INTRODUCTION
Separate thread because this is kind of long. This is a list of classical composers I listen to along with select samples of their music. I always wanted to make this, but I was too busy+ I never wanted to go back to this site again. But I'm depressed as fuck so here I am. Before I go into the actual music I want to talk a bit, too. If a particular composer's section is blank or empty, I plan to fill it out more later. I will spoiler tag the suggested listenings as to not clutter the post with embedded videos.
Classical music helped me through a lot of hard times in my life. If I were to say why I like classical music, my response would be that it's music that spoke to me, music that never felt like an "escape" but an avenue for introspection. Not to say that other kinds of music don't benefit from active listening, but classical music makes me think about my own life and how I feel, instead of being the object to be examined itself.
I was made to play the violin as a child (I am Asian and have never stepped foot in a Western country), but stopped when I went to college years ago. The recent coronavirus pandemic gave me time to relearn my instrument. As an amateur violinist, my choices here can be quite biased to solistic music over orchestral ones. But there is so much work of value that a degree of focus is surely welcome, no?
There aren't many classical music concerts where I come from, and when they do have them they are the generic basic stuff. So a lot of my list comes from listening to recordings, meaning once again my list will be biased against considering orchestration and instrument projection. I don't claim to be an expert on classical music, I am an amateur, I simply wish to share music and my thoughts on them, do not take my word as polemic.
DISCLAIMER
I heavily reject the notions of objective beauty in art, art to me is the process of making an object that when experienced allows the subject to feel feelings that are similar in structure to the feelings the artist had in mind while making the object (Tolstoy had stuff to say about art that was similar). Art to me doesn't have to be pretty, and the dichotomies for me are not "beautiful vs ugly" but "pretty vs ugly" and "kitsch vs beautiful". Structural analysis of what makes music "good" have been around since the time of Aristotle's Poetics and are undoubtedly useful but I don't think they hold everything, music can be harsh and unforgiving but if they make me experience either something new or make me realize I am not alone in how I feel or give me catharsis via vindication then it is surely valuable music. A lot of the modernist composers I will bring up here, like Schnittke or descendants of the Second Viennese School, have been dismissed as hacks for being unpleasant; to people who think this, I hope that my thoughts on their music (as someone who listens to it not for intellectual value but just because I enjoy it) proves interesting.
MEDIEVAL ERA
Perotin
My journey through classical music is kind of backwards. I started with the modernists, and only relatively much later did I try listening to plainchant. Around the time I discovered Perotin, I had a serious death anxiety phase, and was having a philosophical crisis over the implications of material existence. Listening to music written in the Middle Ages resonated with me- these people lived like shit, their life was constant suffering, and they had to look towards religion to comfort them with the idea of the existence of another world, better, pure, clean, full of hope.
BAROQUE
Johann Sebastian Bach
"We (violinists) call Bach the Bible. I've played him for many years, but I don't think I know him." -Jascha Heifetz, Heifetz on Television (1971)
I don't claim to be even a decent violinist, but merely being a violinist means you have to play solo Bach. He's the vegetables of every instrument he wrote for- you may not like them but it's good for you. Bach has been long consigned to the dustbin of history as merely the greatest composer of all time, and it is quite easy to forget he was a ridiculously good violinist (hence why I only listed his violin works). Nobody quite wrote violin music like this before Bach, and neither did quite a few violin dedicated composers that were his contemporaries or even quite a while after (I think of Vivaldi and Paganini).
CLASSICAL
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Frankly, he deserves his own post, so I won't go into detail here.
ROMANTIC
Ludwig Van Beethoven
I claimed I explored classical music in reverse, but I started at Beethoven. Grosse Fuge was the classical piece that made me interested in classical, and afterwards I sought to move forward from there so I went to the romantics then the modernists. Beethoven in a way, "primed" me for what I should like, and caused me to avoid the nutrasweet Mozart (only for a bit) and pleasant Chopin (sadly, altogether).
Niccolo Paganini
Paganini was an innovator in one way, and a traditionalist in another- if you've tried to play him you know what I mean. Paganini shifted violinism from the old polyphonic method with low height, small fingerboards and concave bows to music that goes all the way up the fingerboard, without chords, that played as fast as possible necessitating convex bows. And yet, despite his difficulty, playing Paganini you get the sense that he is kind of a "nice guy"- a non violinist writes violin music as if it were for the piano and inadvertently makes easy sounding music that is horrendously awkward to play. Meanwhile, Paganini while fiendishly difficult sometimes grants you "small mercies" in the form of an open string while you shift. What a nice guy.
Paganini should be played alongside a piano, by the way.
Felix Mendelssohn
LATE ROMANTIC
Antonin Dvorak
I like Dvorak but I don't know where to place him. Dvorak is music I listen to to feel, specifically to feel sentimental. Sometimes he hits me just right.
Franz Liszt
As a violinist, Liszt was someone that was not on my path of listening and in fact I only started listening to him when I was thinking about who I haven't listened to. And truth be told, I really tried to listen to him, but in the he ended up being hit or miss. I really can't get the Hungarian Rhapsodies, or Transcendental Etudes, or Mephisto Waltzes, or Totentanz, despite also suffering from death anxiety. But the Sonata in B made me obsessed, and introduced me to Arthur Rubinstein who is a pianist I really like.
Jean Sibelius
My encounter with Sibelius is kind of awkward- he wrote in this totally opposite language to what he usually does for his Violin Concerto, which ended up being a monumental work for the violin. Therefore, it was hard for me to get into his other works, which were symphonic and quite peaceful and focused on evoking nature.
Johannes Brahms
Cesar Franck
It took me a while to find a recording of Heifetz's last recital on Youtube.
Henryk Wienawski
Eugene Ysaye
By now, the violin-centrism must be getting obnoxious. At the time of writing this, I am currently playing Ysaye's Sonata no. 4.
NEOROMANTIC
Samuel Barber
I quite like Barber. His music has a passionate drive to it. The second movement of the Violin Concerto sounds beautiful and determined, with one instrument soaring after another. The first movement of the Piano Sonata evokes the surface of a sea of tonality, with calm tonal moments and turbulent atonal ones, and the fourth movement evokes desperation and determination. In short, I like this guy's style.
IMPRESSIONIST
Maurice Ravel
Ravel rejected the term "impressionist", and I can see why. Of the so-called "impressionists", Ravel's music is often the most direct. As such, Ravel served as my "gateway" into composers like Mompou, Poulenc, Satie, Respighi, and Debussy. Whenever I feel like my products are bad because they are uninspired, I ponder on this quote from Ravel: "The initial idea is nothing [...] We’ve gone past the days when the composer was thought of as being struck by inspiration, feverishly scribbling down his thoughts on a scrap of paper. Writing music is seventy-five percent an intellectual activity.”
Francis Poulenc
An indulgence for me. He's very light hearted. As a member of Les Six, he was revolting against both German Romanticism and the current French school at the time, which can be why his music doesn't sound so serious. But it sounds good and makes me think of film noir.
Claude Debussy
Everybody loves Debussy- as a contrarian, this led me to not really listen to him at first. However, one should not fall into the opposite pitfall of avoiding a good composer because they are popular.
MODERNIST
Bela Bartok
Bela Bartok's concept of Night Music struck me profoundly. Another person has better words than me: "The hypersensitive theme, unspeakably melancholic, is contrasted with the other, hyperobjective theme [...]: as if a soul in tears can only find solace in the non-sensitivity of nature."
Leo Ornstein
Humans live really long. To think someone who was considered out of vogue by mid-1920 would live until 2002 at the age of fucking 106. His music really is amazing, though- the reprise moment of the gentle opening theme in Morning In The Woods makes me think of a man dying peacefully, his life flashing before his eyes.
Dmitry Shostakovich
If I could, Shostakovich would get a post all to his own. This man to me is the ideal artist. So simultaneously be so prolific and yet achieve such high quality is incomprehensible to me. He is the master of the concept of the drop, the moment (see: mov 1 and 4 Piano Trio 2, Prelude and Fugue 3, Prelude and Fugue 24, Quartet 8). Shostakovich is a real experience to listen to- often times, he can give you 20 minutes of pure monotone gray, hammering brutalist architectures, arias to barren wastelands, and right when you've lost all hope, for thirty seconds to a minute there is a breach from which you see a sky of blazing blue, torrential winds tearing everything apart.
And it's the most beautiful music I've ever heard.
Alfred Schnittke
I have never heard anybody write music on the concept of "life as error" before Schnittke. It could be described as "sad", "tragic", but Schnittke achieved a sound that conveyed a feeling of wrongness, as if one's existence was unnatural and against the natural order of things. The tragic music of the past did not properly convey complete, total hopelessness- as far as I know, only with Schnittke did the feeling of true alienation finally make it to a score and get shared. The Piano Quintet is incredibly bleak and ends on a disturbing ostinato of a lullaby. Concerto Grosso 1 begins and ends with the same prepared piano, as if at the beginning it is telling you you are "cursed" and the collapse at the end was foretold from the beginning and was inevitable. The Requiem has some truly haunting movements, like Requiem Aeternam, Tuba Mirum, and Credo.
The Symphony no. 8 is probably as close as you will get to a perfect work of art- William C White describes it better: "I think Schnittke’s 8th may be the pinnacle of musical art. In that piece, Schnittke sustains the most mystical of moods from start to finish, terrifying us in the first movement, torturing us in the second, ravishing us in the third, unnerving us in the fourth, and leaving us to contemplate all of eternity in the fifth, a movement that must stand completely alone in the history of music as the only symphonic movement dedicated solely to the slow amassing of a single chord."
NEOCLASSICAL
Aaron Copland
Listening to him can be quite a meditative experience. When I listen to the Clarinet Concerto, the first movement I imagine a dying person losing their consciousness, slowly falling into a bed of flower petals as one by one the components of their thinking disappear. The second movement, they wake up in a pure white limbo and find their best friend who died three years prior, having waited for them. They vow to find each other in their next lives, even if they turned into fish, beasts, or birds, and decide to reincarnate together.
Yes, I am in fact cringe.
NONTONAL
Alban Berg
Berg, I think, is not necessarily the access point to the Second Viennese school that he might seem to be after you've listened to a lot of late Romantic stuff. It was only relatively recently after I've already delved into a lot of experimental stuff that I began to appreciate him. He does have that kind of "link" to German Romanticism, though.
Georgy Ligeti
Ligeti is forbidding and imposing music, a structure so detached from what is comfortable because it only seeks to make sense to itself. I find listening to music by Ligeti or Xenakis is like viewing a sculpture, where the vertical element is the simultaneous overlay of pitches, and the vertical element is time, with the sound texture being the sculpture's material.
Morton Feldman
Intensely meditative. Combines the calmness and focus of Webern with the sheer length of Xenakis (Xenakis once famously said that only when music goes on after two hours does it begin to have the quality of "scale"). Often can make you feel an intense feeling of loss.
Arnold Schoenberg
Even though Schoenberg chronologically came before the prior guys, the truth is he's pretty out there and it would definitely be better if you're already deep into experimental music before going into him- he's like a guy who went to isolation on his own island and made music for himself for thirty years. Like Berg, though, he's also kind of rich in German Romanticism (although stuff like "Farben" can sound pretty impressionistic).
POSTROMANTIC
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Rautavaara's music is amazing. It evokes a supernatural object that exists outside of our plane of understanding but intersects it- the effect is created by alternating or overlaying tonal and nontonal music, making us feel like we are understanding some aspect of it but not all. And when his music ends, it's on a dissonant phrase that never resolves but slowly quietens towards silence, as if it was going on forever and simply left our midst, leaving our heads to fill in the details. Incredibly inventive, The Fire Sermon is a short piano piece programmatic in nature alternating between intense turbulent striving and moments of absolute clarity. In "Cantus Arcticus", he even record birds and makes music out of their sounds. Definitely worth listening to.
Sofia Gubaidulina
(RELATIVELY) CONTEMPORARY
Kaija Saariaho
I fucking love this gal. Sept Papillons is incredibly evocative and optimistic, even. Meanwhile, Petals to me evokes the entrance of a dark cave from which nothing can be seen, a vortex of air going into the void carrying petals into it.
Lou Harrison
Very optimistic music and a true pleasure to listen to. The Third Symphony is up there in my top music of all time- the lush orchestration and sheer optimism of the first movement, the lively festivity of the second and fourth. The fifth movement evokes a flyby of a Jupiterian planet, one of immense gravity. The last movement is a night festival of lanterns, fragile music evocative of fireflies, that makes you want to grasp the music from the air and protect it.
The Piano Concerto is an incredible study of just intonation- the first movement incredibly gentle, the second movement being joyful and wild, and if you listen to Keith Jarrett's playing he has an incredible cadenza where he resolves the movement from very percussive passages melting into an amazingly tender phrase, before triumphantly finishing the movement with the orchestra.
The Fourth Symphony is unbelievable. The first movement starts out forbidding, but then melts into this extended string passage with a celesta playing into the background becoming incredibly evocative of the night. Amazing. The second movement is fucking wild, a blend of Native American/ Chinese/ American tonalities into one giant festivity. And the last movement- you gotta hear it to believe it.
La Koro Sutro is beyond words. Jesus Christ, this man just will not miss. The Heart Sutra? In Esperanto?
Toru Takemitsu
He's like Messiaen, but Eastern, and film-ic. This can only be a good thing.
John Adams
Quite cool, I normally hate the Philip Glass and Arvo Part school of minimalism (which Ian Mcdonald describes as "passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass-production and The Bomb") but I like some of this guy's stuff.
John Luther Adams
A pioneer in drone and natural ambience.
Takashi Yoshimatsu
At first I disliked this guy- he seemed like a second-rate composer of film scores. But he grew on me.
POSTMODERN
John Cage
Very much maligned. You compose good music for a while and nobody cares. You orchestrate 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence and everybody loses their minds.
END NOTES
Feel free to discuss classical music in the comments below!
Separate thread because this is kind of long. This is a list of classical composers I listen to along with select samples of their music. I always wanted to make this, but I was too busy+ I never wanted to go back to this site again. But I'm depressed as fuck so here I am. Before I go into the actual music I want to talk a bit, too. If a particular composer's section is blank or empty, I plan to fill it out more later. I will spoiler tag the suggested listenings as to not clutter the post with embedded videos.
Classical music helped me through a lot of hard times in my life. If I were to say why I like classical music, my response would be that it's music that spoke to me, music that never felt like an "escape" but an avenue for introspection. Not to say that other kinds of music don't benefit from active listening, but classical music makes me think about my own life and how I feel, instead of being the object to be examined itself.
I was made to play the violin as a child (I am Asian and have never stepped foot in a Western country), but stopped when I went to college years ago. The recent coronavirus pandemic gave me time to relearn my instrument. As an amateur violinist, my choices here can be quite biased to solistic music over orchestral ones. But there is so much work of value that a degree of focus is surely welcome, no?
There aren't many classical music concerts where I come from, and when they do have them they are the generic basic stuff. So a lot of my list comes from listening to recordings, meaning once again my list will be biased against considering orchestration and instrument projection. I don't claim to be an expert on classical music, I am an amateur, I simply wish to share music and my thoughts on them, do not take my word as polemic.
DISCLAIMER
I heavily reject the notions of objective beauty in art, art to me is the process of making an object that when experienced allows the subject to feel feelings that are similar in structure to the feelings the artist had in mind while making the object (Tolstoy had stuff to say about art that was similar). Art to me doesn't have to be pretty, and the dichotomies for me are not "beautiful vs ugly" but "pretty vs ugly" and "kitsch vs beautiful". Structural analysis of what makes music "good" have been around since the time of Aristotle's Poetics and are undoubtedly useful but I don't think they hold everything, music can be harsh and unforgiving but if they make me experience either something new or make me realize I am not alone in how I feel or give me catharsis via vindication then it is surely valuable music. A lot of the modernist composers I will bring up here, like Schnittke or descendants of the Second Viennese School, have been dismissed as hacks for being unpleasant; to people who think this, I hope that my thoughts on their music (as someone who listens to it not for intellectual value but just because I enjoy it) proves interesting.
MEDIEVAL ERA
Perotin
My journey through classical music is kind of backwards. I started with the modernists, and only relatively much later did I try listening to plainchant. Around the time I discovered Perotin, I had a serious death anxiety phase, and was having a philosophical crisis over the implications of material existence. Listening to music written in the Middle Ages resonated with me- these people lived like shit, their life was constant suffering, and they had to look towards religion to comfort them with the idea of the existence of another world, better, pure, clean, full of hope.
Alleluia nativitas
BAROQUE
Johann Sebastian Bach
"We (violinists) call Bach the Bible. I've played him for many years, but I don't think I know him." -Jascha Heifetz, Heifetz on Television (1971)
I don't claim to be even a decent violinist, but merely being a violinist means you have to play solo Bach. He's the vegetables of every instrument he wrote for- you may not like them but it's good for you. Bach has been long consigned to the dustbin of history as merely the greatest composer of all time, and it is quite easy to forget he was a ridiculously good violinist (hence why I only listed his violin works). Nobody quite wrote violin music like this before Bach, and neither did quite a few violin dedicated composers that were his contemporaries or even quite a while after (I think of Vivaldi and Paganini).
Sonata no.1 for violin solo
Sonata no. 3 for violin solo
Chaconne from Partita no. 2 for violin solo
Partita no. 3
CLASSICAL
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Frankly, he deserves his own post, so I won't go into detail here.
"Haffner" Rondo
Piano Concerto no. 23 mov 2
ROMANTIC
Ludwig Van Beethoven
I claimed I explored classical music in reverse, but I started at Beethoven. Grosse Fuge was the classical piece that made me interested in classical, and afterwards I sought to move forward from there so I went to the romantics then the modernists. Beethoven in a way, "primed" me for what I should like, and caused me to avoid the nutrasweet Mozart (only for a bit) and pleasant Chopin (sadly, altogether).
Grosse Fuge
Violin Concerto
Niccolo Paganini
Paganini was an innovator in one way, and a traditionalist in another- if you've tried to play him you know what I mean. Paganini shifted violinism from the old polyphonic method with low height, small fingerboards and concave bows to music that goes all the way up the fingerboard, without chords, that played as fast as possible necessitating convex bows. And yet, despite his difficulty, playing Paganini you get the sense that he is kind of a "nice guy"- a non violinist writes violin music as if it were for the piano and inadvertently makes easy sounding music that is horrendously awkward to play. Meanwhile, Paganini while fiendishly difficult sometimes grants you "small mercies" in the form of an open string while you shift. What a nice guy.
Paganini should be played alongside a piano, by the way.
Caprice no 4
Caprice no.24 Auer Edition
Violin Concerto no. 2 mov 3
Nel cor piu non mi sento
Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto mov 3
LATE ROMANTIC
Antonin Dvorak
I like Dvorak but I don't know where to place him. Dvorak is music I listen to to feel, specifically to feel sentimental. Sometimes he hits me just right.
Romance op 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm585H_GP3I String Quartet no. 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtIQphYzACQ Humoreske https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB8mzdO3MnI
Franz Liszt
As a violinist, Liszt was someone that was not on my path of listening and in fact I only started listening to him when I was thinking about who I haven't listened to. And truth be told, I really tried to listen to him, but in the he ended up being hit or miss. I really can't get the Hungarian Rhapsodies, or Transcendental Etudes, or Mephisto Waltzes, or Totentanz, despite also suffering from death anxiety. But the Sonata in B made me obsessed, and introduced me to Arthur Rubinstein who is a pianist I really like.
Leibestraum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkXOrkeZyqQ Sonata in B Minor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pds5KT-T22A Sonata in B Minor arranged for solo violin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d7K6JRHFr8
Jean Sibelius
My encounter with Sibelius is kind of awkward- he wrote in this totally opposite language to what he usually does for his Violin Concerto, which ended up being a monumental work for the violin. Therefore, it was hard for me to get into his other works, which were symphonic and quite peaceful and focused on evoking nature.
Violin Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpPYat2aRB4 Piano Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9COpvQwouc
Johannes Brahms
Violin Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iG9tUJ7Am4
Cesar Franck
It took me a while to find a recording of Heifetz's last recital on Youtube.
Violin Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnL7HJnwvOs Symphony in D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfbOVwzyh20
Henryk Wienawski
Scherzo-tarantelle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB43WLLN6ag Polonaise brillante (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21dsRBeIy8A
Eugene Ysaye
By now, the violin-centrism must be getting obnoxious. At the time of writing this, I am currently playing Ysaye's Sonata no. 4.
Sonata no. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6PMXUr0aSs Sonata no. 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwURbkxB4SU Sonata no. 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeVEKh3qXPM
NEOROMANTIC
Samuel Barber
I quite like Barber. His music has a passionate drive to it. The second movement of the Violin Concerto sounds beautiful and determined, with one instrument soaring after another. The first movement of the Piano Sonata evokes the surface of a sea of tonality, with calm tonal moments and turbulent atonal ones, and the fourth movement evokes desperation and determination. In short, I like this guy's style.
Violin Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM0NIQB3ZHU Piano Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiu4dA-dUYE
IMPRESSIONIST
Maurice Ravel
Ravel rejected the term "impressionist", and I can see why. Of the so-called "impressionists", Ravel's music is often the most direct. As such, Ravel served as my "gateway" into composers like Mompou, Poulenc, Satie, Respighi, and Debussy. Whenever I feel like my products are bad because they are uninspired, I ponder on this quote from Ravel: "The initial idea is nothing [...] We’ve gone past the days when the composer was thought of as being struck by inspiration, feverishly scribbling down his thoughts on a scrap of paper. Writing music is seventy-five percent an intellectual activity.”
Trio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI548t18H2k Piano concerto mov 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeuYd8nltBo Pavane for a dead princess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDYH816q6ao
Francis Poulenc
An indulgence for me. He's very light hearted. As a member of Les Six, he was revolting against both German Romanticism and the current French school at the time, which can be why his music doesn't sound so serious. But it sounds good and makes me think of film noir.
Piano concerto in C-sharp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYTj76epqqs Melancolie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWR7_Z7YThA
Claude Debussy
Everybody loves Debussy- as a contrarian, this led me to not really listen to him at first. However, one should not fall into the opposite pitfall of avoiding a good composer because they are popular.
Pagodes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lswHSnJ0Rlw Sonata for violin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU0H_S3AETA violin arrangements of Beau Soir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OXGJKIeY1M and La fille aux cheveux lin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r32CkvpXzUs Clair de lune arrange for solo violin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8wzwsvaFM4 La cathédrale engloutie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAVyKDDsM3s Cello sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJ33aN63Fs Doctor gradus ad parnassum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEQWBu5CCks
MODERNIST
Bela Bartok
Bela Bartok's concept of Night Music struck me profoundly. Another person has better words than me: "The hypersensitive theme, unspeakably melancholic, is contrasted with the other, hyperobjective theme [...]: as if a soul in tears can only find solace in the non-sensitivity of nature."
Piano concerto no. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlJP4fAckpM Out Of Doors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xU-p9wmSqg Violin Concerto no. 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HlqDkv1PzE Sonata for violin solo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbGoiF2A8o
Leo Ornstein
Humans live really long. To think someone who was considered out of vogue by mid-1920 would live until 2002 at the age of fucking 106. His music really is amazing, though- the reprise moment of the gentle opening theme in Morning In The Woods makes me think of a man dying peacefully, his life flashing before his eyes.
Morning in the woods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL4iXqeXarA Suicide in an airplane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1WaInjHUT0
Dmitry Shostakovich
If I could, Shostakovich would get a post all to his own. This man to me is the ideal artist. So simultaneously be so prolific and yet achieve such high quality is incomprehensible to me. He is the master of the concept of the drop, the moment (see: mov 1 and 4 Piano Trio 2, Prelude and Fugue 3, Prelude and Fugue 24, Quartet 8). Shostakovich is a real experience to listen to- often times, he can give you 20 minutes of pure monotone gray, hammering brutalist architectures, arias to barren wastelands, and right when you've lost all hope, for thirty seconds to a minute there is a breach from which you see a sky of blazing blue, torrential winds tearing everything apart.
And it's the most beautiful music I've ever heard.
Piano Trio no. 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piseWd7PUy4 Violin Concerto no. 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3iSCa50DFg Viola Sonata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ZGlnDW5FQ Prelude and Fugue 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIRgyweQbPY Prelude and Fugue 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jFT9BCq8x4 Prelude and Fugue 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6GCJ90NNnk Prelude and Fugue 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLxEQJJWEpY Prelude and Fugue 24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyrj8TnH1s Symphony no. 15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0iZGMXpquQ
Alfred Schnittke
I have never heard anybody write music on the concept of "life as error" before Schnittke. It could be described as "sad", "tragic", but Schnittke achieved a sound that conveyed a feeling of wrongness, as if one's existence was unnatural and against the natural order of things. The tragic music of the past did not properly convey complete, total hopelessness- as far as I know, only with Schnittke did the feeling of true alienation finally make it to a score and get shared. The Piano Quintet is incredibly bleak and ends on a disturbing ostinato of a lullaby. Concerto Grosso 1 begins and ends with the same prepared piano, as if at the beginning it is telling you you are "cursed" and the collapse at the end was foretold from the beginning and was inevitable. The Requiem has some truly haunting movements, like Requiem Aeternam, Tuba Mirum, and Credo.
The Symphony no. 8 is probably as close as you will get to a perfect work of art- William C White describes it better: "I think Schnittke’s 8th may be the pinnacle of musical art. In that piece, Schnittke sustains the most mystical of moods from start to finish, terrifying us in the first movement, torturing us in the second, ravishing us in the third, unnerving us in the fourth, and leaving us to contemplate all of eternity in the fifth, a movement that must stand completely alone in the history of music as the only symphonic movement dedicated solely to the slow amassing of a single chord."
Symphony no. 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgDwmIGTrhk Piano Quintet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfsQX6BF5J0 Requiem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icNHpzt2JzA Concerto Grosso no. 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaaRk0c-780
NEOCLASSICAL
Aaron Copland
Listening to him can be quite a meditative experience. When I listen to the Clarinet Concerto, the first movement I imagine a dying person losing their consciousness, slowly falling into a bed of flower petals as one by one the components of their thinking disappear. The second movement, they wake up in a pure white limbo and find their best friend who died three years prior, having waited for them. They vow to find each other in their next lives, even if they turned into fish, beasts, or birds, and decide to reincarnate together.
Yes, I am in fact cringe.
Clarinet Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOse3zze8a8 Piano Fantasy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xmqK8dClrg Appalachian Spring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVahuS9hk_s
NONTONAL
Alban Berg
Berg, I think, is not necessarily the access point to the Second Viennese school that he might seem to be after you've listened to a lot of late Romantic stuff. It was only relatively recently after I've already delved into a lot of experimental stuff that I began to appreciate him. He does have that kind of "link" to German Romanticism, though.
Violin Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZW0LpaaAV4 Three Pieces For Orchestra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6U8AqRNyU8
Georgy Ligeti
Ligeti is forbidding and imposing music, a structure so detached from what is comfortable because it only seeks to make sense to itself. I find listening to music by Ligeti or Xenakis is like viewing a sculpture, where the vertical element is the simultaneous overlay of pitches, and the vertical element is time, with the sound texture being the sculpture's material.
Viola Concerto mov 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoW_Yu6uvnE&t=288s Sonata for solo cello https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA0MHmwsq8U Musica Ricercata (notably 1,2,7,8) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZMFFcReUgs Atmospheres https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWlwCRlVh7M
Morton Feldman
Intensely meditative. Combines the calmness and focus of Webern with the sheer length of Xenakis (Xenakis once famously said that only when music goes on after two hours does it begin to have the quality of "scale"). Often can make you feel an intense feeling of loss.
For Aaron Copland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj51jb0_T2I Rothko Chapel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZZ0DYIkaP8 Two Pianos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyzKbLqAYH0 For Philip Guston https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13WGthWZink
Arnold Schoenberg
Even though Schoenberg chronologically came before the prior guys, the truth is he's pretty out there and it would definitely be better if you're already deep into experimental music before going into him- he's like a guy who went to isolation on his own island and made music for himself for thirty years. Like Berg, though, he's also kind of rich in German Romanticism (although stuff like "Farben" can sound pretty impressionistic).
Five Pieces For Orchestra, Farben https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFT6NIYMF1I Piano Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEY9lmCZbIc
POSTROMANTIC
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Rautavaara's music is amazing. It evokes a supernatural object that exists outside of our plane of understanding but intersects it- the effect is created by alternating or overlaying tonal and nontonal music, making us feel like we are understanding some aspect of it but not all. And when his music ends, it's on a dissonant phrase that never resolves but slowly quietens towards silence, as if it was going on forever and simply left our midst, leaving our heads to fill in the details. Incredibly inventive, The Fire Sermon is a short piano piece programmatic in nature alternating between intense turbulent striving and moments of absolute clarity. In "Cantus Arcticus", he even record birds and makes music out of their sounds. Definitely worth listening to.
The Fire Sermon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wSNSk97hEY Piano Concerto no. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BunczhLlJAo Cantus Arcticus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO3YRZWLvQo Double Bass Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XISFEiAy2w
Sofia Gubaidulina
Offertorium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvHeTWOfL1c
(RELATIVELY) CONTEMPORARY
Kaija Saariaho
I fucking love this gal. Sept Papillons is incredibly evocative and optimistic, even. Meanwhile, Petals to me evokes the entrance of a dark cave from which nothing can be seen, a vortex of air going into the void carrying petals into it.
Sept Papillons (especially II and VII) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j0LcmdG1kI Petals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkmzXHTrixI
Lou Harrison
Very optimistic music and a true pleasure to listen to. The Third Symphony is up there in my top music of all time- the lush orchestration and sheer optimism of the first movement, the lively festivity of the second and fourth. The fifth movement evokes a flyby of a Jupiterian planet, one of immense gravity. The last movement is a night festival of lanterns, fragile music evocative of fireflies, that makes you want to grasp the music from the air and protect it.
The Piano Concerto is an incredible study of just intonation- the first movement incredibly gentle, the second movement being joyful and wild, and if you listen to Keith Jarrett's playing he has an incredible cadenza where he resolves the movement from very percussive passages melting into an amazingly tender phrase, before triumphantly finishing the movement with the orchestra.
The Fourth Symphony is unbelievable. The first movement starts out forbidding, but then melts into this extended string passage with a celesta playing into the background becoming incredibly evocative of the night. Amazing. The second movement is fucking wild, a blend of Native American/ Chinese/ American tonalities into one giant festivity. And the last movement- you gotta hear it to believe it.
La Koro Sutro is beyond words. Jesus Christ, this man just will not miss. The Heart Sutra? In Esperanto?
Symphony no. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27I8YOlRZSM Piano Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d85BW_ZUs0 Symphony no. 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN4P5WXTX9M La Koro Sutro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTVEeCDA4wI
Toru Takemitsu
He's like Messiaen, but Eastern, and film-ic. This can only be a good thing.
A Secret Post-Tokyo War Story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=013m7xGkzfk Distance de fee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKi9lmZZT2g
John Adams
Quite cool, I normally hate the Philip Glass and Arvo Part school of minimalism (which Ian Mcdonald describes as "passionless, sexless and emotionally blank soundtrack of the Machine Age, its utopian selfishness no more than an expression of human passivity in the face of mass-production and The Bomb") but I like some of this guy's stuff.
The Dharma At Big Sur, mov 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwMgKDFav0Q Common tones in simple time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2yfw-UkI0
John Luther Adams
A pioneer in drone and natural ambience.
Become Ocean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGva1NVWRXk For Lou Harrison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNuT6jFqQsA
Takashi Yoshimatsu
At first I disliked this guy- he seemed like a second-rate composer of film scores. But he grew on me.
Pleaides Dances https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M2T7y1-WOc Saxophone Concerto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xp9zhpuRlUw Symphony no 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhd5Mp9LEQM
POSTMODERN
John Cage
Very much maligned. You compose good music for a while and nobody cares. You orchestrate 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence and everybody loses their minds.
Sonatas and interludes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26K9f8n6ymU Suite for toy piano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Ob7jTzzEI In a landscape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSmXAG2mYY4
END NOTES
Feel free to discuss classical music in the comments below!
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