(July 1, 2015 at 1:08 pm)Alex K Wrote: French people speaking English certainly sound better than vice versa
Yes. I don't know of anyone disagreeing with that. But a French accent in English doesn't just sound better than an English accent in French; a French accent in English sounds good. Not just to me, but to everyone I have spoken with about it. In fact, it sounds so good, I almost wish I were a native French speaker, who was fluent in English, but still had a strong accent.
(July 1, 2015 at 1:08 pm)Alex K Wrote: As a fan of old music, I would rate Monteverdi and Palestrina up there with the best northern composers. German baroque would be nothing without them. Also, and this is a matter of taste, I prefer Slavic composers over French on average.
I was not interested in stating anything about what was necessary for a particular composer to compose what he or she composed. I was making a judgement about the finished product. If you think anyone is better than Johann Sebastian Bach, you are a heretic. If your preference, though, was for Mozart or Beethoven, you could be forgiven your blasphemy, as they are the other members of the holy trinity. Even dropping down from the three greatest composers, Germanic ones still are among the best ever.
(If we were talking about philosophy, then the Germanic ones suck [especially those whose names begin with the letter H, but I don't like any of them]. But with music, it is entirely different.)
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
