Favorite piece written during your lifetime.

[indutrial]

What composer would you visit if you had one? I think I´d go back to Mozart and punch him in the face just to boast on facebook.

I would go back to the mid-1960s and convince Philip Glass to give up music and stick to taxi-driving.

[Petter]

Attack his glass jaw? Good riddance!
Anyway, I watched the back to the future movies awhile ago. They are fun. Best is the ending of the 2nd.

[thalbergmad]

Who needs a time machine??

Most of the composers who could do with a punch in the face are still alive

Thal

[ahinton]

I would go back to the mid-1960s and convince Philip Glass to give up music and stick to taxi-driving.

But even had you succeeded in this perhaps understandable endeavour, might we not all have ended up with a quote from him that would have begun "I had that Elliott Carter in the back of me cab once"?...

Best,

Alistair

[ahinton]

Who needs a time machine??

Most of the composers who could do with a punch in the face are still alive

Thal

But just how many tens of thousands of fists would that take? - and what good might you suppose it would do in any case?...

Best,

Alistair

[general disarray]

Politically speaking -- in the most correct fashion, of course -- one would be compelled to support Modernism in its every facet -- from Glass to Carter.  But, I find very little of this music satisfying beyond its intellectual interest.  Being touched, truly moved, rarely occurs in my listenings.  I find Carter a prime example of this "intellectual effect."  (Glass, I'm afraid, at best only strikes me as having a soporific effect.)  Everyone is rather compelled to admire Carter's music, but few find the words to express their LOVE of his music.  Is love necessary?  Perhaps not.  But affection for a composer's output seems more apt, in the long run, to guarantee his inclusion in the canon than just respect for his intellectual achievement.

My nomination for a "favorite piece written in my lifetime" would be George Lloyd's "Symphonic Mass."  I bet few of you are familiar with his work.  Twelve glorious symphonies, among other large scale works.  All tonal.  That very characteristic plunged him into obscurity years ago.  We have to admit that Modernism has been very fascist in its tendencies.  Anyone who has studied composition since Schoenberg is famiiar with the strict control the atonalists and modernists (Boulez comes to mind) have exerted on academic and state-subsidized compositional output.  Audiences have, for the most part, rebelled, but academicians and critics have prevailed.  Carter, whose music may very well be the most intricately fashioned works of this or any time, is revered.  But not by audiences.  Finding Carter's heart in his confections is a daunting task.

Lloyd's works still use the tonal language necessary to create melodies.  Tune -- snatches of tone sequences that people can remember . . . can actually hum on their way out of the theater or concert hall.  But performances are rather rare.  He is, for a modern composer, quite unfashionable.

In New York recently, a revival of "South Pacific" has made a huge stir.  Critics and audiences have been universal in their response.  Melody once again triumphs.  The thirst for beautiful tunes, I think, is most music lovers' greatest quest.  The beautiful tune in itself is not enough, of course.  We also want to hear the tune developed and transmuted.  Why is it, then, that composers who satisfy this need -- such as George Lloyd -- are still relegated to second-class status?

Why is melody -- still in 2008 -- so shameful?         

[indutrial]

Politically speaking -- in the most correct fashion, of course -- one would be compelled to support Modernism in its every facet -- from Glass to Carter.  But, I find very little of this music satisfying beyond its intellectual interest.  Being touched, truly moved, rarely occurs in my listenings.  I find Carter a prime example of this "intellectual effect."  (Glass, I'm afraid, at best only strikes me as having a soporific effect.)  Everyone is rather compelled to admire Carter's music, but few find the words to express their LOVE of his music.  Is love necessary?  Perhaps not.  But affection for a composer's output seems more apt, in the long run, to guarantee his inclusion in the canon than just respect for his intellectual achievement.

I don't consider Carter to be part of any "-ism" since his music merely bears similarities to atonal and dodecaphonic composers and overall stands as his own unique brand of composition. I would agree that plenty of people get into that music solely on intellectual terms or, sadly, to appear smarter than others, but I would disagree that this is always the case. I've met lots of jazz/improv/rock musicians who lack the proper tools to analyse/theorize modern music yet still appreciate what they're hearing. In the jazz/improv world, almost every musician plays heavily by instinct about 80% of the time. What's interesting is that a lot of free improv musicians' outputs sound remarkably similar to post-Schoenberg music, just not written down or repeated. Amongst rock music, there has been a wider acceptance of dissonance and jagged rhythms (check out bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, King Crimson, Dysrhymnia, Behold the Arktopus, etc....).

I'm sort of from the other side of the fence on this. I've always found the more classical and romantic idioms to be incredibly soporific and uninspired. Modern music put so much more tasty tension, sometimes-shocking vicissitudes, entropy, and downright swagger into the genre, which to me is exactly what honest music should sound like, especially considering what human "qualities" were truly laid bare in the past century.

Melody will always be important, but it's no longer an absolute in qualifying good or bad music, just like swing rhythms are no longer the sole qualifier in defining good jazz and roaring pentatonic solos are not the only thing that define a good rock guitarist.

Critics and audiences are two of the least valuable sources of artistic truth since the former are a bunch of self-promoting dickweeds who are just trying to out-sass other critics and the latter is often just an entertainment-hungry mob that lines up for beer and M&Ms at the intermission and forgets to turn off their cell-phones at the performance.

[general disarray]

Critics and audiences are two of the least valuable sources of artistic truth since the former are a bunch of self-promoting dickweeds who are just trying to out-sass other critics and the latter is often just an entertainment-hungry mob that lines up for beer and M&Ms at the intermission and forgets to turn off their cell-phones at the performance.

Great quote!  You make some excellent points here.  Thanks. 

[Petter]

roaring pentatonic solos are not the only thing that define a good rock guitarist.

This means war

[general disarray]

This means war

That's nuthin.  He called critics "self-promoting dickweeds."   

[stevea]

I have to chime in to add most all works written by Arvo Pärt since he entered his tintinnabuli period. He is my favorite composer that I just discovered a few years ago. Poet Rika Lesser wrote this to Pärt...

“Yours is the only music I’ve ever wanted to live inside. Sometimes I wish that the music would stop, congeal, erect a lasting structure around me, one that would silently vibrate and, resonating, enclose me. Forever.”

These aren't piano works, but favorites of his are...

* Summa for string orchestra (1991)
* Trisagion for string orchestra (1992)
* Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell (1977)
* Fratres for string orchestra and percussion (1983)

Great recording of these by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra:

http://www.amazon.com/Part-Summa-Arvo/dp/B00005MNCL/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211826695&sr=8-1

* Magnificat for chorus (1989)
* My Heart's in the Highlands for countertenor and organ (2000)

http://www.amazon.com/Arvo-P%C3%A4rt-Magnificat-Dimittis-Sonatinen/dp/B0001J4HBS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211827212&sr=1-1

* Wallfahrtslied (Pilgrim's Song), version for men's choir & string orchestra (1984)
* Orient and Occident for string orchestra (2000)
* Como cierva sedienta for soprano, women's chorus and orchestra (1998)

http://www.amazon.com/Orient-Occident-Part/dp/B00006I61F/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211827406&sr=1-1

* Bogoroditse Djevo for chorus (1990)

http://www.amazon.com/I-Am-True-Vine-Arvo/dp/B00003Z9U9/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211827941&sr=1-1

* Tabula Rasa, double concerto for two violins, string orchestra and prepared piano (1977)

http://www.amazon.com/Silencio-Arvo-Part/dp/B00004YR5P/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211828348&sr=1-1

* Fratres for violin and piano (1980)

http://www.amazon.com/Arvo-Part-Fratres-b-1935/dp/B000PJ02D6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211828035&sr=1-3

A great recording with all versions of Fratres:

http://www.stereophile.com/recordingofthemonth/808/

http://www.amazon.com/P%C3%A4rt-Fratres-France-Springuel/dp/B000003D0Q/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1211828475&sr=1-2

-Steve

[ahinton]

I don't consider Carter to be part of any "-ism"

Well, perhaps that's where you make an unwitting mistake(!), for he is surely a Carterist; that's what he does and has done for almost seventy years - just fought hard to find his own way, gone that way and, in so doing, determined (as Norman Douglas put it) "to be true to that self when found - a worthy and ample occupation for a lifetime" - and that lifetime has been an immensely long and productive one, as still it is...

Best,

Alistair