| | Rodney, please let me know if I don't speak for you on this, but I think I can defend the general spirit of what was behind your decision to exclude rock musicians from this discussion.
First off, you were asking about the first Objectivist *composer.* The term 'composer' immediately implies someone who writes music in the European classical tradition, meaning they create their musical scores using the established Western system of musical notation. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, "Jimi Hendrix is a great rock composer." Composers are in effect musically "literate", meaning they can read and write music (but don't take this to mean that illiterate or semi-literate musicians don't/can't make valuable artistic contributions).
Composers have full command over all the musical happenings of a given piece of music they are creating - it's a highly individualistic endeavor. Additionally, they can harness and realize ideas in their head which are far beyond the capability of their own technical prowess on the instruments they write for, as they have the luxury of outsourcing the performance of a piece to specialists.
Rock music, on the other hand, is usually created in a collaborative process heavilly dependent on *songwriting*. Songwriting is the effort to combine lyrics and music into complete work. A song can either begin as a poem that is then set to music, or as instrumental music which has lyrics especially created for it.
Anyhow, the term 'serious music' has come to mean any music that written by composers in the European tradition. People opt to use the term 'serious' instead of 'classical' because the term Classical also refers to a specific era in music history (roughly 1750 to 1800 if I can recall), and it avoids any resulting confusion. Certainly, to refer to music in this way implies that all other music is not serious, and I think that's unfortunate. But again, I don't think that the point of excluding rock music from this discussion is to suggest there is no merit or depth in rock or other non-classical styles.
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