Anton Brucker

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This composer, long a favortie of mine, is listed as a 'famous aspie' in another thread. The funny thing is that I'd had him pegged as one: a mania for counting objects, extremely shy, loved sitting in the organ loft and improvising.

I've heard Bruckner's music described as a 'you either love it or hate it' thing. I wonder how much selected aspie traits actually go into the 'liking' part. Just a thought.

He is awesome! I really like his 9th Symphony, and his choral works (masses & the
Te Deum). He is among my favorites.

Yep, he's a great composer. I visited the village Ansfelden were he was born.

On the program notes for a concert that included one of his symphonies it was said that if a conductor did a good job of interpreting his work he would give the conductor a coin as a tip. The amount of money of the coin was minuscule compared to the conductor's wage and Bruckner did not realize this. Still, it was so difficult to win a tip that any conductor who did had the coin mounted in a frame to be hung on the wall to show that the composer considered him one of the best there is.
Mahler was a close contemporary of Bruckner. The Teaching Company Course on him recounts that when he was working on his first symphony he became so absent minded from thinking about it that family and friends had to help him navigate into the village so that he would not walk into lamp posts and people. His first symphony was very controversial, he apparently incorporated things in it that he knew would piss off the critics because they were going to be pissed off no matter what he did. At the premiere, one of the men in the audience was so offended that he walked up to the composer and demanded a pistol duel but Mahler was too grownup to indulge in such things. After his Resurrection Symphony was published he spent two decades continuing to make subtle edits trying to perfect it. A recording of interviews with New York Philharmonic Orchestra musicians who had played under Mahler's direction described him as appearing so eccentric that when he ate at his favorite restaurant they had to seat him away from the view of other customers for fear of frightening them away. He also had very specific instructions on how he wanted his meal of apples and spinach, his favorite dish, prepared.
When Autism Speaks wants to cure autism, an expedient akin to curing the wrong color of skin in the antebellum South, by identifying prenatal infants who have it in order to abort them and when society establishes barriers that prevent autistic people from marrying and starting families, all because they are not exactly like everybody else they are defined as life unworthy of life, they would sterilize the world of such things as the music of Bruckner, probably Mahler, of physicists who have advanced science and anybody who cannot think exactly the way everybody else thinks and cannot live exactly the way everybody else lives.

I had a roommate in college, a French horn player, who used to check out Bruckner scores from the library and sit there and conduct along with a recording for hours. He did the same with Mahler, who like Bruckner, made massive, genius use of horns. I was introduced to a lot of great music that way.