What do you think about musical works in the 20th century?

The ranking was updated on the 21st of October

updated on 28th October

Started the project to make a referencial list. http://www.peerlesspe...

I like your idea of getting peoples opinions on classical music from the 20th Century, and am very much interested in this subject as a classical activist seeking change in the musical establishment.

From my perspective as an advocate for general audiences and amateur musicians there is a problem with your list. Composers like Puccini, Strauss, Ravel, and Rachmaninov identified with the historic concept that music should communicate to audiences in a commonly understood musical language. I.e., their output was designed to inspire, move, and affect audiences.

Composers like Stockhausen, Ligeti, Boulez, Nono, Varese, Babbit, as well as the later Schoenberg, Stravinsky et al, had entirely different objectives with their music. Communicating with general audiences was not one of them. These composers attract the interest of professional composers and a very small circle of aficionados and cognoscenti (estimated at less than 2%).

Linking the two kinds of composers together is like making a list of Japanese and English book titles and showing it to American and English people. The Japanese titles on the list will be mainly understandable only to the small number of people who studied Japanese in school or grew up in Japanese homes.

I have studied the problem of 20th Century music in considerable depth. Before the 20th Century composers served either patrons, the church, or a larger music public (in the 19th Century their public expanded to entire nations). They produced works that have continued to inspire listeners through many centuries. But in the 20th Century professional musicians took control of :classical music. In the early period, composers wanted to demonstrate their independence and revolutionary spirit by by producing music that would confront and shock audiences. Audiences soon evaporated. Now the far avante gardists have dwindled, but the establishment continues to reject music that evokes the former relationship between audiences and composers - i.e. music that produces joy, inspiration, solace, is designed to appeal to children, or serve for practical purposes or worship.

Because the new music cut its ties with general audiences, it also excluded music that would inspire new generations of music lovers. Although you may know avante garde-music lovers in Japan, would you agree that most Japanese music lovers wont go to concerts where new music makes up all or most of the repertory?

I dont want to become dogmatic with the above ideas, and am always interested in hearing perspectives on these questions. But you are clearly a serious and knowledgeable music lover, and I invite you to tell me more of your goals with your web site.;

Cordial regards,

Dear Nnamelet, I'm very much glad to get your response.
Your perspective seems so reasonable and balanced that I can hardly state nothing but only a few.
Briefly speaking, I find resemblances where you see differences. You say severance, but I say continuance.

You recognize two groups of composers who wrote music having each other's different objectives. It wouldn't be wrong, but I think the picture is a little oversimplified. What idea do you have about composers you don't mention ie. Britten, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and Prokofiev. Some of their compositions would come into line with Puccini's and Ravel's. And some compositions would fall into the group of Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez... Not a few composition would leave on borderline still.

Audience: Do you think Handel or Haydn serve their patrons only? It is of course, true, but their works have been enjoyed by much more people of 19th and 20th centuries.
When composers write music only in order to show up novelty or shock audeience, their works would not be survived, but some works written by composers of avant-garde that time seemed to obtain audience more and more. Although such works including Gruppen, Pli selon pli, or Como una ola de fuerza y luz will never have myriad fans, they keep needful for symphony orchestras.

I should add that the audience - I feel like call them consumers - of commercial music which is often identical with popular music but sometimes includes a classical recording where Yoyo appears outnumbers avid fans of every other music genres.

My stance is clearly against commercialism and mass productionism. But I didn't and won't reject any kind of music.
So I think the ranking site's scope should be more large.

You imagine a great lover of music who lives in 22nd or 23rd century. What does he listen to? What would you like to give the person? It may be enjoyable, sometimes instructive. Music you choose speaks who you are.

Lastly, I may as well to state Metzmacher's Who is Afraid of 20th-century Music, the set of Cds hinted me.

Regards,
Lj

Updated the ranking on Nov 11 '06, and added some links to listen to samples.

Thanks for your votes.

Hello and thanks for your response!

I greatly appreciate your reply. You have obviously put a tremendous amount of effort into your database and invitation to classical music lovers to share their opinions. If I may be so bold as to say so, your work reflects "Japanese quality". It's the kind of uncompromising attention to detail that we have come to appreciate in so many areas: automobiles, digital cameras - and also classical music performers. I know of no finer string quartet that the Tokyo Quartet, for example.

It is a great pleasure to correspond and discuss music with someone as dedicated and knowledgeable as you. Sure, we may have different perspectives, but music plays a critical role in both our lives.

Responding to your question about 20th Century composers whose work can be compared with the greats of the 19th Century. Yes, Prokofiev and Shostakovich composed works of great inspiration. But when we look more closely at their repertory, we see that those pieces that contemporary audiences (and I) appreciate were mainly produced under duress from the Communist Party leadership to produce works that had something to say to the people - and weren't merely "decadent experimentation", e.g. Peter and the Wolf, Lt. Kije Suite, 5th Symphonies of both composers. Shostakovich's late works that he wrote when he could do what he wanted, like the 13th Symphony and the late string quartets leave me absolutely cold.

I appreciate two of Benjamin Britten's works, the Young Person's Guide to the Symphony, and a Ceremony of Carols - both of which are based on non original themes. In much of the rest I detect mainly exercise of formidable technical skill but little interest in communication with music lovers. Nevertheless, Britten wrote operas on meaningful themes and did not belong to the musical revolutionaries whose main goal in life was to smite the bourgeoisie (epater les bourgeoisie).

Bartok was one of the most sublimely gifted of 20th Century composers. My father and mother entertained him at our house in Kansas City in 1941. I was a small boy then. Dad was also born in Hungary and was a gifted avocational musician. I am now playing recordings of the incomparable Childrens' Pieces (volume 1 on Hungarian folk themes, and volume 2 on Slovakian themes). With the simplest of technical means on the piano - accessible to any first-year piano student - Bartok evokes a huge range of emotion and inspiration through these folk tunes - play, humor, sadness, aching reminiscence, ebullience, fire. But sadly, Bartok was a child of the arts revolution of the early 20th Century. He put much of his creative life after his famous folk-music expeditions with Zoltan Kodaly into experimental works that now endear him mainly to the "avante-gardists". These "modern" compositions are more interesting to listen to than those of many other avante gardists, but have little to offer nonprofessional music lovers. At the end of his life - miraculously - Bartok had a change of heart and returned to composing works that will appeal to 23rd Century music lovers, like the Concerto for Orchestra. Among his last words were regret that his time on earth had run out while he still had so much more that he wanted to contribute.

We have plenty of first-hand quotes from composers and musicians like Milton Babbitt ("Who cares if you listen"), Pierre Boulez ("burn down the opera houses"), and John Cage (who openly expressed his contempt for average audience members, and remarked coolly that "Americans can get along without Beethoven" ). These composers expressed in extreme or candid words a philosophy that was shared by most of the moderns of the 20th Century: i.e. that the prime duty of the composer is to follow his or her muse and inner inspiration - no matter how incomprehensible it might be to others. In fact, incomprehensibility to the average music lover is an important test of whether music has depth and substance.

Consider instead, the philosophy of the great 19th Century classical composers. Peter Tchaikovsky wrote "I hope with all my heart that my music gains a broader audience and that a growing number of people will love it and find in it comfort and solace".

Or consider Edvard Grieg's response to the German musician, Jadassohn, who tried to get him away from interest in folk music and smaller pieces to write larger works: "I leave it to Beethoven and Brahms to build the great temples and edifices in music. I build more modest musical abodes in which my countrymen may feel at home".

So, in my judgment, the problem of 20th Century composition isn't just audiences having technical experiments imposed on them in the name of art. It has made many fear to speak out lest they be considered Philistines. It has lost to the world many potential 20th Century composers who did have something to say to audiences. An example of the latter is Frederick Hand, composer of the noted film "Kramer vs. Kramer". Hand was a composition major at the Hart School of Music in Connecticut when he found that he would be forced to write 12-tone music if he expected to get his degree. He switched to becoming a performance major in guitar instead, and continued composing the way he wanted to after graduation. But that meant forever giving up any standing with the formal music establishment.

I retain interest in the outcome of your polls, and I hope you compile percentage or similar statistics of the number of persons registering interest in the various composers and pieces you talk about.

Meanwhile, I find much of my enjoyment in rediscovering forgotten masterpieces from baroque times.

Warmly Telemann

[A couple of follow-up points I forgot to mention re your questions:

1) the 20th Century greats who had one foot in "both camps"? One example is Stravinsky, who produced his popular favorites like Rites of Spring, Petruchka, and Firebird early in his career while he was still under influence of the spirit of the 19th Century and willing to serve the great Russian ballet impresario, Diaghilev. But therafter Stravinsky candidly states in his autobiography that he turned his back on evocative music of the type that would appeal to audiences. He could afford to do that because he permanently left Russia and The Soviet Union - where the leadership did not allow avantegardist experimentation. So, in my judgment, this is one of the few areas where Communism had a valuable influence!

2) The great baroque composers like Telemann, Handel, and Bach as well as hosts of other fine composers of their times served patrons, a town (Telemann) or the Church. In my view it's precisely because these composers had a mission to serve others or glorify God, that their inspiration was lasting. In contrast, composers of today who serve no one but themselves are lucky if they get a single performance, and, in my judgment, will not be "rediscovered" in the 23rd Century.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was known to chafe under the limits place on him by his noble patrons. He wrote to his father that his music had two layers - a surficial pleasing one - and a second layer of complexity that skilled musicians could understand. It's lucky for us that Mozart had these limits, because had he worked in the 20th Century he too might have followed his muse into "outer space" where none but professionals would have appreciated his technical virtuosity. He would not enjoy the towering reputation he has today.

In fact, the same system operates for painters sculptors and other artists. They have produced their finest works when working for patrons or the Church, i.e. under constraints that "kept their feet on the ground".

Insightful composers and conductors have recognized that the final arbiter of taste has always been and always will be audiences, not peer professionals.

Telemann