Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1960s – Part I (1960-1964)

shosty no. 8, dorian horizon, threnody, polymorphia, britten's cello symphony are my main contenders. hard not to vote for no. 8 but i did just vote for his 10th symphony in the last poll and i see a lot of support for it so far.

idk any messaien from this period, gonna have to check that.

chronochromie might be my favorite Messiaen

It's an excellent pick!

for the late 60s, i pretty much know you have my shostakovich picks already in mind, so

Crumb - Night of the Four Moons, Echoes of Time and the River
Xenakis - Persephassa
Ginastera - Bomarzo

PS you are evil for not including Cantata Para America Magica in this one!!!

Never heard (of) it tbh. I hope that makes me a little less evil.

Please do listen to it, it is amazing

Will do!

Steven Asbury conducts it along with Popol Vuh on a disc on one of those labels I get mixed up with each other - mode/neos/col legno

Sounds good, Asbury is ever reliable.

Btw Jon, which of the Crumb and/or Ginastera would you most like to see in Part II? I may not be able to include all of them (Xenakis is definitely in, though).

Kontakte

Night of the four moons, out of those two crumbs

But Bomarzo is the piece of whose insane originality people are least likely to be aware

If you’re asking me to choose, then Bomarzo, and Crumb can have his heavy hitters in the 70s (Ancient Voices, Music for a Summer Evening [one of the few times I’ve straight up wept at a concert], Black angels [which is ok and obviously super famous but not my favorite crumb]

Forgot to close the paren
)

Dutilleux, maybe? (If only to avoid mentioning my usual suspects. LOL)

Quite a bit here I need to (re-)listen to so, yep, another playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/33DsZwpcvgLf5tZKyiMqH2
(A couple of things are completely absent for once but I'll search more thoroughly shortly.)

Britten's Cello Symphony is a little bit fabulous. I *definitely* erred in largely ignoring BB over the years.

One of these days I'll listen to that crazy four-volume 'Britten conducts Britten' boxset in its entirety.

The “Britten the performer” box is also fantastic, conducting Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Grainger, Schumann and as pianist accompanying Rostropovich etc

Probably my favorite performance of the Debussy cello sonata

Love their take on the Arpeggione Sonata as well.

I'm just voting for Atmospheres

An unfuckwithable pick.

accidentally voted for shosty quartet #10 instead of #8, oops, so keep that in mind.

It's got a lot going for it and in some ways is even more unyielding than the 8th, presaging his imminent late style, so hardly a vote lost, really.

The Borodin Quartet's first recording (reissued on Chandos) absolutely nails it.

i do like both! but i did pull the trigger without double-checking, and 8th is a longtime fav

The competition is so strong that I will likely not vote for these but I encourage people to listen to the Britten Nocturnal and the Ohana piece if they want to check out guitar music on this list.

At least Terry Riley made the list, if not Young, Reich and Glass.

I don't Reich and Glass wrote anything major this early?

*don't think

Indeed they did not.

Music in Similar Motion by Glass from 1969 is one of my favorites. How Now is also good. I'd need to check on early Reich.

Reich's sixties works are somewhat notable - It's Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase, abd Pendulum Music. Although I'll admit the Seventies output is better for both Reich and Glass.

I'll probably include the former in Part II. Reich's It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966) are classic, but they fall outside of this series' purview.

My enthusiasm for early minimalism blinded me to the change in convention re: decades. The Sixties were disruptive in many ways...

On an unrelated note, Intolleranza 1960 is actually from 1961. My bad.

Riley's Music from the Gift, which is a mix of group and solo performances from a jazz band and Riley playing around with tape machines, is a nice distinctive early hybrid piece. The DSCH SQ#8 was the last thing I heard live pre-lockdown, felt momentous

The most fitting examples of proto minimalism up to the point these polls have covered are by Bernard Hermann: Psycho, North by Northwest

Also Kind of Blue imo

almost surely one of the shostakovich quartets, though I'm probably selling "In C" short -- every time I hear it, I think, stop having opinions about "In C" and just enjoy this wonderful music that happens to be "In C"

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Shostakovich SQ8, Kontakte, Threnody, Philomel, Atmospheres all so huge. Philomel is actually tempting...

The competition is so strong that I will likely not vote for these but I encourage people to listen to the Britten Nocturnal and the Ohana piece if they want to check out guitar music on this list.

And in the end, Philomel is how I voted, which seems incredible even to me, with this competition. I'll try to say more about why when I'm more awake tomorrow.

The adaptation of ancient myth to the latest technology of the time was really striking, original, and effective imo. Although it is stark, the sound world is immersive, esp on headphones. The way it digs into Philomel's first-person experience of trauma through wordplay and dialogue between the singer (always trapped dead centre), her recorded voice echoing across the soundstage, and the 'pure' panned synthesized sounds is expressive and affecting. It singlehandedly disproves the idea of postwar serialism as dry, heartless academic exercise and I can't think of another piece like it.

That reminds me I have the Bethany Beardslee biog lying around somewhere waiting to be read.

Oh, nice.

I was excited to find this: https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.2/mto.11.17.2.adamowicz.html . Hope to have some time to dig in.

I'd love to hear Barbara Hannigan sing it.

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

In an ideal world, every work would get at least one vote, but this'll have to do.

The Babbitt discussion and esp the analytical paper got me thinking about Paul in Santa Cruz. Was sorry to find that he passed last year. He is missed.

Forgot to vote *again*. Maybe imagine a '1' against that Pettersson symphony. (As possibly the most intriguing new-to-me thing with no votes.)

voted terry riley because i’m too lazy to expand my horizons in spite of all pom’s hard work.

I don't blame you, In C is bottomless.

Counterculture ftw:

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Classical Compositions of… the 1960s – Part II (1965-1969)

The Babbitt discussion and esp the analytical paper got me thinking about Paul in Santa Cruz. Was sorry to find that he passed last year. He is missed.

Oh man, no way, RIP Paul ;_;

I had no idea. RIP.

I'm listening to this album of his (most of it written after he got sick): https://open.spotify.com/album/5QBA3xpLrdk22dzkxn2J3S?si=Gr7-RRzAST6Dw2XzfiRqmw

(He linked it here when it came out.)

I remember him from my brief stint as a lurker in the early days. RIP.

I had no idea he was a composer – thanks for the link.

Yes, really interesting poster, I had no idea about his life outside ILX.

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/08/nauert-in-memoriam.html

*sob*

Yeah, simultaneously heartbreaking and amazing.

Listening to this version of In C for the first time. It rocks!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MOMckrkn8

The Babbitt discussion and esp the analytical paper got me thinking about Paul in Santa Cruz. Was sorry to find that he passed last year. He is missed.

― Feel a million filaments (Sund4r), Thursday, 9 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Very sad to hear this :-( (read an obit just now: https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/08/nauert-in-memoriam.html).

We corresponded a little bit around 2005, he sent me a few CDs (including a piece of his). I was so glad he posted here on various composers just when I was beginning to discover and fall in love with that music for the first time.

Concerto in Slendro and Xenakis' Eonta are wonderful pieces from this period.

The one piece thing that I really love/didn't get a vote is Galina Ustvolskaya's Duet for Violin and Piano (1964). Savage piece.

"Eonta" is fantastic.

Oh wow, I just scrolled back to learn that Paul in SC had passed via this thread. He was a theory prof at UCSC, some of his former students were in The Fucking Champs, Estradasphere & others. RIP Paul.