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

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.