Dredging modern music (1900-1970)

[indutrial]

I haven't written or read much on this forum in a couple of years, mostly due to my being too busy with school to study music the way I used to, but I've decided to poke my head in again and see what's going on. Having just come off a long break from studying music at all, I was surprised with how readily I fell back into exploring works from all over the period of 1900-1970, in no small part due to reading through an old edition of the 'Modern Age' volume of the Oxford History of Music. It's occurred to me that I will likely be spending the rest of my life examining the composers of this robust period. While my enthusiasm is certainly based entirely out of my musical tastes, it seems to get more accelerated when I consider the level of neglect that most of this period's music suffers. Compared to the monolithic aura of nineteenth-century works (the classical and romantic greats) and the edgy allure of post-1950 gimmickry (e.g minimalism, holy minimalism, Cage, or any avant-garde junk that Ubuweb would wax poetic over), this period tends to fall below the radar and/or suffer at the behest of lazily reductive and defeatist musical ethos.

Though this period encompasses countless composers from more nationalities and musical schools than ever before, I have lately been poring over scores by a number of composers who could loosely fall into a 'post-Scriabin' (or expressionist) category; composers such as Sabaneev, Feinberg, Sorabji, Bacevicius, Ornstein, and Melkikh. As well, I've been redoubling my efforts to look into several of my favorite 'post-Stravinsky' (often but not always Paris-based) composers, including Tansman, Milhaud, Bentzon, Mihalovici, Absil, and Harsanyi. I apologize for using reductionist qualifiers, but it's really difficult to discuss a lot of these composers in a vacuum.