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

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!