Favourite piece of 20th century music (Rest is Noise centric)
Linked to The Rest is Noise festival in London this year, the Guardian have just published this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/29/rest-is-noise-festival-favourites
Apart from all the usual suspects, there are some interesting choices in there too - notably Sibelius, Harvey and Bryars.
Also interesting how there's nothing from Berio, Cage, Boulez, Part, Xenakis, Carter etc...
So do any of you have a favourite piece of 20th century music?
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How is Sibelius not one of the most obvious of usual suspects?
Other than maybe the fact that they've chosen 7 where most lists might pick 5 (I'd go for 2 or 3, personally...).
Anyway, no, I don't have a favourite piece of 20th century music (by which I'm taking you to mean "classical" music composed in the 20th century).
What I do have is a very very long list of quote-unquote 20th century music I love and which, seeing as it's Friday night and I'm a few sheets to the wind, I have no qualms typing out a small selection of even though I know nobody gives the remotest of flying fucks.
So yeah, top tier (and contenders for "favourite"):
Alfvén - Symphony 4 and the 1st (maybe also the 2nd?) Swedish Rhapsody
Prokofiev - Alexander Nevsky
Sibelius - fucking everything, but for the sake of argument we'll say Symphonies 2 + 3 and the Finlandia hymn and maybe the Lemminkainen suite and Nightride & Sunrise
Shostakovich - Piano Concerto 2
Rautavaara - Cantus Arcticus
Bantock - Celtic Symphony
Glière - Symphony 2
Vaughan Williams - too much, again, but let's go with Symphonies 6 + 7 and the English Folk Song Suite and the Lark Ascending because I'm not tryhard enough to pretend otherwise, and also the Serenade to Music because I can
Bax - Symphony 6
Rodrigo - Concierto de Aranjuez
de Falla - Noches en los Jardines de España
Pärt - Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Respighi - Pini di Roma
Second tier (hardly worth separating, really, but I've done it now):
Glass - Low Symphony
Richard Strauss - Alpine Symphony
Martinu - pretty much any of each of the 6 symphonies, let's say maybe 3 + 6
Nielsen - ditto, but make the arbitrary choices 4 + 5
Milhaud - La Création du Monde
Janacek - Sinfonietta, and the suite from From The House of the Dead (had the overture to this in my head when I've woken up for the last few weeks or so, worrying stuff. Maybe chuck in a few other opera suites too - and while we're at it, Rimsky-Korsakov's suites-from-the-operas were mostly 20th century as well, whack 'em all in).
Mahler - Symphony 8
Kamran Ince - Symphony 2 "Fall of Constantinople"
Avshalomoff - Flute Concerto
Carlos Chávez - Symphony 4
Revueltas - Le Noche de los Mayas
Barber - Adagio for Strings
Ruth Gipps - Symphony 2
Britten - Sinfonia da Requiem
Turnage - Drowned Out
Adès - Asyla
Prokofiev - Scythian Suite
Shostakovich - Symphony 5 and maybe a few others - 10 and 13, I guess
Pärt - Spiegel im Spiegel, Für Alina
Also would have from that article Schoenberg's 5 pieces, Webern's 6 pieces, Music for 18 Musicians, the Quartet for the End of Time, and the Rite.
Sean, you can close DiS now, you're not gonna get a better list of music.
No replies.
Good list!
I'd pretty much have everything from Sibelius that you've listed, at one point he was easily my favourite composer full stop.
So would it be fair to say you're not really a fan, given from the choices you've made, of the more avant-garde and experimental stuff from the last 100 years or so?
Depends on your definitions, really. Given the choices I've made, I'd personally say that was an untrue statement
what with inclusions of Webern, Ince, Mahler, Prokofiev, Adès, Pärt, Schoenberg, Reich, Glass, Shostakovich, Rautavaara, Strauss, Janacek, Nielsen, Milhaud, Britten, Turnage, Messiaen, Stravinsky, et al. All of whom were probably just as experimental and groundbreaking as anyone else mentioned in the Guardian article /the OP.
But then if you're defining "avant-garde and experimental" just in terms of the fashionable movements like serialism, minimalism, musique concrète, etc. that indie hipsters love then, yeah, it's probably under-represented (though still in that list if you look closely).
On the other hand, it's true that
most of my list is pretty tonal and weighted heavily towards the first half of the century. I'd never even attempt to hide that I'm essentially a romantic at heart.
I would also like to add Martinu's Fantasia for theremin, oboe, string quartet & piano to my list
and you can judge fo yourself whether you think this is an attempt to make it "edgier".
Hmm by avant-garde I guess I'm mainly referring to post-1950/60 music
And by experimental I mean composers like Ives, Cage, George Crumb, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, Ruth Crawford Seeger, etc. I was more picking up on the pre-1950 weighting (as you mention below) of your list.
There are large swathes of your list and mine which would cross-over, I'll do mine in a minute, but in terms of absolute favourites I think I'm far more fond of the developments in the latter half of the century.
Incidentally I resent the implications of that music being popular for 'indie hipsters'. The main audiences for this type of music is as far from that demographic as you can get...
this list puts me in a headlock
Think Dan just won DiS. Not even any fucking Holst. I'm partial to Arvo Part (add yr own umlaut) but I need to hear so much else I'm trembling to think about it
As a fan of mindbending prog and insane Cardiacs-tastic melody, where next?
Sadly, as the above conversation with numbersman hints at,
this isn't really the school of music that most prog- (and post-) rockers draw most from, so I'm sure he/others will be able to provide better suggestions than me.
That said, there's still plenty there I think you'd like - I'd be inclined to start with the Milhaud piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3GPtgY9hSQ
Oh yeah, and obvious crossover piece: Glass's Low Symphony
which is based on Bowie's Low.
Also, turn this up LOUD:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4U7wNZu-CU
yo this is cool
had feared an excess of le fromage but actuellement c'est triste et joyeux in more or less equal and complementary measure
Sibelius has never been taken massively seriously as a modern composer
He's seen as too reliant on tonality, and not radical enough in many ways (despite being quite innovative in his use of structure and motivic development). He doesn't sound progressive enough, basically, due to the similarities between his style and the late 19th century school of composition.
So whenever there are big discussions on 20th century music, he's often overlooked, especially due to his large period of inactivity after the late 1920s.
I think that depends massively on who's having the discussions
I agree he can be overlooked, but at the same time if you drew up a list of the top half-dozen or so 20th century composers with the highest profile, he'd be right in there with Debussy, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, etc.
I'd also argue that, while he obviously straddled the turn of the century, a larger part of why he doesn't sound "progressive enough" is due to the following century or so of music inspired by him.
Well it was academics and critics during his lifetime who called him unprogressive
It's mainly after WWII that he's been seen as pushing boundaries, in far more subtle ways than his contemporaries, and admired for this.
But yes, he's popular and rightly so. I suppose with Sibelius and Rachmaninov, because they're so intrinsically linked with late-romantic music, they're very well engrained in the symphony orchestra's repertoire. And because of this, the general audiences for these types of concerts don't necessarily equate either composer with the 20th century, it's often forgotten due to their musical language.
julius eastman - evil nigger
Don't know about my favourite
But a piece I've been enjoying greatly recently is La Monte Young's 'The Well-Tuned Piano'. It's stupidly rare to get hold of a physical copy, but this podcast is a full recording of one of his performances:
http://radiovalencia.fm/nosuchprogram/2012/05/10/no-such-program-2-8-1-the-well-tuned-piano-10-may-2012/