A Century of Classical — a first listen to the 20th Century (part 2)
It’s another jump back in time to continue on with the 20th Century listening guide. After the first part last week that took us from ecclesiastical English oratorio to daring Danish drama (check it out to see more about how the format works), our second set of selections will include pieces from 1931 to 1965, running the whole gamut from intense meditations on war and suffering, to a light-hearted(?) game of tennis. Read on to find out more…
1931 — String Quartet 1931 (Ruth Crawford Seeger)
string quartet in four movements
GAGA: ★★★½
An essential work by a female composer in a landscape so often painted as entirely male, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s guilt at writing music ‘solely for pleasure’ amid the post-Depression poverty led her to dive full force into both folk-influenced and avant-garde composition. Her 1931 quartet is a richly expressive affair despite its perhaps-intimidating harmonic and rhythmic language; the third of its four untitled movements in particular looks ahead to the minimalism of the second half of the century, with its deceptively lush, protracted harmonies, pulsating drones and rhythmically propulsive swells.
1932 — Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (Florence Price)
suite in three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★½
Florence Price was the first African-American woman to have her work played by a major orchestra, and she knew how to use an ensemble of that size well; it’s the forces she chose to portray the history of enslaved Africans and their arrival in (and adaptation to) America in Ethiopia’s Shadow. Weaving a musical tapestry of African American song amidst a European Romantic tone poem, Price’s stylistic synthesis in this and other works became the blueprint for a following generation of Black composers in the USA.
1933 — Janitzio (Silvestre Revueltas)
movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Much as Villa-Lobos’ and Granados’ personal strain of post-romantic composition as heavily influenced by their nations’ popular music (check out last week’s list to find out more about them), so too was Revueltas’ by the musics of Mexico — both those of the indigenous people and those brought by the colonisers. Janitzio presents a portrait of the titular island in Lake Pátzcuaro, an honest reflection of the area and its atmosphere and yet a slyly sardonic takedown of such ‘picture postcard’ compositions as a genre in and of themselves.
1934 — Saxophone Concerto (Alexander Glazunov)
concerto in three continuous movements for solo alto saxophone and strings
GAGA: ★
While Adolphe Sax had designed the saxophone in 1840, and it had been taken up in more popular spheres such as marching bands and jazz by the ’30s, the instrument was still relatively rare in classical music, and in particular as a soloist. Glazunov’s concerto, however, almost single-handedly changed the state of play, with its sweeping Romanticism highlighting the emotive qualities of the sax to their fullest, and immediately entering (and catalysing the creation of) the repertoire.
1935 — Violin Concerto (Roger Sessions)
concerto in four movements for solo violin and orchestra without violins
GAGA: ★★½
Removing the violin section from the orchestra in a violin concerto might seem an odd move, but Sessions’ choice to leave only the lower strings to underpin the texture of the concerto lends its sound world an alluring warmth and darkness. The work was seen by Sessions as his first proper break from the brusque reimagining of classical textures that governed his early work, and across its four movements the concerto presents long expanses of continuous material in which motifs and ideas surface and recede amid the flow like rolling waves.
1936 — Sinfonia india (Carlos Chávez)
symphony in one movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Chávez’s second symphony is also his most popular and well-known work, and though it is written in one movement it nonetheless follows the standard three-part form for a classical symphony. Named for its basis in indigenous songs (and use of traditional percussion) from Northern Mexico, the symphony is one of Chávez’s most distinctly ‘Mexican’ works, though retaining his worldly influences from the classical music of both Europe and the US.
1937 — Job: A Masque for Dancing (Ralph Vaughan Williams)
ballet in one act for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Job is an interesting beast for multiple reasons: firstly, it was the first ballet put on entirely by a British creative team, meaning it was instrumental in the development of a British national balletic style; and secondly, ballets on religious subjects are comparatively rare. However, Vaughan Williams’ trademark folkish style helps powerfully evoke the various tableaux from the prophet’s life (and for good reason — William Blake’s illustrations on the Book of Job were a primary inspiration).
1938 — Carmina Burana (Carl Orff)
scenic cantata for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★½
While Orff’s legacy and debatably-reluctant involvement with the Nazi Party remain a contentious point, there is little denying that Carmina Burana, and particularly its opening/closing powerhouse ‘O Fortuna’ (yes, that ‘O Fortuna’), have endured like few other classical works. But dive beyond the bombast of the cry to Fate and a diverse and emotionally driven cantata underpinning a tale of love across the seasons unfolds itself; the love aria, ‘In trutina’, and the darkly comic lament of a roasting swan, ‘Olim lacum colueram’, are notable highlights.
1939 — Symphony No. 4 (Alexandre Tansman)
symphony in three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Polish and later French composer Alexandre Tansman saw a fair deal of success in his life, but in the years following his death his star has never shone as brightly as many of his contemporaries and compatriots — unfairly so, too, as his Fourth Symphony illustrates. Its three movements are replete with charisma and charm; the first opens with serenity before being dragged kicking into a bustling allegro, the second (for only the strings) wears its intense sentiment on its sleeve, and the third tumbles through roiling jazz-influenced counterpoint of which Hindemith would be proud.
1940 — Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Olivier Messiaen)
suite for clarinet, violin, cello and piano
GAGA: ★★★½
In June of 1940, Messiaen was imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp; upon meeting other musicians imprisoned there with him, and being offered some small leniencies by the camp guards, he set to work on writing one of the most influential chamber works of the 20th Century. The Quartet for the End of Time was inspired by a quotation from the Book of Revelation (though given its wartime origin the title takes on a second, more sinister meaning), and Messiaen’s highly personal use of birdsong and Indian classical rhythms (or tala) illustrate the work’s Biblical programme with singular character.
1941 — Barstow (Harry Partch)
movement for voices and instruments
GAGA: ★★★★
Harry Partch forms a third corner of the triangle of American experimentation, along with Henry Cowell and John Cage; but while Cage and Cowell experimented with new ways to play existing instruments, Partch forged his own path and built new ones with unique tunings specifically for his works. Many of those creations, including the Diamond and Bamboo Marimbas, the Surrogate Kithara and the Chromelodeon, find themselves in Barstow, a characteristically chaotic setting of “Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California” that is as engaging as it is bizarre.
1942 — Gayane (Aram Khachaturian)
ballet in four acts for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Khachaturian’s score is by far the most famous feature of this Soviet folk ballet, whose libretto pivoted multiple times between a more fervently nationalist tale of standing true against treason to a more sincere celebration of love in a multiethnic community. Both the ‘Sabre Dance’ and the ‘Adagio’ have found considerable life separate from the rest of the ballet, but the whole score is a charismatic and ultimately unabashedly uplifting time.
1943 — Der Kaiser von Atlantis (Viktor Ullmann)
legend in four scenes for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Like Messiaen, Ullmann spent the war imprisoned in a Nazi camp; unlike Messiaen, Ullmann was Jewish. Ullmann and librettist Peter Kien worked on the opera in Theresienstadt, but due to the opera’s clearly satirical tone (and no doubt the identity of its composer and librettist) it was never allowed to be performed. Kien and Ullmann were murdered in Auschwitz, but their work survived in the hands of Dr. Emil Utitz, who along with another survivor, Dr. Hans Gunther Adler, ultimately ensured the preparation and eventual first performance of this crucial wartime work in 1975.
1944 — Sea Sketches (Grace Williams)
suite in five movements for string orchestra
GAGA: ★
Grace Williams holds the distinction of being the first British woman to soundtrack a film, and while her score to 1949's Blue Scar is great, it is in her concert works that she is most remembered. Despite Wales’ strong choral tradition, Williams (a Glamorgan native) wrote principally instrumental works, and Sea Sketches is one of her most enduring — a portrait of the various moods of the sea, strongly influenced by her nostalgia for the Barry coast.
1945 — Metamorphosen (Richard Strauss)
study for 23 solo strings
GAGA: ★½
While Strauss never outlined the explicit inspiration or meaning behind Metamorphosen, its composition coming at the end of the Second World War, its intense expressivity and a quotation of the Marcia funebre from Beethoven’s Eroica all point to a meditation on the horrors of the previous six years. A figure far less sympathetic to the Nazi powers than, say, Orff, and one who attempted to use his artistic influence to help Jewish family and associates, Strauss wrote at the end of the war that “the most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom”; Metamorphosen appears the musical transcription of that deeply wounded and resentful signing-off to the wartime.
1946 — Symphonie Liturgique (Arthur Honegger)
symphony in three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★½
An explicitly pacifist work written shortly after the culmination of the Second World War, Honegger’s third symphony reconfigures the typical programme of the form, titling each movement after liturgical texts, the likes of which would be more commonly seen in a choral work. The opening Dies Irae, named after a funereal sequence evoking the Apocalypse, is a brusque and unforgiving opener, while the middle De profundis clamavi (“From the depths I cry”, the incipit of Psalm 130) is a more pensive affair, but the one-two punch delivered in the final movement Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us peace”) is the most memorable — a crazed march that abates to a lyrical, soothing coda.
1947 — String Quartet No. 3 (Grażyna Bacewicz)
string quartet in three movements
GAGA: ★★
A work by one of Poland’s preeminent composers of the 20th Century, Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 3 was highly regarded by her contemporaries (Lutosławski was a big fan), but has seen little wider acknowledgement in comparison to many of her other works. Its harmonic language and in particular textures are decidedly neoclassical, though not without their modernist charm, but what really stands out about the quartet is its extreme idiomacy (how well the piece is written for the instruments); Bacewicz’s frequent use of open strings, complex bowings and detailed markings illustrate her understanding of the forces she is writing for, and help add emphasis to the musical material, enriching the work further.
1948 — Sonatas and Interludes (John Cage)
set of pieces for prepared piano
GAGA: ★★★★
John Cage wrote a lot more than just silence; and while 4’33’’ — not the only notes-less piece, FYI — is certainly Cage’s most (in)famous composition, it forms only a fraction of the innovation on which his reputation rests. The Sonatas and Interludes are his most significant work for prepared piano, wherein he instructs the pianist (or a sympathetic piano technician) to place everyday objects upon and between the strings such as nuts, bolts and pieces of rubber — and these preparations transform the uniform timbre of the piano to a smorgasbord of percussion, with sounds evoking rattles, bells, drums and more.
1949 — Il prigioniero (Luigi Dallapiccola)
opera in a prologue and one act for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★½
One of the first completed operas written via serialist compositional methods, Dallapiccola’s radio-turned-stage-opera is a philosophical story on themes such as guilt, remorse and redemption. Adapting in part materials from his earlier Canto di prigiona, the serialist compositional technique forms the skeleton over which Dallapiccola’s intense post-Romantic dramaturgy can be hung, with the prisoner’s moral dilemma, his mother’s increasing despair, and the voices of judgment from above being threaded amongst music that is both deeply austere and extravagantly expressive.
1950 — Polyphonie X (Pierre Boulez)
work in three movements for 18 instruments in seven groups
GAGA: ★★★★½
Boulez didn’t like Polyphonie X — so much so that after its premiere (marked like so many by both applause and scorn), he officially withdrew it on account of its technical flaws, after which he referred to it as a ‘document’ rather than a piece of music. That hasn’t stopped it, however, from gaining acclaim and subsequent performances from other quarters — Stravinsky was a noted fan of the work, and it is widely seen as central to Boulez’s development of his personal serialist style and his exploration of larger instrumental forces.
1951 — Nummer 2 (Karel Goeyvaerts)
movement for thirteen instruments
GAGA: ★★★½
Widely (though not unanimously) seen as the first ‘total serialist’ work (where every aspect of the composition is governed by numerical series), Nummer 2 is both rigorously mathematical and wildly creative. The piano forms the backbone of the work both sonically and structurally, with the other 12 instruments a much more interruptive, jagged force — though in the central section of the piece they at times find their way to an almost-consonant sense of unity.
1952 — Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac (Benjamin Britten)
work in one movement for alto, tenor and piano
GAGA: ★½
The second of Britten’s five Canticles (none of which are actually canticles in the liturgical sense), Abraham and Isaac tells the story of God testing the elder patriarch by ordering him to sacrifice his son (spoilers: he agrees, but God intervenes at the last second). Britten’s style is characteristically whimsical in places, though he also crafts high drama and extreme beauty in corners; the effect of the two vocalists singing in close harmony to evoke the voice of God is a particularly striking feature.
1953 — Symphony No. 2 (Malcolm Arnold)
symphony in four movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Malcolm Arnold is possibly most known for his film score to The Bridge On The River Kwai, which earned him an Oscar, but like so many other film composers in the earlier decades of the 20th Century, he was an accomplished concert-hall composer too. This Symphony is the second of his nine, and is full of a distinctly English compositional charm — reminiscences of Britten, for sure, as well as others like Walton and Vaughan Williams, but in a package that is distinctly Arnold in its flair, humour and dramatic range.
1954 — Nones (Luciano Berio)
movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★
As far as hard-core serialism goes, Nones might actually be a fairly good place to start — at only around 7 minutes long, it is perhaps one of the most digestible larger-scale works in the repertoire. Originally intended as the groundwork for an oratorio on the Auden poem, Nones instead became an intricately textural orchestral work that vaguely follows a theme-and-variations structure. And there is a lot of variation — with rhythmic and timbral motifs like staccato strings or gaudy brass growls punctuating different sections to help the ear navigate the calculatedly atonal landscape.
1955 — African Suite (Fela Sowande)
suite in five movements for string orchestra
GAGA: ★
Fela Sowande is widely seen as the father of Nigerian art music — and with an education rooted in both Lagos and London, and an intimate knowledge of both sacred and secular Western classical music, alongside jazz and the folk music of his homeland, he was well-equipped to unite the different strands of his musical upbringing into his compositions. The African Suite is his most internationally known work — the first movement even got a slot as title music on a Canadian music review show — and illustrates a highly personal stylistic treatment of African music, with sonic palettes ranging from jazz through impressionism to rococo poise.
1956 — Il canto sospeso (Luigi Nono)
cantata for singers, choir and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★½
Few pieces of the 20th Century have caused quite so much controversy as Nono’s total-serialist cantata. Its unabashedly left-leaning political message, setting letters and personal texts of resistance fighters executed by the Nazis during World War II, not only upset the preconceptions of serialist music in the classical world (Adorno equated serial music with totalitarianism) but also ruffled the post-war German audiences of its premiere and early performances; some even chalk the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing in Munich down in part to a planned performance of the work that was ultimately cancelled. Though hardly neoclassical in sound, Nono did adhere to Baroque conventions of alternating instrumental and vocal movements for a cantata, and also used a carefully constructed tone row as the basis of the piece to give it a (modernist) sense of clarity and precision — a difficult work, for sure, but a masterfully composed one.
1957 — Agon (Igor Stravinsky)
ballet in four parts for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
Agon combines all the best of Stravinsky’s various compositional styles — the modernist firebrand, the intricate neoclassicist, and the studied serialist. The score to a plotless ballet where the full orchestra never plays together at any one time, all of Stravinsky’s most iconic idiosyncracies are on full display here — it is, in many ways, the perfect one-and-done taster of one of the most luminary composers in history and what makes his output so extraordinary.
1958 — Ellora Symphony (Yasushi Akutagawa)
symphony in one movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
Yasushi Akutagawa was one of post-war Japan’s most important musical figures, helping to form a musical bridge between his own country’s musical traditions and those of the West (particularly the Soviet Union, in which he was for a time the only Japanese composer to be officially published). His Ellora Symphony, however, breaks from the Shostakovich-inspired sounds of his first symphony; instead, over a single movement broken into distinct ‘parts’, he explores a primitivistic, muscular style, drawn from the atmosphere and history/mythology of the titular temple complex in India.
1959 — The Sofa (Elizabeth Maconchy)
comic opera in one act for singers, chorus and chamber orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Considered one of the most important composers in defining a national musical style for the British Isles, Maconchy was not averse to some rather bizarre and raunchy humour in her music. With a libretto derived by Ursula Vaughan Williams from a Crebillon libertine novel, this ‘light-hearted, light-headed and entirely improbable’ opera (Maconchy’s words) tells the story of a horny man who is turned into a sofa by his grandmother, only to have his girlfriend get it on with another man… on him. I don’t really think I need to say anything else. (In case I do, though, the orchestration is great, Maconchy’s vocal writing is supreme, and the humour is absolutely on point.)
1960 — Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Krzysztof Penderecki)
composition for 52 string instruments
GAGA: ★★★★★
The title gives you a fair warning, but… this piece is a LOT. Penderecki’s use of extended techniques for his 52 solo strings went far beyond many used before, not just in terms of variety but density. The strings wail, whine, scream, screech and scratch, with the players hitting every possible bit of the instrument in every possible way, and Penderecki pulls no punches in making the sound as impenetrable, affronting and unpleasant as possible. To that end, as an evocation of the horrors of nuclear war, it’s unparalleled.
1961 — Symphony No. 3 (Einojuhani Rautavaara)
symphony in four movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Rautavaara’s Third is the composer’s ‘Bruckner’ symphony — going so far as to use Wagner tubas, an instrument almost exclusively found in late-19th-Century German repertoire, in the score. Rautavaara’s symphony manages to bridge the use of serial composition (typically a technique that results in atonal music) with his typical radiant tonal language to create a dramatic and breathtaking set of sonic vistas throughout.
1962 — Symphony No. 13 (Dmitri Shostakovich)
symphony in five movements for bass soloist, men’s chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
One of Shostakovich’s bitterest and darkest works, his Thirteenth (commonly known by the unofficial subtitle Babi Yar) sets the works of Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with different movements tackling bureaucracy, class division, political supression and (most strikingly) the massacre of Soviet Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv during the Nazi occupation. But it’s not a work that looks solely backwards; both Yevtushenko and Shostakovich bring the questions with them, condemning the erasure and distortion of history and art — a sentiment which still feels uncomfortably relevant today.
1963 — Sept répons des ténèbres (Francis Poulenc)
work in seven movements for soprano, choir and orchestra
GAGA: ★★½
Poulenc’s music is often thought of as whimsical, comedic and light-hearted, but in more straight-laced religious works like the Sept répons, the spiritual and emotional conflicts that troubled the composer — the reconciliation of his Catholic faith and his homosexuality, in particular — do show themselves. Not that the Sept répons are dreary at all — they’re stunning and boldly arresting, as a matter of fact, and still feature a lot of his singular charm — but a wonderful way to remember just how diverse his output (and that of the composers around him) was.
1964 — Match (Maurizio Kagel)
piece for two cellos and percussion
GAGA: ★★★½
Anyone for a game? Much of Kagel’s output integrated dramatic practices into the music — choreography, staging, facial and bodily expressions, to more fully complete the artistic narrative. Match is possibly the best first way to see what he’s doing, as it’s very evident — the two cellists are the tennis players, the percussionist sitting between them the umpire. This is a work that’s worth watching a performance of to get the full impact — who doesn’t want to see two string players swerving their bodies trying to volley the choppy pizzicatos and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tremolos.
1965 — Jeu de Miroirs de Votre Faust (Henri Pousseur)
work for soprano, piano and tape
GAGA: ★★★★★
Henri Pousseur’s full opera Votre Faust is so long, and constructed in such a way, that you can’t actually use all its score in one performance; good thing, then, that certain sections of the score have also been released as solo pieces, including this movement for soprano, piano and tape. Electronic music had been growing over the past couple of decades by this point, and Pousseur’s usage of it here (and throughout the whole opera) is very typical of the time — distortion and reconfiguring of the live materials coupled with incisive interruptions and glitchy washes of sound. It’s not the most welcoming sound palette, and the voice and piano lines don’t make it any easier on the audience (or themselves), but for an adventurous soul it’s a wonderful archetype of the kinds of musical experimentation that were occuring at this point in the century.
So there we have it — part 2 complete! Spotify playlists for the music I talked about above will be here (for the full playlist) and here (for the selections) — check them out, if you’re short something to listen to. As before, naturally not every big name was able to be included in favour of an interesting and diverse collection of pieces — let me know which you feel also deserved a spot here, or any that you’re curious to explore further! And if this is your jam, consider subscribing to my Medium so you never miss when I post something (and check out part 1, if you haven’t already). See you next time for the last chunk of the century! :)
A.C.
