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

This is where I admit that I can't remember if I've ever listened to this.

xxxxp Sund4r

I have an extremely limited experience with notated music. Basically just a dumbass going through it and drawing some loose pop analogies. So I like parts of baroque that work like jazz (intriguing variations and such) and pop (pretty and intuitive tunes) but dislike those that work like metal ("dark" and pompous, plenty of vocal stuff). The romantic period seems to emphasize the metal tendencies so I'm struggling with it. I can't get into most IDM and ambient music and feel serialism and spectralism, respectively, are their kindered spirits. Love Reich to death but can't get behind Arvo Part and such. There are things I don't think pop music can do better or even do at all cause they are so linked to very specific historical circumstance. Music of the lords if you will. So the regal pomp of Handel or pastoral nostalgia in the Lark Ascending register. Pop doesn't really do stuff like that. Not well at least.

Looking forward to this countdown changing my mind on plenty of this. Or at least giving me more nuance.

This was the first Mahler symphony I got into obsessively. It's still the apotheosis of 'young mahler' for me. I feel like he is summoning the whole bohemian woodlands music tradition here (gm would have been born Czech if he was born in the same place but during the 20c)

Wait am I wrong about that

No, that's correct.

Well, sort of. The Czech Republic has only existed since 1993, so. But where Mahler was born and raised is today located in the Czech Republic, yeah. Nationalities didn't really make sense like that back then. Mahler was a German speaking Jew, and said he felt thrice homeless, as a bohemian amongst austrians, an austrian amongst germans, and a jew in the world.

He was born really close to the dividing, where the jewish community oriented itself towards Vienna or Prague. Imagine Mahler composing in the tradition of Smetana and Dvorak, but, y'know, as originally as Mahler.

I feel the 3rd is where that strain is heard most robustly

Cool, simmel. Ha, I always think of the Cage percussion and prepared piano pieces as forerunners to IDM. The spectralism/ambient thing definitely makes sense, esp if you're talking about something like SAW II or noisier ambient drone.

Btw, a lot of jazz and (mostly pre-rock) pop was eligible for this poll! I was sort of hoping someone would do a ballot that was all Broadway and Tin Pan Alley tunes.

Wow @ 33m-long first movement to Mahler 3. It's good stuff so far, though. We'll sit with this for a while before moving on.

Didn't catch that unfortunately. Dislike Broadway generally but could muster a solid top 20 Tin Pan Alley ballot. Pre-rock pop seems worthy of it's own poll. Anyway, thanks for not laughing off my analogies. Love Mahler!

Did someone say cumbia?

https://youtu.be/OQn61-Q2dwQ

― _Rudipherous

Hahaha but that's POLLERA with an A. You might think it means woman who sells chickens but pollera is actually a traditional one piece dress that is used in latin america.

Oops. Yes, I was hoping it was just the female version.

I'm still a little confused about this pollero/cumbia thing. Are chicken salesmen a common topic for cumbia songs?

This long-ass Mahler symphony is ruling btw. What this sort of thing should be all about, you know?

Goddamn is this poll-running business draining. Gonna be a challenge to make it through 10 days and get a recording done.

Anyway, some spiritual hat minimalism up next.

94 Arvo Pärt - Magnificat Points: 329 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2925/14070849383_04f4c1b0c3_b.jpg

The quote about First Construction above was from Schwartz and Godfrey btw.

I voted for this! And I've sung this. Love it.

93 Maurice Duruflé - Requiem Points: 332 Votes: 2 #1 Votes: 0

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Pic-Lib-BIG/Durufle-Maurice-03.jpg

The first composer in this countdown whom I honestly knew nothing about.

Although he was born in 1902 and died in 1986, Maurice Duruflé is not a typical 20th-century musician. Compared with other great composers of his day — Bernstein, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten — he seems strangely out of touch with his times, both in his music and his personality. Duruflé has been described by students, colleagues, and biographers as a reclusive and private person who seemed unusually unsure and timid given his fame. He lived in Paris during one its most chaotic and creative periods, and yet he had no interest in sharing in the salons of the literary and musical elite. Eschewing change, he was a conservative in a radical world. In 1969, for example, on hearing a jazz mass in one of its chapels at Saint Étienne, he expressed his outrage in a loud voice over what he considered to be a scandalous travesty!

His four gregorian motets are great and I voted for them. Ubi Caritas might be the prototype for a lot of shitty music - Morten Lauridsen, Ola Gjeilo, etc - but that doesn't make it any less great. Like, check it out on youtube.

It's looking like most of us are drifting off for the night. I thought the next composer might do even better than he did, owing to the strong avant-metal cru presence in the voter base for this poll, but he still did pretty well for himself.

92 Glenn Branca - Symphony no. 13 ('Hallucination City') Points: 333 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/543625625-the-glenn-branca-ensemble-performing-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=X7WJLa88Cweo9HktRLaNXgBZzacLBctF1C%2BJeKCcxSlSU1A3jo026GWAQdQg%2FkbrRnCvC3trKDy%2BzsWL%2FojZ4g%3D%3D

Finally officially released on CD, a contender for my AOTY.

Ha, just realised that it's nearly 3 am in the UK.

Each guitar is strung with two pairs of three strings, tuned an octave apart. (The soprano guitar is tuned to B, the tenor guitar to E, and the alto guitar to G.) The unrecorded Guitars D'Amour, performed at Expo 94 in Seville, Spain, was Branca's first and last piece for guitars in standard tuning. Symphonies No. 8 and 10 featured an octave guitar tuned to E, but covering 3 octaves, with 2 pairs of strings per octave. The bass guitars are in standard tuning, except on the final problem, where all guitars use a microtonal variation of Branca's normal tuning.

In his work with electric guitars, Branca has experiemented with density and volume, and the unpredictable acoustic phenomena generated through sound fields. He has invented new instruments and a compositional system to express his discoveries about the harmonic series.

Branca originally wrote his Symphony No. 13, "Hallucination City," for the year 2000 celebrations in Paris, hoping for an ensemble of 2,000 guitarists. When that performance did not happen, he premiered the work on June 13, 2001 outdoors in front of the World Trade Center in New York City with 100 guitarists. He has recently recorded the work, and last month he performed it at the Montclair State University School of the Arts in New Jersey.

"Structurally, it was perhaps Branca's most impressive work ever, filling out 62 minutes with no movement breaks. It started out purely consonant, repeating simple rising motives," Kyle Gann wrote in his review of the premiere for The Village Voice. "Starting at a deafening level, the work got louder almost throughout, and - after a stasis of a few minutes that could have signaled an ending - suddenly burst into tensely rising chromatic scales."

"It's true that the sheer loudness of Branca's guitar symphonies tends to overwhelm all other considerations," Gann wrote in an essay for American Mavericks. "But it's equally true that his rhythmicized, repetitive conflicts between harmonies preserve the heart of the symphonic tradition, especially if you compare them with Branca's 19th-century symphonic hero, Anton Bruckner."

From: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/symphony-no-13-hallucination-city-for-100-electric-guitars-glenn-branca

We're in for another whiplash change of pace, with a tie for the #90 spot before we call it a night.

TIE 90 Les Baxter - Quiet Village Points: 335 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

http://stagoleeshop.com/images/product_images/original_images/lesbaxter.jpg

90 Ennio Morricone - For A Few Dollars More, film score Points: 335 Votes: 4 #1 Votes: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eU1oj-gos4k/hqdefault.jpg

TIE

Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/user/1213493496/playlist/1gdrjEQPZiP44ODeNysAyS

Thank you Sund4r

The Tudor/Wergo recording of the Cage that Jon chose for the playlist is sounding great.

The two way tie for 90 both on my ballot. The power the exotica impulse in music has over me remains inscrutable. No amount of self-deconstruction lessens its effect. Les is its king. (Perhaps it's my woeful lack of travel)

Fistful of Dollars might be the more aha moment but I think that For a Few Dollars More is even more brilliant.

An overactive radiator and the miseries of life are keeping me up so let's get an early start in on this.

88 Luciano Berio - Sequenza III (for female voice) Points: 342 Votes: 5 #1 Votes: 0

https://compagniaoltremare.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/voce-seq.png

Whoops! I skipped #89, very sorry!

89 Igor Stravinsky - Symphonies of Wind Instruments Points: 340 Votes: 3 #1 Votes: 0

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F68BMpyGecs/hqdefault.jpg

"[The Symphonies of Wind Instruments] is not meant 'to please' an audience or rouse its passions. I had hoped, however, that it would appeal to those in whom a purely musical receptivity outweighed the desire to satisfy emotional cravings."

- Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography

In contrast to his lavish "audience lollipop" The Firebird (1910), Stravinsky described the Symphonies of Wind Instruments as "an austere ritual that is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogenous instruments." Using the terminology of sacred music, Stravinsky creates "short litanies" comprised of varied, discrete musical ideas, from lively cantilena melodies that recall the Russian folk tunes of his early works to ascetic chorales that look forward to his sacred works like the Symphony of Psalms (1930).

Stripping the term "symphonies" of its Classical-era associations, Stravinsky here invokes the word's root meaning, "sounding together." To this end, Stravinsky rapidly juxtaposes blocks of sound, each with its own instrumental, rhythmic, and temporal identity. The effect is a kind of disjointed, collage-like form, whose visual corollary can be found in the Cubist canvases of his friend and collaborator Pablo Picasso. Emphasizing precision over expression, Stravinsky creates four discrete tempos (whose relationships are multiples of each other) that must be strictly adhered to and in which, in the words of writer Paul Griffiths, "rubato is ruled out."

- From: http://www.laphil.com/philpedia/music/symphonies-of-wind-instruments-igor-stravinsky

Regarding Sequenza III, which placed higher, at #88:

The voice carries always an excess of connotations, whatever it is doing. From the grossest of noises to the most delicate of singing, the voice always means something, always refers beyond itself and creates a huge range of associations. In Sequenza III I tried to assimilate many aspects of everyday vocal life, including trivial ones, without losing intermediate levels or indeed normal singing. In order to control such a wide range of vocal behaviour, I felt I had to break up the text in an apparently devastating way, so as to be able to recuperate fragments from it on different expressive planes, and to reshape them into units that were not discursive but musical. The text had to be homogeneous, in order to lend itself to a project that consisted essentially of exorcising the excessive connotations and composing them into musical units. This is the “modular” text written by Markus Kutter for Sequenza III.

Give me a few words for a woman
to sing a truth allowing us
to build a house without worrying before night comes

In Sequenza III the emphasis is given to the sound symbolism of vocal and sometimes visual gestures, with their accompanying “shadows of meaning”, and the associations and conflicts suggested by them. For this reason Sequenza III can also be considered as a dramatic essay whose story, so to speak, is the relationship between the soloist and her own voice
Sequenza III was written in 1965 for Cathy Berberian.

Luciano Berio

From http://www.lucianoberio.org/node/1460?1487325698=1

Sequenza III is another longtime favourite, which knocked me out when I heard it in that history class at 19, with just the sheer range of what he (and Berberian in the classic recording obv) was able to get out of the human voice, both technically and expressively. The guitar sequenza is one that I might have listened to more but this will always be definitive for me.

Anyway, risks of doing these things without enough sleep etc.

Duruflé's Requiem was #2 in my ballot. Besides Fauré's famous one (with which it's often paired on recordings), it's my favourite requiem of all time, and one of my top 10 religious pieces in general. I love calm serenity with which both of them tackled the heaviest of subject matters, though Fauré's approach I guess is a bit prettier compared to Duruflé's more solemn one. I can't really say I prefer one above the other, but I decided to place Duruflé higher in this poll because he needs more recognition than Fauré.

sund4r's quote is correct that Duruflé was very much out of time, and he seems to have not been influenced much by contemporary 20th century music, neither by avant-garde nor popular stuff. Apparently he was also incredibly self-critical, publishing only a handful of compositions he was absolutely satisfied with (mostly organ music). The entirety his published output fits on two CDs, I think.

this is all v nice so far. i've surprised myself by knowing most of it (tho never even heard of duruflé!), maybe i should have voted after all. i'll be sure to participate in the next ilm notated music poll fifty years from now

A quick recap:

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

So I'd well recommend checking pretty much anything by him, it's all wonderful. For the requiem, you can go wrong with the version he himseld conducted, though there good later ones to, such as this one. For the organ works, Marie-Claire Alain's interpretations are the best ones I know, though I'm not sure if they've been compiled on one recording. For a complete organ works I disc, I like this one, where Vincent Warnier plays on Duruflés "home organ" (the one in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont where he served as an organist).

(xxpost)

"though there are good later ones too"

I did listen to almost all of his Requiem last night. It was pleasant, yeah. I could see myself putting it on again.

Something truly obscure up next.