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

Unfortunately, I don't have Griffiths or Schwartz/Godfrey with me now but we can start with Universal's introduction:

Stockhausen was 23 years old when he composed this piece, scoring it for oboe, bass clarinet, piano and three percussionists. He conducted its premiere performance (Darmstadt, 1952), which ended in a scandal. The structure of the piece, consisting of three “stages,” the processes set in motion (clearly and precisely indicated in Stockhausen’s introduction) were evidently too new, too revolutionary. Now, 60 years later, Kreuzspiel is played the world over, from Tokyo to Sao Paulo to Lucerne, as a standard piece in the repertoire of modern classics.
The work consists of an interplay, a “crossing” or “intersecting” of “temporal and spatial processes” which are “simultaneously linked” in the third stage.

from http://www.universaledition.com/composers-and-works/Karlheinz-Stockhausen/composer/698/work/3248

12ish minutes into De Staat and loving it

What might be the most grooving serial piece up next:

I thought this was going to be Agon!

a kind of grooving anyway IMO

One I like for the car:

56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra Points: 446 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.shadeddog.com/images/rca_ecs-9-v2.jpg

late to this party, but very much looking forward to investigating the results

thanks for doing this!

love Concerto for Orchestra, and along w Rite of Spring and Alexander Nevsky score, part of my "sounds like Star Wars" canon ;) 2nd movt = C3PO and R2D2 providing comic relief as they walk thru the desert on Tatooine

heh

55 John Zorn - Cobra Points: 449 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/gijoe/images/f/fe/Cobra_logo.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100403201428

My #28.

The score is worth checking out.
And this video (by Derek Bailey) covers it as well as any quote I could dig up.

54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos Points: 452 Votes: 4 #1s: 0

http://camra.stphilipsoconnor.org.au/images/bartok_poster.jpg

My #23.

Oh wow. The whole thing! Executive decision time, should we playlist just books 5 and 6 where all the juicy stuff is?

B-b-but books 3 and 4 give you the Chromatic Inventions and "Bulgarian Rhythm". The whole thing is only about 2.5 h. I think we can do it.

alright man I'm going in. Gonna use Dezso Ranki if they got him.

Thx!

no Ranki no Sandor :(

Bartok's wife would seem a reliable choice but I'm afraid of Hungaraton sound quality of that era. Went with Jando, who came up with Ranki and Kocsis under the same teachers and is underrated as a Bartok pianist.

Mikrokosmos is really fun to listen to on shuffle

Jando is the one I've always listened to.

53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion Points: 453 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.musicroom.fr/images/catalogue/fullsize/DU10600.jpg

#15 on my ballot

Played this! Actually, didn't vote for it in favor of a few other Glass pieces, but it's certainly hypnotic. As cheesy and harmonically maudlin as modern-era Glass can be, you can't say he shied away from utterly spartan demonstrations of his concepts.

One more before I head out:

52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Points: 461 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/61/76561-004-1BA38323.jpg

The horn plays unaccompanied on natural (rather than tempered) harmonics at the beginning and the end, onstage in the Prologue. In the Pastoral, the first song, in D flat, Charles Cotton's seventeenth century words "could be a description of a Constable landscape...[while] the horn continues to play in imitative diatonic phrases." So wrote Humphrey Carpenter in his 1992 biography of Britten. In the succeeding Nocturne (words by Alfred Lord Tennyson, ABA form, E flat and C major), the horn echoes and later embellishes its partner's jaunty, triplet-filled melody. Next, in the Blake Elegy, subject matter darkens the music landscape. Its extended horn preface and postlude are dominated by descending half-step intervals, eerily so at the end -- symbolizing "the sense of sin" that had its origin, for Britten, in boarding and public schools that he both dreaded and despised. The anonymous, fifteenth century Lyke Wake Dirge follows in grim G minor, and is keened by the tenor at the upper extreme of his voice, keeping the half-step intervals from the Elegy. Here, however, they ascend. Carpenter calls this "a relentless funeral march in the strings...the tenor's swoops up the octave suggest mortal terror of judgment." Its canonic character turns ghoulish at the horn's brash intrusion more than halfway through. The B flat setting of Ben Jonson's Hymn to Diana, goddess of the moon as well as the chase, is marked "presto e leggiero." Triplet-filled hunting calls and scales passages on the horn are imitated by the tenor in a cadenza near the end. The sixth and final song lets the horn rest while the tenor sings Keats' sonnet about the healing power of sleep, albeit uneasily, almost pleading on repeated high D's at the end ("seal the hushèd casket of my soul") over a sustained D by two solo violins and viola. From offstage, the horn repeats the Prologue note for note in an Epilogue.

Roger Dettmer, AMG

This is another piece where Britten is master of the uncanny for me. It's also one of the works that makes it glaringly obvious that he was a for-real genius in his musical response to language. Those decisions he makes that are so unlikely and yet perfect.

the lyke wake dirge section is just total goosebump material for me whenever i listen to that

51 Edgard Varèse - Ionisation Points: 467 Votes: 5 #1s: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AmRtnikwUMw/maxresdefault.jpg

Ionisation is scored for some three dozen percussion instruments, of which only three--chimes, celesta,
and piano--are capable of playing notes in the equal-tempered scale. Composition based on the
preeminence of pitch here gives way to a music of timbres and rhythms. As the first of many allpercussion
scores written in this century, Ionisation is remarkably subtle in its use of those instruments.
The form is articulated by changing sonorities--a passage scored only for metal instruments; a fleeting
duet for drums and maracas; a hair-raising moment (the first sustained loud point in the score) when
several players have the same triplet figure (a rhythmic unison); the first high, Morse-code clanging of the
anvils, more than midway through. The grand and sonorous coda is marked by the entrance of the piano,
celesta, and chimes--the three instruments of definite pitch. Varèse once defined his mission as the
"liberation of sound" (just as Schoenberg promised the "emancipation of dissonance.") Ionisation is the
purest demonstration of his success, and of his eventual influence. It is the work of both a pioneer and a
master.

from: http://cso.org/uploadedFiles/1_Tickets_and_Events/Program_Notes/ProgramNotes_Varese_Ionisation.pdf

Recap:

51 edgard varèse - Ionisation
52 Benjamin Britten - Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings
53 Philip Glass - Music in Similar Motion
54 Bela Bartok - Mikrokosmos
55 John Zorn - Cobra
56 Bela Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra
57 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kreuzspiel
58 Edgard Varese - Density 21.5
59 Louis Andriessen - De Staat
60 Maurice Ravel - Rapsodie espagnole
61 Yamashiro Shoji (with Geinoh Yamashirogumi) - Akira (Original Soundtrack)
62 Bela Bartok - String Quartet no. 4
63 Maurice Ravel - String Quartet in F
64 Benjamin Britten - War Requiem
65 Steve Reich - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ
66 Pierre Boulez - le marteau sans maître
67 Brian Eno - Discreet Music
68 John Luther Adams - Become Ocean
69 Jerry Goldsmith - Alien, film score
70 Gustav Mahler - Das Lied von der Erde
71 Igor Stravinsky - Les Noces
72 Claude Debussy - String Quartet in G Minor
73 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 9
74 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic
75 Antonin Dvořák - Symphony no. 9 ('New World')
76 Iannis Xenakis - Pithoprakta
76 Steve Reich - Sextet
78 Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question
79 Jean Sibelius - Symphony No. 4
80 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 5
81 Philip Glass - Akhnaten
82 George Gershwin - An American In Paris
83 Antonin Dvořák - Rusalka
84 Steve Reich - Piano Phase
85 Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut
86 Claude Debussy - Etudes
87 Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
88 luciano berio - Sequenza III (for female voice)
89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments
90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score
90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village
92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City')
93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem
94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat
95 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 3
96 John Cage - First Construction in Metal
97 Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music
98 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
99 Benjamin Britten - The Turn of the Screw, opera after Henry James
100 Gérard Grisey - Les espaces acoustiques

We're at the halfway mark!

Varèse is the king of the 20th century for me i think, a channel thru which almost everything good and important flows; but i feel like he's under-served in terms of great recordings. anybody got any suggestions?

The 2CD set on decca conducted by Chailly was considered the new benchmark when it came out. I don't have many others besides that, just Boulez. Can't remember how the two Naxos discs were reviewed.

Certainly the more specialized pieces have been recorded a lot on mixed recital discs. There are a lot of density 21.5s and ionisations out there.

Also Robert Craft recorded most of the Varese oeuvre on Columbia in the early 70s and while I haven't listened to it it has a cool ass cover.

think I've got the Chailly, not sure about it tbh

Our #50 might be top 5 if you asked the right composition faculties.

50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire Points: 471 Votes: 3 #1s: 0
http://timerime.com/upload/resized/41207/485045/resized_image2_5c8665dc9357c37ffbba275ebf9265a1.jpg

#8 for me. Interesting that it only made three people's ballots.

Should be top 10 but that's true of a lot of things that have already placed!

Definitely the most glaring 'TOO LOW' for me. Even #8 on my ballot was probably too low, listening to Lucy Shelton's recording now. A piece I keep getting more out of. Every aspect of it is so delicious and masterful, simultaneously comic and eerie/deranged. How many innovations go back to this one piece?: the uniquely expressive and dramatic sprechtstimme vocal part, the chamber instrumentation so lovely and effective that "Pierrot ensemble" became a standard type of modern chamber ensemble, obviously the atonal language, but also Schoenberg's fine sensitivity to timbre and dynamics here.

A friend of mine celebrated her 30th birthday by renting out a bar and performing Pierrot Lunaire in it.

Woah.

I know someone who commissioned every composer she could find (a lot because she's a hotshot pianist) to write a short piano piece for her to play on her 30th.

49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet Points: 473 Votes: 3 #1s: 0

http://www.paraethos.com/images/aqualung2.jpg

This is where I admit that, as much as I like the idea behind this, and as much as I like Sinking of the Titanic, and as much as I like Frederik's story, this piece has always driven me a bit bonkers, at least the original 25m recording, which is the only one I ever listened to.

I love this piece so much. Guaranteed to unclog even the most stubborn tear ducts, at least for me.

Whoa, I honestly didn't think this would show up over Sinking. I'm not sure Gavin Bryars has two recordings in the top 100 classical works of the 20th century, but I love this piece. And yeah, it should be heard in a big church late at night, pretty drunk and with a pretty person by your side.

Also, can't wait to dive into all these works I've never checked out. I mean, I know Schoenberg - we're doing Friede auf Erden this october, and wow! - but never know where to start. Pierrot Lunaire it is.

Oh man, if you've never heard it before, Pierrot is OPO material.

I can see how Jesus' Blood... could seem mawkish and/or irritating but it's one of the pieces of music I remember hearing as a kid, and for some reason the strongest memory it provokes is my granddad dying and so... I ended up not voting for it because I couldn't bear to listen to it again.

Sorry to be a downer

I think I find "Jesus' Blood" a little too sentimental but there are times when sentimental is fine. Pierrot shd've been higher but I didn't vote so there it is