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

If you haven't seen the segment from Allegro non Troppo that is set to this, it's a must-see.

I chickened out of showing it to my class when I taught music appreciation some years back.

confession: i still think this piece is about a deer, no matter how often others attempt to disabuse me of the notion.

The quiet revolution

had i thought about it i would have expected this to come in very high, makes me wonder if it's all massive hits from this point on

By 'hits' are you including stuff that ILX would love but maybe isn't a big-selling recording? I think Feldman's Rothko Chapel is probably top 10 but I can't imagine finding it at a Goodwill.

Hm, that's an interesting pick. (I also wondered about "hits".)

There's one major 20th century composer, for a fair number of people the greatest 20th century composer, and definitely one of the most programmed in the concert hall at this point, who hasn't shown up at all yet. Which is interesting.

22 Arvo Pärt - Fratres Points: 648 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ink_prod/photos/0291/2215/photo_large.JPG

Oh, do you mean Rachmaninov, Jon?

Cmd-F "copland" also yields zero results.

No neither of them.

John Williams?

Shostakovich!

Whoa.

fgti didn't vote obv.

Although top 20 is still a mystery...

No Prokofiev so far either.

Nor Carl Nielsen! But that might just be me.

I don't think I knew who Nielsen was before this poll tbh. I don't think he has the same level of international recognition as the people we're talking about.

I voted one of the Nielsen symphonies very high. He has some unbelievable stuff. Prokofiev is super underrated because of his freakish facility with hooks. Something that tuneful can't be good. And tbh my main Prokofiev vote was for one of his most bristling modernist things.

(But something that tuneful can be good, obv)

And here we go again:

21 Claude Debussy - Preludes (Books 1 and 2) Points: 663 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 1
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/X6BbTo9JaHs/maxresdefault.jpg

A treasure trove of post-tonal theory examples.

Recap of 21-100:

21 Claude Debussy - Preludes (Books 1 and 2)
22 Arvo Pärt - Fratres
23 Claude Debussy - Prélude a l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)
24 Gustav Holst - The Planets
25 Leonard Bernstein et al - West Side Story
26 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 6
27 Duke Ellington - The Far East Suite
28 John Cage - 4'33'
29 Philip Glass - Music in 12 Parts
30 Olivier Messiaen - L'Ascension
31 Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung
32 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 3
33 Igor Stravinsky - Agon
34 Luciano Berio - Sinfonia
35 Alban Berg - Wozzeck
35 Gyorgy Ligeti - Requiem
37 Gyorgy Ligeti - Lux Aeterna
38 Gabriel Fauré - Requiem in D minor
39 Claude Debussy - Nocturnes
40 Claude Debussy - La mer
41 Bela Bartok - Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion
42 Arvo Pärt - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten
43 John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for the Prepared Piano
44 Steve Reich - Tehillim
45 Claude Debussy - Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp
46 Jean Sibelius - Symphony no. 6
47 Ennio Morricone - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
48 Alfred Schnittke - Concerto for Choir
49 Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet
50 Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire
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

I was the person who gave this #1. My gateway to a whole universe.

Shut out of the top 20 wwwwtttttffffff

"Fratres" definitely my favorite Pärt piece, esp. the CD w/all the different versions

That's a great list. Didn't vote so can't predict a top 20 at all but I'm supposing Gorecki and Morton Feldman will be in the top 20? Maybe more Debussy, Glass and Part too.

Steve Reich in there too obviously...

One sad thing I notice, which I guess isn't that surprising given how sexism has influenced the classical canon (as well as other canons, of course, but I think it's particularly noticable in classical music), that there is only one woman composer in the top 100 so far. I doubt that Sofia Gubaidulina or Lili Boulanger (who were both in my top 5) will make it to the list anymore, nor Kaija Saariaho or Laurie Spiegel or Unsuk Chin, but I guess Alice Coltrane and Wendy Carlos might still have a chance due to their broader "pop" appeal?

20 Steve Reich - Different Trains Points: 667 Votes: 6 #1 Votes: 0
http://www.jmeshel.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Steve_reich_different_trains_electric_counterpoint.jpg

http://www.trainsandtravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/map.gif

i like, say, ruth crawford seeger and saariaho (who i didn't realize was a woman) myself (didn't vote, though, i got overwhelmed), but my gut feeling on this is that the systemic prejudice of the classical canon against women has its biggest effect before we get to the point where we're making lists of our favorite notated works, that women simply aren't given the opportunity to compose great works, to develop the skill set which allows one to composer great works, that men are. it's like trying to make a list of the greatest all-time american football quarterbacks - a really high proportion of them are going to be white.

It is a bit shocking to realize just how lopsided it is, though. I had hopes for Caroline Shaw, Gubaidalina and Saariaho, though I only voted for Shaw. Didn't feel I knew the others well enough, but had hoped to find some good recommendations here.

I mean, I doubt that we'd find many women composers in the canon of most Western musical styles from 1890-1960 or so, maybe a little more in e.g. the blues but surely not a majority. It's definitely true that art music composition (not performance or education) has tended to remain stubbornly male-dominated, although a lot of my favourite present-day composers are women. (Non-white composers is an even greater lacuna. I mostly take these things as obvious by now.) Aside from Monk, I voted for Caroline Shaw, Julia Wolfe, Kate Soper, Jennifer Higdon, Pauline Oliveros, and Saariaho fwiw, so I'd recommend them. Check out this Soper piece.

Undeniable and uncomfortable truth.

Female composers are out there composing, though, more than ever before. But for the most part we don't have them on our lists. Saariaho is very close to being my favorite active composer but that doesn't excuse me.

(Xposts)

my gut feeling on this is that the systemic prejudice of the classical canon against women has its biggest effect before we get to the point where we're making lists of our favorite notated works, that women simply aren't given the opportunity to compose great works, to develop the skill set which allows one to composer great works, that men are.

I agree that this effect is the biggest explaining factor with earlier centuries, but certainly not with the 20th and 21st century! There's a long list of women composers who have simply been ignored or at least not given the attention they deserve because of implicit or explicit sexism.

Take, for example, someone like Germaine Tailleferre: she was a member of the Les Six, lived until 1983, and has a large body of work that (in my opinion) is certainly comparable in quality with the five men in the group. But she's still been performed and recorded way less than Milhaud or Poulenc or Honegger, with only a handful of recordings available (and even those are almost solely her chamber works, as they are obviously cheaper to record) as small prints on small labels, so the majority of her oeuvre remains unrecorded.

So with Tailleferre sexism has meant she's been performed less and recorded less, which means there's less chances of hearing her music, which in turn means there's less chance of her ever making it into the canon, even among those people (like everyone who voted here surely is) who are not sexist themselves and have nothing against rating women composers.

(xxxpost)

Tbf, the other members of Les Six didn't do so great in this poll either. (I had to Google to remember Auric and Durey.)

I generally vibe very strongly with the French and francophone compositional aesthetic (Debussy, koechlin, Ohana, ravel, Messiaen, Delerue, Desplat all huge for me and saariaho is practically an honorary Gaul) but the Les six moment is a moment which has failed to ignite me

(I tried to consider a devil's advocate position of e.g. "do we also need concern ourselves that there aren't more male flautists?" but then I realised that all of the legendary flautists I can think of are men. So yeah.) As a guitarist, I do tend to think that Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking composers have been somewhat marginalized in the canon as well.

Another poll veteran.

19 Jean Sibelius - Tapiola Points: 668 Votes: 4 #1s: 0
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Yy0_zqEOp4A/hqdefault.jpg

Interesting that this placed higher than those symphonies. Idk if that's due to Alex Ross's efforts or yours, Jon.:P (I would have ranked it higher than those symphonies myself if I included any Sibelius on my ballot.)

My highest ranking Sibelius! Different Trains otoh I never really cared for -- assuming that Music for 18 Musicians is still to come, and really hoping Drumming didn't get shut out of this.

speaking of, 80 years old today!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/03/steve-reich-80-birthday-best-works-pieces

There will only be one newcomer to the poll today. But he is not up next...

18 Arvo Pärt - Tabula Rasa Points: 682 Votes: 5 #1s: 0
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Wachstafel.jpg

Man, I've just never really connected with this composer at all. His stuff always sounds pleasant when I listen to it but it just sort of washes over me.