Quote:
Originally Posted by TuomasEaston
In my experience, I think Metal and Jazz players are FAR more pretentious than classical players. Classical music is generally not as spotlight for individual musicians.
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While you're not necessarily wrong, I think you're confusing "Pretentious" with "Egotistical" or "Narcissistic".
To be pretentious about your chosen artform is to have, essentially, a delusion that results in justifying that whole artform as being far more important and deep than it actually is.
A great number of metal or jazz players don't have that problem where they claim their own artform to be the ultimate form of music. They're often wildly derisive of other acts within the same genre for no better reason than personal aesthetic judgements, or they'll insist on challenging a perception that puts them into the same group as another act they dislike.
The problem you're describing is simple egotism, where that person feels they, personally, deserver greater spotlight or acclaim than they actually do. That's somewhat different to being simply pretentious.
Regardless, the answer to this entire thread is simple - Institutions provide an education, context, and guidance on the importance of classical music, that is largely shared between all students and institutions as the result of research and analysis. This means they become very quickly aware of the greats and why they were great within that field.
They are however unlikely to be so aware of greats within the comparitively recent time (last 100 years worth) of popular music, and even if they are, they're comparing those recent greats to artists with hundreds of years of acknowledged importance. To many classical musicians, no modern day musician can possibly claim the same importance as a Bach or a Beethoven until they've been dead long enough that, by rights, their music should be long forgotten, yet if they were truly that important their music would last, like Bach's, hundreds of years after death.
Not to mention, the recent canon of popular metal or jazz musicians, or even popular musicians as a whole, is fiercely contested even by devout aficionados of those genres. Nobody can contest Bach as a great composer. It's comparitively easy to contest Metallica as an important rock band, and that means there's simply much less to support anyone who tries to be pretentious about heavy metal music - there's no safety net of hundreds of years of scholarly thinking and analysis, to fall back on to prove the importance of metal in the grand scheme of artistic endeavour.