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Until relatively recently, 20th century concert music was a tough sell. It had the reputation of being dissonant, noisy, difficult, and unpleasant. It was a century that began with Arnold Schoenberg dispensing with harmony and Igor Stravinsky upending rhythm, followed by a World War that knocked the complaisance out of any rational being and told us that the coming century was going to be anything but calm and easy.

A number of composers felt that music needed to reflect the mood of the angst-ridden age.

But even Schoenberg admitted “There is still plenty of music left to be written in C-major.” He didn’t believe his 12-tone revolution would destroy all tunes to come, but was simply a logical conclusion to music history from Bach through Wagner, from tonality through chromaticism to atonality. And we shouldn’t blame poor Arnold for all the dreary ruckus that followed: His own music is quite emotional and beautiful, even if it often requires some serious commitment from his listeners.

He was right about one thing certainly: There was plenty of music written in C-major, throughout the century. And F-major and D-minor. In fact, most of the music written in that century was based on familiar scales, albeit with plenty of playing around and trying new ways to use them.

It’s just that the music-industrial complex, so to speak, was hijacked around mid-century by a clutch of academically-minded composers — the “Darmstadt Mafia” — insisting that serialism was the only music to take seriously, and that the more unlistenable it was, the greater it must therefore be. (Some of these composers did write interesting music in that style — it wasn’t a complete loss — but they looked down their noses at anything that might stink of a tune.)

And so, contemporary music turned its back on the concert audiences and those composers wrote only for other composers of their ilk, and audiences shrunk from any concert program that insisted they listen to the stuff. Modern music acquired a very bad reputation.

But I find that after 60 years of concert-going and music absorption, I listen to 20th century music more than that of any other era. It is music that speaks directly to me. Oh, I listen to bunches of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but the plurality of my music listening edges to the century in which I grew up.

So, I wanted to create a list of representative compositions from the century in question and present them as a course in great music that anyone can listen to and enjoy.

I went through my collection of thousands of CDs and chose 30 pieces to offer. I listened to each one, in order, to refresh my memory — and to flat out enjoy them all over again.

The roughly chronological list begins with a surprising entry. Most people think of Ives’ music (if they think of it at all) as noisy, crashing, impish tomfoolery. But Ives was a well-trained musician, with a degree from Yale University. His Symphony No. 2 is pretty tame, except for his borrowing of familiar popular tunes, and a raspberry at the end.

Here is my list:

1900-1920

Charles Ives (1874-1954) — Symphony No. 2 (1902; premiered in 1951) (42 minutes long). Performance listened to: Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1973.

Ives studied under the respectable, if stuffy Yale professor Horatio Parker, and after graduating in 1898, began working on his second symphony (the first was his senior thesis composition for Parker) and included bits from Camptown Races, Turkey in the Straw and Columbia the Gem of the Ocean run through a kitchen blender. He finished Symphony No. 2 in 1902, although, with Ives, he was never completely finished and continued tinkering until his death in 1952. The symphony wasn’t premiered until Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic played it in a radio performance in 1951. The house-bound but still cantankerous Ives heard it on his radio in Connecticut and his response was that he spit.

I listened to Ormandy’s version from 1973. The recordings listed here are not my choices as “best” — although they are all good — but merely the ones I had to hand when I started this project.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) — On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring (1912) (7 minutes long). Performance: Thomas Beecham and Royal Philharmonic, recorded 1958.

Delius’ score instructs, “With easy flowing movement,” and the quiet, peaceful evocation of the countryside (presumably English) and its birdcalls, it is a calming balm for a tussled soul. Originally, it was one of Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the other half being Summer Night on the River. Beecham championed the composer’s music and his performances of the music are definitive.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) — Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916) (21 minutes long). Performance: Arthur Rubinstein, piano, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orch., recorded 1969.

Falla was an Andalusian composer and the quasi-Impressionist Nights in the Gardens of Spain functions as a kind of piano concerto, with three movements, each describing a different Andalusian garden. Rubinstein heard it first soon after its premiere in 1916 and performed it regularly after that.

Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) — Classical Symphony (1918) (13 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1961.

Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 is the Sara Lee of symphonies: No one doesn’t love it. It is a jaunty, energetic gloss on the Classical-era symphonies of Haydn, seen through the “wrong-note Romanticism” of the composer’s style.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) — The Planets (1918) (50 minutes long)

Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1975.

Marketed as “space-age music,” the intent of Holst’s seven-movement suite is astrological, not astronomical, and each movement is a musical description of a psychological type. It has become enormously popular, and it has been recorded more than 80 times, first in 1926 with the composer conducting.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) — Pulcinella (1920) (39 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1979.

Stravinsky took some old compositions by 18th century composers and reworked them into bright, colorful Stravinskian cogs in what Leonard Bernstein once called “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine,” giving them new life as a ballet score, complete with voices.

1920s

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — The Lark Ascending (1921) (16 minutes long) Performance: Zina Schiff, violin, Dalia Atlas, Israel Philharmonic, recorded 1989.

Poet George Meredith wrote of the lark in his poem from 1881, “He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound…” and Vaughan Williams gives us the violin and orchestra version, with the British pastoral, And whose primary intent seems to be the creation of simple beauty.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) — La Création du Monde (1923) (17 minutes long) Performance: Simon Rattle, London Sinfonietta, recorded 1986.

European composers began hearing jazz and they loved it. Milhaud even moved to Harlem for a while, to soak it all up. One of the best translations of jazz to the classical idiom is his Création du Monde, with its resonant saxophone solo at the beginning.

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) — Pacific 231 (1923) (6 minutes long) Performance: Charles Dutoit, Bavarian Radio Symphony, recorded 1985.

A steam locomotive begins to move, gathers speed, churns along and comes slowly to a stop, in this propulsive tone poem to modernity. Trains have been a theme in 20th century music, from Duke Ellington’s Happy-Go-Lucky Local to Villa-Lobos’ Little Train of the Caipira. Chug-chug.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) — The Pines of Rome (1924) (20 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1958.

There were no flying humpback whales in Respighi’s original score; blame Disney for that. But what you do get are rousing tunes and some spooky catacomb music, with a grand finish, the kind that gets you out of your chair cheering.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) — Symphony No. 7 (1924) (22 minutes long) Performance: John Barbirolli, Halle Orchestra, recorded 1966.

Sibelius’ final symphony is also his shortest, being in one movement, but by some accounts his best. My old teacher said when he was young, he wanted to play the French horn, because it had all the great solos. But he wound up with the trombone, which “only plays supporting material,” he said. But in this symphony, the trombones get the big tune, the one you will most likely remember and hum after it’s over.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) — Piano Concerto in F (1925) (32 minutes long) Performance: Andre Previn, piano and conductor, Pittsburgh Symphony, recorded 1998.

Who was Arnold Schoenberg’s favorite composer in America? His frequent tennis partner, George Gershwin, who was much more than a Tin-Pan Alley songster. At the time, there was a big rush to figure out how to incorporate jazz into concert music. Well, here’s how.

Leos Janacek (1854-1928) — Sinfonietta (1926) (23 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic, recorded 1989

What grabs you at first are the 14 trumpets, four horns, trombones, tuba and euphoniums. But the rest of the music pops with chunks of memorable tunes, piled like crabs in a bucket, and the way Janacek uses musical “jump cuts” to go from one to the next.

1930s

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) — Symphony No. 2 “Romantic” (1930) (29 minutes long) Performance: Gerard Schwarz, Seattle Symphony, recorded 1989.

All those American symphonies written in the 1930s and ’40s have been largely forgotten, despite their quality, but when Ridley Scott used Hanson’s music during the closing credits of his 1979 film Alien, it resurrected this “Romantic” symphony, which developed a second life. Scott did it without Hanson’s permission, which pissed off the composer, but Hanson never sued, probably because of the boost it gave his music with audiences.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) — Piano Concerto in G (1932) (21 minutes long)

Performance: Samson François, piano, André Cluyten, Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, recorded 1959.

The French were just as taken with jazz as Americans were, in the 1930s. Lots of composers attempted to weave the syncopations and blues notes into their work. Ravel did it twice, with each of his piano concertos. But this one has a slow movement of such hypnotic ethereal peaceful beauty that you feel in a trance, broken by the explosion of the finale.

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) — Saxophone Concerto (1934) (14 minutes long) Performance: Marc Chisson, saxophone, José Serebrier, Russian National Orchestra, recorded 2010.

Glazunov was exiled to Paris when he wrote his own jazz-influenced concerto for alto saxophone, which is perhaps less jazzy than Russian, but is nevertheless probably the best concerto ever written for the instrument.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) — Adagio for Strings (1936) (8 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1957.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin made a movie in 2003 titled The Saddest Music in the World, about a contest to find such music. Well, he needn’t have worried: Hands down, the winner (ignored by the film) is Sam Barber’s orchestral transcription of the slow movement of his string quartet. Unbearably beautiful, it is near impossible to hear it without weeping.

Colin McPhee (1900-1964) — Tabuh-Tabuhan: A Toccata for Orchestra (1936) (17 minutes long) Performance: Howard Hanson, Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, recorded 1956.

McPhee heard Javanese gamelan music on a visit to Bali and then moved there. He became an ethnomusicologist as well as composer and wrote his own gamelan-influenced music full of the percussive tintinnabulation that is so catchy. Tabuh-Tabuhan is his most popular work, meaning it’s pretty much the only piece most people know, McPhee having otherwise fallen into undeserved oblivion.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) — Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (1938) (7 minutes long) Performance: Bidú Sayão, soprano, orchestra of cellos, conducted by Leonard Rose, recorded 1949.

The composer was fascinated by the long-line melodies that Bach sometimes wrote and came up with his own. Originally a single movement for soprano and eight cellos, it was recorded that way in 1949 by Bidú Sayão in a recording of singular beauty and power. It is very difficult, as the final third of the movement is required to be hummed through the nose, with the mouth closed, and ending on a nearly impossible octave leap. He later wrote a second movement, but this recording of just the first is so exceptional, it has to be heard.

1940s

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) — Symphonic Dances (1940) (35 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony, recorded 2002.

It is sometimes hard to realize that Rachmaninoff is essentially a 20th century composer. And all his later music (the Paganini Rhapsody, Third Symphony and this, the Symphonic Dances) is rife with irony and astringency. Heart no-longer on sleeve, but with unforgettable tunes and absolutely brilliant orchestration. These Dances were his final composition, and for my money, his best.

Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) — Violin Concerto (39 minutes long) Performance: Ruggiero Ricci, violin, Anatole Fistoulari, London Philharmonic Orch., recorded 1956.

Khachaturian doesn’t get much love. His music is catchy, tuneful, and never very deep. And so, the Music-Industrial Complex (i.e. German musicographers) turn their noses up. But what is music if not melody? And bright arresting orchestrations. At some point, the world will catch up with Khachaturian and realize there’s room for music that is simply enjoyable, with no philosophical baggage attached.

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) — Concerto for Orchestra (1943) (47 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1958.

Bartok was ill and in hospital when Serge Koussevitzky visited him in 1943 and presented him with the commission for this orchestral masterpiece. Bartok had fled Hungary because of the war and was dying of leukemia, but he got out of bed, left the hospital and wrote what became his most popular work, essentially his symphony, a five movement piece featuring brilliant solo work for pretty much everyone member of the orchestra. He died two years later.

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) — Symphonic Metamorphosis on a Theme by Weber (1943) (22 minutes long) Performance: Wolfgang Sawallisch, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1994.

So much of the century’s music seems to have been written as gloss on music of the past: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody; Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony — even Ives’ symphonies constantly quote old tunes. Hindemith’s most popular piece (popularity not having followed the composer into the 21st century) is his recasting of melodies written by Carl Maria von Weber. It is brilliant. Hindemith should be played more.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) — Appalachian Spring (1944) (24 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Bernstein, New York Phil, recorded 1961.

When the century’s music seemed to becoming more intellectualized and abstruse, Aaron Copland developed a simpler, more audience-friendly style, best captured in this hugely popular ballet score. Copland became the American composer. Originally for a chamber group, the orchestral version is now a standard concert piece.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) — Violin Concerto in D (1945) (24 minutes long) Performance: Jascha Heifetz, Alfred Wallenstein, LA Philharmonic, recorded 1953.

Korngold was a prodigy once compared to Mozart, came to America and became the Ur-film composer (three Oscar nominations). But after WWII, he tried to reestablish his bona fides as a serious composer, with this most beautiful of 20th century violin concertos, now in the standard repertoire. It begins with a startling two-octave run in just five notes. Championed by Jascha Heifetz, it is now in every serious violinists repertoire.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) — Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell (“Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra”) (1946) (17 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1974-1978.

Another gloss on old music, Britten wrote his “Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a means to teach about the instruments, along with narration. But much better without the sometimes condescending talking, it is a brilliant showpiece for the orchestra.

1950s

Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) — Fantasia para un Gentilhombre (1954) ( 22 minutes long) Performance: Manuel Barrueco, guitar, Philharmonia Orchestra, Placido Domingo, conductor, recorded 1996.

Rodrigo reworked the music of 17th-century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz, in another retro work, mixing the old dance music with eminently listenable modern orchestra colors.

Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) — Mysterious Mountain (Symphony No. 2) (1955) (19 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago, recorded 1958.

Hovhaness wrote 67 symphonies and sometimes it is hard to tell them apart: His style was his style and he stuck to it. But his second symphony, called Mysterious Mountain, is his most popular and a perfect introduction into what you get with this Armenian-American stalwart.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) — Candide Overture (1956) (4 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Bernstein, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1989.

The best overtures are bouncy, tuneful, catchy and bright. It is almost as if Bernstein had absorbed all of the best overtures of the past and wrapped them up in his ultra-brilliant Candide overture, certainly the composer’s most-often programmed work.

Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) — Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957) (20 minutes long) Performance: Christina Ortiz, piano, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond., recorded 1989.

The composer write this late concerto for his son, Maxim, to perform. He didn’t have a very high opinion of the work, thinking it a throw-away piece, but it is his most accessible concerto, with a second movement nearly as hypnotic as the Ravel. It may be lightweight Shostie, but it is nothing to sneeze at.

In going through these recordings, some of which had to be dug up out of the lower shelves of my collection, I have redoubled my admiration for the music of the previous century.

Decluttering my Classical Music, Part 2

August 4, 2021

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As I continue to contemplate the possibility of perhaps, maybe, decluttering my trove of Classical music CDs, I come to the 20th century. I have to admit, that I listen to music from that period more than any other. It was my century. And so, I have a ton of discs from composers who wrote, beginning in the 19th, but extending their careers into the 20th, and now, music from the 21st century.

Sometimes, we forget that such lush music as that of Rachmaninoff or Richard Strauss continued to be written: Strauss’ Four Last Songs, perhaps the most high-calorie confection ever put to paper, was premiered in 1949, four years after the end of World War II, and 36 years after Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. “There’s still plenty of good music to be written in C-major,” said Arnold Schoenberg.

So now, as I did last time, I am going to sort through the violent century and salvage what I think needs to be saved, making a pile of recordings and regretfully saying goodbye to too much great music, but, you know — I’m 73 years old and I’m not going to be able to listen to all of the thousands of CDs that currently clog my shelves.

I’ve set the goal of picking a single work (or set of works) by significant composers to throw on the pile. I’m going by chronological order, according to birth dates. And we start by remembering that Edward Elgar was a 20th century composer. Yes. He was.

Edward Elgar 1857-1934 — Initially I thought the work I could not do without was the doleful Cello Concerto, from 1919. The First World War speaks directly through that music. But, no, I have to go with the Violin Concerto of 1910, which is one of the few noble concertos that can stand with those of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Berg and Shostakovich — not merely tuneful, but an expression of the highest thoughts and emotions that humans are capable of.

But, I’m in luck. Because I can save the Violin Concerto, played by Pinchas Zukerman on a disc package that includes the Cello Concerto, played by Jacqueline Du Pre, with the Enigma Variations thrown in. A perfect summing up of the best of Elgar.

Gustav Mahler 1860-1911 — Choosing is too hard. I have double-decker shelves devoted to Mahler, the composer who moves me above all others. How can I clear it out? How can I consider any of it as “clutter?” I thought originally I would have to save Das Lied von der Erde, and I don’t know how I can say goodbye to it. But Mahler said famously, the symphony must contain the world, and the piece that does that more than any other is the Third Symphony, and so, I’m putting that on the pile.

I just counted, and I currently have 14 recordings of the Third (with another on the way from Amazon). The one I keep is Riccardo Chailly and the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Not only is it a great performance, but the 2-discs are magnificently engineered. The sound is stunning.

Claude Debussy 1862-1918 — While I love Debussy’s piano music (especially played by Paul Jacobs), the keeper is La Mer. I have not counted the versions on my shelf, but there are not a few.

Pierre Boulez recorded it twice. The second is OK, but nothing special, but his first go-round, on Sony, is cut by diamond and the most exciting one I know. It may not be a sea-spray evocative as some, but it makes a compelling case for it as belonging to the 20th century. It comes in a package with a pile of other Debussy.

Richard Strauss 1864-1949 — Strauss can sometimes seem a bit reptilian. How much is show-biz with his show-off orchestration. But there is no doubt to the sincerity of his Four Last Songs. They are the most profoundly moving orchestral songs I know, outside Mahler’s Der Abschied.

I wanted to save Jessye Norman’s version, with Kurt Masur, but I have to admit, my heart has always belonged to Leontyne Price in these songs, accompanied by Erich Leinsdorf. Both versions are gorgeous, but Price is now packaged with Fritz Reiner’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. On the pile.

Jean Sibelius 1865-1957 — As tightly argued as Mahler is spacious, Sibelius packs a great deal into a well-cinched frame. Of his seven symphonies, the one that speaks to me loudest is the final one, which makes me feel in my bones the vast icy spaces of Scandanavia.

Leonard Bernstein recorded it twice, once for Columbia (now Sony) and later for Deutsche Grammophon. The first is tighter, but the second comes with the Fifth Symphony, giving me the chance to save two symphonies for the price of one. Bernstein slowed his tempos as he got older, and some people don’t like the broadened Fifth, but I have no problem with it. And the Seventh takes me to other places.

Serge Rachmaninoff 1873-1943 — My dearest friend, Alexander, refuses to listen to Rachmaninoff, saying he is too gooey and Romantic. But I have been trying to get him to recognize that his music — especially his later music — is oozing with Modernist irony. What is more sly than the Paganini Rhapsody? Yes, there’s the “big tune,” but even that is undermined by what surrounds it. But if I have to save just one piece, that would be the Symphonic Dances. I love them to death.

But, like so many other things in this list, I can have cake and eat it at the same time, with the recording by Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra, bundled with the gooey, Romantic Second Symphony under Mariss Jansons, and the tornado of the Third Piano Concerto, played by Leif Ove Andsness.

Arnold Schoenberg 1874-1951 — Now we’re entering territory fully recognizable as Modernist. I wish I could save Pierrot Lunaire, but I have only one slot available, and it has to go to Verklaerte Nacht. While I admire Pierrot, I love Transfigured Night.

Of the versions I have, both in its orchestral form and its original sextet form, I am surprised at how good the version is that was recorded by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. It goes onto the pile, and gives me the bonus of the Orchestral Variations.

Charles Ives 1874-1954 — I have three or four versions of the Concord Sonata, and heard it live played by Jeremy Denk. It should be saved. But I am going, instead, with the Fourth Symphony, which is pure Ives, with all his usual tricks. Friends think I’m joshing when I claim that Ives’ music is beautiful. But it is. You just have to get used to the idiom.

The best version (I have four of these, too) is the first recording, led by Leopold Stokowski. One word for it: Transcendental.

Maurice Ravel 1875-1937 — Stravinsky dismissed him as a “Swiss watchmaker,” but I think that was only professional jealousy. Yes, we’re all tired of Bolero. But I want to save the Concerto for Left Hand, which is jazzy in parts, terrifying in parts, and always makes you wonder that anyone can play two-hand piano with only one hand.

But there is also that ethereal slow movement of the G-major Piano Concerto. The disc with Martha Argerich playing the G-major and Michel Beroff playing the Left-Hander, with Claudio Abbado and the LSO, also gives us the orchestral version of Le Tombeau de Couperin. What a luscious disc.

Bela Bartok 1881-1945 — There’s a lot to save with Bartok, also. But I can’t have the Contrasts, the piano concertos, the six quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra. No. One disc. And the piece I want to keep most is the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

Luckily, one of the greatest performances of that music, by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, also features one of the greatest performances of the Concerto for Orchestra. It is essential listening for any music lover.

Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971 — Much music, many styles. Part of me wants to save the Requiem Canticles and the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, just to tweak those who hate 12-tone music. But since the entire 20th century seems launched by The Rite of Spring, just as the 19th was launched by the Eroica, I have to save it.

There are lots of great performances, but none as feral and primal as the first of them recorded by Leonard Bernstein and the NY Phil. Even Stravinsky, who hated “interpretation” in performance agreed that it was like no other. The disc also includes Petrushka, so, what’s not to love?

Anton Webern 1883-1945 — Do we have to? I’m afraid so. Luckily, there isn’t much of it. No one can make blips and blurps like Webern. He was the godfather of all subsequent serial music, disconnected, alienated and difficult. Yet, he makes such interesting sounds. And few pieces last more than a few minutes, even seconds. Take at least one bit of the broccoli: Try a little Webern.

Karajan put out a tight, condensed disc with the Passacaglia, the 5 Movements for String Orchestra, Op. 5, the 6 Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6, and the Symphony, Op. 21. This is a fair sampling, really well played. And the entire symphony lasts only 10 minutes.

Alban Berg 1885-1935 — The third wheel of the Second Vienna School is the easiest to love and enjoy. He is the most emotional, and found a way to cheat on his 12-tones, to suggest key areas. His Violin Concerto is the most powerful fiddle concerto of the whole century, the most personal, the most emotional, and the most beautiful.

No one plays it who doesn’t give it his or her most serious efforts. It cannot be just tossed off. My favorite is by Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Chicago Symphony and James Levine. It also includes Wolfgang Rihm’s Time Chant, which, I’m afraid, I find utterly forgettable. I’m saving the disc, anyway, for Mutter and Berg and all the pain of loss in the world condensed to music.

Serge Prokofiev 1891-1953 — Shouldn’t I save the Seventh Piano Sonata? Or the Third Piano Concerto? Or the Fifth or First symphonies? Yes, I should, but I’m going to save the full ballet score of Romeo and Juliet, which, I believe, is the greatest ballet score of all time. The whole thing, not just the suite. I might be swayed by having seen it danced many times, in some of the best productions ever. But the music stands on its own.

There are three possibilities: Previn, Maazel and Gergiev. I’m going with Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra. It just noses out the others.

Paul Hindemith 1895-1963 — Hindemith used to be the third part of the triad of Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith as the top Modernists in music. But he has fallen on hard times. Stravinsky and Bartok have better tunes. But when Hindemith borrows tunes from Carl Maria von Weber, he is as good as any. I love a lot of Hindemith, but I admit, he is not overtly lovable. But the Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber is jaunty, catchy and a ton of fun.

A really good performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch also gives us two of Hindemith’s best other scores, the Mathis der Maler symphony and Nobilissima Visione. This is Hindemith you could actually learn to love.

Duke Ellington 1899-1974 — Yes, in my book, this is classical music. Ellington does for his group of instruments nothing less than what Ravel can do for the standard symphony orchestra, with all the colors and surprises. And harmonically, Ellington is ages ahead of many more traditional composers. I have about 50 discs of Ellington’s music, and I love him in each of his decades. But the height of his creativity and originality was with the band he had in the 1941-42, the so-called Blanton-Webster band, named for bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor sax, Ben Webster. It’s a misnomer, because you can’t forget all the other luminaries in the band, from Harry Carney to Cootie Williams to Johnny Hodges.

There is a three-disc release that has most of the work the band did in those two years, including Ko-Ko, Cotton Tail, Harlem Air Shaft, Take the A Train, Blue Serge, Sophisticated Lady, Perdido and the C-Jam Blues. Each a miniature tone-poem. This is music to take seriously. Seriously.

Aaron Copland 1900-1990 — There are two Coplands, the earlier, knottier Modernist of the Piano Variations, and the later, popular composer of Rodeo, El Salon Mexico and Billy the Kid. But to my mind, his very best is Appalachian Spring, a ballet score he wrote for Martha Graham. It is usually heard as a truncated suite and enlarged for full orchestra.

But the version I love best, and the one going on my pile, is the original full-length chamber version. Copland recorded it himself, along with the suite from Billy the Kid. Unfortunately, you have to put up with the tedious and tendentious Lincoln Portrait, here narrated by Henry Fonda.

Harry Partch 1901-1974 — England has its eccentrics, but America has its crackpots, and Partch is Exhibit A. Having decided that the tempered musical scale is a “mutilation” of true music, he invented and built a whole orchestra of new instruments, such as the chromelodion, the quadrangularis reversum, the zymo-xyl, the gourd tree and cloud-chamber bowls, in order to play music in his 43-note octave. I saw an exhibit of them at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1960s. They were stunningly beautiful to look at. Hearing them, is something different.

Partch wrote a lot of music for his instruments, some enchanting, like his songs on Hobo graffiti, Barstow. I am saving his full-length Delusions of the Fury, which is based on a Japanese Noh play and an African legend and a codification of Partch’s own delusions. Hooray for him.

Dimitri Shostakovich 1906-1975 — Surely the major composer of the middle of the 20th century, Shostakovich labored hard under the yoke of Stalinism, and his music expresses his deep humanity (except when he is buckling under the pressure of the commissars and pumping out party-hack material; but we can ignore all that). His symphonies 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14 and 15 are among the greatest works of the century. But I’m saving his first Violin Concerto. It is, I believe, his ultimate masterwork.

Its dedicatee, David Oistrakh, recorded it with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the the New York Philharmonic and anyone who cares about classical music should know this performance. It is coupled with Rostropovich playing the first Cello Concerto with Ormandy and the Philadelphia. Together this is a powerful pair.

Olivier Messiaen 1908-1992 — Harry Partch wasn’t alone. French composer Olivier Messiaen had his own ideas about harmony and rhythm, and created an idiosyncratic body of music that is built on bird song and Eastern mysticism, combined with fervent Christianity.

He wrote his Quartet for the End of Time in a Nazi prisoner camp and played it for the first time for its inmates and guards. His most popular work (if you can call anything so peculiar “popular”) must be the Turangalila Symphony, a rich, spicy, aromatic blend of orchestral colors, and you can get both works together in a set with conductor Myung-Whun Chung and the Orchestre de l’Opera Bastille.

Henryk Gorecki 1933-2010 — Gorecki had the misfortune to have become popular. His Third Symphony topped the pop charts in England in 1992 and sold a million copies world-wide. Officially titled the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, it speaks of war, love and loss. It is a slow piece, moving only by tiny steps from first to last. Its popularity has led some critics to pooh-pooh its depth and beauty, believing nothing that popular could be any good. They should listen more carefully.

The version that sold so well was the premiere recording with Dawn Upshaw and David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta. I have several versions on my shelves, but this first one is still the best. Onto the pile.

Morton Subotnick 1933- — The California-born composer of electronica had a brief moment of fame in the late 1960s when Nonesuch Records released his Silver Apples of the Moon, and followed it up with The Wild Bull. The first, with its synthesizer squeaks and blips was bright and energetic, the second with its groans and wheezes, was much darker.

Both deserve to be remembered. They may be a relic of their times, but they really are worth listening to. And they are now both on a single Wergo CD.

Arvo Pärt 1935- — The Estonian composer’s meditative music is what he calls “tintinnabuli,” and in 2018, Part was the most performed living composer in the world. His music appeals not only to the classical audience, but to the New Age one as well. It is spiritually-aimed music and is both beautiful, well-constructed, and easy to listen to. You can wash in it like a warm bath, or you can listen as intently as you might to Bach or Bartok.

He has arranged his most popular piece, Fratres, for any number of instruments and combinations (there is even an entire CD of nothing but variations of the piece), and I could save pretty much any one of his discs. But I am going to put Te Deum on the pile, primarily for the Berlin Mass that is on the disc.

Philip Glass 1937- — Glass is unavoidable, even in popular culture. He must be the most prolific composer since Vivaldi. He began as a strict Minimalist, but loosened up that style to become what can only be called a “Glassian.” At his best, he is hypnotic and powerful. At his worst, he can become tedious. His Einstein on the Beach was epochal and groundbreaking. I have an entire shelf devoted to his releases. His trilogy of movie scores for the Godfrey Reggio abstract-narrative films in the quatsi series are a perfect introduction to Glass. Koyaanisqatsi was the first and best known.

But I am going to save the third, Naqoyqatsi, mainly because it can be heard as an extended cello concerto played by Yo-Yo Ma.

John Adams 1945- — Almost neck-and-neck with Glass is John Adams, another lapsed Minimalist who has created his own distinct voice. His opera, Nixon in China, is pretty well the only contemporary opera to join the mainstream repertoire. I’ve seen it live, and I’ve seen Adams’ Doctor Atomic live. They are both thrilling as Verdi or Puccini.

But I’m going to save a particular favorite orchestral work, Harmonielehre, or “Harmony Lesson.” Its opening chords are even more startling than the two E-flat bangs at the start of Beethoven’s Eroica. And the disc I’m saving includes two of Adam’s most popular and gripping overture pieces, The Chairman Dances and A Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

Osvaldo Golijov 1960- — The youngest composer on my pile is now 60. I first heard his music in a live performance of Ainadamar with Dawn Upshaw singing the lead. It blew me away. And I was going to put my recording on my pile, but then I heard his Passion of Saint Mark or La Pasión Según San Marco, and fell in love with it.

It combines Latin and African rhythms and folk music with a huge percussion section and more than 50 singers. When it was premiered, it got a 15-minute standing ovation. It deserves its place on my pile.

____________________

And so, my fantasy ends. I have now an imaginary pile of music to listen to, to the exclusion of a thousand other CDs. But it is just a fantasy; I could never actually declutter my shelves. I have, in the past, culled recordings to make space for new, but now those I culled are just stuffed into old dressers, cluttering up the drawers in both of them, hidden from view as if I had actually gotten rid of them. But I can’t. And with new recordings coming my way from Amazon, I may have to cull once more, just to make space. And I may need another old dresser in the storage room just to take care of my rejects. Marie Kondo can go jump in a lake.

Places in the heart

June 4, 2013

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The music of Charles Ives has been thought gnarly and noisy, difficult and dissonant. And it is, for sure. But it is also profoundly nostalgic and deeply American.

Instead of avoiding his music because it is so “modern,” you should let the music steep inside your consciousness and let it dredge up all your most inkept feelings of loss and childhood. Ultimately, his music is not so much avant-garde as it is heartbreaking. Fireworks, parades, summer vacations, church picnics — it’s all there in the music. And all the more potent for its evocation of the New England that Ives grew up in.

For Ives, New England was America. He was born from the soil of New England and finally was returned 79 years later to that same soil. He inherited the culture of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne and turned it into sound.

His piano sonata Concord, Mass. 1840-1860, his Holidays Symphony and his Third Symphony (Camp Meeting) all grow from his New England roots, full of the marching-band tunes, patriotic airs and revival-meeting hymns he heard as a boy.

But one piece above all sums up his New England experience, and it is one of his easiest to digest and, therefore, most popular. It is Three Places in New England, and it describes in music three very precise landscapes.

Sometimes called the “New England Symphony,” it was written by Ives between 1903 and 1911. It contains three movements that are unforgettable impressions of the land and people.

Landscape plays a big part in the history of painting and hardly less in literature. We can visit the very square foot of land in Canada where painter Frederic Edwin Church stood to paint his monumental Niagara Falls or we can tour the Lake District that inspired William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

But it is not often that landscape inspires music. There is the occasional Moldau or La Mer, but scene-painting in sound is not often as precise as a painting. Smetana takes in the whole river, not a single view, and Debussy’s ocean is any ocean.

Yet Ives gave us in his Three Places three distinct sites that can be visited and enjoyed and compared with the sound portraits.

Shaw Memorial, Boston

The SHAW MEMORIAL, Boston

The first section in Ives’ music is titled ”The St. Gaudens in Boston Common” and is subtitled ”Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment.”

The St. Gaudens is a Civil War monument, considered by some people to be the best American example of memorial sculpture. It was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and unveiled in 1897 at the northeast end of Boston Common, across the street from the Massachusetts Statehouse.

The deep-relief sculpture commemorates the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment and its commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, who died in the Civil War.

The 54th was unusual at the time because its enlisted ranks were composed entirely of African-Americans. On May 28, 1863, the largest crowd in Boston’s history came out to see the 54th march off. They saw the thousand Black soldiers marching, accompanied by their White officers on horseback.

A souvenir of the day quoted Byron: ”Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”

Two months later, Shaw and a third of his command were dead, killed in the attack on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor. Their charge had failed, but the soldiers had fought so well that they legitimized what had been considered a questionable idea: African-Americans in combat.

Shaw initially was buried in a common combat grave with his dead troops, and after the war, when plans were made to exhume the gallant young officer and give him an official ceremony in a Massachusetts cemetery, his parents refused, writing that they could hope for ”no holier place” for him than ”surrounded by his brave and devoted soldiers.”

Saint-Gaudens, America’s premier sculptor at the time, was commissioned in 1883 to monumentalize Shaw, and briefly considered a standard equestrian statue, but finally decided that the Black troops deserved the memorial as much as Shaw and devised plans to include them.

He wanted to represent the soldiers accurately; some were as young as 16, others were bearded grandfathers. So he hired African-Americans to pose for him and made 40 heads as studies. Sixteen went into the final bronze.

So Shaw rides his horse in front of a rhythmical line of marching soldiers, their heads, sleeping packs and rifles creating a visual drumbeat.

Ives’ 8-minute portrait of the monument is a diffuse, dissonant wash, as though not only the images of the Civil War but also its very idea were obscured in the haze of memory and history.

”Moving — marching — faces of souls! Marked with the generations of pain, Part-freers of a destiny, slowly, restlessly swaying us on with you towards other freedom!” Ives wrote in his score.

The monument was only a few years old when Ives began writing about it, and the layers of time show through in the music: the war, the remembrance of war, the causes and unfinished business of the war in a conflicting mass of sound.

Often, in the welter, you can make out a familiar tune: Marching Through Georgia or Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Then it all fades away into the nostalgic past.

Today, the sculpture is nearly black in its patina. It sits on its granite plinth looking vaguely like a plaque on a headstone. The tour buses stop, and the tourists pour out with their cameras. Some shoot the gold-domed statehouse, others shoot the St. Gaudens.

One bus unloads two dozen Japanese tourists. They also point their cameras. The amplified sound of a tour guide overpowers the street noise — but in Japanese — and I cannot possibly know what she is saying or what the Japanese tourists can make of the racial complexity involved in the war, the monument and American history.

Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut

PUTNAM’S CAMP

The second movement is called ”Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut.”

Gen. Israel Putnam, like most American generals in the Revolutionary War, was better known for strategic and tactical retreats than for victories. Charged with holding the Hudson Highlands in 1777, he lost Fort Monroe and Fort Clinton while backing up into Connecticut.

He and his troops wintered near Redding, Conn., in 1778, undergoing much of the same privation and hardship Washington endured at Valley Forge.

But Ives isn’t remembering the Revolutionary War in his music. Rather, he is remembering his childhood, when he used to visit the site of Putnam’s Camp and fantasize what it must have been like in the winter of 1778-79.

He also recalls the patriotic Fourth of July picnics he attended there and the brass bands that played.

”Long rows of stone campfire-places still remain to stir a child’s imagination,” Ives wrote.

What he hears is a grand cacophony of marching bands, playing different tunes at the same time. It is loud, bouncy and ear-blasting, getting louder and louder, with strains of The British Grenadiers and other songs, and ending in a misquoted bar and a half of reveille.

It is all a jolly 6-minute joke but the kind of music Ives loved best. ”Pretty sounds are for pretty ears,” he said, deriding those who wanted pleasant melodies from his orchestra.

Once, upset over the hoots and boos of an audience listening to some modern music, Ives got out of his seat and exhorted the unappreciative crowd to ”Stand up and take your music like a man!”

Putnam’s Camp is today a state park, half on the east side of Connecticut 58, half on the west. It is the eastern half that is most visited; it has a lake, a parking lot and picnic tables, and many of the people who come there probably give little thought to the Colonial army that once wintered there.

On the other side of the road, there is a path through the woods that passes the lines of camp hearths and a hilltop cemetery full of the unmarked graves of those who died fighting for American independence.

At the lake, a man — who looks like he’s playing hooky from work — casts his fishing line into the water. The fall remnants of waterlily leaves are curled and brown on the water, and a few Canada geese honk on the lawn.

The sky is overcast, and the woods are brown as tweed, with neither shadows nor highlights. And the old-fashioned New England Fourth of July patriotic and religious picnic is as much a part of the past as Putnam’s war.

Housatonic River, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

HOUSATONIC at STOCKBRIDGE

The last section of Three Places in New England is perhaps the most moving. It is ”The Housatonic at Stockbridge.”

That is, the Housatonic River at Stockbridge, Mass.

The Housatonic is one of those alternating lazy and cascading streams that run from north to south, along which New England’s factories were built in the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

It begins at a small pond in Washington, Mass., and wends its way 149 miles to Long Island Sound at Stratford, Conn.

Along its banks are both towns and woods. Ives honeymooned in the Berkshires in 1908 with his new wife, Harmony, and one Sunday morning, they strolled near Stockbridge and the river.

”We walked in the meadows along the river,” he wrote many years later, ”and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the riverbed and the colors, the running water, the banks and the trees were something that one would always remember.”

The 4-minute movement that Ives wrote captures the quiet and the mist: It is ambiguous tonally and melodically, like a remembered dream, builds to a climax that evaporates abruptly, uncovering the quiet chords playing on the orchestral strings as if they had been sounding all along, but drowned out by the noise.

Like the strings in Ives’ Unanswered Question, which are drowned out by chattering woodwinds, the final quiet strings in Three Places are the eternal harmonies of nature.

Ives liked his piece well enough that he turned it into a song later, with words by poet Robert Underwood Johnson:

”Contented river! In thy dreamy realm — the cloudy willow and the plumy elm.”

It is an elegy to nostalgia.

Stockbridge has changed since the Iveses visited. It is now a prime tourist destination, full of gift shops and art galleries, with frozen yogurt. It is also the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum. Rockwell made his home there and used Stockbridge natives as models for his magazine-cover paintings.

The river eases in and out of town, crossed by four or five small bridges. The Housatonic is an average of only 35 yards across in Stockbridge, hardly more than a brook.

On a cloudy day in October, it also is hidden by the grayness. I have visited every spot along the river in town and enjoyed its quiet but missed its beauty.

Until late that afternoon when I stand on the hill by the Rockwell Museum looking over the river out at Pleasant Hill and a chink in the clouds widens, throwing a spotlight on the meadow across the water. The bare winter sycamores along its banks suddenly stand out like neon, and the band of sunlight sweeps from left to right, finally in its passing leaving the scene in gray once more.

And the riverbed and the colors, the running water, the banks and the trees were something that one would always remember.

DEEP TIME

The search for Ives’ three places has turned into a pile of time on time, present on past, past on deeper past, all wound up in a single point of geography.

It is as if the Indians, who were in New England before the Pilgrims came, had a deeper understanding of reality. When something happens, they believed, it is always happening. Time is not a straight line but a basket full of harvest, all piled in together.

So that I cannot see this single piece of real estate, the Housatonic, the Yankee military camp or the St. Gaudens statue, without thinking of history, memory, my past and my nation’s past, all balled up into a single, complex thing.

All happening at once and all happening in my eye, looking at the past.

And I know it is not just true for these three places, caught in Ives’ web of meaningful noise, but for all places and all times.

Charles and Harmony Ives

CHARLES IVES

Charles Ives is the father of American music.

Before him, what American composers wrote for the concert hall was a dim reflection of European — and especially German — art music, with its sonatas and symphonies. After him, it was possible to feel truly American.

You can see his influence in the folk tunes that show up in Aaron Copland, the spare orchestrations and open harmonies of Roy Harris and the avant-garde fun John Cage has with noise.

Ives was a funny duck. Born in 1874, he studied composition at Yale, but instead of becoming a poverty-stricken composer, he became a wealthy insurance executive. Ives and his partner, Julian Myrick, founded a successful agency that pioneered much of the industry’s modern practice. Myrick had the business sense, Ives brought the creativity.

Together they prospered, ultimately becoming the largest insurance agency in America. In 1929, the firm sold $49 million worth of insurance.

But he was also a genius in music, taking little stock of what he learned from his stuffy college professors and feeding large on the oddball music education he received from his father, George Ives, who was bandmaster for the small Connecticut town of Danbury.

George Ives loved to experiment with sound, playing with microtones, out-of-tune instruments, polytonality and organized noise. That enthusiasm for experiment, which in George was a variety of practical Yankee inventiveness, became for his son a creed and a muse.

Yet although Charles Ives’ music was more modern than Stravinsky’s and more dissonant than Bartok’s, he really was not concerned with fitting into the long history of European art music. It is obvious in the music; Ives was not writing about modern things.

For although the music is filled with ear-splitting dissonances, it is unabashedly nostalgic. Ives felt a powerful nostalgia for the past — his past — and his music drips with bits of the music he heard when he was a boy: old hymn tunes and marching-band music.

No matter how loud and incoherent Ives sounds at first, at long last, it settles into Bringing in the Sheaves and Columbia the Gem of the Ocean — not whole but in snippets, as if half-remembered.

Ives wrote the bulk of his music in the first years of this century. His business and his ailments — he suffered from a poor heart muscle — kept him from concentrating on composition after 1918.

Or perhaps, as Ives’ early biographers, Henry and Sidney Cowell, suggested, ”The war was a shock of the first magnitude to a man whose life was based on his confidence in human progress.”

He lived on until 1954, becoming for many American composers a kind of father figure and rallying point.

—Richard Nilsen

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