Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1970s – Part I (1970-1974)

Honourable Mentions

Benjamin Britten – The Journey of the Magi (Canticle IV), Op. 86 (1971)
Bernd Alois Zimmermann – Ich wandte mich und sah alles Unrecht das geschah unter der Sonne (1970)
Dmitri Shostakovich – Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva, Op. 143 (1973)
Giacinto Scelsi – Three Latin Prayers (1970)
Hans Abrahamsen – String Quartet No. 1, ‘Ten Preludes’ (1973)
Krzysztof Penderecki – De natura sonoris No. 2 (1971)
Luciano Berio – Recital I (for Cathy) (1972)
Toru Takemitsu – Autumn (1973)
Vagn Holmboe – Symphony No. 10 (1970-1972)

Please forgive whatever omissions you may perceive. Canonicity flew out the window a while back.

Amazing half decade

Ginastera's Sonata for Guitar and Murail's Tellur in the late 70s poll pls.

Forgot to mention Brouwer and Apivor for this one.

No Vox Balaenae? I might have voted for that one.

No obvious winner rn. Cassandra's Dream Song, Music in 12 Parts, Mantra, and maybe the Reichs and Crumbs strong. Reich's greatest work came after this, though, imo. Will listen more.

Not familiar with Apivor and my interactions with Brouwer's output have been fairly limited so far. I'll try to include the Ginastera and Murail next week.

Vox Balaenae deserved an honourable mention at the very least. Mea culpa, as ever.

I don't know what it the answer is but it certainly isn't "Inori".

Oooh. My sense of chronology is so wonky I still get a little surprise each time. First thought is Nono vs Ferneyhough vs Lachenmann vs Boulez vs Schnittke vs Messiaen vs...LOL, this might be the most familiar batch so far. Fabulous. Might end up using a random number generator here.

I can't imagine Claude Vivier without Inori, although the influence may have been reciprocal.

A wee playlist (with a handful of selections absent)
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qTrQ8edTZh7S9Rw1AcvKr

I think this has to be Rothko Chapel. Write in for Rzewski's Coming Together, esp the Alter Ego version.

only know the glass and shosty (and the reich which is not for me). will be scanning the thread.

oh wait, i know the britten cello suite but had no idea it was composed so late!

Spelling-wise, it’s Como una ola..., of course (autocorrect is ever unvigilant).

Voting "Clapping Music" as it inspired the true artistic masterpiece of this millennium:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5tWYmIOWGk

fp

I can't imagine Claude Vivier without Inori

I think it was the first time Stockhausen was actively dull but cvmmv.

at first glance i’d go with one of these:

drumming
mantra
melodien

i’ll want to revisit the takemitsu, crumb, and eastman. also check out the pieces i’m not familiar with, including most of the britten and shostakovich.

I voted for SF Polyphony as a gut reaction, having heard a few discs worth of Ligeti somewhat recently and vaguely recalling that one was the one I liked most? I'd like to hear the Schnittke and the Gubaidulina, and I think I may have the Silvestrov in the pile of unlistened-to stuff.

curious if people here would consider Harold Budd's Pavilion of Dreams (written sometime early 70s, recorded '76, released '78) to belong in a poll like this. for those who haven't heard it, it is very distinct (to my ears) from the rest of Budd's music. it's also one of my very favorite pieces of music of all time

Went ahead and voted for Como una ola de fuerza y luz. I dig the spookiness of later Nono ...and how I typically end up brushing up on some history!

Karl, it's a lovely piece but I'd say it falls outside of this poll's purview because it's not really concert music per se. There's no score of it, as far as I can tell, and its existence is bound up with the recording Budd, et al. made of it in 1978.

I'd like to briefly stan for Axel Borup-Jørgensen's little known Marin, which exhibits what the orchestral language of the 1960s can do in the name of oceanic tone painting, and Ștefan Niculescu's Ison Ia, a self-contained piece for chamber orchestra that marks the passage from his avant-garde experiments in the 1960s to his increasingly more spectral (via Romanian folk music) and overtly melodic style in the 1970s and 1980s.

12m into Marin and this is fantastic!

I'll admit that I'm a little lighter on this period than the last couple and probably the next couple - I think it's been sometimes glossed over by me, a bit late for 'history' and a bit early for 'contemporary' maybe idk? I never spent that much time with Nono before. Como una ola de fuerza y luz sounds incredible and was not what I expected. Eerie, harrowing sound masses.

His sparer late output, starting with …sofferte onde serene… (debatably), gets most of the praise these days, and while it's certainly deserved, his earlier, more outwardly political works are incredible in their own right. Their emotional heft is undeniable and does much to give the lie to the usual canards about serialism.

listened to a few of the noms over the weekend. the schnittke symphony is kinda remarkable.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Will Boulez keep getting snubbed? The Rituel is a more immediate aural experience than his other well-known works.

I seriously considered it! Incidentally, I don't recall Maderna himself featuring in this series. Did he ever come close?

Tried to go with 'Rothko Chapel' but the poll said I'd already voted. No idea how/when/for what, lol.

Boulez seems to always lose out narrowly in these for me.

I tend to associate Maderna with faceless postwar serialism that comes into relief only occasionally, but that’s probably an assessment born out of ignorance on my part. His output is massive iirc.

Tried to go with 'Rothko Chapel' but the poll said I'd already voted.

i voted for it in your honor! (and also because i love it with all of my heart and more)

I feel like I've had a DG CD of Maderna's Quadrivium, etc, forever. Still not sure what I think of it really!

And Cassandra's Dream Song it is, no doubt largely because I know it better than most of the competitors (Reich/Glass excluded), but I really do think it's a remarkable piece that sums up a lot of what there is to like in the complex end of contemporary music, in a digestible solo work. The alternation between fragments that are centred around the one pitch of A and the fragments of busier, non-tonal material works really well to give a good balance between unity and variety. The element of performer choice in selecting the order of the latter set of fragments is a suitable integration of aleatory that maintains compositional integrity to the work while leaving room for performers to shape the work, while the forced improvisation resulting from the difficulty of the second set of fragments integrates a completely different sort of performer independence! Brouwer's Tarantos is structured in almost the exact same way, btw, without the 'unplayable' element: might be interesting to see how it can be adapted to Latin guitar music, for those who don't know it.

the schnittke symphony is kinda remarkable.

― edgard varese-type beat (voodoo chili), Monday, April 20, 2020 11:38 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

what i went with

I like lots of these but don’t feel passionately about any of them. Going with ‘Melodien’ for the not great reason that it may be my only opportunity to vote Ligeti in these polls.

I tend to associate Maderna with faceless postwar serialism that comes into relief only occasionally, but that’s probably an assessment born out of ignorance on my part. His output is massive iirc.

His Oboe Concertos are very good.

too much ligeti to choose from, went for the chamber concerto. wish I knew how to describe this music beyond it sounds rly cool but just listened again & it sounds rly cool. I like the schnittke symphony too (presumably an amazing experience live) but find 3 & 4 more satisfying overall. I should give the supposedly “conservative” composers like britten & shostakovich some more time now tho since I’m less uncritical of modernist/progressivist ideological assumptions than I used to be

/Tried to go with 'Rothko Chapel' but the poll said I'd already voted./

i voted for it in your honor! (and also because i love it with all of my heart and more)

Rothko Chapel may be my fave piece of music ever, so... that!

The way it enters, as if emerging out of the mist... the little Drift-era Scott Walker detours into bits where melody takes a real backseat to timbre, then switches back again... the bell klangs! (especially that first big one around 8 minutes in)... the dead-eyed inhuman chorus - beautiful, but, not lovely... does anyone else find some moments to be kinda goth?... that gorgeous melody toward the end, as if to say 'was any of this even real?' (a trick Sylvian utilized a few years ago on "There is a Light...")... it's a pretty action-packed 25 minutes for such a spacious piece, with not a note/texture/device out of place.

I mean... DAMN.

The first Feldman piece that truly clicked for me was For Bunita Marcus, and when I went back and revisited Rothko Chapel it sounded like Brian Wilson

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

A common theme across these polls, or so it seems to me: the winning works' stans are never the most vocal.

au contraire... only if you underestimate the mighty Imagine Dragons constituent

I stand corrected.

Soon we shall all have been born:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1970s – Part II (1975-1979)

Write in for this one:

https://youtu.be/SXcNKKqAaps

wow, who needs bagpipes when you can breathe like that. never even conceived of oboe shredding. truly righteous

Holliger rules on every front – even his conducting is top notch. The next poll will incidentally feature a large-scale work of his that I think is easily among the last century’s greatest.

Yup was hoping you were going to include that :)

Christopher Redgate was another oboe shredder I was investigating before I stopped listening to music. Just came across this video of his playing at OTO

https://youtu.be/Z6s9D61g71Y

Re: Holliger I also love his recording of Zelenka's trio sonatas. All killer no filler as they say.

otm

His Koechlin series for Hänssler is a damn fine instance of advocacy as well.

And Berio's Sequenza VII was written for him.

Love his koechlin recordings