POLLERO!: ILM's Top 100 Notated Pieces of Music Since 1890

We got 18 ballots, which I was happy to see for a daunting list of music that is usually not a primary focus at ILM. The results are definitely diverse, with a wide range of aesthetics in evidence. In fact, only one composer got two #1 votes, for different pieces. (I was looking at unweighted ballots when I said there were two.) Several pieces got #1 votes but didn't make the top 100, interestingly.

A reminder that the voting thread was here: Dedication to Polls and Voters: Notated Music Since 1890 - Voting and Discussion Thread
and nominations were here: http://pastebin.com/bapmkdm0

And starting out with #100:
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques Score: 318 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0
http://www.livescience.com/images/i/000/059/796/original/visible-spectrum.jpg?interpolation=lanczos-none&fit=around%7C300:200&crop=300:200;*,*

Les espaces acoustiques [occupied] him for 11 years (1974–85) and lasts over an hour and a half in performance: the forces of the component pieces range from the solo viola of the opening Prologue (1976) to the large orchestra of Transitoires (1980) and the concluding Epilogue (1985), and each save the last can be played separately or along with any adjacent work in the cycle (the ending of the first piece, for instance, forms the beginning of the second). The entire cycle is based on a pattern of inhalation–exhalation–rest. The moments of rest are marked by regular, periodic patterns and a part of a harmonic spectrum on E (41.2 Hz); the inhalations develop these repetitive figures, pushing them into a state of maximum disorder and instability; the exhalations proceed from the resulting disorder back to a new state of rest on E. Especially characteristic is the blurring of the distinction between harmony and timbre to which Grisey gave the name ‘instrumental synthesis’. The low E in the trombone at the opening of Partiels (1975) is followed by a chord which imitates the timbre of the trombone, modelled after a sonogram analysis of its sound. Long stretches of the same work employ harmonic transformations that simulate with purely instrumental forces the electro-acoustic technique of ring-modulation.

I didn't know this one before, to be honest, but I am enjoying it so far.

The Spotify playlist will be posted at the end of the day.

567 compositions received at least one vote. There are a number of popular or scholarly 'hits' that didn't make it to our final countdown.

didn't feel knowledgeable enough to vote but i'm eagerly anticipating the rollout and strongly approve of the results so far

Same here, though I didn't know the Grisey before and have not got all that far into listening, it seems really interesting.

4 and a half minutes into "Partiels", I can definitely see why it is so well-regarded.

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James Points: 320 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2003/Oct03/Turn_Screw_ME.jpg

Dunno if I'll keep up the blurbs throughout but:

With its tightly-controlled response to James’s tale, Britten’s opera runs the risk of seeming to shirk depth of expression as decisively as it shuns technical elaboration. Yet there is a spontaneity and naturalness in the musical ideas, and a compact solidity in the form schemes of each scene, which give the lie to arguments that Britten’s response was thin or inhibited. Above all, the music reveals its absolute rightness in the way it brings to convincing life the extraordinary Jamesian blend of starchy social conventions and turbulent emotional forces which those conventions promote, while seeking their suppression. Britten gives substance to Jame’s psychological insights without in any way distorting them. The Turn of the Screw marked a decisive change in Britten’s development. After it, chamber opera would be his main concern, and the chromatic intensity obtainable from the acknowledgment of some aspects of 12-note principles a central technique. What did not change, in essence, was the type of subject Britten favoured in his dramatic works.

Another one I hadn't really listened to before, owing to my opera blinders. (I did vote for Peter Grimes, though!) I always enjoy Britten a lot when I hear him; yet it somehow rarely occurs to me to put him on. And I'm definitely liking this, or at least Act 1, so far. (I never knew there were 12-note rows in this.) Is there such a thing as an English opera fan? Because Dido and Aeneas is probably my favourite CPE opera.

Oh cool, it's started. I voted for Les Espaces Acoustiques.

People who listen to a lot of opera (or musicals for that matter): do you find that you can listen to the music of an opera front-to-back (e.g. on a recording) without following and focusing on the narrative? Because, already, by Scene 3, I feel like I've got just the audio from a sung movie (that I haven't watched) playing in the background while I'm trying to do other things. If you're not actually watching a performance, do you prefer to just listen to the major arias, the way that people will listen to compilations of hits from Broadway shows?

xp

I don't listen to a ton of opera, but I usually will follow along in the translation of the libretto a little, maybe not line for line but just to get an idea of the action of each scene. It's never occurred to me to skip around in the arias, and I don't really like Broadway hits comps for the same reason I don't really like Greatest Hits albums-- you never know what great deep cuts you might be missing.

I definitely listen to opera that way. I read a plot synopsis at some point before listening but then I just play it while doing my day job like any other classical music. Usually in halves (like disc 1 then disc 2 a few days later).

I voted Turn of the Screw pretty high in my ballot. Act 1 scenes 7 and 8 (The Lake - At Night) give me the chills of the uncanny.

I am partially influenced by seeing it performed in Seattle in the 90s... The production had some really cool ideas, most memorably during Miles' number about his feeling of being 'bad', miles was sitting on the floor in the middle of an empty room with an open window at the back. The whole floor of the room is covered by a sheet. During the course of Miles' number, Peter Quint appears at the window behind him, reaches into the room, and begins to VERY SLOWLY PULL THE SHEET, WITH MILES ON IT ABSORBED IN HIS ARIA, TOWARDS THE WINDOW.

Kicking off a string of pieces that I am very familiar with and love:

98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis Points: 322 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p00tcy3k.jpg

Metastasis, 1953-54
Piece written for 61 orchestral players (46 strings), with each
playing a different part.
Uses multiple glissandi (straight lines) in the music for string and
horn parts. These indicate for the player to begin at a certain pitch
and slide through all the frequencies on the way to a different pitch
(could be higher or lower).
Xenakis realizes that drawing the glissandi in the score can create
a special surface of straight lines, called a ruled surface. This was
the inspiration for his design of the Philips Pavilion.
He thought of the glissandi as graphs of straight lines (time on the
horizontal axis, pitch on the vertical), where different slopes
correspond to different “sound spaces.”

One of the pieces that smeared my brain when I took late 20th century music history at 19.

Listening now to the Grisey. Probably a dumb question, but there's no way this is standard western temperament, right?

That's not dumb and you're right: it's not. I think that in pretty much any 'spectral' music, the pitches are based on specific frequencies derived from spectrographic analysis of acoustic phenomena. So, e.g., in "Partiels", you start out with a low E on trombone. Then you get an orchestrated chord where all of the pitches are determined by the prominent frequencies that Grisey found when he did a spectral analysis of a trombone playing that low E.

Slow roll out would make sense here, Sund4r, to allow listening time and a bit of reaction before the next tranche (not that I'm going to even attempt complete operas).

10 per day?

What do other people think?

My arguments: We're in the bottom reaches of the top 100 now. I could maybe slow it down a bit for the top 10 but the countdown would take nearly two months if I were to go e.g. 2 a day through the top 100, and nearly three weeks even for 5 a day. Metal poll countdowns go through 20-40 albums per day, for comparison. Yes, some operas are a lot longer than the average metal album but e.g. "Metastasis" is about 8 minutes long. Even Turn of the Screw is just under 2h and fits on 2 CDs like plenty of double albums.

I wasn't planning on giving everything a complete listen during the rollout, just sampling stuff and bookmarking what I liked for later. I think 10 a day is fine, gives plenty of time for discussion and doesn't drag out the process for too long.

I'm working the same way. I don't give every album a complete listen during metal polls or EOY polls either. I am going to listen to Metastasis again in its entirety before moving on, though!

There's like eight different recordings of The Turn of the Screw on Spotify alone; does anyone have a favorite recording of this, or should I just put on the Decca one?

I imagine Jon can help you here, although I have a feeling he likes the 2004 Naxos recording.

Now we finally come to a notated composition that was released as a proper album per se, and a beautiful one.

97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music Points: 323 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

https://ecmreviews.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/dolmen-music1.jpg

I knew of Meredith Monk (vaguely) from a class I took fifteen years ago, but I hadn't heard any of her work-- Soulseek was always a little spotty for contemporary art music. I really like her approach to the voice, and I don't always like vocal chamber music.

^ Would have voted for that if I had voted.

Turn Of The Screw was my no.8. The Glyndebourne DVD with Toby Spence is exceptionally good.

The Decca CD with Helen Donath is good but I think I listen to the Erato one just as much.

Yeah my turn of the screw fave is the naxos (originally recorded for Collins classics) conducted by britten's right hand man steuart bedford.

Warning: the Spotify playlist (sund4r will link it later this eve) includes only a remix of the monk piece, bc the original is not on Spotify. All other works have been on there so far. Presuming we have some Phil glass coming up though, that is also a fallow area on Spotify.

I found the Monk piece on Youtube, it was 23 minutes (hopefully the right one). https://youtu.be/7su7d76LhWg (oh please don't embed)

Yes, that's it. It's side B of the LP but we were voting for compositions, not albums, so, yep, that's the whole thing. If you can find the ECM LP on vinyl, you won't regret it.

A apologize for not voting in this but I would have had to apologize even more for voting in it. (Way too unfamiliar with classical music, which isn't all that's covered, but an important part of it.) Probably would have voted for Dolman Music.

I didn't vote in this, because I don't know very much about this stuff, but I'm super-excited about the rollout! I'm sure I'll find all kinds of great pieces I've never heard of.

same

Wow, Meredith Monk is cool. Anyone having any experience with performing her music?

10 a day seems fine to me.

I voted, and when the results are done and everybody is posting their ballots, I hope mine prompts a lot of "ugh, I could have done better than that" and boosts turnout in future polls.

Meredith Monk receiving a 2014 National Medal of the Arts and Humanities

Uf, I'm having a hard time with all of these. I already knew serialism, spectralism, opera and some, I guess spiritual?, types of minimalism are not for me. The chants on Dolmen Music just sound really cheesy to me. As opposed to something like Music for 18 Musicians which is crazy beautiful. Will give a shot to all 100 tho.

^^ that

I don't know a lot about this stuff, but I can think of 10 pieces listed in the noms sheet that I like more than others. Hopefully nobody on this board is going to go "ugh, you voted for Mahler? Really?" but even if they do, who gives a shit, really?

(that was an xpost to WilliamC obv)

Spiritual hat minimalism.

I voted for Mahler, lol...

Simmel, what kinds of notated music do you like (other than Reich obv)?

I had at least three maybe four Mahlers on my ballot, I unashamedly profess the Debussy Mahler Sibelius axis as the king shit

We're staying in America, and among my personal favourites, for the next one.

96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal Points: 327 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

http://www.bellperc.com//media/images/hire/thunder.jpg

... Cage moves away from the traditional Western absorption in pitch, to a point where "pure" (i.e. nonpitched) timbre and rhythmic structure dominate his thinking. The First Construction is scored for an ensemble of six percussionists, who perform on such instruments as brake drums, oxen bells, large 'thundersheets' of metal, gongs, Turkish cymbals, and a 'string piano' (that is, the strings of a grand piano struck directly). The entire work is based on units - rhythmic and formal - of sixteen; for eample, there are sixteen sections, each consisting of sixteen measures. These units, at every level, subdivide into the proportions 4-3-2-3-4.

RIYL: rhythmic electronic music

I really like this version.

I had three Mahler pieces on my ballot, I just meant that if you were going to go after populist stuff, Mahler might be a popular choice. He was a great composer, I'm still finding my way through the symphonies.

I had no idea of the existence of this poll. Glad it got made.

btw: Pollero means guy who sells chickens in spanish so I thought this was some sort of cumbia or salsa poll.

I was unfamiliar with Grisey – this is wonderful.

I had no idea of the existence of this poll.

People keep saying this. Ha, I worried that I was plugging it too much!

Didn't know that about the Spanish meaning but it makes sense, ha.

And it was time for a new display name. (Thx, Rudipherous.)

When I was a mod, I wanted to put up a standing message at the top of the boards and new answers pages pointing out which polls were currently running. That got shot down real fast.

Did someone say cumbia?

I think that might be the Cage percussion piece I have been searching for the right version of (i.e., the one that was incorporated into the theme music for a radio show I used to listen to), for decades. Will have to check when I am home.

Next one is sure to be a hit.

95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3 Points: 328 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00008GQTR.01.L.jpg

The Third Symphony arguably takes as its theme the process of Mahler's assimilation while extending the iconoclastic implications of the Second's finale in the half-hour long first movement. Similarly structured around a proliferating march, its progress from D minor to F major is portrayed, in internal score annotations (e.g. ‘Pan schläft’, ‘Die Schlacht beginnt!’), as a battle between the opposed ‘forces’ of the expositional duality: here representing death and winter inertia on the one hand, the awakening ‘life’ forces of Pan on the other. The often deliberately realistic vulgarity of the military-band style orchestration of the march highlights the implicitly subversive origins of its main theme (a student song by Binzer – Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus – beloved of anti-Habsburg, pan-Germanists in Mahler's student days) and lends an almost concrete political implication to the ‘anarchic’ qualities that outraged the work's more consevative critics.

- Peter Franklin

This is where I admit that I can't remember if I've ever listened to this.

xxxxp Sund4r

I have an extremely limited experience with notated music. Basically just a dumbass going through it and drawing some loose pop analogies. So I like parts of baroque that work like jazz (intriguing variations and such) and pop (pretty and intuitive tunes) but dislike those that work like metal ("dark" and pompous, plenty of vocal stuff). The romantic period seems to emphasize the metal tendencies so I'm struggling with it. I can't get into most IDM and ambient music and feel serialism and spectralism, respectively, are their kindered spirits. Love Reich to death but can't get behind Arvo Part and such. There are things I don't think pop music can do better or even do at all cause they are so linked to very specific historical circumstance. Music of the lords if you will. So the regal pomp of Handel or pastoral nostalgia in the Lark Ascending register. Pop doesn't really do stuff like that. Not well at least.

Looking forward to this countdown changing my mind on plenty of this. Or at least giving me more nuance.

This was the first Mahler symphony I got into obsessively. It's still the apotheosis of 'young mahler' for me. I feel like he is summoning the whole bohemian woodlands music tradition here (gm would have been born Czech if he was born in the same place but during the 20c)

Wait am I wrong about that

No, that's correct.

Well, sort of. The Czech Republic has only existed since 1993, so. But where Mahler was born and raised is today located in the Czech Republic, yeah. Nationalities didn't really make sense like that back then. Mahler was a German speaking Jew, and said he felt thrice homeless, as a bohemian amongst austrians, an austrian amongst germans, and a jew in the world.

He was born really close to the dividing, where the jewish community oriented itself towards Vienna or Prague. Imagine Mahler composing in the tradition of Smetana and Dvorak, but, y'know, as originally as Mahler.

I feel the 3rd is where that strain is heard most robustly

Cool, simmel. Ha, I always think of the Cage percussion and prepared piano pieces as forerunners to IDM. The spectralism/ambient thing definitely makes sense, esp if you're talking about something like SAW II or noisier ambient drone.

Btw, a lot of jazz and (mostly pre-rock) pop was eligible for this poll! I was sort of hoping someone would do a ballot that was all Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes.

Wow @ 33m-long first movement to Mahler 3. It's good stuff so far, though. We'll sit with this for a while before moving on.

Didn't catch that unfortunately. Dislike Broadway generally but could muster a solid top 20 Tin Pan Alley ballot. Pre-rock pop seems worthy of it's own poll. Anyway, thanks for not laughing off my analogies. Love Mahler!

Did someone say cumbia?

https://youtu.be/OQn61-Q2dwQ

― _Rudipherous

Hahaha but that's POLLERA with an A. You might think it means woman who sells chickens but pollera is actually a traditional one piece dress that is used in latin america.

Oops. Yes, I was hoping it was just the female version.

I'm still a little confused about this pollero/cumbia thing. Are chicken salesmen a common topic for cumbia songs?

This long-ass Mahler symphony is ruling btw. What this sort of thing should be all about, you know?

Goddamn is this poll-running business draining. Gonna be a challenge to make it through 10 days and get a recording done.

Anyway, some spiritual hat minimalism up next.

94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat Points: 329 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2925/14070849383_04f4c1b0c3_b.jpg

The quote about First Construction above was from Schwartz and Godfrey btw.

I voted for this! And I've sung this. Love it.

93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem Points: 332 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Pic-Lib-BIG/Durufle-Maurice-03.jpg

The first composer in this countdown whom I honestly knew nothing about.

Although he was born in 1902 and died in 1986, Maurice Duruflé is not a typical 20th-century musician. Compared with other great composers of his day — Bernstein, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten — he seems strangely out of touch with his times, both in his music and his personality. Duruflé has been described by students, colleagues, and biographers as a reclusive and private person who seemed unusually unsure and timid given his fame. He lived in Paris during one its most chaotic and creative periods, and yet he had no interest in sharing in the salons of the literary and musical elite. Eschewing change, he was a conservative in a radical world. In 1969, for example, on hearing a jazz mass in one of its chapels at Saint Étienne, he expressed his outrage in a loud voice over what he considered to be a scandalous travesty!

His four gregorian motets are great and I voted for them. Ubi Caritas might be the prototype for a lot of shitty music - Morten Lauridsen, Ola Gjeilo, etc - but that doesn't make it any less great. Like, check it out on youtube.

It's looking like most of us are drifting off for the night. I thought the next composer might do even better than he did, owing to the strong avant-metal cru presence in the voter base for this poll, but he still did pretty well for himself.

92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City') Points: 333 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/543625625-the-glenn-branca-ensemble-performing-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=X7WJLa88Cweo9HktRLaNXgBZzacLBctF1C%2BJeKCcxSlSU1A3jo026GWAQdQg%2FkbrRnCvC3trKDy%2BzsWL%2FojZ4g%3D%3D

Finally officially released on CD, a contender for my AOTY.

Ha, just realised that it's nearly 3 am in the UK.

Each guitar is strung with two pairs of three strings, tuned an octave apart. (The soprano guitar is tuned to B, the tenor guitar to E, and the alto guitar to G.) The unrecorded Guitars D'Amour, performed at Expo 94 in Seville, Spain, was Branca's first and last piece for guitars in standard tuning. Symphonies No. 8 and 10 featured an octave guitar tuned to E, but covering 3 octaves, with 2 pairs of strings per octave. The bass guitars are in standard tuning, except on the final problem, where all guitars use a microtonal variation of Branca's normal tuning.

In his work with electric guitars, Branca has experiemented with density and volume, and the unpredictable acoustic phenomena generated through sound fields. He has invented new instruments and a compositional system to express his discoveries about the harmonic series.

Branca originally wrote his Symphony No. 13, "Hallucination City," for the year 2000 celebrations in Paris, hoping for an ensemble of 2,000 guitarists. When that performance did not happen, he premiered the work on June 13, 2001 outdoors in front of the World Trade Center in New York City with 100 guitarists. He has recently recorded the work, and last month he performed it at the Montclair State University School of the Arts in New Jersey.

"Structurally, it was perhaps Branca's most impressive work ever, filling out 62 minutes with no movement breaks. It started out purely consonant, repeating simple rising motives," Kyle Gann wrote in his review of the premiere for The Village Voice. "Starting at a deafening level, the work got louder almost throughout, and - after a stasis of a few minutes that could have signaled an ending - suddenly burst into tensely rising chromatic scales."

"It's true that the sheer loudness of Branca's guitar symphonies tends to overwhelm all other considerations," Gann wrote in an essay for American Mavericks. "But it's equally true that his rhythmicized, repetitive conflicts between harmonies preserve the heart of the symphonic tradition, especially if you compare them with Branca's 19th-century symphonic hero, Anton Bruckner."

From: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/symphony-no-13-hallucination-city-for-100-electric-guitars-glenn-branca

We're in for another whiplash change of pace, with a tie for the #90 spot before we call it a night.

TIE 90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village Points: 335 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

http://stagoleeshop.com/images/product_images/original_images/lesbaxter.jpg

90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score Points: 335 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eU1oj-gos4k/hqdefault.jpg

TIE

Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/user/1213493496/playlist/1gdrjEQPZiP44ODeNysAyS

Thank you Sund4r

The Tudor/Wergo recording of the Cage that Jon chose for the playlist is sounding great.

The two way tie for 90 both on my ballot. The power the exotica impulse in music has over me remains inscrutable. No amount of self-deconstruction lessens its effect. Les is its king. (Perhaps it's my woeful lack of travel)

Fistful of Dollars might be the more aha moment but I think that For a Few Dollars More is even more brilliant.

An overactive radiator and the miseries of life are keeping me up so let's get an early start in on this.

88 Luciano Berio - Sequenza III (for female voice) Points: 342 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0

https://compagniaoltremare.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/voce-seq.png

Whoops! I skipped #89, very sorry!

89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments Points: 340 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F68BMpyGecs/hqdefault.jpg

"[The Symphonies of Wind Instruments] is not meant 'to please' an audience or rouse its passions. I had hoped, however, that it would appeal to those in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy emotional cravings."

- Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography

In contrast to his lavish "audience lollipop" The Firebird (1910), Stravinsky described the Symphonies of Wind Instruments as "an austere ritual that is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogenous instruments." Using the terminology of sacred music, Stravinsky creates "short litanies" comprised of varied, discrete musical ideas, from lively cantilena melodies that recall the Russian folk tunes of his early works to ascetic chorales that look forward to his sacred works like the Symphony of Psalms (1930).

Stripping the term "symphonies" of its Classical-era associations, Stravinsky here invokes the word's root meaning, "sounding together." To this end, Stravinsky rapidly juxtaposes blocks of sound, each with its own instrumental, rhythmic, and temporal identity. The effect is a kind of disjointed, collage-like form, whose visual corollary can be found in the Cubist canvases of his friend and collaborator Pablo Picasso. Emphasizing precision over expression, Stravinsky creates four discrete tempos (whose relationships are multiples of each other) that must be strictly adhered to and in which, in the words of writer Paul Griffiths, "rubato is ruled out."

- From: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/symphonies-of-wind-instruments-igor-stravinsky

Regarding Sequenza III, which placed higher, at #88:

The voice carries always an excess of connotations, whatever it is doing. From the grossest of noises to the most delicate of singing, the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself and creates a huge range of associations. In Sequenza III I tried to assimilate many aspects of everyday vocal life, including trivial ones, without losing intermediate levels or indeed normal singing. In order to control such a wide range of vocal behaviour, I felt I had to break up the text in an apparently devastating way, so as to be able to recuperate fragments from it on different expressive planes, and to reshape them into units that were not discursive but musical. The text had to be homogeneous, in order to lend itself to a project that consisted essentially of exorcising the excessive connotations and composing them into musical units. This is the “modular” text written by Markus Kutter for Sequenza III.

Give me a few words for a woman
to sing a truth allowing us
to build a house without worrying before night comes

In Sequenza III the emphasis is given to the sound symbolism of vocal and sometimes visual gestures, with their accompanying “shadows of meaning”, and the associations and conflicts suggested by them. For this reason Sequenza III can also be considered as a dramatic essay whose story, so to speak, is the relationship between the soloist and her own voice
Sequenza III was written in 1965 for Cathy Berberian.

Luciano Berio

From http://www.lucianoberio.org/node/1460?1487325698=1

Sequenza III is another longtime favourite, which knocked me out when I heard it in that history class at 19, with just the sheer range of what he (and Berberian in the classic recording obv) was able to get out of the human voice, both technically and expressively. The guitar sequenza is one that I might have listened to more but this will always be definitive for me.

Anyway, risks of doing these things without enough sleep etc.

Duruflé's Requiem was #2 in my ballot. Besides Fauré's famous one (with which it's often paired on recordings), it's my favourite requiem of all time, and one of my top 10 religious pieces in general. I love calm serenity with which both of them tackled the heaviest of subject matters, though Fauré's approach I guess is a bit prettier compared to Duruflé's more solemn one. I can't really say I prefer one above the other, but I decided to place Duruflé higher in this poll because he needs more recognition than Fauré.

sund4r's quote is correct that Duruflé was very much out of time, and he seems to have not been influenced much by contemporary 20th century music, neither by avant-garde nor popular stuff. Apparently he was also incredibly self-critical, publishing only a handful of compositions he was absolutely satisfied with (mostly organ music). The entirety his published output fits on two CDs, I think.

this is all v nice so far. i've surprised myself by knowing most of it (tho never even heard of duruflé!), maybe i should have voted after all. i'll be sure to participate in the next ilm notated music poll fifty years from now

A quick recap:

88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

So I'd well recommend checking pretty much anything by him, it's all wonderful. For the requiem, you can go wrong with the version he himseld conducted, though there good later ones to, such as this one. For the organ works, Marie-Claire Alain's interpretations are the best ones I know, though I'm not sure if they've been compiled on one recording. For a complete organ works I disc, I like this one, where Vincent Warnier plays on Duruflés "home organ" (the one in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont where he served as an organist).

(xxpost)

"though there are good later ones too"

I did listen to almost all of his Requiem last night. It was pleasant, yeah. I could see myself putting it on again.

Something truly obscure up next.

87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer Points: 345 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

http://www.oneicity.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Flickr-Ice-Cream-Truck.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KCToGv-lO7c/hqdefault.jpg

I gave more points to "Maple Leaf Rag" but I like this one too, especially the way the melody relies on the m6 interval. Really great American composer.

I've always wondered, was "The Entertainer" popular at all before it was used in The Sting?

This is no doubt the one entry in the top 100 I have the earliest memories of, since a kid in the '80s I had Commodore 64 Snoopy platform game which featured this tune on infinite loop. After hours and hours of playing it, I think the melody is burned in my mind until the day I die.

https://youtu.be/vRvd1Zx51Vw

"The Maple Leaf Rag" is usually cited as the one that was most popular and important in its time but Joplin was very successful and popular by 1902, when "The Entertainer" was written.

Edward Berlin in Grove:

In 1901 Joplin moved to St. Louis with Belle, his new wife, and devoted his time to composition and teaching, relegating performance to a minor part of his activities. Adding to his fame through the next few years were such outstanding rags as “Sunflower Slow Drag” (1901, with Scott Hayden), “The Easy Winners” (1901), “The Entertainer” (1902), and “The Strenuous Life” (1902)

Wikipedia fwiw:

In the June 7, 1903 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, contemporary composer Monroe H. Rosenfeld described "The Entertainer" as "the best and most euphonious" of Joplin's compositions to that point. "It is a jingling work of a very original character, embracing various strains of a retentive character which set the foot in spontaneous action and leave an indelible imprint on the tympanum."[2]...

...In November 1970 [three years before The Sting], Joshua Rifkin released a recording called Scott Joplin: Piano Rags[4] on the classical label Nonesuch, which featured as its second track "The Entertainer". It sold 100,000 copies in its first year and eventually became Nonesuch's first million-selling record.[5] The Billboard "Best-Selling Classical LPs" chart for September 28, 1974 has the record at #5, with the follow-up "Volume 2" at #4, and a combined set of both volumes at #3. Separately both volumes had been on the chart for 64 weeks.[6] The album was nominated in 1971 for two Grammy Award categories, Best Album Notes and Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra), but at the ceremony on March 14, 1972, Rifkin did not win in any category.[7] In 1979 Alan Rich in the New York Magazine wrote that by giving artists like Rifkin the opportunity to put Joplin's music on disk, Nonesuch Records "created, almost alone, the Scott Joplin revival."[8]

LOL the playlist is 8 hours long already. Listen up Gustav and Glenn, take some lessons in getting to the point from your Uncle Les, why don'tcha?

Fwiw, top 77 albums of 2015 playlist is 60h17m long (about 7.8h for 10 albums). Top metal albums from 00-15 playlist is 141h44m.

i'm really vexed about what version of The Entertainer to put on the playlist. Does anyone dig the v slow Rifkin style anymore? (I seem to recall that was supposed to be authentic...?)

Checking in here from hospital where my daughter was born, can't really participate much. But go for Joplin piano roll recording!

heyyyy many congrats DL!!!

thank you!

hahaha, i love that you popped in for scott joplin advice!

congratulations to you and family!

Congratulations, Dominique!

Yes, congrats! That's wonderful!

"The Entertainer" is short enough that you could add both, isn't it? A slow recording and a more uptempo one?

congrats D!

I am so completely annoyed with myself that I forgot this was happening and didn't vote. Big ups to Durufle

i went with the piano roll, who can argue with a new parent?

Btw, if you squint, you can see me in the front row of the Branca orchestra (on the roof of the WTC, summer 2001) in that pic, on Bob Bannister's left.

This will not be the next composer's last appearance on this poll...

86 Claude Debussy - Etudes Points: 346 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0
https://yt3.ggpht.com/-5o3p4cOdW7s/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/O87RrxzUREQ/s88-c-k-no-rj-c0xffffff/photo.jpg

Did everyone vote for at least one Debussy piece? I think it might be possible.

No worries, DJP. I was looking forward to your ballot, though! It would have been good to see another list with a lot of vocal/choral repertoire music, since it's not my main area. I think Fred covered for you there a bit.

Ha, yeah... I guess if we'd had another one we could have taken over the whole list with choral music! Except I guess my list was mostly what I've performed myself. It's just hard to compare something I've listened to and perhaps heard in concert once or twice, with something where I've pored over the score for possibly months...

I don't think I voted for any Debussy? I cut something at the last minute, because I figured I hadn't heard it enough. I wan't to listen to it more, though. Several pieces.

ETUUUUUDES

Dying magician surmounts his agony, goes out on top. My most frequently listened to Debussy work these days, probably.

(Oh yeah another note on the playlist: in some cases, such as the Berio Sequenza III, I have chosen the track from a cheeseball compilation instead of from its proper place on a DG (or Philips or Decca or other Universal Music Group label) album. This is a workaround to be able to have good-sounding versions of UMG tracks on the playlist, because unfortunately the lion's share of the DG/Decca/Philips etc classical recordings on Spotify were added to their library back when UMG was still watermarking their files. But UMG has been licensing their holdings to budget digital compilation labels like X-5 for awhile, and the versions that appear on these compilations are not watermarked. This is why the Sequenza on the playlist is not taken from the DG complete Sequenzas album but from a comp with a dumb title and andre rieu cheek by jowl with ligeti.)

lol mine also would have been heavy with things I have personally performed

where's the nomination list? I will assemble a "what might have been" ballot of suggestions for you, Sund4r.

oh nevermind just saw the link in the opening post

(omg did I not nominate the Brahms Requiem, wtf me)

sorry to spam the thread after not voting but was this noticed and were any potential votes for these combined:

Richard Strauss - Four Last Songs
Richard Strauss - Vier letzte Lieder

lol

that really makes us look like rubes

Dunno how I missed that but there was one vote for "Vier letzte Lieder" and none for "Four Last Songs".

I believe this is the second opera in the top 100:

85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut Points: 350 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manon_Lescaut_(Puccini)#/media/File:Locandina_Manon_Lescaut.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6b/b3/93/6bb39396529583aec83071fa21aa7c77.jpg

if you can overlook the fact that it's set in the 'desert' of New Orleans, the finale is one of the most heart-wrenching in opera. Sola, perduta, abbandonata!

I'm going to see Sondra Radvanovsky play Manon in November, which should be great.

sharivari, for the playlist -- Caballe or Callas?

Not much to choose between them. Callas if it's the remastered version, Caballe if not perhaps.

We've had some pretty dramatic contrasts between neighbouring pieces so far but the upcoming one is definitely up there.

84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase Points: 354 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

http://flo.szk.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/pp.png

feel like Reich and most of his minimalist compadres were playing a double game, not only aware of conventional melody but carefully constructing a method that accommodated it

i admire his theory and enjoy its execution but he always feels lightweight to me

i have a shitload of reservation there too but

pop is a technique that crosses all genres

How is that a double game? I'm pretty sure both Reich and Glass have explicitly said as much.

As much as I intellectually admire the concept of having two pianists play the exact same melody while one keeps speeding up gradually, I also just enjoy the headfuck of hearing it, on that jittery line. That said, this is a lesser Reich piece for me and didn't make my final ballot.

How is that a double game? I'm pretty sure both Reich and Glass have explicitly said as much.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

"double game" = accepting being read as theoretically rigorous at the same time as making sweet populist tunes but i don't intend this as serious criticism, just thinking out loud about why that school is lower tier in terms of my own aesthetic/sense of importance.

am being ornery and rockist in ways that i wouldn't normally countenance but i think the minimalists are mostly minor

not a get out but an acknowledgement = i've had a couple of beers tonight. stand by this empty prejudice tho.

Oh, I think with both Reich and Glass, part of the point is that there does not need to be an opposition between theoretical rigour (or at least innovation) and populism/surface appeal, and if there were a conflict, both have shown they would favour the latter (Glass much more blatantly). I am actually not that sure that 'theoretical rigour' has ever been a core value for Glass.

I mean, Glass briefly mentioned the Jefferson Airplane among his influences when he spoke to my PhD seminar.

Rigour be damned: gimme something I can rock &/or bliss out to.

yeah, i accept that as a core value this isn't something they've necessarily claimed.

what i'm quibbling about is really my personal perception of over-exposure within a narrative history of modern compostion but i love the work well enough, i just think they hit lazy grooves. John Adams is a way lesser composer to me but i think he tried harder in the long term to explore interesting places.

And, at the same time, I was studying with Luciano Berio and writing 12-tone music. The way I wrote 12-tone music was like, “Don’t transpose the row. Don’t retrograde the row. Don’t invert the row. Just repeat the row over and over, and you can try to sneak in some harmony.” And Berio said, “If you want to write tonal music, why don’t you write tonal music?” And I said, “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
... I could respect the purity of spirit in John Cage’s work, and I could certainly appreciate the mastery in Berio and Stockhausen, but my heart wasn’t in the game. I became a composer because I loved Bach, because I loved Stravinsky, because I loved jazz. And this was answering none of those. There was no fixed pulse, there was nothing you could tap your foot to, there was nothing you could whistle to, there was no key to hang on to; it was the very antithesis of that...

... In popular music, you had Junior Walker coming out of Motown who was playing a tune called “Shotgun,” which had a repeating bass line throughout the whole tune and no B section [sings bass line] for the whole tune. And you never heard that before. It was always a release: the B section and back to the A section. In Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” there was a kind of spontaneous gravitation towards constancy of harmony. [Also] minimizing harmonic movement coming from Africa, coming from Bali, which we didn’t mention, and of course a very big influence on me was preparing “In C” with Terry Riley. Which put all of these things--snapped it all--together.

- quotes from Reich, from: http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_reich.html

semi-drunkly exploring my own judgement process as much as anything

but lol Berio otm as far as i'm concerned

and again to me Riley is way more out there in his pop fuckery but draws more from that source

i mean fuck it nothing is bad here i just want to create my own moany old man perspectives

i'm coming in late on this, but are we really recommending the joplin piano roll? god that thing is sad. tertiary syphilis is a terrible thing.

John Adams is a way lesser composer to me but i think he tried harder in the long term to explore interesting places.

I usually feel like he is exploring Broadway or neo-Romanticism, which are not my favourite places to go to. Nixon in China is cool, though.

(But working on it.)

oddly adams always feels much more actively regressive than reich or glass to me. i recall in that mostly not-great bbc 4 series on the 20th century musical avant-garde he was playing the role of the fusty old conservative who hated schoenberg, hated cage, thought we needed to escape the pernicious influence of intellectualism, and it reinforced a lot of the negative feelings i already had about his work

I usually feel like he is exploring Broadway or neo-Romanticism, which are not my favourite places to go to...

oddly adams always feels much more actively regressive than reich or glass to me.

I wonder if maybe this is NV's point, that Reich/Glass are neither populist/trad enough (like Adams) nor intellectually rigorous enough (like Berio)?

Minimalism is just fun. Saw Music in 12 Parts live recently with the Philip Glass Ensemble, and yeah, it was really really fun, one of the funniest classical concerts I've been to in a long time. Think I voted for it as well. I don't really rate Glass that highly otherwise, I just don't like the sound of it. Reich isn't particularly theoretically vigorous, but there's just something about the way his best work sounds. Piano Phase, Music for 18 Musicians, Sextet. I don't know what it is, but perhaps it's just the harmonics of it? I feel like if it was 'that' easy to do the minimalist copycats would have been better, though. And Adams, well, Nixon in China is a great piece of theater, of history. And the album The Chairman Dances is a great recording, kinda like Tabula Rasa by Pärt - I think I've already said this upthread. John Adams is, like, Arcade Fire. Not that many original thoughts, but they're done nicely every now and then.

i do think some of reich's early theoretical stuff develops on cagean ideas in interesting ways, e.g. the 'music as a gradual process' essay, but from around music for 18 musicians on he seems less interested in having a cohesive aesthetic vision

The early writings were the reason why I singled out Glass as never have been concerned with theoretical rigour. I agree that Reich was, in his own way, prior to the mid-70s.

This is a pretty opera-heavy stretch.

83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka Points: 356 Votes: 2 #1s: 0

http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/met-rusalka.jpg

Is everyone watching the US debate? Because we've got another American great coming up.

82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris Points: 361 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://originalvintagemovieposters.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/An-american-in-Paris-2271.jpg

I listened to all of disc 1 of the '92 Naxos Manon Lescaut + a YT of the finale and I actually quite enjoyed it, despite having literally never listened to Italian opera for recreation before.

An American in Paris, on the other hand, is definitely something that I have on more than one occasion.

I get most of my Italian opera through Liszt solo piano fantasias but Verdi was a breakthrough thing for me

Despite my image, I was assuming that An American in Paris meant the symphonic poem from 1928, not the film from 1951, but I wonder if anyone was voting for that film's soundtrack.

We've got one more opera left for the night. Any guesses?

I'm not huge on Italian opera, but Rossini is a favorite. Haven't heard Manon Lescaut, though. Doing Verdi's Requiem at Copenhagen opera house this friday, btw. This has nothing to do with anything, but I can't fall asleep so I just wanted to write something.

I'm guessing Maskarade by Carl Nielsen!

Lulu!

Oh, that's v cool, Frederik!

Our last piece for the night ties together some of today's themes, in a way.

American post-minimalist opera:

81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten Points: 363 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aPvTwoTtFCA/maxresdefault.jpg

I'd like to see this live sometime. Of course I've missed at least a couple of chances already living here.

Btw, frustratingly this is not on Spotify so I had to cobble together what I could from the essential glass compilation and the couple of interludes on a Naxos disk.

Thanks so much for your work with the playlist!

I've never seen one of his 'operas' live! I would love to.

I wonder if maybe this is NV's point, that Reich/Glass are neither populist/trad enough (like Adams) nor intellectually rigorous enough (like Berio)?

rhanks sund4r this is definitely the gist of what i was rambling about

Minimalism is just fun.

and this is why, because i hate fun.

and if i'd've got it together to vote i wd've definitely placed pieces by Glass and Reich in my ballot but there's something...they've been too subsumed into pop music acceptance somehow, it's too easy a pleasure mostly. feel the same about Pärt or Gorecki - too obviously pretty, nothing to chew on

not a thought processs i could honestly sustain or defend for any length of time, more a private caveat

Saw Akhnaten earlier this year at the ENO and it was one of the most incredible performances I've ever seen. I know nothing about opera but this was truly jaw-dropping. The same production is coming to the LA Phil in November and any interested parties should definitely make the effort to attend.

I usually like Glass when he gets to the point (Glassworks, North Star) and Reich best when he stretches out. But I almost never dislike Reich, while there is plenty of later Glass that is of little interest to me. Would totally watch a Glass 'opera' live though.

Recap so far:

81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten 363 3 0
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris 361 4 0
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka 356 2 0
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase 354 4 0
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut 350 2 0
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes 346 2 0
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer 345 4 0
88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice) 342 5 0
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments 340 3 0
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score 335 4 0
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village 335 4 0
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City') 333 3 0
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem 332 2 0
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat 329 3 0
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3 328 3 0
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal 327 3 0
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music 323 4 0
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis 322 4 0
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James 320 2 0
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques 318 2 0

80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5 Points: 365 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zQuX36FiGmY/UgLpngKHnoI/AAAAAAAAG8o/-kS16k69Vyw/s1600/Gustav_Mahler_5_2.png

TOO LOW

The lone trumpet call that opens this symphony launches a whole new chapter in Mahler’s music. Gone is
the picturesque world of the first four symphonies—music inspired by folk tales and song, music that calls
on the human voice and is explained by the written word. With the Fifth Symphony, as Bruno Walter put it,
Mahler “is now aiming to write music as a musician.” Walter had nothing against the earlier works; in fact,
he was one of the first serious musicians to understand and to conduct those pieces long before it was
fashionable to champion the composer’s cause. Walter simply identified what other writers since have
reemphasized: the unforeseen switch to an exclusively instrumental symphonic style, producing music, in
Symphonies 5 through 7, that needs no programmatic discussion.

In fact, the break in Mahler’s compositional style is neither as clean nor as radical as we might at first
think. The trumpet call that opens this symphony is a quotation from the climax of the first movement of
the Fourth Symphony—a direct link, in other words, with the world Mahler has left behind. And Mahler has
hardly given up song for symphony. In fact, the new focus on purely instrumental symphonies seems to
have freed Mahler to produce, at the same time, an extraordinary outpouring of songs, including most of
his finest. And, although they are not sung—or even directly quoted—in Symphonies 5 through 7, their
presence, and their immense importance to Mahler, is continually felt. The great lumbering march that
strides across the first movement of this symphony, for example, shares much in spirit, contour, and even
detail with the first of the Kindertotenlieder and the last of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn settings, “Der
Tamboursg’sell” (The drummer boy), both written while the symphony also was taking shape.

From: http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/1_Tickets_and_Events/Program_Notes/052010_ProgramNotes_Mahler_Symphony5.pdf

I thought it was going too far when Steve Reich wrote that opera for Ke$ha.

my very favorite Mahler works are 6, 9, DKW and DLVDE, but it's 5 that I have clocked the highest sheer number of listens to. For one thing, it's just incredibly listenable from a dramaturgical standpoint; it's also incredibly difficult to get right. I probably have 30 different recordings of it and there are maybe 3 where I am just yes fuck yes all the way through. My #1 choice does not exist on Spotify but my #2 might, off to check.

wow it's uncanny how none of my faves of this symphony are on there. It's like they're baiting me.

Which ones are your favorites?

1. Bernard Haitink/Concertgebouw Orch live version from the Haitink Christmas Concerts (Kerstmatinees) box set
2. Daniele Gatti/RPO
3. Solti/Tonhalle Zurich Orchestra live (this is on Spotify but it's watermarked so can't use it)
4. Rafael Kubelik/Bavarian RSO Live (Audite) (they've got this! and i'll probably use it)

One more of the mainstream concert hall's favourite composers up next, with his first appearance in this poll.

79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4 Points: 366 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://www.danslesvolcans.net/carnet/images/captures/sibelius4.jpg

The fourth symphony was once considered to be the strangest of Sibelius's symphonies, but today it is regarded as one of the peaks of his output. It has a density of expression, a chamber music-like transparency and a mastery of counterpoint that make it one of the most impressive manifestations of modernity from the period when it was written.

Yeah I like Sibelius' symphonies. I don't think I was familiar enough with this one to vote for it though.

For y'all King Crimson fans, this symphony is also a cornucopia of tritones and whole tones. And that quoth the raven ending, oh man

And with that, I am persuaded to listen to Sibelius.

78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question Points: 368 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m72ef549pZ1qa028to1_500.jpg

This one made my top 20 but, on another day, could have been top 10. In one short piece, Ives anticipates and encapsulates everything the American avant-garde/experimentalists do best.

This 1909 piece for string orchestra, solo trumpet, and four flutes presents the listener with multiple levels of activity. In fact, the entire work involves the juxtaposition of many different 'musics' - tonal versus atonal, highly consonant versus dissonant, smooth versus angular, quiet versus shrill. These levels are so individualized that they proceed simultaneously in different meters or at different tempi. The musical strands have also been separated spatially, so that the sounds of strings, flutes, and solo trumpet emerge from different parts of the hall...

... The strigs play very quietly throughout, representing the silence of the seers; the trumpet, which repeats its one jagged phrase at staggered intervals throughout the piece, asks 'the Perennial Question of Existence'; the third element, which Ives terms 'the Fighting Answerers (flutes and other people),' grows increasingly dissonant and angular with each reappearance...

- Schwartz and Godfrey

Totally deserves its iconic status. I forgot to throw it a vote. I always kind of wish it was way longer!

iTunes went right to "Central Park After Dark" after that one. I forget how awesome that is sometimes.

And for his second appearance in the countdown:

76 Steve Reich - Sextet Points: 370 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CiqNG5GHduQ/maxresdefault.jpg

I still have the Another Look at Counterpoint disc in my CD drive because of "Piano Phase" so I can jump to this one. I always mostly thought of this piece as a part of the album more than a standout per se, weirdly, but always a good part of the album that I enjoy?

Listening to persian surgery dervishes rn and not stopping for no reich

I missed that Sextet is actually tied with another piece, one that I hold in pretty high esteem.

76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta Score: 370 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://www.furious.com/perfect/graphics/xenakisdiagram2.jpg

I found Norman Kay's review of the first British performance of this, in the Spring 1967 issue of Tempo:

Throughout the work, Xenakis has reversed the normal procedure; instead
of building his material from separately announced units, he has refined it from a
mobile mass of indeterminate sound. He has confronted the listener with contrasts
of density and of continuity and discontinuity. He has controlled his material by
calculation, rather than by traditional tone-placing. Since Pithoprckta, Xenakis has
moved further along his chosen path, but the later procedures, not excluding the
use of a programmed computer (which after all does nothing but present the
composer with a wider range of choices more quickly than would be possible by
any other means) are all foreshadowed in this early work. So, indeed, are the
problems. By far the largest of these centre on two main points. First: is there a
direct parallel between the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, and the basic mat-
erial of music ? If not, then Xenakis and composers like him are trapped inside a
new pseudo-parallelism not very different in origin from, and much more danger-
ous in results than, the literary parallelism of the nineteenth century; and a
Romanticism which this time reduces the responsibility of the artist very conven-
iently. Second: even granted that a true parallel may be present, is it not impossible
to filter its facts in such a way that the human ear can usefully absorb them
and find them meaningful? Would it not require a kind of aural microscope to
separate the plethora of facts involved, and a kind of computerised memory
storage before they could be related to human experience? Otherwise, is it not
rather like asking a man who has just rammed his head into a brick wall not to feel
any pain, because the wall is really only a shimmering wave of particles ? Are not
our any pain, because the wall is really only a shimmering wave of particles ? Are not
our limitations of sense too great?

Two trombones, xylophone, wood block, 46 strings, each with individual parts, used as percussion, noisemakers, glissando machines, coming together and apart in an emulation of Brownian motion.

Love that critique. I think about the paradoxical Romanticism of the avante garde often.

I wonder what Kay thought the grave dangers were of Xenakis's scientific parallelism.

E.g. the lone wanderer who this time is the only one who dares to abnegate his will!

Xpost to self, and not directed at Xenakis who always sounds fucking great

playing catchup right now. I also have to wash dishes, but luckily I've got the Branca symphony that's loud enough to cut through the running water sound :)

If conductors of major North American orchestras voted in this poll, the next piece might have been a contender for #1. It's also the first entry in our countdown to receive a #1 vote.

I'll give you 10-15m to guess what it is.

btw Rusalka was my #10 but I did my whole ballot from 1-4:30am the night before the original due date so I'm not in a good position to defend it. I really like Dvorak though. I played the very first of his Slavonic Dances in high school and it was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. The notes in my London recording of Rusalka says Dvorak had always wanted to be know as a composer of operas first and foremost-- I think that's why I gave Rusalka such high standing. I'd love to discuss him more when his 9th symphony places.

Hahaha xpost I bet it's Dvorak's 9th and I'm the #1 vote.

Become Ocean?

I wish I voted :(

Frederik, I wish you handled programming for major North American orchestras. (Including Seattle for that matter.)

Tom OTM:

75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World') Points: 374 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 1

http://media.oxfam.org.uk/images/products/HighStDonated/Zoom/hd_100163443_01.jpg?v=1

So Dvořák was basically unknown in his lifetime, right? And then every conductor in America started doing the New World one? I've got a Szell recording with the Cleveland SO and a beat up old LP of Berenstein with the New York Philharmonic, but it's the Szell one I've been listening to since I was 17.

A populist classic and rightly so. Such classic tunes.
xp

permanently ruined for British people of a certain age thanks to a series of 1970s bread commercials

Sund4r otm, this is one of the truly great warhorses.

Great book I read years ago called New World Symphonies about the gradual and very muddled integration of genuinely north american material into the classical lexicon (not just Dvorak, also talks abt Delius, Grainger, Coleridge-Taylor etc). Not academic, super thought provoking.

this

https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Symphonies-American-European/dp/0300072317

NV on the other hand, have you considered loving this piece and never eating bread again?

i am fond of it but it is irrevocably burned into my head as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE

i love the szell recording a lot but for the playlist i had to take the opportunity to get the Czech Phil with Karel Ancerl in there.

74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic Points: 375 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/St%C3%B6wer_Titanic.jpg

In The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) - where the essence of the work is its unfulfilled idea, as in the 'conceptual art' of the period, so that the score is a body of verbal instructions - the aim was to recover the sound of the band on the sinking liner playing their hymntune as they went down with their vessel...

Bryar's use of hymns... is devoid of religious meaning. Indeed, all his work questions the assumption of a psychological continuity between an artist's work and his self - hence his penchants for what could not be believed: the sentimental, for the manifestly constructed (as in minimalism), for meaningless coincidence, for fantasy novels.

- Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After

Did the Eno-produced recording make the Pitchfork top ambient albums list?

The Bryars does remind me (a lot, actually) of Stars of the Lid. Were SotL eligible for this poll?

Also re: Bryars, there's three different recordings of this on Spotify in the US and they're all wildly different lengths. One is one track @ 25 minutes, one is 11 tracks at 61 minutes, one is 15 tracks at 74 minutes. I'm trying out the 61 minute version after listening to most of the 25 minute version, there's less taped stuff so far but it's still mostly similar sounding string loops etc.

I didn't think SotL ever notated anything but maybe I'm wrong? The Bryars has a text score but it's fairly open. I definitely see the comparison (although Bryars obv came earlier).

And we're back to the symphonic canon with:

73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9 Points: 380 Votes: 2 #1s: 1

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e7/e2/8a/e7e28a970540431285a31ae8fdd90b6d.jpg

The '75 recording of Sinking... is the classic one, done with Brian Eno (and backed with Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which I voted for, on the album). Speaking of programming for orchestras, that's actually my dad's job, and one time his orchestra did Jesus' Blood. The score is literally one line for each instrument, and then instructions as to when to enter and exit. And this score was for three different versions (they played all three at different times one night in a church. It was beautiful! I went there with a girl I liked, and held her hand as she cried. One of the best concerts I've been to :) )

The version of Sinking of the Titanic I put on the playlist is the first one, recorded for eno's label. Spotify also has the second much longer CD era one on Point Records and then a couple of more recent live ones

First movement of mahler's 9th is just the most incredible span of music, goes through my head all the time

Sounds cool, Frederik. I imagine it would be p cool to i) have a Dad who programs for an orchestra ii) have a Dad who knows who Gavin Bryars is iii) have a local orchestra that would play Gavin Bryars.

72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor Points: 380 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KNxVfv_1LIA/hqdefault.jpg

I like Debussy and I like string quartets but, somehow, I don't actually know this piece.

And to finish off the night:

71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces Points: 381 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51gYjmCCRPL._SX379_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

The countdown so far then:

71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 Luciano Berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

I want all the magma fans itt to listen to les noces real good.

Ha, I totally see that comparison.

Starting off the fourth day of the countdown, we have a composer we've seen before but he's not here for a symphony this time.

70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde Points: 388 Votes: 2 #1s: 0

http://www.apesound.de/out/pictures/master/product/1/mahlererde.jpg

Ha, OK, I'll admit to not knowing this particular piece and assuming it was more like a regular lied. Apparently, it is a symphonic composition with two voices.

this mahler lad is pretty popular huh

Early in 1907, Gustav Mahler was given a newly published verse collection of German translations from the Chinese, Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, The Chinese Flute. Mahler, distracted and overworked, put the book aside. Late that summer, when he came across the gift again, he was worse than overworked. In July, his daughter Maria, four‑and‑a‑half, had died of scarlet fever and diphtheria, and he had learned that he himself suffered from a severe heart condition. Work pulled him out of despondency. Those melancholy verses spoke to Mahler with singular urgency. He began sketches, and the songs were his chief project for the following summer.

It was clear to him from the beginning that he was writing no ordinary song cycle but something larger and more cohesive, something, in fact, symphonic. Bruno Walter recalled Mahler’s describing the work as “a symphony in songs,” and Mahler did in the end head the score “a symphony for tenor and contralto (or baritone) and orchestra.” Ever since Bruno Walter chose a contralto when he conducted the first performance in 1911, most performances have followed Walter’s lead. But Mahler expressed no clear preference, and in fact when the poems’ speakers are referred to, the references are masculine.

Das Lied von der Erde is not, however, among Mahler’s numbered symphonies. It would be his ninth, but, with Beethoven and Bruckner in mind, he was superstitious about ninth symphonies and convinced that he would not be granted the time to go beyond that freighted number. He thought to put one over on the gods by not assigning a number to the symphony after the Eighth, and when he finished the symphony he called No. 9 he triumphantly told Alma that it was of course “really the Tenth” and that the danger was past. But the gods were not taken in by Mahler’s bookkeeping, and death claimed him as he was at work on the symphony he called No. 10.

From: http://www.keepingscore.org/content/farewell-das-lied-von-der-erde-song-earth-symphony-tenor-and-contralto-or-baritone-and-orc

Das Lied ties for my favorite work by Mahler. Like the ninth, it has one of the most amazing opening passages in classical music -- the cackling main of the orchestra while those flutter tongued flutes smugly gloat in their nest like doves who cherish the certainty of death. And then later in that first song when the poet makes out a gibbering ape down there in the cemetery (eine Affe ist!!!) holy shit.

The closing number has been equaled but never surpassed as a composed simulation of improvisation IMO. Ewig... Ewig...

I want all the magma fans itt to listen to les noces real good.

― I wish you could see my home. It's... it's so... exciting (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, September 28, 2016 12:06 PM (two hours ago)

Oh yeah, I can totally get that! Coooool.

for "les noces", the recording i recommend is the pokrovsky. the backing is midi, but it doesn't even matter because the singing is sooooo great.

There are a bunch of great choices for Les noces but I went with Gergiev for sheer oomph

One of the only really shitty ones is Stravinsky's unfortunately. It was sung awkwardly in English and while it was a cool idea to have all the piano parts taken by prominent American composer-pianists, it just sounds flaccid.

I believe this is the second film score to appear in the countdown:

69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score Points: 388 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VbTnNmjmEWQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Stone cold masterpiece. This was a top 10 vote for me. In some ways Goldsmith's definitive achievement (many would say planet of the apes). The use of blown conches and echoplex are so perfect. Have you ever wanted to hear a cross between Bartok and Tago Mago?

Several years ago, Intrada released a definitive 2CD edition of this which is still in print and would make a fantastic first purchase for someone wanting to start exploring the world of creative film scoring. Spotify doesn't have the Intrada edition but the comparatively brief OST is also superb.

<3 <3 <3

Catching up on some of the symphonies that has been listed so far. Sibelius' 4th was very good, Dvorak was ok I guess :) Not really my thing, but definitely a classic of it's kind. Wondering if there's more Mahler to come, would think the 5th and 9th might be the most popular. I only voted for 2nd. Began a study of all his symphonies last spring, but only made it through the first two. Listening and reading about number 3, so far I miss the, as people say, irony of the first two? It's much more straight in it's nature worship, where the first two, through the use of Frere Jacques and Antonios Fishsermon has a pointed sarcasm to them.

Up next, what I like to think is the most programmed orchestral work in Denmark:)

68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean Points: 395 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3393696861_10.jpg

Ms. Swift, one of today’s most popular and powerful pop stars, praised the recording of Mr. Adams’s large-scale, hypnotic, environmentally aware “Become Ocean” in a letter she wrote to the orchestra’s music director, Ludovic Morlot.

“I was thrilled to hear that Taylor was moved by ‘Become Ocean,’ like all of us at the Seattle Symphony,” Mr. Morlot said in a statement. “This is a powerful piece with a unique soundscape. We’re especially thankful that she wishes to support our musicians, and that she shares our belief that all people should be able to experience symphonic music.”

Ms. Swift’s gift to the orchestra will be used to support an educational program called “Link Up: Seattle Symphony” that works with elementary school students, and to bolster the musicians’ pension fund. In her letter to Mr. Morlot, the orchestra said, she reminisced fondly about attending orchestral concerts with her grandmother.

From: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/taylor-swift-gives-50000-to-seattle-symphony/

stravinsky was a pretty terrible conductor for somebody who was so picky about how his pieces should be conducted. anyway the english version is pretty awful but it at least inspired dominique leone's version, which is exactly the performance that version needs. :)

Xpost I think that's pretty much accurate! It's the least ironic symphony in the front half of his career.

I was conservative with Become Ocean and decided I need it to age a little more before I can throw it a high vote. But I sure do like it and really hope I can see it live at some point.

It was near the bottom of my ballot but I like it. I listen to Inuksuit much more.

Also, become ocean is one of those rare recordings where 320 kbps MP3 was audibly not cutting it for me and I had to have it lossless on my lil player.

Whoa, I only just realised that I never bought Become Ocean! I've only streamed it and so haven't heard it in good-quality audio. I have Inuksuit and Light That Fills the World.

I bought it for money in 320 on emusic and then rationalized going off and pirating the flac

Btw songbirdsongs while much earlier Adams is amazing
(NB it is way up my alley though)

He's my favourite John Adams, although I admittedly don't know that much about the second US president.

agreed

had no idea about the t-swift thing, hope we hear some of this influence on her next album

67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music Points: 396 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/enoloopdiagram.jpg

It's a great record but I wouldn't have placed him above any Mahler

Up next, the "Beethoven of the 20th century", in the words of my PhD advisor.

66 Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau Sans Maître Points: 399 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/images/8588.jpg

I love this piece. But lololol.

Btw for the playlist, it is understood that the piece discreet music is just side a of the original album, right?

I'll defer to the man himself when it comes to quotes for this one. My #20. Ostensibly difficult listening that I find paradoxically satisfying; just scratches the right itch in all its culturally imperialist hyper-modern French glory. The list of mentions for this one piece in the index of the '95 ed. of Griffiths' Modern Music and After is longer than that for most composers.

xp Yes re: Discreet Music. We voted for compositions, not albums/recordings.

The thing I love about le Marteau is the way it plays almost like a perturbed form of exotica (a form which was coming into its first flourish at about the same time)

Totally. I also always think of Pierrot as demented cabaret music.

With his third appearance on the countdown so far (and I don't even need to change the disc in my CD player):

65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ Points: 404 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fzkIvg3azsQ/maxresdefault.jpg

The video of Alarm Will Sound's performance is worth watching.

The second Requiem setting coming up:

64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem Points: 409 Votes: 3 #1s: 0
https://www.carolinaperformingarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bombed_coventry_custom-8346d7bdf6c602ff51da4a88ed4ba6ac2aae74c3-s40-c85-287x219.jpg

The War Requiem was not meant to be a pro-British piece or a glorification of British soldiers, but a public statement of Britten's anti-war convictions. It was a denunciation of the wickedness of war, not of other men. The fact that Britten wrote the piece for three specific soloists -- a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya), and a British tenor (Peter Pears) -- demonstrated that he had more than the losses of his own country in mind, and symbolized the importance of reconciliation. (Unfortunately Vishnevskaya was not available for the first performance, and had to be replaced by Heather Harper). The piece was also meant to be a warning to future generations of the senselessness of taking up arms against fellow men.

It was dedicated to four of Britten's friends who were killed during World War I:
Roger Burney, Sub-Lieutenant, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve
Piers Dunkerley, Captain, Royal Marines
David Gill, Ordinary Seaman, Royal Navy
Michael Halliday, Lieutenant, Royal New Zealand Volunteer Reserve
The first London performance was on 6 Dec 1942, in Westminster Abbey. The Decca recording that we have used was recorded in 1963. The work received immediate critical acclaim and was hailed as a masterpiece. It was widely performed both in Britain and abroad. Perhaps the combination of English poetry with the familiar text of the Latin mass made the Requiem accessible to such a range of listeners and caused it to be so well received.

- from http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~tan/Britten/britwar.html

I'm glad the Hovis music made it in the poll yesterday

The first of a pair of string quartets:

63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F Points: 412 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Maurice_Ravel_1925.jpg

I haven't really read this thread yet, and don't know (where or) when to post this, so I am posting this now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4f8fej9Sqo

I thought this one might place higher but he did write a lot:

62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4 Points: 427 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.classicalarchives.com/images/artists_cma/wp/2144.jpg

The String Quartet No. 4, one of Bartók’s greatest masterpieces, is imbued with elements from Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian music. It was written a year after String Quartet No. 3, and the two quartets can be viewed as a pair. Both works are in Bartók’s most abstract style, and display a highly coloristic approach to string sonority. However, the Fourth Quartet departs from the Third in its structure, which is an “arch” form: A-B-C-B-A. The first and final movements are linked, as are the second and fourth movements. The fourth movement was a later addition to the Quartet; Bartók did not originally conceive of the work in the symmetrical five movements. The third movement, the only slow one of the Quartet, stands alone. Bartok called it the “kernel” of the work, around which the other movements are arranged.

The Quartet demands great technical ability from the players. It is the first time we hear the famous “Bartók” pizzicato – where the player plucks the string hard enough to make it “snap” against the instrument. The Quartet also asks for a plethora of other extended techniques, along with rhythmic szforzandos, particularly in the outer movements. In the second movement, all four instruments play with mutes on the strings, and the matching fourth movement is entirely pizzicato.

- from: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/string-quartet-no-4-bela-bartok

https://youtu.be/nz8uzuJxufo?t=13s

I have a weird pet peeve about people describing music as "abstract" because it is avant-garde or unconventional. Other than musique concrète, all instrumental music is abstract.

Our last one for the night, another film score:

61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack) Points: 429 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.ew.com/sites/default/files/1433866018/akira2_0.jpg

Recap:

61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

Hoo boy, pretty much striking out completely on Spotify when it comes to the score of Akira. I found one solitary rerecording of one theme on a comp of anime music.

I haven't seen this movie in 20 years. Pieces from the soundtrack are sounding pretty cool now.

The Akira soundtrack is still amazing, the sound and arrangements are so unique! All those weird & dramatic vocalisations, busy urban marimbas, and so on... Apparently Geinoh Yamashirogumi consists of mostly amateur musicians, and Shoji Yamashiro himself is a scientist as his main occupation.

Btw, if you want to get the soundtrack on CD, remember to get the Symphonic Suite Akira version. I have the 1988 Japanese CD, and it sounds amazing, especially considering how inconsistent CD mastering was on many Western albums in the '80s. There's another version of the soundtrack that adds dialogue and sound effects from the movie on top of the music, you don't want that!

Oh yeah, and War Requiem! It's not beautiful and sublime in ways a lot of my favourite Britten is, but it sure is effective in getting its message through. Last year I saw it performed live for the first time, and some of those discordant bits conveying the horrors of war are heavier than any metal or noise music I've ever heard. Just breathtaking!

bartok's a great composer, but he doesn't really have a "definitive work" imo. he's got a bunch of stuff that's pretty much all great. so i don't expect him to be placing super high in this poll!

I feel like the academic consensus for peak Bartok is sonata for two pianos and percussion/quartet no 5/music for strings percussion and celeste

Jon, was there some particular reason you didn't put the original, Britten-conducted recording of "War Requiem" (with Pears, Vishnevskay, and Fischer-Dieskau) on the Spotify list? This isn't meant as a criticism, you have way better judgment over different recordings of classical music than me, I was just wondering why you chose the version you did?

Quartet 5 over Quartet 4? Really? Huh.

James Redd: Neat video. It reminded me that I need to get a copy of the Bream 20th Century Guitar disc, which I just ordered from Amazon. I was surprised to see it on Apple Music six months ago or so, since it had been OOP.

xp

60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole 433 3 0

http://img.cdandlp.com/2012/11/imgL/115773771.jpg

I should get into Ravel one day. All I know is the obvious tune, and I love that one, but I've never delved deeper into his oeuvre.

bolero is so completely unrepresentative of ravel's work! i'm not deeply familiar with his compositions but "miroirs" is amazing, he's a must-listen if you're into impressionism at all.

Miroirs was my highest ravel vote
Also am in awe of the melodies de Stephan mallarme, ma mere de l'oye, Daphnis, and both piano concertos

Tuomas I totally would have used britten's recording but all the versions of it on Spotify are from before universal music group stopped their audible watermarking of files, so they don't sound good. Hickox has been a common 2nd choice for the war requiem (though I kind of wanted to use a more recent wildcard one)

Ok, that explains it... Just out of curiousity, what does this watermark sound like?

big honking airhorn every 2 minutes

Elements like the decay on pianos, acoustic guitars and cymbals, and the body of quieter choral passages, are most affected. It basically sounds like certain frequencies are being heard through the blades of a fan. It's not the most glaring thing but once you notice it its inescapable, and I can't help but think it produces a subtle feeling of displeasure in listeners who don't notice it as well.

Xpost to self Jesus the list of great ravel must also include the piano trio! And the orchestral version of tombeau de couperin

At #59, an avant-prog epic:

59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat Points: 433 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_250/MI0001/003/MI0001003231.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

I wrote De Staat (The Republic) as a contribution to the debate about the relation of music to politics. Many composers view the act of composing as, somehow, above social conditioning. I contest that. How you arrange your musical material, the techniques you use and the instruments you score for, are largely determined by your own social circumstances and listening experience, and the availability of financial support. I do agree, though, that abstract musical material - pitch, duration and rhythm - are beyond social conditioning: it is found in nature. However, the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity.

I have used passages from Plato to illustrate these points. His text is politically controversial, if not downright negative: everyone can see the absurdity of Plato's statement that the mixolydian mode should be banned as it would have a damaging influence on the development of character.

My second reason for writing De Staat is a direct contradiction of the first: I deplore the fact that Plato was wrong. If only it were true that musical innovation could change the laws of the State!

-Andriessen, 1994; from http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Louis-Andriessen-De-Staat/1425

Btw, discussion of Bartok SQs should be supplemented with: Let's listen to Bartok String Quartets

don't know Andriessen, love that quote, can't wait to go home and check him out

He had sort of a more aggressive, dissonant take on post-minimalism. I'd be interested to see what you think.

A way more pugilistic early nyman

Andriessen is easily my favourite living composer but I'm a terrible dilettante so that might not be much of an endorsement

I was just reminded that they're putting on Messiaen's Quatuor pour le fin de temps here tonight! I hope I can make it.

Another long-time favourite for me:

58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5 Points: 439 Votes: 5 #1s: 0

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/lecture51massanddensity-141117213253-conversion-gate02/95/lecture-5-1massanddensity-19-638.jpg?cb=1416260712

Even the most cursory view of the exciting flute
repertoire of the twentieth century will immediately
recognize Varèse’s short masterpiece, Density 21.5,
as a seminal work having a far-reaching effect on later
repertoire. Three aspects of the work stand out in this
regard:
■ It contains the first use of key clicks—pitched,
drum-like sounds made by slapping the keys
while playing a soft staccato note in the low register.
The wealth of key click sounds and other
extended techniques now found in our repertoire
can be traced to this innocent beginning in 1936.
■ Varèse’s extended use of the extreme upper register,
demonstrating the possibilities of Georges
Barrère’s new platinum flute, was undreamed of
at the time.
■ Density 21.5 is not a “flute piece” but rather a
Varèse piece. The dramatic impact of the work
redefined the flute as an instrument capable of a
powerful musical intensity

- Patricia Spencer, from http://www.patriciaspencerflute.com/images/VareseArticleFinal.pdf

I can't believe I forgot to vote Density 21.5 -- really approachable Varese IMO.

Tons of great pieces in the roll-out so far. As far as Ravel and Bartok -- these are two of my favorite composers, and tho I find Ravel more consistent than Bartok, they both make it easy to drop in at any point in their repertoire. I'm a little surprised Bartok's quartet #4 is so low -- I always viewed it as the pick for a quartet cycle that as a whole, is one of THE cycles of the 20th Century. Ravel's as well (and also Debussy's) -- I fully expect to see Shostakovich (8?) show up soon.

If you're curious about Ravel beyond Bolero, I say start with the piano music. To me, his piano music is sublime -- practically perfect, really. Hoping Gaspard de la Nuit shows up, as its second movement Le Gibet is my idea of piano music that's as rich and resonant as any orchestral piece.

and thanks to all for the congrats! Hopefully able to contribute more to the thread now that the baby is coping better with life on the outside.

We've got a whole string of heavy hitters here. What might be the most grooving serial piece up next:

57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel Points: 442 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://www.karlheinzstockhausen.org/OCR/cross_play_4.jpg

The video of this performance really rocks.

Unfortunately, I don't have Griffiths or Schwartz/Godfrey with me now but we can start with Universal's introduction:

Stockhausen was 23 years old when he composed this piece, scoring it for oboe, bass clarinet, piano and three percussionists. He conducted its premiere performance (Darmstadt, 1952), which ended in a scandal. The structure of the piece, consisting of three “stages,” the processes set in motion (clearly and precisely indicated in Stockhausen’s introduction) were evidently too new, too revolutionary. Now, 60 years later, Kreuzspiel is played the world over, from Tokyo to Sao Paulo to Lucerne, as a standard piece in the repertoire of modern classics.
The work consists of an interplay, a “crossing” or “intersecting” of “temporal and spatial processes” which are “simultaneously linked” in the third stage.

from http://www.universaledition.com/composers-and-works/Karlheinz-Stockhausen/composer/698/work/3248

12ish minutes into De Staat and loving it

What might be the most grooving serial piece up next:

I thought this was going to be Agon!

a kind of grooving anyway IMO

One I like for the car:

56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra Points: 446 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.shadeddog.com/images/rca_ecs-9-v2.jpg

late to this party, but very much looking forward to investigating the results

thanks for doing this!

love Concerto for Orchestra, and along w Rite of Spring and Alexander Nevsky score, part of my "sounds like Star Wars" canon ;) 2nd movt = C3PO and R2D2 providing comic relief as they walk thru the desert on Tatooine

heh

55 John Zorn - Cobra Points: 449 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/gijoe/images/f/fe/Cobra_logo.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100403201428

My #28.

The score is worth checking out.
And this video (by Derek Bailey) covers it as well as any quote I could dig up.

54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos Points: 452 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://camra.stphilipsoconnor.org.au/images/bartok_poster.jpg

My #23.

Oh wow. The whole thing! Executive decision time, should we playlist just books 5 and 6 where all the juicy stuff is?

B-b-but books 3 and 4 give you the Chromatic Inventions and "Bulgarian Rhythm". The whole thing is only about 2.5 h. I think we can do it.

alright man I'm going in. Gonna use Dezso Ranki if they got him.

Thx!

no Ranki no Sandor :(

Bartok's wife would seem a reliable choice but I'm afraid of Hungaraton sound quality of that era. Went with Jando, who came up with Ranki and Kocsis under the same teachers and is underrated as a Bartok pianist.

Mikrokosmos is really fun to listen to on shuffle

Jando is the one I've always listened to.

53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion Points: 453 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.musicroom.fr/images/catalogue/fullsize/DU10600.jpg

#15 on my ballot

Played this! Actually, didn't vote for it in favor of a few other Glass pieces, but it's certainly hypnotic. As cheesy and harmonically maudlin as modern-era Glass can be, you can't say he shied away from utterly spartan demonstrations of his concepts.

One more before I head out:

52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Points: 461 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/61/76561-004-1BA38323.jpg

The horn plays unaccompanied on natural (rather than tempered) harmonics at the beginning and the end, onstage in the Prologue. In the Pastoral, the first song, in D flat, Charles Cotton's seventeenth century words "could be a description of a Constable landscape...[while] the horn continues to play in imitative diatonic phrases." So wrote Humphrey Carpenter in his 1992 biography of Britten. In the succeeding Nocturne (words by Alfred Lord Tennyson, ABA form, E flat and C major), the horn echoes and later embellishes its partner's jaunty, triplet-filled melody. Next, in the Blake Elegy, subject matter darkens the music landscape. Its extended horn preface and postlude are dominated by descending half-step intervals, eerily so at the end -- symbolizing "the sense of sin" that had its origin, for Britten, in boarding and public schools that he both dreaded and despised. The anonymous, fifteenth century Lyke Wake Dirge follows in grim G minor, and is keened by the tenor at the upper extreme of his voice, keeping the half-step intervals from the Elegy. Here, however, they ascend. Carpenter calls this "a relentless funeral march in the strings...the tenor's swoops up the octave suggest mortal terror of judgment." Its canonic character turns ghoulish at the horn's brash intrusion more than halfway through. The B flat setting of Ben Jonson's Hymn to Diana, goddess of the moon as well as the chase, is marked "presto e leggiero." Triplet-filled hunting calls and scales passages on the horn are imitated by the tenor in a cadenza near the end. The sixth and final song lets the horn rest while the tenor sings Keats' sonnet about the healing power of sleep, albeit uneasily, almost pleading on repeated high D's at the end ("seal the hushèd casket of my soul") over a sustained D by two solo violins and viola. From offstage, the horn repeats the Prologue note for note in an Epilogue.

Roger Dettmer, AMG

This is another piece where Britten is master of the uncanny for me. It's also one of the works that makes it glaringly obvious that he was a for-real genius in his musical response to language. Those decisions he makes that are so unlikely and yet perfect.

the lyke wake dirge section is just total goosebump material for me whenever i listen to that

51 Edgard Varèse - Ionisation Points: 467 Votes: 5 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AmRtnikwUMw/maxresdefault.jpg

Ionisation is scored for some three dozen percussion instruments, of which only three--chimes, celesta,
and piano--are capable of playing notes in the equal-tempered scale. Composition based on the
preeminence of pitch here gives way to a music of timbres and rhythms. As the first of many allpercussion
scores written in this century, Ionisation is remarkably subtle in its use of those instruments.
The form is articulated by changing sonorities--a passage scored only for metal instruments; a fleeting
duet for drums and maracas; a hair-raising moment (the first sustained loud point in the score) when
several players have the same triplet figure (a rhythmic unison); the first high, Morse-code clanging of the
anvils, more than midway through. The grand and sonorous coda is marked by the entrance of the piano,
celesta, and chimes--the three instruments of definite pitch. Varèse once defined his mission as the
"liberation of sound" (just as Schoenberg promised the "emancipation of dissonance.") Ionisation is the
purest demonstration of his success, and of his eventual influence. It is the work of both a pioneer and a
master.

from: http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/1_Tickets_and_Events/Program_Notes/ProgramNotes_Varese_Ionisation.pdf

Recap:

51 edgard varèse - Ionisation
52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos
55 John Zorn - Cobra
56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra
57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel
58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5
59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat
60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

We're at the halfway mark!

Varèse is the king of the 20th century for me i think, a channel thru which almost everything good and important flows; but i feel like he's under-served in terms of great recordings. anybody got any suggestions?

The 2CD set on decca conducted by Chailly was considered the new benchmark when it came out. I don't have many others besides that, just Boulez. Can't remember how the two Naxos discs were reviewed.

Certainly the more specialized pieces have been recorded a lot on mixed recital discs. There are a lot of density 21.5s and ionisations out there.

Also Robert Craft recorded most of the Varese oeuvre on Columbia in the early 70s and while I haven't listened to it it has a cool ass cover.

think I've got the Chailly, not sure about it tbh

Our #50 might be top 5 if you asked the right composition faculties.

50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire Points: 471 Votes: 3 #1s: 0
http://timerime.com/upload/resized/41207/485045/resized_image2_5c8665dc9357c37ffbba275ebf9265a1.jpg

#8 for me. Interesting that it only made three people's ballots.

Should be top 10 but that's true of a lot of things that have already placed!

Definitely the most glaring 'TOO LOW' for me. Even #8 on my ballot was probably too low, listening to Lucy Shelton's recording now. A piece I keep getting more out of. Every aspect of it is so delicious and masterful, simultaneously comic and eerie/deranged. How many innovations go back to this one piece?: the uniquely expressive and dramatic sprechtstimme vocal part, the chamber instrumentation so lovely and effective that "Pierrot ensemble" became a standard type of modern chamber ensemble, obviously the atonal language, but also Schoenberg's fine sensitivity to timbre and dynamics here.

A friend of mine celebrated her 30th birthday by renting out a bar and performing Pierrot Lunaire in it.

Woah.

I know someone who commissioned every composer she could find (a lot because she's a hotshot pianist) to write a short piano piece for her to play on her 30th.

49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet Points: 473 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.paraethos.com/images/aqualung2.jpg

This is where I admit that, as much as I like the idea behind this, and as much as I like Sinking of the Titanic, and as much as I like Frederik's story, this piece has always driven me a bit bonkers, at least the original 25m recording, which is the only one I ever listened to.

I love this piece so much. Guaranteed to unclog even the most stubborn tear ducts, at least for me.

Whoa, I honestly didn't think this would show up over Sinking. I'm not sure Gavin Bryars has two recordings in the top 100 classical works of the 20th century, but I love this piece. And yeah, it should be heard in a big church late at night, pretty drunk and with a pretty person by your side.

Also, can't wait to dive into all these works I've never checked out. I mean, I know Schoenberg - we're doing Friede auf Erden this october, and wow! - but never know where to start. Pierrot Lunaire it is.

Oh man, if you've never heard it before, Pierrot is OPO material.

I can see how Jesus' Blood... could seem mawkish and/or irritating but it's one of the pieces of music I remember hearing as a kid, and for some reason the strongest memory it provokes is my granddad dying and so... I ended up not voting for it because I couldn't bear to listen to it again.

Sorry to be a downer

I think I find "Jesus' Blood" a little too sentimental but there are times when sentimental is fine. Pierrot shd've been higher but I didn't vote so there it is

Voted for this. Love the original version, don't care for the Tom Waits version at all, although I guess Waits gave it some traction which is at least partly responsible for it placing above Sinking (which I think is a superior piece)

A friend of mine celebrated her 30th birthday by renting out a bar and performing Pierrot Lunaire in it.

― ¶ (DJP), Friday, September 30, 2016 9:52 AM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's so cool. Anybody we can hear on record/online?

Sentimentality is fine, even good. I just don't feel like Jesus' Blood goes anywhere. With Reich, all the rhythmic phasing effects give you something to listen for in the repetitions; with early Glass, you've got the additive rhythms. With Sinking of the Titanic, you have the gradual timbral shifts and atmospheric sounds. The gradual introduction of straightforward string and brass harmonizations of a one-line loop over 25 minutes just doesn't seem very interesting to me. I think I might like it as a five-minute piece.

I totally believe that it could work in this situation:

it should be heard in a big church late at night, pretty drunk and with a pretty person by your side.

sund4r I usually listen to the Lucy Shelton recording of Pierrot too, and that's what I've put on the playlist.

(note to listeners: Shelton's recording is a 2fer. She performs the cycle first in German and then in English. The poems are so wonderful that it's well worth also listening to the english one... but not first!)

At 48, one that I didn't know before the discussion thread. It's pretty interesting, though:

48 Alfred Schnittke - Concerto for Choir Points: 475 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/M7x2aeKlE_8/maxresdefault.jpg

ok how weird is it that i just clicked on the kate bush thread and this schnittke piece is mentioned there by Michael Jones in the first post I see (he felt one of the kate live interludes reminded him of this pc)

Yay! Did this this spring, so much fun to sing.

That's so cool. Anybody we can hear on record/online?

She didn't record her performance but she does have a website: http://www.thealobo.com/multimedia

i see she's singing the Durufle Requiem in Sarasota in January!

Varese is one of the few legitimate modern classical composers I find really accessible. Maybe that means that he is "lite" too? I think I prefer the older recordings of his works that were my first exposure to his music.

I've never thought of Varèse as lite fwiw.

47 Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Points: 477 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0002/774/MI0002774960.jpg?partner=allrovi.com

Dude's second appearance in a countdown of all notated music since 1890, which is p interesting, I have to say.

He is one of most inventive and original composers known to me tbh

There are so many sides to the work he's done in film... Everything from neo-bel-canto to krautrock.

I wish I had nominated his score to The Thing. I don't remember why I pruned it from my noms list.

I prefer Nino Rota, but I am not that familiar with either of them.

i wonder if varèse isn't so much 'lite' as he is fairly easily translatable into and readable through the aesthetics of electronic music etc

morricone POX off top of head

the thing
for a few dollars more
copkiller
oceano
il prato
exorcist ii the heretic
my name is nobody
once upon a time in the west
days of heaven
grand slam

I'm not really saying Varese is lite, but if I like him, it leaves me wondering.

Enjoying Mikrokosmos. If I were ever to study piano, I'd be happy to practice material like this, I think. (Not that drowning-in-the-molten-confection-of-melancholy romantic piano music though.)

i like giu la testa and vergogna schifosi. also his soundtrack to "danger diabolik" which really should get a proper issue one of these days.

It was terribly unjust to stop at listing 10 morricones. Giu la testa rules. I don't know the second one you said but I'll check it out!

My favourite version of the classic notation software, before they made it more like Finale:

46 Jean Sibelius - Symphony no. 6 Points: 480 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwi5sMHX2LfPAhWCMj4KHYMDBI4QjBwIBA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.suomenrahapaja.fi%2Fproductresources%2Fsource%2Fpic1%2F17984.png&psig=AFQjCNFBEJlY43hleFk2BrFpoQXu7AXvOg&ust=1475345568802157

http://www.suomenrahapaja.fi/productresources/source/pic1/17984.png

http://d29ci68ykuu27r.cloudfront.net/product/Look-Inside/covers/19221755.jpg

Fought the temptation to post a picture of a 1930s Goethe medal

When Robert Creeley made a pun on Bartok/bar-talk, did that have any significance related to the composer or was it just Creeley being goofy?

This has been bothering me for decades.

Maybe he was just describing his environment.

Bartok was not particularly bibulous to my knowledge. He was an influential and zealous collector of folk tunes though, which maybe could be called musical 'bar talk'? IDK.

Sibelius 6th - the piece which started my obsession with this composer 20 years ago. My #2 vote on my ballot IIRC; on another day it could have been #1.

Someone described this as Sibelius' one landscape piece which doesn't even have any people in it. I can buy that. It is a wondrous pantheist soundplace. It's based on Dorian mode and influenced by palestrina's church polyphony. I love it fiercely.

ps Sund4r I am learning to notate symphonic music in Notion on ios. Someday I'll make it to Sibelius on desktop... maybe. I keep coming back to my MIDI grids though :/

thx for those Morricone lists, I also love the "Il Gatto" sdtrk and that stunning 2CD comp on Ipecac

Ha, I remember someone once told me a story about telling their music history prof a convoluted joke (that I obv don't remember) involving Bartok smiling at someone on the other side of a bar, i.e. "beaming across the barline". The prof responded "That's not funny! Bartok never smiled!"

Another one I don't seem to know, oddly:

45 Claude Debussy - Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp Points: 483 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SSTgEkQASNI/maxresdefault.jpg

my favorite piece of chamber music in all the world

i have nothing else to say on the matter

44 Steve Reich - Tehillim Points: 483 Votes: 4 #1s: 0
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-g_G__OziRqk/UNHa_WSxIII/AAAAAAABKew/_HTBWBbtpwM/s1600/reich+portada.PNG

#13 on my ballot. Played the shit out of this album after first hearing it in that class at 19.

My #1 is at 43.

43 John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for the Prepared Piano Points: 489 Votes: 5 #1s: 1

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jRHoKZRYBlY/maxresdefault.jpg

Pretty cool where Stephen Drury demonstrates piano preparations

cool video

So fucking great. I feel like nothing can really prepare you for how these pieces/this instrument actually sound. So colorful. Have people done ballet to these?

It appears so: https://www.nycballet.com/ballets/s/sonatas-and-interludes.aspx

42 Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten Points: 507 Votes: 4 #1s: 0
http://assets.londonremembers.com/images/big/46119.jpg?1319382426

gorgeous

And to finish us off for the night, no stranger to the countdown:

41 Bela Bartok - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Points: 511 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EsW7p0PVH10/maxresdefault.jpg

I didn't know the Part piece before. It is nice.

Goes down smooth.

Recap:
41 Bela Bartok - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
42 Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
43 John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for the Prepared Piano
44 Steve Reich - Tehillim
45 Claude Debussy - Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp
46 Jean Sibelius - Symphony no. 6
47 Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
48 Alfred Schnittke - Concerto for Choir
49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire
51 edgard varèse - Ionisation
52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos
55 John Zorn - Cobra
56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra
57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel
58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5
59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat
60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

#41, like Pierrot, established a paradigmatic 'band' for 20th century successors. Crumb especially made hay of this instrumentation

I'm finding this playlist useful, though I have no plans to try to listen to it systematically. Even so, there are composers here that I am enjoying somewhat more than I have when I've tried them in the past.

No argument could change my love for Tehillim.

40 Claude Debussy - La mer 514 3 0
http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2012/02/01/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_wide-71890becdcf93cd06e1ea7fd55db0b7bd00a86ba-s900-c85.jpg

Just listened to this (for the first time, I think!) while making and starting breakfast. I like it obv. A bit more dramatic than I expected. I can see why film composers like it.

The first of two two-fers today:

39 Claude Debussy - Nocturnes Points: 515 Votes: 4 #1s: 0
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/obv33I2Kf10/hqdefault.jpg

I don't have anywhere near the knowledge to have voted in this poll, but I've been lurking and listening. Thank you for putting in the effort, Sund4r, and to everyone who voted, for introducing me to some amazing stuff.

Both La Mer and (especially) the Nocturnes were hugely important for me. In my first college music history class, I remember hearing Debussy and being transfixed. I didn't know music like that existed -- magic, mystic, divine, lustful. They called it "impressionistic", but I didn't (and still don't) really get the tag -- it was way too vague, not addressing the actual emotions the music stirred up in me. What I did know was that all of a sudden, an entire dimension of what music could do was revealed to me, and I'm probably still looking for that feeling in both my own music, and in listening to new things.

Debussy hated the 'impressionist' tag iirc. I think one of my music history profs used the term "Symbolist" instead. "Nuages" is a definitive orchestral Debussy work for me. I only included one piece of his on my ballot, which was unfair to the overwhelming volumes of great music he wrote. (I did rank it very high on my ballot!)

I also listened to Debussy quite a bit in my early to mid-20s so I don't know why I almost never do now, unless there's a teaching reason for it. I think it's because it does feel a bit like Impressionist art to me, if only because of conditioning/received wisdom, and there's only so much washed-out prettiness I need on a regular basis? I realise this doesn't do justice to his expressive range, so I should probably listen more.

Another late 19th century French piece up next, a favourite of singers. (I think it will make a lot of people happy.)

5-10 minutes to guess.

xp
Debussy was such a formative thing for me, it's hard to be objective about his music. I listen to a lot of it in the background now, like comfort music, because I don't have to think about it at all, it's in my bones. I never heard it as washed-out prettiness, because the harmonies in something like the Nuages or Sirenes were so...hmm, what? They had a darkness, a feral quality that he first used explicitly in Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, as far as pagan imagery-- I was drawn to exactly that quality.

You'd see it show up in Stravinsky, Bartok, Ravel (of course), Messiaen -- basically, anyone who followed Debussy's lead in harmonic adventure. It always makes me laugh to read about Debussy as part of the boring classical music canon, because my associations with his music are so subversive, so individual, and strike a lot of the same mental and emotional triggers as, say, black metal or avant prog a la Magma.

these days, i take people who call the classical music canon "boring" about as seriously as i take people who call black and white films boring.

No, you're right, I'm getting more from it, listening now, and I think I have at the times that I listened to him more. xp

I need to sort out my thoughts about this obv.

38 Gabriel Fauré - Requiem in D minor Points: 516 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zTAadoArzIM/maxresdefault.jpg

Debussy was such a formative thing for me, it's hard to be objective about his music. I listen to a lot of it in the background now, like comfort music, because I don't have to think about it at all, it's in my bones. I never heard it as washed-out prettiness, because the harmonies in something like the Nuages or Sirenes were so...hmm, what? They had a darkness, a feral quality that he first used explicitly in Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, as far as pagan imagery-- I was drawn to exactly that quality.

Basically, Dominique otm. The debussian prism is probably more core to my adult (mid 20s and on) inner life than anything else (except maybe Sibelius and late Scott walker). It's a way of receiving and refracting information, almost. My hero forever.

Oh, that would have been my guess! And yay, lovely piece of music, and a joy to sing. I've been thinking a bit of Requiems due to singing Verdi yesterday, and I think part of what I dislike about Verdi is that it sounds communal. It sounds like the entire populace of Italy standing up and celebrating the church. While the music of Fauré (and Duruflé) sounds like a much more personal vision of christianity. I guess a lot of this simply has to do with time, that religion was more in decline as they were made, and Duruflé especially seems to have been as conservative and kinda normative as anyone. But it still has an outsider feel to it, if that makes sense.

Faure requiem never attentively heard by me until this year-- and it is unbelievably great. There's this one sinuous passage that made me want to cheer the first time I heard it. Thx Tuomas for vigorous advocacy of this music (and my version is one of the recordings of the original 'church' arrangement also thx to Tuomas)

, and I think part of what I dislike about Verdi is that it sounds communal. It sounds like the entire populace of Italy standing up and celebrating the church.

Verdi would have been chagrined to hear this, he was bitterly anti-clerical

Verdi would be chagrined to hear a lot of my opinions about him, lol. But holy shit it was fun to sing :)

Hm, the soprano solo in the "Pie Jesu" is legit beautiful.

We're returning to a two-fer from a composer who's more in my wheelhouse, but compromising because we have a couple of religious choral pieces from him.

37 Gyorgy Ligeti - Lux Aeterna Points: 517 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9gKQVrIdw5w/hqdefault.jpg

Could you almost say it's a... Ligeti split?

lol

TIE 35 Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem Points: 522 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/bf/b6/7a/bfb67a7bbefec118609503fc44e637dc.jpg

Has to be one of the most original choral works ever written.

TIE 35 Alban Berg - Wozzeck Points: 522 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2009/June09/Berg_Wozzeck_0184422bc.jpg

I listen to Berg's chamber music a fair bit, and "Lyric Suite" is in my personal pantheon, but I've honestly never listened to all of this.

The 'fragments from' might be a good way station for you

There was a film version on youtube at one point. It was very good. 'Ein guuuuter mensch!'

I got through all of Act 1 and am now on Scene 3 of Act 2 (from this recording). I love it so far, even without following the libretto or understanding the German. It's like everything I enjoy in Wagner concentrated and adapted to Berg's lyrical take on the 12-note language.

I'm not sure I know what postmodernism is in music, despite once taking a course on it, but all the same, I feel like the next piece is an important example of it.

Berio?

34 Luciano Berio - Sinfonia Points: 533 Votes: 6 #1s: 0
http://www.esosi.org/mm/history3.jpg

xp Wow, good guess.

Tbh, there's a lot of music I crammed through listening to when studying for comps in grad school so I can't say for sure that I never listened to all of Wozzeck before.

Serial ballet:

33 Igor Stravinsky - Agon Points: 539 Votes: 4 #1s: 0
http://oberon481.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4e3853ef01156fc94be8970c-800wi

With his second appearance on the countdown:
32 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 3 Points: 555 Votes: 6 #1s: 0
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTcyMzg4NDEyOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzA2MzUyMQ@@._V1_UY268_CR2,0,182,268_AL_.jpg

My comp study notes on the keyed guitars in this one:

Keyed gtr: harpsichord-like design. Ea. string divided by metal bridge that spans middle of ‘harp’. String struck by plectrum on one side. Pickup ‘hears’ on other side. Picks up sympathetic vibrations. -> hear pure harmonic not fundamental -> reverberant, rich, no attack. Another design features “paper-thin leather disks that spin, rubbing the string w/ more or less force depending on key pressure -> delicate touch -> v. hi harmonics.

Now that Wozzeck is over and done with, I'd just like to say

woah Georg Büchner woah

Berg made me read this stuff and woah, GB feels like a major thing.

Agree with comments upthread that Bartók SQ4 is surprisingly low. Could it be that the nonexistent #3 lobby has somehow got the advantage!? :-D

Agon: my highest Stravinsky vote. Just catchy as all hell

Lol, I'm enjoying it but "catchy as all hell" isn't quite how I'd describe the last pas de deux.

And to finish us off for tonight, one of my favourite 'choral' works of the late 20th century:
31 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung Points: 566 Votes: 6 #1s: 0
http://www.sonoloco.com/rev/stockhausen/stockhausenpictures/IRosaka70.jpg

Pretty good summary here.

I was always thankful that the erotic poetry is in a language I don't understand.

Recap:

31 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung
32 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 3
33 Igor Stravinsky - Agon
34 Luciano Berio - Sinfonia
35 Alban Berg - Wozzeck
35 Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem
37 Gyorgy Ligeti - Lux Aeterna
38 Gabriel Fauré - Requiem in D minor
39 Claude Debussy - Nocturnes
40 Claude Debussy - La mer
41 Bela Bartok - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
42 Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
43 John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for the Prepared Piano
44 Steve Reich - Tehillim
45 Claude Debussy - Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp
46 Jean Sibelius - Symphony no. 6
47 Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
48 Alfred Schnittke - Concerto for Choir
49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire
51 Edgard Varèse - Ionisation
52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos
55 John Zorn - Cobra
56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra
57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel
58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5
59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat
60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 Luciano Berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

30 Olivier Messiaen - L'Ascension Points: 575 Votes: 5 #1s: 0
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3093/528/400/Norwich.1.jpg

29 Philip Glass - Music in 12 Parts Points: 594 Votes: 4 #1s: 1
http://dazedimg.dazedgroup.netdna-cdn.com/593/azure/dazed-prod/1010/9/1019597.jpg

Somehow I always thought the organ version of L'Ascension was the original but it turns out I was wrong. Just listened to the orchestral version, which is v nice.

12 Parts is one of the first Glass pieces I ever heard. Used to space out to this stuff.

Love music in 12 parts. Sadly for the first time in this poll this piece does not exist on Spotify, not even excerpted on a glass comp :(

(Admittedly, I mostly listened to excerpts. This is one piece where compositional music's 'long' reputation is justified.)

Yeah, it's on Naxos Music Library but prob not Spotify, yeah.

Early glass is very very thin on there.

It is not helping me focus on work this morning.

The next piece also got a #1 vote, was my #100, and may be the most talked-about composition of the 20th century. Coming up after I move to the coffee shop (where I may listen to it!)

Sacre du Printemps?

betting on 4′33″

No lime OTM:

28 John Cage - 4'33" Points: 594 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 1
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d9/18/06/d91806c537c8eef43ecdd4f0139057ad.jpg

At least the first chapter of this is recommended.

Le Sacre was a good guess but I ranked it way higher than 100.

As a huge fan of Cage's more conventionally 'musical' music (I might like it as much as some of you guys like Debussy), I think I have a bit of a grudge that this is the one thing everyone knows about him. But obv, important, great statement, had to be done once, etc.

TOO LOW

In its way, a mindbending work of art that changed the way I understood what art could be when I first encountered it.

gann's book is v good yes, as enjoyable and readable a solid scholarly introduction you're going to find on just about anything

My #1. I have had a 30+ year debate with my wife about this piece and how to think about art, what even qualifies as art.

Previous ILM discussion:
John Cage's 4'33"
Please stop referencing 4'33" by John Cage

Duchamp had the same idea 30+ years earlier i think, but it's still a great and important piece which is precisely why idiots crack wise about it

in a bizarre bit of happenstance this cartoon from 1932 is by someone called hy cage

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/images/cartoon10.gif

I think the cartoonist misunderstood either time signatures or rests.

Duchamp had the same idea 30+ years earlier i think, but it's still a great and important piece which is precisely why idiots crack wise about it

Did Duchamp do this in a musical context?

27 Duke Ellington - The Far East Suite Points: 598 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0

https://alanbumstead.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/img_0796.jpg

I was going to say that Ellington is a serious contender for the greatest American composer of the early 20th century imo, and I still hold that view, but this is from 1967! I listen to Ellington all the time, and voted for two pieces by him (from 1935 and 1940) but I don't know this one at all tbh.

It's the best thing by Ellington that I've ever heard, so I rated it high in my ballot. Just the way his arrangements manage to evoke that whole diversity of moods he wants to come across in this piece is nothing short of brilliant.

Did Duchamp do this in a musical context?

not to my knowledge but i was thinking of the "anaesthetic" found pieces exemplified by "Fountain" - imo Duchamp focuses on a particular way of apprehending as being the aesthetic quality rather than something innate to that which is apprehended. so for Duchamp visual art becomes a way of looking, as in 4'33" music becomes a way of listening

and this still creates a role for the artist as a selecter or delimiter - Duchamp still in some way - indifference or otherwise - chooses his found objects, and Cage specifies a particular span of time as constituting the piece - except when he doesn't

Right, and I think Cage was quite aware of the precedents in the visual arts, and gave credit to these. It's the application of that idea to musical composition that was significant with 4'33".

Far East suite (one of several late Ellington masterpieces) is not available in full on Spotify anymore so I had to settle for three pieces picked from Ellington comps

(Sund4r see also Afro Eurasian Eclipse)

cage's '26 statements re duchamp' is nice https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dXJyDIuHuEUC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=26+Statements+Re+Duchamp+year+from+monday&source=bl&ots=uCNDG0w-S5&sig=IS7Ct3KN_MroJLtXiBrMI35i9KY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjigOGG2LzPAhWoBsAKHbDyAzIQ6AEIPzAD#v=onepage&q=26%20Statements%20Re%20Duchamp%20year%20from%20monday&f=false

excellent, i've never come across that before but i wondered if something like it existed

My ballot was unranked, but Sinfonia might well have been my #1 if I'd attempted a ranked one. By the way, Jon, while I heartily approve of your selecting the premiere recording for the playlist, given that a fifth movement was added shortly after, you might add a recording of that movement for completeness (this new one isn't bad)

26 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 6 Points: 625 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8f/7b/64/8f7b641f31b98a7f6016b0e41a68a23a.jpg

Lol, perfect picture!

Good God there's a lot of recordings of this on Spotify. I have the Tilson Thomas/SFSO recording on mp3 and voted based off of that, but is there a 'best' recording of the 6th?

An ultra-populist double-header coming up.

Clair de Lune? Or as my dad calls it 'Clear the Room'. I'm sure none of you had ever heard that one before...

Gorecki's 3rd b/w The Planets?

25 Leonard Bernstein et al - West Side Story Points: 627 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://images1.villagevoice.com/imager/u/original/8226956/nyv_zoe_20160203_sharks_courtesy_photofest.jpg

I don't think "Suite bergamasque" was even nominated?

(xpost)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Alternating_time_signatures2.gif/400px-Alternating_time_signatures2.gif

Tom v, Bernstein (60s NYPO) is my favorite 6th but there are a lot of others that run it close. Boulez is fantastic, Abbado's last live recording, the MTT you have is very good. Barbirolli is a highly unusual one with a slow grim tempo for the first mvmt. Others I'm forgetting about.

Puerto Rican gang has former bodyguards to listen in (6)
^Graun cryptic sword clue yesterday

Bernstein (60s NYPO) is my favorite 6th

This is the one I'm listening to. Sounds great.

Lol that west side story was posted as I was typing my recommendation of bernstein's Mahler

The 60s Bernstein Mahler cycle was a little subpar in terms of sound until the round of remastering they gave it about 5 or 6 years ago. Now it sounds fantastic. (I think it was on its 3rd or 4th digital remastering by then...!)

Tom was half OTM:

24 Gustav Holst - The Planets Points: 632 Votes: 7 #1s: 0

http://nineplanets.org/images/solar-system-439046_640.jpg

Just listened to Planets the other day, it's still terrifically thrilling in all its pomposity. Clearly the Rosetta Stone for many adventure film composers (not just John Williams).

I wish more film composers would lift the other movements besides Mars! (Well, Leonard Rosenman did do a nice Jupiter inspired bit for the bakshi lord of the rings)

The Planets mightily deserves its popularity. It also deserves to be recognized as a masterpiece of Ravellian meticulousness. And its misterioso movements deserve as much love as its assertive ones.

(Holst also no one hit wonder. Egdon Heath, the Choral Symphony and the Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda all fantastic. Dude made his own translations from Sanskrit. Respect.)

Btw I added the fifth movement of the Berio Sinfonia from a recent recording, thanks for the tip

I voted for two other Holst pieces in this very poll owing to my time spent in high school concert bands, though neither as high as my vote for the Planets.

Yeah his band music too! He did a lot of things, none of which are much like the planets.

23 Claude Debussy - Prélude a l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) 636 5 0
https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/62/135762-004-D84B6E66.jpg

My #11

If you haven't seen the segment from Allegro non Troppo that is set to this, it's a must-see.

I chickened out of showing it to my class when I taught music appreciation some years back.

confession: i still think this piece is about a deer, no matter how often others attempt to disabuse me of the notion.

The quiet revolution

had i thought about it i would have expected this to come in very high, makes me wonder if it's all massive hits from this point on

By 'hits' are you including stuff that ILX would love but maybe isn't a big-selling recording? I think Feldman's Rothko Chapel is probably top 10 but I can't imagine finding it at a Goodwill.

Hm, that's an interesting pick. (I also wondered about "hits".)

There's one major 20th century composer, for a fair number of people the greatest 20th century composer, and definitely one of the most programmed in the concert hall at this point, who hasn't shown up at all yet. Which is interesting.

22 Arvo Pärt - Fratres Points: 648 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ink_prod/photos/0291/2215/photo_large.JPG

Oh, do you mean Rachmaninov, Jon?

Cmd-F "copland" also yields zero results.

No neither of them.

John Williams?

Shostakovich!

Whoa.

fgti didn't vote obv.

Although top 20 is still a mystery...

No Prokofiev so far either.

Nor Carl Nielsen! But that might just be me.

I don't think I knew who Nielsen was before this poll tbh. I don't think he has the same level of international recognition as the people we're talking about.

I voted one of the Nielsen symphonies very high. He has some unbelievable stuff. Prokofiev is super underrated because of his freakish facility with hooks. Something that tuneful can't be good. And tbh my main Prokofiev vote was for one of his most bristling modernist things.

(But something that tuneful can be good, obv)

And here we go again:

21 Claude Debussy - Preludes (Books 1 and 2) Points: 663 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 1
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/X6BbTo9JaHs/maxresdefault.jpg

A treasure trove of post-tonal theory examples.

Recap of 21-100:

21 Claude Debussy - Preludes (Books 1 and 2)
22 Arvo Pärt - Fratres
23 Claude Debussy - Prélude a l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)
24 Gustav Holst - The Planets
25 Leonard Bernstein et al - West Side Story
26 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 6
27 Duke Ellington - The Far East Suite
28 John Cage - 4'33'
29 Philip Glass - Music in 12 Parts
30 Olivier Messiaen - L'Ascension
31 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung
32 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 3
33 Igor Stravinsky - Agon
34 Luciano Berio - Sinfonia
35 Alban Berg - Wozzeck
35 Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem
37 Gyorgy Ligeti - Lux Aeterna
38 Gabriel Fauré - Requiem in D minor
39 Claude Debussy - Nocturnes
40 Claude Debussy - La mer
41 Bela Bartok - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
42 Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
43 John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for the Prepared Piano
44 Steve Reich - Tehillim
45 Claude Debussy - Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp
46 Jean Sibelius - Symphony no. 6
47 Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
48 Alfred Schnittke - Concerto for Choir
49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire
51 Edgard Varèse - Ionisation
52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos
55 John Zorn - Cobra
56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra
57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel
58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5
59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat
60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 Luciano Berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

I was the person who gave this #1. My gateway to a whole universe.

Shut out of the top 20 wwwwtttttffffff

"Fratres" definitely my favorite Pärt piece, esp. the CD w/all the different versions

That's a great list. Didn't vote so can't predict a top 20 at all but I'm supposing Gorecki and Morton Feldman will be in the top 20? Maybe more Debussy, Glass and Part too.