A Century of Classical — a first listen to the 20th Century (part 3)
Oh lordy, we’re here at the end of the series on 20th Century classical music (check out part 1 and part 2 to get you up to speed and find out how this format works), and our third installment covers the final 35 years of the century, from 1966 to 2000. In store are protest songs, folk songs, minimalism, microtones and helicopters. Yes, really, helicopters.
1966 — Chant après chant (Jean Barraqué)
work for soprano, piano and six percussionists
GAGA: ★★★★
A chunk of an epic multi-part work on Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil that was still unfinished at the time of Barraqué’s death, Chant après chant is an intricately structured thing. Barraqué constructed seventeen distinct musical phrases of drastically varying lengths, on occasion presented simultaneously, with a focus on paradoxes and self-contradictions found in Broch’s book. The musical language may seem disparate and at times even random, but Barraqué’s timbral and textural focus on resonance vs. transience is at the centre of all the variety.
1967 — November Steps (Tōru Takemitsu)
concertante work for shakuhachi, biwa and western orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★
Takemitsu’s Requiem, written ten years previously, was the work that got him recognised outside his native Japan, but with November Steps (commissioned by the New York Phil for its 125th birthday and premiered under Seiji Ozawa) his reputation as a master composer was solidified in the west. Inspired by a comment Leonard Bernstein made after hearing Eclipse (a concert work for traditional instruments Takemitsu wrote the previous year), Takemitsu combines the shakuhachi (an end-blown bamboo flute) and biwa (a traditional variation of lute) with a symphony orchestra across eleven variations that masterfully illustrate Takemitsu’s skill at manipulating and combining instrumental sounds.
1968 — Symphony (Ester Mägi)
symphony in three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
A major figure in Estonian 20th Century music, but almost completely unknown outside her homeland, Mägi’s Symphony is a fairly slight thing, clocking in at around 12 minutes in total, but its angular and arresting personality don’t leave a listener wanting. Estonia being a Soviet territory in the 60s, Mägi’s music perhaps unsurprisingly shares certain sonic similarities with the music of other Soviet composers such as Khachaturian or Shostakovich, but with its root in Estonian traditional songs and Mägi’s specific compositional tastes (which emphasises chamber-style musical expression even on a larger scale), it has an appeal all its own.
1969 — Konx-Om-Pax (Giacinto Scelsi)
work in three movements for orchestra and chorus
GAGA: ★★★
Konx-Om-Pax takes its name after the 1907 book by occultist Aleister Crowley (and the incantation featured within it), and this Scelsi work certainly has an air of the mystical about it. It is, in essence, a protracted exploration of sound colour — very long, drawn-out chords that dovetail through the assembled forces, rippling, swelling and ebbing in texture, dynamic and harmony. It may not on first listen appear to be the most intricate work, but Scelsi’s mastery of instrumentation, much like Takemitsu’s, is in subtlety as well as scale.
1970 — Black Angels (George Crumb)
suite in three parts and thirteen movements for electric string quartet with auxiliary percussion
GAGA: ★★★★
A musical elegy to the Vietnam War, Crumb centred much of Black Angels on the numbers 7 and 13, along with their associations with luck and misfortune in various numerologies; they dictate durations, patterns — and are even shouted amid the work. The music is, as per usual for Crumb, drastic in its stylistic variation, ranging from a faux-viol consort (with the musicians bowing behind their fingers on the fingerboard) and a set of tuned wine glasses through to semi-disguised Schubert quotations, tam-tams and the intensely modern — sparse, icy textures, grungy harmonies, and an unexpectedly brutal opening with high, caterwauling tremoloes that represent the insect-like whirring of helicopter blades. (Remember this, it will come back later.)
1971 — Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (Gavin Bryars)
work for ensemble and tape
GAGA: ★
While helping to film a documentary about the unhoused in Elephant & Castle, London, Gavin Bryars noticed amongst the footage one man singing a half-remembered gospel refrain. Upon realising the emotional impact of the sample, it became the basis of his composition Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet; Bryars loops the sample as a backbone while gradually building a dense and rich set of harmonies around it. It’s simple, but utterly gorgeous.
1972 — Taverner (Peter Maxwell Davies)
opera in two acts for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
Peter Maxwell Davies had been planning an opera on the 16th Century composer John Taverner (NOT his contemporary, Tavener-without-the-first-R) since a student in 1956, but only 16 years later did the full work — now with a healthy dose of historical liberty — fully come to fruition. Though not immediately apparent at first, Davies weaves references to music of Taverner’s time throughout the otherwise-modernist soundworld — be it a quote of Taverner’s own music (a passage of one of his masses that became famous as the basis of several hundred In Nomines in the period) or the usage of early music instruments like lute, viols, shawm and recorders. It ends up leaving the work in a strange space of both memorial and parody, inherently timeless and yet knowingly post-modern.
1973 — String Quartet no. 4 (Ascent) (Ben Johnston)
string quartet in one movement
GAGA: ★★
Though not overly complex to the ears, Johnston’s String Quartet no. 4 (like all his quartets) is intensely precise and finickety for the players. Johnston was one of the pre-eminent composers exploring alternative tunings in the 20th Century, and his system in particular specified incredibly precise alterations in tuning based upon the precise ratios between the frequencies of notes. This might all sound like a lot, but in Ascent Johnston’s system is tempered (temperament pun very much intended) through its application to a recognisable tune — namely, Amazing Grace. As a fusion of new-school classical composition and old-school folk melody, it’s both engaging and strangely nostalgic.
1974 — Femenine (Julius Eastman)
work for chamber ensemble
GAGA: ★½
Now one of the most significant Black composers and performers of the 20th Century, Eastman’s music was at risk of being forgotten after his tragic, untimely death and the comparative neglect he faced in the music world as opposed to other (non-black) minimalist composers, were it not for the dedicated work of Mary Jane Leach and others in archiving and promoting it. Femenine (yes, spelt like that) is one of many distinctively-titled Eastman works that utilises minimalist compositional processes to explore the cultural aesthetics of gender, sexuality, race, faith and mental illness in 20th Century America — the work is a fairly long ride, but boy if it isn’t a truly hypnotic one.
1975 — The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Fredric Rzewski)
theme and 36 variations for solo piano
GAGA: ★★½
Rzewski’s tribute to the will of the people is truly a beast — an hour-long suite for piano, based on a Chilean protest song, that traverses all the stylistic trends of American classical music at the time (minimalism, folk vernacular, modernist complexity, you name it!). The structure of the work is broken up into 6 sets of 6 variations — the first five each consist of five variations whose stylistic features are ‘summed up’ in a sixth, while the sixth set is a stylistic summary of the previous five sets of variations with one final, exclamatory recapitulation of the theme at the end. It’s perhaps a little academic in spots, but Rzewski’s stylistic fluidity and dedication to variety keep the work fresh and engaging.
1976 — Ainsi la nuit (Henri Dutilleux)
string quartet in seven continuous movements
GAGA: ★★★
One of the most illustrative works of Dutilleux’s distinct compositional practice and one of the most widely-lauded 20th Century quartets, Ainsi la nuit is principally constructed around a single hexachord, or collection of six pitches — namely, C♯, G♯, F, G, C and D — and Dutilleux exploits all the capabilities of these pitches, creating both tonal and atonal harmonies, often in combination. It also highlights Dutilleux’s concept of progressive growth — material is both recalled and pre-called throughout the music, leading to a remarkable sense of unity despite the piece’s piecemeal structure.
1977 — Fratres (Arvo Pärt)
movement originally written for chamber orchestra (several versions exist)
GAGA: ★
Pärt evidently recognised he’d struck gold with Fratres, seeing as official versions have been released for at least 17 different combinations of instruments. A high point of his personal tintinnabuli style (wherein scalic and arpeggiated triadic material are juxtaposed, often at slow paces and with delicate orchestrations), Fratres functions just as much as a set of variations of its central chord sequence. It may have been played out to near-ubiquity, but it still remains as haunting and transfixing as ever (no matter which version you hear).
1978 — Le Grand Macabre (György Ligeti)
opera in two acts and four scenes for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
This opera is pretty ridiculous — I mean, it opens with a prelude for car horns. But get past the comedic veneer and you find… well, a rather comedic opera, despite its title, and one that’s raunchy and random in all the best ways. The writing is oh so Ligeti, with pastiches of opera throughout history finding its home alongside dense tone clusters, aggressively tonal brass, overdramatised coloratura soprano, and an incredibly dry sense of wit throughout. It’s a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience, for sure — if you’ve ever thought opera is too serious for you, this might just change your mind.
1979 — Orion (Claude Vivier)
movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
Murdered at just 34, Claude Vivier’s untimely and gruesome death often overshadows the immense contribution he made to contemporary music, including developing the system of sonic-analysis-based composition that became known as spectral music. Orion features the first fragments of what would become a more fully-fledged spectral style in later works, but also a much more organically evolving series of explorations on the initial trumpet melody. It’s a sweeping, dramatic work that recalls the vastness and magnitude of its namesake constellation.
1980 — Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media (Easley Blackwood)
twelve pieces for variously-tuned electronic instruments
GAGA: ★★½
Like Ben Johnston above, Easley Blackwood was one of several composers in the 20th Century interested in alternative tuning systems. Blackwood took to dividing the octave into different numbers of even steps other than 12 (the standard in Western music) — and for each set of divisions, from 13 to 24, he composed a piece of electronic music. Blackwood’s fascination was seeing whether recognisable Western harmonic relationships could be recreated (or at least analogised) in these nonstandard tuning systems, and the Etudes show the fruit of his work — strange to the ear, for sure, but not as alien as one might expect.
1981 — Tehillim (Steve Reich)
composition in four movements for voices and instruments
GAGA: ★½
In 1977, Steve Reich travelled to Israel to learn about Biblical cantillation, and brought back a new-found interest in incorporating his Jewish heritage into his music. Tehillim, a large-scale setting of excerpts from Psalm in Hebrew, is one of the more explicit representations of this — written in a longer-form canonic style distinct from his earliest works, four voices and accompanying winds loop and draw out the chant-inspired melodies over tuned tambourines, hand claps and rich, punchy string chords.
1982 — Three Voices (Morton Feldman)
work for one live and two pre-recorded voices
GAGA: ★★★★
A long, mostly-wordless, gently pulsating work, dedicated to virtuoso soprano Joan La Barbara, Three Voices is emblematic of Feldman’s own take on minimalism — not the harmonically full-bodied, actively-textured stuff that Reich, Glass and Eastman (among others) were writing, but one centred on pared-back, almost unplaceable stasis and uneasy dissonance. Feldman’s works often stretch duration past their comfortable limits (his String Quartet II typically clocks in somewhere between 5 and 6 hours long), but Three Voices provides a eerie and manageable (if disquieting to some) way in to the composer’s more subdued works.
1983 — Symphony no. 4 (Alfred Schnittke)
symphony in one movement and 22 variations for countertenor and tenor soloists, chamber choir and chamber orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
A choral symphony and one of the greatest works of musical ecumenism ever penned, Schnittke’s whole fourth symphony is built around a string of seufzer (or ‘sighing’) motifs: first heard in harmonically clumsy canon between the three prominent keyboardists (piano, harpsichord and celesta), it wends its way through the orchestra, finding particular audience at two prominent wordless vocal solos by countertenor and tenor. The music’s drama and tension rise and recede, disquieting stillness and raging walls of sound competing — until the waters part, the dissonances recedes to a unison D, and the choir sings Jewish, Lutheran, Catholic and Russian Orthodox melodies together as a musical symbol of togetherness and inter-faith understanding.
1984 — Akhnaten (Philip Glass)
opera in three acts for singers, chorus and orchestra without violins
GAGA: ★★
The second of Glass’s ‘Portrait Trilogy’ of operas about great thinkers of their time (the first being the mammoth Einstein on the Beach and the third being the Gandhi-centric Satyagraha), Akhnaten (portraying the rise and fall of the titular pharaoh and his new religious system) has perhaps seen the greatest public uptake of the three. Violins canned due a lack of space in the premiering theatre’s pit, the dark and brooding colour afforded the orchestra by this decision perfectly fits the themes of political and religious manipulation, cult of personality, and history and legacy. Guided through the story by a spoken narrator and featuring an atypical countertenor lead role (premiere audiences were taken aback by this compositional choice), Akhnaten’s music is propelled by Glass’s trademark style, backed by arpeggios and creative applications of tonal harmony.
1985 — Ausklang (Helmut Lachenmann)
concerto for piano and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★
Helmut Lachenmann helped pioneer a style of composition known as musique concrète instrumentale, where the instruments as a whole are treated as sources of sound in the manner that early tape music would utilise everyday noise as samples. Ausklang is one of many Lachenmann pieces to use this principle masterfully — whether scratched strings or air noises blown through brass, extending to the piano soloist hitting the frame within the piano with a hammer or dragging fingernails along the surface of the keys. It’s daunting to read on the score, but a repository of strange and wonderful sounds you’re unlikely to have heard before.
1986 — Orawa (Wojciech Kilar)
movement for string orchestra
GAGA: ★
The composer to the scores for Coppola’s Dracula and Polanski’s The Pianist (amongst others), Kilar is yet another film composer (like Korngold in the first installment, and Arnold and Williams in the second) whose concert career is just as luminary. Orawa is a distinctly un-American take on the minimalist style (they can repeat things across the pond, too), with a feel of Eastern European folk music about it; building from just a simple melody over a two-note cell, it grows, accruing more material until it runs to its explosive, chaotic finish.
1987 — Symphony no. 4 (Prayer) (Galina Ustvolskaya)
symphony in one movement for mezzo-soprano, trumpet, piano and tam-tam
GAGA: ★★★
This ain’t like any symphony you’ve heard before, folks. True to its subtitle, Ustvolskaya’s fourth sets a Slavonic prayer, and is her smallest sympony in scale. Her famous comment that “none of [her] music is chamber music, not even in the case of a solo sonata” might raise eyebrows here, but it is true that despite its size the writing is distinctively un-chamber-like. Not that it’s overly symphonic either, it’s just… an object of devotional art, devoid of further status, which passes and is done. More conceptual than might first meet the ear, and one of the most haunting and barren religious compositions of the era.
1988 — Red Earth (Michael Finnissy)
work in one movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
The title of this composition hints at the almost geological scale that it seems to work on — material moves in huge chunks and is rent apart by hammer blows and sudden shifts in texture and timbre. Finnissy, widely seen as the torchbearer for the ‘New Complexity’ movement that seeks hyper-detailed sets of musical systems evolving throughout every layer of the piece, may not be here at his most intricate, but the slightly larger brushstrokes lend the work an unstoppable urgency.
1989 — Three Occasions for Orchestra (Elliot Carter)
three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
Elliot Carter died in 2012, over a century after he was born, and was still writing up until his final months. But what made this legendary composer so respected was not just his longevity but his unique fusion of American and European modernism with a recognisably ‘fresh’ harmonic and rhythmic touch. The Three Occasions, sure enough, commemorate three separate dates — the 150th anniversary of the state of Texas, the passing of a musical patron, and Carter’s anniversary with his wife — each with a outlook that is equal parts respectful and upbeat, with crisp textures and complex, ever-evolving harmonies.
1990 — The Dead Man (John Zorn)
string quartet in 13 movements
GAGA: ★★★★
If I had a nickel for every 13-movement string quartet I put on this list that began with squealing tremolos, I’d have two nickels — which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. Zorn broke into the not-quite-mainstream with an album of Morricone arrangements that sound little like Morricone (the film master loved it), and this strange, irreverent fusion of popular tunes and avant-garde concert-hall repertoire fills his music to the brim. The Dead Man might be a title more typically for a doom project than a string quartet, but after listening you just might agree it fits.
1991 — Concerto for Orchestra (Joan Tower)
concerto for orchestra in one movement and two parts
GAGA: ★★½
The Concerto for Orchestra is one of the most famous works in Pulitzer Prize finalist Tower’s impressive output. Both her style and her compositional concepts approach the American tradition with a fond but critical eye, and in the Concerto for Orchestra the sounds of Old Hollywood meet the harmonies and textures of New Europe. The movement has a similar grand sense of scale as Red Earth, though the effect is very different — Red Earth stops you in your tracks, while the Concerto instead opens up a wide, winding path before you.
1992 — Veni, Veni Emmanuel (James MacMillan)
concerto for solo percussionist and orchestra)
GAGA: ★★★½
MacMillan’s Catholic faith informs much of his compositional work, extending beyond his many liturgical pieces into even his concertos. Veni, Veni Emmanuel, a percussion concerto written for deaf percussion queen Evelyn Glennie, draws on the music of the titular chant (you might know it as ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel) but withholds it until the very end — what ensues in between is a string of both symbolically and musically rich movements including a dance, a prayer and a chorale that expand upon the religious subtexts of the work while also lending it a clear and compelling structure.
1993 — Helikopter-Streichquartett (Karlheinz Stockhausen)
work for amplified string quartet in four helicopters with audio and video transmission
GAGA: ★★★★★
If I had a nickel for every string quartet on this list related to helicopters that featured shouted numbers… Inspired by a dream Stockhausen had (and good lord, what a dream it must have been), this chamber-piece-by-name-only sees the members of a string quartet each sent into the skies in their own personal chopper (most of the time the military gets drafted in to help); what follows is a raucous web of tremolo and glissando, with the players shouting strings of numbers between each other over radio mic, all beamed in full video into the concert hall. If you want more(!), the movement can also be found as the third scene of Mittwoch (Wednesday), the third in his monumental opera cycle Licht (“Light”).
1994 — Stele (György Kurtág)
work in three movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
A lot of Kurtág’s music is very slight, svelte, and fleeting — he once wrote a 12-movement string quartet that is over in 8 minutes — though his style also extends to longer, larger works. Stele is a sombre work, dedicated to cellist and composer András Mihály (a frequent dedicatee of Kurtág’s works). The first movement sees the orchestra bend in and out of pitch with itself, before a more frenetic and whirring second movement leads to anguished chords, and a final movement of more gently undulating textural swells. Kurtág’s small-scale precision being expanded gives studied, drawn-out explorations of individual textural ideas in each movement, resulting in a piece that, while perhaps a little peculiar at first, proves a enthralling listen.
1995 — Panic (Harrison Birtwistle)
concerto for alto saxophone, jazz drummer, wind, brass and percussion
GAGA: ★★★★
In the kind of musical outrage not commonly seen since the start of the century, the premiere of Birtwistle’s Grecian-inspired sax-and-drums concerto at the Last Night of the BBC Proms was apparently met with “thousands” of complaints from confused viewers more used to the traditional pomp and circumstance of… well, Pomp and Circumstance. Still, get past the sensational headlines and you get a lean, relentlessly energetic work that places the protagonistic role of Pan firmly in the hands of the almost-uninterrupted solo saxophone.
1996 — Lilacs (George Walker)
work in four movements for soprano and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
This Pulitzer-awarded work made George Walker the first Black composer to win the illustrious American composition prize, in a unanimous decision from the jury who praised its lyricism and deeply American identity. Setting a long poem by Walt Whitman originally written to commemorate Lincoln after his assassination, Walker doesn’t shy away from passages of dense tonal clusters and expressive, neo-romantic dissonance while still expertly communicating the heart of Whitman’s elegy.
1997 — Viola, Viola (George Benjamin)
movement for two violas
GAGA: ★★★
Benjamin’s title for Viola, Viola is an particularly apt one — because this isn’t really a duet in the sense of two instruments actively working together, but two single parts that happen to have come into contact. While they do share plenty of material, the overall mood is a combattive one — the two violas trading blows, while the audience watches on from the sidelines as if they’ve just walked in on something they hadn’t intended to see. It’s gutsy and bold, a creative reimagining of the string duo format and an essential new work in the underpopulated viola repertoire.
1998 —Two Paths: A Dedication to Mary and Martha (Sofia Gubaidulina)
concerto for two violas and orchestra
GAGA: ★★½
Take the two violas from before, and now add an orchestra. Gubaidulina’s dedication to the two sisters of Lazarus and their different displays of dedication (the one a worldly dedication to the essentials of earthly living, the other a wholehearted giving up of oneself to the sublime) is one of the composer’s most extroverted and gestural works, as well as one of her most approachable. Beginning with cascades and surges that give way to the two violas’ interplay, and leading to several variations in which the differences between the two personas are intensified and obfuscated, Gubaidulina creates a dramatic programme that extends the work before the usual thematic confines of a concerto.
1999 — The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (Karl Jenkins)
mass for choir and orchestra
GAGA: ★
One of the most popular composers in terms of CDs sold (his Adiemus series being his best-selling), Jenkins’ 1999 composition joins Britten’s War Requiem in the ranks of pacifist choral works built off the texts of the Mass. Commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum and dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo War, Jenkins’ tender and accessible work is concertedly wide-reaching — Renaissance soldiers’ song leads to an Islamic adhaan, before secular poetry on the brutalities of war is interspersed with the standard movements of the Ordinary. Some may look down their nose at the blatantly popular style, but the work was intended to move as many people as possible and Jenkins’ vernacular style is perfect for achieving just that.
2000 — L’amour de loin (Kaija Saariaho)
opera in five acts for singers, chorus and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★
L’amour de loin is a perfect work to close out the century — at once bracingly modern in its style and yet looking back to musical and poetic traditions of centuries past. Plot derived from the mythologised biography of troubadour Jaufre Rudel, and titled after a central theme of his work (love from afar), Saariaho and librettist Amin Maalouf create an affecting and elegantly poised work that pits matters of the heart against matters of the soul — and the struggles these two face when they meet is deftly rendered in the vibrant and beautifully orchestrated score, and intensely emotive vocal writing.
So — there we have it, one hundred (and one) years of classical music, from oratorio to opera, choir to quartet, symphony to song cycle. Hopefully there have been a few picks that might convince the more skeptical of you to dip your toe into this rich and varied period of musical history — and maybe even a couple of fresh faces and unknown works to satisfy the more seasoned listener. As always, Spotify playlists for this updateare here (for the full listing) and here (for the selections), and all playlists I put together are available to view on my public profile. Any suggestions on what bits of music to write about next, I’m all ears — leave a comment or drop me a line! — and if you like what I do, consider subscribing to my Medium so you know when I upload any of my assorted music musings. Anywho, until next time,
A.C.
