Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1910s

Oh lol. I have never knowingly heard ICP.

Firebird suite

That said, Sund4r, I'd love to read your thoughts on Sprechgesang, so feel free to post them as you see fit. As you know, my technical knowledge of music is severely limited.

Concord Sonata, frankly. Stravinsky was ooga booga-ing for the bourgeoisie while Ives was creating a masterpiece of proto-post-modernity

Jesus Christ tho it’s like

The Debussy sonata AND the Janacek AND Prokofiev 1 AND Elgar Cello AND even El Amor Brujo which totally rules

This was like the zenith of fun classical music

More fun than the roaring twenties?

I suppose we'll find out soon enough.

i'd like to see an informed defence of sprechgesange which set out how you can tell the good performances from the bad

(it all sounds annoying to me but i am also unreconciled with most classical singing, in all its various evolving periods, so maybe i am just irredeemable as a listening appreciator -- ps i get that juggalot lunaire is meant to sound unhinged, and expressionist versions of unhinged get p overstatedly caligari p quickly)

first line reads snarkier than intended, that's actually what i'd like to read! esp.from sund4r!!

Probably gonna vote "Vers la flamme" tho.

An excellent choice. Which version do you prefer? (I'm partial to Roger Woodward.)

i'd like to see an informed defence of sprechgesange which set out how you can tell the good performances from the bad

― mark s

i can't give you an informed defense, but if you want to hear bad sprechgesang listen to frank zappa, for instance "the dangerous kitchen"

or even more than that, "star wars won't work"

when the venn diagram of things i very much don't want to hear forms a perfect circle

Mark do you like Wozzeck

ooga booga-ing for the bourgeoisie

Thanks for the display name!

im persuadable (i'm listenable to the boulez version right now)

yes thats what i meant to write

Try Dohnányi's – Eberhard Wächter is a much better Sprechgesänger than Walter Berry imo.

(This may go some way towards responding to your initial challenge.)

ok :)

(tho i'd still also like an actual real informed musician-composer-teacher to pin down their sense of the necessary precepts) (to give me something to disagree with as i'm processing it lol)

BTW, I can only assume that Prokofiev's 2nd Piano Concerto is going to be counted as a 1920s piece based on the reconstruction. Because that absolutely is one of the top 10 pieces of music ever written.

Indeed (to the former – I'm not a huge Prokofiev stan beyond the 1st Violin Concerto and the War Sonatas).

That's fine, so long as it has a seat at the table.

Don't worry, it will. And I'm still curious to hear your Vers la flamme recording pick. :)

Might be the piano he's using, but Horowitz's is right up there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0nrg7Lqfak

Good stuff.

(At work. Will post at lunch!)

I think this is my favourite decade of classical music but there's quite a lot I haven't heard of here! Got a lot of love for the Bartok string quartet, Three Places in New England, the Debussy preludes and images, the Planets, the Firebird (got a totally charming recording on pedal steel guitar), the Rite of Spring, both the Vaughan Williams, and Strauss' absent Alpine Symphony (if just for the opening, which I used to play over & over).

I'd like to write in a vote for Charles Villiers Stanford's The Blue Bird from his 1910 8 part songs, which cuts me deep for personal reasons and feels so full of loss. Of these I'll vote for Debussy's first book of preludes

I'll seek out that Stanford piece (I'm not familiar with his oeuvre at all tbh).

As ever, don't hesitate to prop up favourite recordings should you have any. I very much admire Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's way with Debussy and the Préludes in particular. And the immortal Michelangeli…

Voted Book I of the Préludes, where I think Pollini gets it more right* than most (*right as in, "how I think each one should go"). Hope someone throws a bone to Webern's 6 Pieces though - the version on the complete works box conducted by Boulez is controlled hysteria.

You can refer to a score here: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/03959/pnba

NB: I am not a singer.

So this may be basic stuff but, as per Schoenberg's instructions, aiui, the vocalist is expected to follow the notated rhythms strictly. The notated pitches are to be struck but let go immediately and the vocalist follows the line in sliding towards the next note, which strikes me (a non-singer) as pretty tricky. With a mix of conjunct and very disjunct (plenty of sevenths and ninths) contours in the line, and the wide, detailed dynamic range, you have quite a substantial expressive repertoire to work from, but it is one that is also carefully notated and can certainly be followed (and evaluated). Compositionally, the way he could use recognizable sets of intervals in each movement can provide unity. Is that a helpful start? Any vocalists want to jump in?

no clue for this decade, gonna have to listen/relisten to everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnMv6-XTROY

2xp He did elaborate later that the pitches should be 'good' but not 'strictly adhered to'.

xp ^^^^ a bourgeoisie properly ooga booga'ed

Ever since I came back around on "classical", this period has been the anchor for my appreciation and understanding of music in general. Amazing how this hazy anxious uncertain cloud of sound just swept in and made the stuff from just a couple decades before seem old and antiquated. This is probably my favourite decade of "classical" music. Voted Concord Sonata on this but I could have gone with any of a dozen pieces, especially the Scriabin sonatas.

Thanks for the display name!

<3

I love Rite Of Spring on a technical level, top 10 works of all time for sure, but when I think about what Concord was attempting (and succeeding at, gloriously)? There is honestly no 20th c. work I admire more.

I don't know if I've been posting about it recently-- upon reading "Essays After A Sonata" my awe of this sonata just runneth over-- but I think the only comparable work to it is Finnegan's Wake; FW works so well as a casual read (or read aloud) and is richly rewarding upon close examination. And in Concord, there are stupefying moments throughout. Certain nudge-and-wink compositional aspects of it-- the viola and flute, the board-- are, sure, hilarious in their apparent superfluousness, but are SO GORGEOUS in execution.

I mean listen to this, this moment in "Hawthorne" is so glorious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDNPpsUaVYo&t=17m40s

My favourite passage

Hm: hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDNPpsUaVYo&t=17m40s

Oh wow, Debussy Jeux didn't even make the long-list here? scandaloos

Fuck.

This is as ridiculous as the absence of Sibelius's Violin Concerto in the last poll. Mea culpa, once again.

You gotta have either Jeux or the Etudes, man. The place-setters for the next phase of Debussy if not for that goddamn colon tumor.

This is the decade to end all decades. So many masterpieces left off but you know, it’s ok, it makes the vote a little less agonizing!

But I was all set to vote Preludes Bk I for this one, Sibelius either the 7th or Tapiola for the next one. But I forgot fucking Pierrot aggghhhhh

Curiously I don’t feel too tempted by the rite...

It's a testament to the strength of the decade that the Debussy Preludes are not currently in my top 2. I'm pretty sure I wrote a paper on the Concord Sonata in undergrad but I don't remember it very well, weirdly. I can't not listen to it now. Unlikely that anything will beat Pierrot in the end, though.

So this may be basic stuff but, as per Schoenberg's instructions, aiui, the vocalist is expected to follow the notated rhythms strictly. The notated pitches are to be struck but let go immediately and the vocalist follows the line in sliding towards the next note, which strikes me (a non-singer) as pretty tricky. With a mix of conjunct and very disjunct (plenty of sevenths and ninths) contours in the line, and the wide, detailed dynamic range, you have quite a substantial expressive repertoire to work from, but it is one that is also carefully notated and can certainly be followed (and evaluated). Compositionally, the way he could use recognizable sets of intervals in each movement can provide unity. Is that a helpful start? Any vocalists want to jump in?

That is indeed helpful, thanks.

There are quite a few excellent performances of Pierrot lunaire available on YT, so side-by-side comparisons are easily undertaken by amateurs such as myself. It also goes without saying that the visual component is hardly irrelevant to the work.

Kiera Duffy does an amazing job here and I'm surprised to encounter Cristian Măcelaru in this repertoire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2cBUJmDr8

The place-setters for the next phase of Debussy if not for that goddamn colon tumor

Tbf three more Sonatas were in the works, so the first three are as much an indication of future directions as Jeux and the 12 Etudes. Not to mention he was a jingoistic motherfucker who could have easily devolved into writing ear-numbing music pour la mère patrie, especially given his response to WWI. But I like to think that wouldn't have happened regardless.

I mean I love it, it rules, it birthed a new moon, but I love it just as much for the sweepstakes it kicked off where every place on earth eventually had a composer floating that land’s own stomping folk colossus. And for the glorious genre of horror film scoring.

Xpost to self

it's Ives' Concord

you dating his Fourth Symphony to the 1920's? fair enough if so!

Yep.

Re Prokofiev peak works convo
The 2nd and 3rd symphonies are magnificent monsters, you pom need to hear them if you haven’t

I have heard them and I don't get them at all. But it's been ages... I'll revisit them next week.

Btw, for the 1920s poll, pls don't forget Heitor Villa-Lobos - Douze études pour guitare. Probably won't defeat the best of Bartok/Webern/Schoenberg but the 11th is still probably my favourite thing to play.

Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is peak music

Don't worry Sund4r, I've got you covered. I've got reservations aplenty about Villa-Lobos's output but those Etudes are all-time.

Xpost quite possibly my favorite piece of chamber music

So many cool prototypical and influential ensembles from this general time period

That Debussy trio
The “Pierrot ensemble”
Bartok two pianos and percussion

OTM

Yeah, that's 100% otm.

I'm really struggling here. Might just go with The Oceanides in the end but Vers la flamme is equally tempting (they all are).

Fuck it, I'm going with Mahler's 9th, which was probably the most important music ever to me as a 19 year-old.

the first movement is about as good as music gets

Yep. And when Jascha Horenstein is conducting it, the whole thing.

i'll give this one to scriabin sonata 10

Deserved imo. Which reminds me:

My Tenth Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun ... they are the kisses of the sun.

Ok Alex.

you know he's right

I never heard back from mark! Did the description of sprechgesang give you something to process and disagree with?

Almost ran out of time again. Somewhat arbitrary late vote for the Ravel (D&C) I had in mind before I even saw the list. Aaargh.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Poor moonstruck Pierrot.

Hard to argue with the winner, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Art_works_that_caused_riots

I respect Stravinsky far more than I enjoy his music but it's impossible to argue with the Sacre.

Onwards, fellow travellers:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1920s

While I feel the best piece won this poll, I'm now listening to the Ralph Vaughan Williams compositions for the first time and these two here are unbelievably sublime. The Lark Ascending and Fantasia are just magical pieces of music. Possibly a bit on the tail end of fashion given their romantic roots, but good lord what sheer beauty.

yeah they're wonderful, just an absurdly rich decade

Indeed they are, and Arvo Pärt's now ubiquitous compositional style seems unthinkable without the Fantasia in particular. It's tempting to think of Stravinsky (and Prokofiev) as the torchbearers of 'primitivism' in the 1910s, but Vaughan Williams's musical language in these pieces also taps into an imagined 'archaic' consciousness, one grounded in endless melody instead of polyrhythm and not all that dissimilar Erik Satie's own self-consciously naïve experiments in simplicity.

By the way, Andrew Davis's studio recording of the Fantasia with the BBC Symphony Orchestra is stellar, but I think I like this live performance even better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpwqZSp_CyM

*dissimilar from

all these last posts otm

pom could you suggest a relatively recent piece which exemplifies “Arvo Pärt's now ubiquitous compositional style” and wherein i might hear this RVW influence ?

I hear echoes of both in Dobrinka Tabakova's music.

Btw Pärt's Silouans Song strikes me as a good example of what he (consciously?) owes to RVW.

The Lark Ascending and Fantasia are just magical pieces of music.

Indeed they are. Thanks for linking to that Davis' recording Pom!