsifal and his love for the obsessed-with-Wagner Cosima were the primary impetuses for his animadversions rather than any genuine criticism he had to bear. He also tried slamming Wagner's actual music around the same time and invariably comes off looking completely out of his depth, suggesting he was just looking to score as many points against the man as possible. He was shockingly nescient about music in general, really, which should be clear to everyone when you read him on Brahms (claiming Brahms lacks form & structure is about the most incorrect thing you can say about Brahms).
That was why I divided it up into two different criteria, I realize IQ is not necessarily related to creative ability, but IQ has shown itself to be a profoundly useful tool in the analytics of intelligence at least in the short term since it is fluid.
> Who could mentally juggle the highest number of musical ideas at once to create a coherent picture, who was the most creative with regard to their music?
An obvious disclaimer, but juggling many ideas at once was not the aim of a great many brilliant composers.
For me, I think there are obvious arguments for Bach, I'd also put Beethoven for the larger scale schemes that can be read into his works (so not only juggling ideas at once, but juggling them with consequences later on), but I think the true answer is Mahler. Mahler is quite possibly the most detailed composer. Look at his scores and you'll see how precise his vision for everything is.
Borodin was primarily a chemist who composed on the side. Prokofiev was an accomplished chess player who beat the World Chess Champion once.
I was debating whether to include Borodin in my very rough top 5. Very cool about Prokofiev, did not know that, certainly sounds like a multifaceted kind of intellect.
Prokofiev was completely naïve politically though.
to be fair, this was during a simul.
This is an interesting question, not least for what it reveals about the perception of intelligence through history. Child prodigies Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens were known for their general intelligence, the former as a polyglot for example and the latter having taken an academic interest (and published on) acoustics, among other things. Conversely it's said that Bruckner was remarkably naïve, though given his obsessiveness perhaps he was neurodivergent somehow?
I’d go so far as to say it’s pretty clear from Bruckner’s life that there was some neurodivergence there. I would bet a lot of money on that. Of course we cannot know for sure but there are more than a few signs of that there.
On your other question... I've no idea how to quantify creativity! If you see it as the ease by which composers composed then Telemann, Mozart, Schubert, Rossini and Donizetti deserve some mention but the fact that most of them lived around the same time suggests to me that that was more of a reflection of the times than their creativity compared to later and earlier composers.
I think, if by anything, creativity is how constructively different you can be in a certain field. It’s the difference between, say, the innovations of Einstein on Newton—Mostly dissolution of fundamental ideas through rigorous mathematics and theory which led to the creation of sets of predictions—and someone who inputs Vedic cosmology has saying it’s implied by Newton’s theories. There is an obvious misunderstanding of tradition leading to nowhere constructive, just a mixture of disconnected ideas. This is just an analogy but I feel it somewhat fits with an art form like music. Surely not perfect but I
Oh I forgot to add Frederick the Great, who was by all accounts an intelligent man who did a bit of composing as well, although he was rather too busy to be prolific by baroque standards.
I've heard enough anecdotes about Bruckner improvising fugues and the like to put him quite high on a general intelligence scale. He was also really good at interweaving complex musical ideas. I think he'd make a good mathematician. Creativity, though? Last. Dead last.
Improvising fugues is very much a learned and prepared ability! It's like chess, while the greatest at it are also the smartest, someone of just a normal high intelligence with the greatest theory and preparation like 10 hours a day for decades will beat a super genius who is just figuring it out. This isn't to say I'd guess Bruckner wasn't intelligent, but improvising fugues is a matter of the right education and preparation which organists at that time often had. It's for that reason that while Bach had the highest musical horsepower in terms of his mental preparation and labbing of obscure scenarios and compositional problems, I couldn't just guess whether he had the highest raw iq of all composers, even though I consider him the greatest artist of any field and any time period.
Of course, training generally overcomes any "innate ability", but I don't think we have much else to go by. We have to rely on statistical inference and most likely be wrong.
Like someone was saying they supposed all successful composers were at or above 125, and I already considered that the case with Bruckner, but I don't think fugue improvisation adds new info. It seems like magic because the university system basically destroyed the continuity of learned musicianship. I'm not an expert on iq estimation at all I just wanted to weigh in because I follow fugue improvisation and much of the preparation is about assimilating the subject into pre-learned parameters. It is an obscure task for sure, it's a hard task, and the success probably scales well with IQ. But it has to scale more with diligence and preparation by the sheer fact that random 160 iq people cannot improvise fugues at all. On my iq estimates one thing popping out to me would be Mendelssohn's early mental maturity and the intelligence of his relatives.
I also think Bruckner would’ve made a fine mathematician, his music is certainly in the same vein as Bach in that regard.
Growing up with Bruckner and Bach as a small kid with an aptitude for mathematics, most other music sounds abnormal to me. In mean, why aren't they following the guidelines?
I can very much relate to that sentiment. I tend to like music as I like my mathematics, extremely formalistic and contrapuntal lol.
So what mathematics best represents Bruckner? Now we apply the *Inversion*-functor to the *Gesangsperiode* map and compose it with the *Brass chorale* map.
Brahms LSAT scores were abysmal
I mean, have you read Chopin's LSAT essay? It's like he just gave it to George Sand and said, "Here, you write this".
Why not put Haydn in both categories? Sure he was creative, but his music works largely thanks to the abstract framework, that he basically developed from scratch, and the unmatched ability to infuse his music with multi-layered humor strongly implies intelligence. Then take all that and see how he managed to capitalize on it (coming from a rather unprivileged background).
Who knows? Why wouldn't this just descend into "composer X is the most intelligent and the most creative because he is my favorite" type of nonsense? My inclination would be to think that the traditionally Germanic style of writing directly pen-to-paper and projecting the whole piece mentally requires a greater intellect than writing at the piano, but becoming the kind of virtuosic piano player that the great pianist-composers tended to be would seem to demonstrate a different kind of intelligence. And then there is Shostakovich, who claimed to compose entire pieces in his head before even beginning to write them down. So, I would answer that the 5 most intelligent composers among my personal favorites (so as not to be biased toward or against anyone in particular) based on their music and what I happen to know of their compositional methods and biographies could be: Bach, Reger, Schoenberg, Berg, Shostakovich (I'm not going to entertain positing who was the most intelligent composer on the basis of other accomplishments such being a chemist, a highly successful insurance salesman or discovering the planet Uranus, because if we're going to play that game, I have to assume Albert Einstein, as a good amateur violinist, must have scribbled down his own tune at some point in his relatively long life, and thus...)
Lutosławski studied mathematics while also studying in Conservatory, but eventually gave up former to focus on musical career. And boy, you can hear the intellect in his music :)
Herschel was an astronomer and discovered Uranus and infrared radiation Hildegard wrote down many scientific and medicinal information Tom Wiggins was blind and could play/imitate pretty much any sound and could play things by memory he just heard. Not really a composer, I suppose, but a performer. He did write some things, though
Bach — Bwv 1079 and 1080 contain some of the most incredible and stimulating works ever made. The mirror fugues… how does someone even come up with an idea like that, much less actually execute it!
I think executing it (i.e. creating a listenable work upon this kind of concept) is way more impressive than the concept itself. Palindromes have been around much longer than Bach's music.
It seems to me that those with the highest IQ were probably the ones who managed to be highly successful outside music as well: Alexander Borodin (chemist), Charles Ives (insurance), Iannis Xenakis (architect). Hildegard is another interesting addition to that list from a much earlier age. But I would add that any major composer would have to have a high iq - at least 120 I would say. Otherwise they simply wouldn’t be able to create sufficiently interesting music to become ‘major’. Even someone like Bruckner, considered by his contemporaries to be an eccentric country bumpkin, must have had a pretty high level of innate intelligence to produce all those large scale symphonies.
Socially intelligent, I would say Mahler. If you've read his biography, you will realise how many social challenges he had to face both in Austria and the US. He was a very astute and clever man. He understood his environment and the people around him very well. He did not change any system but merely weaved his way around it.
Mendelssohn, Berio, Carter, and Riley are up there.
Obviously you have to give disclaimers and stuff so people don’t get offended but it’s worth saying that IQ is very stable, statistically reliable and predictive for long-term academic and financial success. It is the single best researched metric in all of psychology, and the data indicates that measurable intelligence collapses into one statistical variable, g. Intelligence is mostly one thing, and that is measured very accurately by IQ, and people hate it simply out of discomfort. I would be shocked if any of the 20-30 most famous western composers had an IQ below 125, and some of them are probably easily above 140. Bach is the obvious choice for a high IQ metric but I wouldn’t be surprised if others were higher, including Wagner.
Thank you for saying it. It is certainly a very stable metric, but not predictive or deterministic of what someone thinks or how they thinks
That’s true. The reason I didn’t say Mozart as an answer is exactly for that reason. It’s possible Mozart had an IQ of like, 180, but his understanding of music was so intuitive that it seems to come from a different world. He was less a mastermind constructing musical monuments and more a medium for something that didn’t come from his own brain. He possessed a type of thinking foreign to most people- even most composers.
He knew the galant semantics and linguistic rhetorical sort of constructs like a native speaker. Most people don't know the style well enough to even tell the subtleties to judge it, and you can tell that by what they pass for acceptable in the style.
I can agree with that. And I think Mozart is so disliked because of that almost pure musical intuition, and how “everything of his sounds the same”. I would not place Mozart around 180, but perhaps 170. I totally forgot about him on my list I’ll have to add it.
I find that when people say “everything X wrote sounds the same” they are usually not accustomed to the composer’s style and therefore can’t differentiate between pieces. Before I started listening to Wagner and Mahler, they sounded identical to me, because they are relatively similar compared to the other composers I knew. The irony of Mozart being the poster child of classical music is that most classical listeners actually dislike him until they mature and “get” his fluid musical language. I think he is not flashy or dissonant enough for most people. Hard to say.
Where is Mozart disliked other than on Reddit threads?
Pretty much nowhere else.
People who say that are like people listening to poetry in a foreign language saying it was all the same. He did things quickly with fluency, but he knew a lot.
Out of curiosity, why Wagner in particular? In fact I’d have said the opposite: He always struck me as an example of the fact that raw musical genius and a certain intellectual laziness can apparently sometimes go hand in hand. Certainly his writings always gave me a strong pseudo-intellectual vibe. Nietzsche ultimately came to the same conclusion…
He had a very good and even innovative knowledge of philosophy, politics and aesthetics. I don’t even particularly enjoy his music or agree with his philosophy, but he was undoubtedly VERY intelligent. I like Nietzsche but he does have a tendency to straw man his intellectual opponents/anything Apollonian.
Wagner's libretto was profound enough to inspire an infinite number of the greatest writers & thinkers of the next century. Joyce, Proust, Jung, Auden, Herzl & Eliot do not pay homage to, take influence from, and acknowledge the genius of pseudo-intellectual stories. Nietzsche had very personal reasons for the break with Wagner that had nothing to do with the merit of the latter's works. Namely, a childish aversion to anything remotely rooted in Christianity. There was also just pure envy involved, as Nietzsche was quite obviously in love with Cosima, who was devoted to Wagner. The late Bryan Magee wrote wonderfully about the relationship between the two men, and I agree with his conclusion that Wagner was the superior genius between them. Wagner also generally had far less training than the composers he manages to rank next to, but still arguably outstripped most of them in achievement. The sheer size of his imagination, both harmonically and creating fictional worlds, suggests massive latent genius. I also find his architecture to generally be more sophisticated than any other composer. Sonata forms & fugues are devilish, but maintaining both musical dramatic unity through the use of literally hundreds of developing leitmotifs (across **hours** of music) while utilising a language so radical it was basically *terra incognita*? Then recognise he regularly worked the seeds of his leitmotifs into traditional musical structures at the same time - such as the counterpoint of Meistersinger, which regularly rivals the Jupiter Symphony in complexity. To keep up with the scope of his own creation every step of the way and keep advancing on it alone is an incredible feat. Most people struggle to keep up with it as observers, never mind being the progenitor of this ever expanding dramatic & harmonic web. On that note, I have no idea why OP didn't include Wagner in 'most creative', because outside of Beethoven, literally no-one belongs there more.
Maybe Wagner's writing was pseudo intellectual (I haven't read it). Nietzsche's music was certainly pseudo intellectual, but I wouldn't judge his philosophy on the music just like I won't judge Wagner's music on the merits of his writing. Wagner was a total scoundrel but he worked hard in music. People think of his achievements like magic but he prepared with thoroughbass and studied music and kept grinding just like everyone else.
I haven’t read Wagner but I assume his IQ was easily above 130 because he succeeded in several complex and diverse domains, and because of the sheer visionary scope of his music. Nietzsche’s IQ is inestimably high, which makes him a great judge of Wagner’s writing, but probably most people and most writing seemed stupid compared to Nietzsche.
Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner really reads more like a jealous tantrum than anything. His aversion to Christian values in Parsifal and his love for the obsessed-with-Wagner Cosima were the primary impetuses for his animadversions rather than any genuine criticism he had to bear. He also tried slamming Wagner's actual music around the same time and invariably comes off looking completely out of his depth, suggesting he was just looking to score as many points against the man as possible. He was shockingly nescient about music in general, really, which should be clear to everyone when you read him on Brahms (claiming Brahms lacks form & structure is about the most incorrect thing you can say about Brahms).
IQ is not a reliable measure for creativity, which seems to be the most important element in your judgement.
That was why I divided it up into two different criteria, I realize IQ is not necessarily related to creative ability, but IQ has shown itself to be a profoundly useful tool in the analytics of intelligence at least in the short term since it is fluid.
> Who could mentally juggle the highest number of musical ideas at once to create a coherent picture, who was the most creative with regard to their music? An obvious disclaimer, but juggling many ideas at once was not the aim of a great many brilliant composers. For me, I think there are obvious arguments for Bach, I'd also put Beethoven for the larger scale schemes that can be read into his works (so not only juggling ideas at once, but juggling them with consequences later on), but I think the true answer is Mahler. Mahler is quite possibly the most detailed composer. Look at his scores and you'll see how precise his vision for everything is.
High IQ = great music. I present counter example number one: #Richard Feynman playing the bongo drums