Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1920s

Honourable mentions:

Alban Berg – Chamber Concerto (1923-1925)
Alban Berg – Der Wein (1929)
Alexander Mosolov – Factory: Machine Music (‘Iron Foundry’), Op. 19 (1926-1927)
Alexander von Zemlinsky – Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 (1922-1923)
Béla Bartók – Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs (1920)
Béla Bartók – Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (1921)
Béla Bartók – Out of Doors (1926)
Carl Nielsen – Springtime on Funen (1921)
Carl Nielsen – Wind Quintet (1922)
Carl Nielsen – Three Piano Pieces (1928)
Carl Nielsen – Three Motets (1929)
Darius Milhaud – Le Bœuf sur le toit, Op. 58 (1920)
Edgard Varèse – Hyperprism (1922-1923)
Edgard Varèse – Octandre (1923)
Edgard Varèse – Intégrales (1924-1925)
Edgard Varèse – Arcana (1925-1927)
Francis Poulenc – Concert champêtre (1927-1928)
Gabriel Fauré – String Quartet in E minor, Op. 121 (1923-1924)
Igor Stravinsky – Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1923-1924)
Igor Stravinsky – Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1929)
Jean Sibelius – Andante festivo (1922)
Karol Szymanowski – String Quartet No. 2, Op. 56 (1927)
Manuel de Falla – Pour le tombeau de Claude Debussy (1920)
Manuel de Falla – El retablo de maese Pedro (1919-1923)
Manuel de Falla – Concerto for Harpsichord, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Violin and Cello (1923-1926)
Ottorino Respighi – Pini di Roma (1924)
Ottorino Respighi – Feste romane (1928)
William Walton – Viola Concerto (1928-1929)

This looks a bit easier than last time. It might be Bartók’s moment. I’d have included more Varèse and maybe the Respighis in the main poll, personally. “Arcana” is 😮

I'll candidly admit to not being a huge Varèse fan so my biases are showing (and it's bound to get worse).

rhapsody in blue is my favourite collection of sounds of all time

If I had to shortlist it:

Alban Berg – Lyric Suite (1925-1926)
Anton Webern – Symphony, Op. 21 (1928)
Béla Bartók – Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 (1922)
Béla Bartók – String Quartet No. 4 (1928)
Carl Nielsen – Symphony No. 5 (1921-1922)
George Enescu – Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 3 in A minor, ‘dans le caractère populaire roumain’, Op. 25 (1926)
Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 105 (1922-1924)
Jean Sibelius – Tapiola, Op. 112 (1926)
Maurice Ravel – Sonata for Violin and Cello in A minor (1920-1922)

deems, is a subtle dig at Gershwin's structural chops?

*is that

I'll have to do some re-listening. Maybe this is where I finally vote for a Bartók string quartet (or piano concerto!), a Nielsen symphony or something by Janecek or Prokofiev. (Most of their selections sound pretty attractive in my memory at this instant.)

deems is known for his love of rigorous structure & clarity tbf

bolero is the only one of these that I've seen a room full of ppl go wild for at a house party so it's a vote from me

Yes but

https://youtu.be/ROKMp4iemUc?t=1034

(17:14 if the time-stamped link didn't work.)

I was going to say that I've never knowingly heard an Enescu work, for shame :/ So thanks for that link!

On an unrelated note, I've been re-listening to some of Bartók's solo piano music and find myself utterly unable to accept anything other than Zoltán Kocsis's recordings, over and above the composer's own.

Similarly, this performance of Zoltán Székely's famous arrangement for violin and piano of the Romanian Folk Dances is so perfect (sound quality notwithstanding) that I can't imagine any other even as I've heard countless versions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX-XJdnu1I4

I didn't include in the 1910s poll because the competition was just too fierce, but damn.

More relevantly in light of our current poll, their recording of the 2nd Violin Sonata is incredible.

Apologies for the Eastern European spamming, but I can't resist posting Enescu's own recording of his 3rd Violin Sonata with Dinu Lipatti, which remains definitive despite the antiquated sound quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-mgL6VuJnA

I could vote for Varese in this and every future poll with a clear conscience

deems, is a subtle dig at Gershwin's structural chops?

― toilet-cleaning brain surgeon (pomenitul), Thursday, 6 February 2020 09:24 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is ensuring to stress the universality of the sentiment

I don't like Stravinsky enough to really like Varèse. Ionisation is cool, though.

Funnily I'm not crazy about a lot of Stravinsky. Varese is more textural to me.

Would vote Varese but I don't know how much I like Ameriques.

So maybe Bartok (idk why I am going on about it I keep forgetting to vote lol)

Oh I can't really vote but I do love Varese

Mind you I ended up clicking Mahler's 9th last time because fuck yeah

*fistbump*

the accidental purist

Last movement forever

Interesting to note that Messiaen got started in the late 1920s. Those Preludes for piano are actually some of my favourite works of his, as they really bring out the Debussy/Ravel/Dukas influence (the latter was his teacher at the time).

Another wee Spotify playlist.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7BOVSTumJpNrnn1MPPYF3d

(As always "b-b-but that one's a terrible recording" type sentiments welcome.)

Always appreciate the effort you put in making the playlists.

Likewise, thanks NNN!

Yes but

https://youtu.be/ROKMp4iemUc?t=1034

pom you make a good point, this enescu rules. v strong ottoman flavour. pls continue to spam

Omg this decade. Hardest yet, probably. Not even an honourable mention for Schoenberg's Piano Suite, the first 12-note work? :( It would be a contender for me but we're still spoiled for choice: Bartok 4, Webern Symphony, Schoenberg 3, Lyric Suite as good as modernism gets; Bolero, Rhapsody in Blue seat-packing classics; Tapiola somewhere in between; Villa-Lobos Etudes and de Falla Tombeau essential guitar repertoire. My vote will likely go to the Bartok quartet or Villa-Lobos etudes but it almost physically hurts to have to pick them over those other modernist works.

I feel like dodecaphonic-era Schoenberg really hit his stride in the 1930s. Granted, it's impossible to overstate the Piano Suite's historical importance but I never come back to it.

The Prelude gets stuck in my head, no joke.

I could make a top 10, but it's really going to be one of these two things:

Sergei Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 (1912-1923)
Sergei Prokofiev – Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26 (1917-1921)

Both in my top 10 compositions ever, basically.

Ha, I never heard Gould's speaking voice before: https://youtu.be/N7O_3q-ZttQ

(though it's Pollini's recording that I mostly listen to)

Heard this version of Bolero on the radio last week: https://youtu.be/3iqyskHZO0M

Just watched the first couple of minutes of that Gould video and it's awesome. lol @ his Schoenberg impression.

Nice twelve-tone humming

i see dmitri shostakovich has entered the building

The dazzling first symphony by an 18 year-old from Leningrad.

will vote for him in the 30s and 40s, probably.

there's a lot on this list i don't know. sibelius 6, bartok sonata for violin/piano, and rachmaninoff piano conc 4 are my leading contenders (and maybe bolero, but it probably doesn't need the help)

I know it’s reasonably well known at this point, but anyone who has never heard Nielsen’s 5th must do so ASAP

It’s not gonna take my vote away from late Sibelius but it’s as great a piece as anything on the last 3 polls.

Hear, hear.

When is Vox Maris coming up?

How credible is that quote about ensuring the supremacy of German music for 100 years btw? My undergrad prof cited it too and it seems to come up in a bunch of journalistic sources but I've never seen it anything I would consider an authoritative source. It seems like a strange thing for an Austrian Jew to say, esp one who fled to the US a decade later. It doesn't even really make sense to me - why wouldn't composers fron other countries be able to compose with the same method? I had come around to assuming it was basically fiction so was surprised to see Gould quote it. Historians? Mark?

i hadn't really listened to any nielsen before but was pretty into his 3rd in my listenthrough of the previous decade poll

Each of Nielsen's symphonies is a wonderful beast in its own right, but the 5th is, I think, the most impressive and comes closest to being utterly sui generis. When the drummer is asked to improvise 'as if to stop the orchestra at all costs', 'tis an aural sight to behold.

From memory, I guess the 4th may be the more "canonically great" or something, but I've always found Bartok's SQ #3 such a condensed blast.

Digging that Enescu.

Nice.

I actually ended up voting for it for fear no one else would, even though I don't think it's the 'best' work (whatever that means) on this list. Otherwise, I would have likely gone with the Lyrische Suite.

re schoenberg hoping to ensure the supremacy of German music for 100 years: i've often encountered the declaration cited, sometimes alongside the the claim that his politics were conservative enough and patriotic enough that he fought in the trenches in WW1 -- tho it turns out (googling just now) that this wasn't voluntary, he was drafted, and in fact resented the interruption to his work. as you say, he was jewish and austrian and in time an exile, so there are ironies aplenty. did he say it in the 1910s or the 1950s or when? either way, *if* he said it, he recognised the ironies and intended them -- after all he knew his work was widely resisted and disliked, and that nothing would enrage certain types of german more than the recognition of his priority as a composer (who were his peers and competitors? richard strauss?)

of course he also argued that the 12-tone project was the historico-logical continuation of the development of harmony as understood by late beethoven, late wagner etc -- and (for example) adorno more or less accepts this argument and places it at the heart of his reading of schoenberg's importance, tho he adds that the logic of the history pushes us towards a music that is intrinsically broken (thus mirroring a broken world blah blah). AS didn't like this last but much -- his response was along the lines off "if that egghead fuck thinks my music is ugly not beautiful he can do one"

tl;dr: no idea where it's from or if it's genuine -- i will check if it's in the peter yates book "20th century music", which is a common source for over-cited anecdotes, but has no index grrrr

Fwiw a cursory search for a segment of the quote's German equivalent yielded yet more paraphrases. I'm tempted to file it under 'apocryphal'.

ugh i always forget how hard it is to fkn find anything in the yates book -- anyway the chapter in it that is entirely an introduction to schoenberg very much makes the "development of harmony" argument (which is a commonplace of course but this is probably where i first encountered it), except taking it back to bach. it also very much stresses his dark sense of humour at all points, his conservatism (so principled that it made a radical of him) and his instinct that battlesites mark the thread of history, so start fights if you want to be remembered

(it also quotes mahler being mordant abt the cultural homelessness of being a a non-viennese in vienna, an austrian in germanic culture, a jew everywhere -- maybe bcz he can't find an equivalent direct quote from AS, who wd probably have felt saying something like this sounded too much like being sorry for himself) (also he was born viennese lol)

xp: pom, that's the word i wanted: the yates book is a source of other well known but hard-to-source schoenberg quotes that verge on the apocryphal, such as his description of cage as a "great inventor" -- at least some of his basis for what he writes is having a been a journalist and minor new music impresario since the 40s, plus a long-time correspondent with cage. anyway he knew and chatted with many of these figures, and some of these apothegms arrive in reported form from him while he's communicating with someone else. this is just a guess, but his reportage and analysis was an important early link between the european radicals and the american experimental tradition (the book came out in 1967).

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I played gong for a performance of Bolero, which basically involves counting out 250 measures of rest and striking the gong twice. :|

Voted for Wozzeck, after seeing the Met's live broadcast of it last month I found I really loved it. Emotion in my serialism, thanks.

Oh man, Wozzeck!

The Second Viennese School were very emotional!

These are all highly electable classical compositions, but I went with Enescu's Sonata! Been playing it a lot thanks to this poll, I love it.

*high five*

Went with Webern in the end cuz, you know, it's purty and stuff.

Feeling vaguely guilty about not showing some love to Janáček as I heart pretty much all of those nominations and a text search suggests I'm the only one to have mentioned his name. And even then I misspelled it. LOL

Yeah, it hurt to deny the Symphony.

It was a little heartbreaking to read papers/exams by students where they would describe it as chaotic or incomprehensible. I sometimes almost wondered what they were hearing.

Heh, that was definitely me the first time I heard it. It's a clichéd metaphor, but you need to learn the idiom's rudiments beforehand.

Yeah, that's what I hoped I was helping them do.:(

Tbf there needs to be a modicum of willingness on the listener's part, and most people are simply uninterested in exploring why it is they feel so repelled by that bewildering web of sounds upon encountering it for the first time. Same goes for modernist literature, painting, architecture, film, etc. There's only so much you can do as a pedagogue to awaken said willingness.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Dammmmitttt

I missed the one day warning

Pretend Sibelius 7 got 2 votes instead of one, okay?

Well clearly my vote wasn't counted. I voted Prokofiev's 2nd piano concerto.

A shame about the low turnout and the top result (j/k, I like Gershwin).

Onwards to an especially dire decade for our would-be illustrious species:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1930s

Pretend Sibelius 7 got 2 votes instead of one, okay?

my man

<3

Sibelius's 7th deserved better. I'm glad even The Tempest got a vote, though – it absolutely rules.

Oh man, no Janacek pieces got a vote? That's brutal. This was his decade, too bad there were so many other luminaries around at the same time.
If anyone hasn't heard these Janacek pieces by any chance please give them a listen. All of them.

:(

They're all wonderful, but I have a soft spot for the string quartets, especially as played by the Pražák Quartet.

xpost

i yield to no one in my love for sibelius' incidental music. Sure the tempest is the coup de grace but swanwhite, pelleas, king christian and jedermann are just as dear to me. I love that there's this other less rigorously self-critical side to him which is just all wonderful hooks and fairy wishes