What Are The Most Significant Works Classical Music?

I think it would rapidly get unrealistic if everyone added the complete works of composers that they're big fans of (eg, I'd end up adding everything by J S Bach).

So how about just Chopin's Études?

There was so much food for thought in your post a page back, dubrob, I’ve been struggling to respond without running to multi pages. Your point about compositional craft/technique being a distinguishing factor in classical music seems to me to be a key one.

I’d like to broaden that statement by arguing that all music, regardless of genre, is a synthesis of particular elements: melody; harmony; rhythm; structure/form (the inter-relationships of all the elements); something I’ll call the X factor which is emotion, excitement, visualization, message – an element that’s sometimes hard to describe because it reaches into us to touch something we may have difficulty understanding; and lastly, performance/recording. What distinghuishes genres is how these elements are combined, the importance of each to the overall impact of the music.

To start with an example you gave, Heartbreak Hotel, why is it a landmark for many of us? There’s little in the way of melody, harmony, structural or rhythmical interest. Surely it’s all X factor and performance (recording too – the Sun Studio sound). The sound of Elvis singing that song, regardless of its musical worth, touched people all over the world in a way that defies analysis. Cover versions of rock songs have seldom succeeded because performance and occasion are all.

Jazz tends to pay more attention to rhythm and harmony, structure too. It is certainly a more complex form than rock, calling for far more skill in execution. But it too is a performance-based genre with a big dose of X factor. When we take in live jazz we realize how difficult it is for performers to reproduce what we just heard. Interaction between performers and audience can cause a degree of excitement and level of performance difficult to duplicate. Yes, we rejoice in the skills of the musicians but to reach us they need to communicate and at a level difficult to describe. Mingus used to go nuts at his musicians if they weren’t, in his estimation, speaking from their souls.

Classical music benefits too from a high degree of emotional commitment on behalf of the musicians but its distinction lies elsewhere. Your claim re. the importance and stature of compositional skill in classical music seems to me to be a valid one, dubrob. It doesn’t put classical music on a higher plane than other genres, just makes it different. At the same time, classical composers ignore other musical elements at their peril. Sure, the interest in Stravinsky’s music is primarily rhythmic, harmonic and structural. But regardless of the composer’s own claims to be nothing more than a kind of processing unit for the mathematical relationships between notes, there’s more than a little X in there. Any listener can identify the tensions in ‘Symphony in Three Movements’, the earthy excitement of ‘Les Noces’. Composers, even the great ones, can over-compose, sacrifice too much at the altar of compositional technique e.g. Brahms in his motets and perhaps his 4th Symphony. Composition is after all as much about what you leave out as what you put in. Carter may work painstakingly through the inter-relationships and implications of every note he writes but to produce great works he needs to know when to call it a day, when to give up on an ingenious sequence of bars to benefit the overall structure and impact of a work. Recordings of composers’ first, second and umpteenth thoughts on a work show us that the very best, like Sibelius, knew when to prune and when to let it go. With no single answer to any musical problem, composers need to address factors other than just compositional technique to tell them when they have it right, and there might be more than a little gut feel in the final answer. Look how long VW sweated over the final note of the second movement of Symphony 4 before he decided on E.

The way musical elements combine in particular genres is the reason fusion music so seldom works. Attempts to meld the appearance of Adonis with the brain of Einstein often end up with the reverse. I totally agree dubrob: Topographic Oceans is the point at which Yes stepped over the line and in trying to turn rock music into classical, produced neither. Similarly with Lamb Lies Down on Broadway for Genesis. The visceral excitement of good rock went awol. At the other end of the scale classical music’s forays into rock, blues and jazz can be downright embarrassing – Tippett at his extreme or one-off deals like Russo’s Three Pieces for String Band and Symphony Orchestra, a piece that sounds to me like Mantovani Does New Orleans. Bernstein made a pretty good fist of it by applying strict compositional principles to jazz and swing-flavoured rhythm and melody. It’s early days on Golijov, but he seems to be able to bridge genres successfully by not aiming to satisfy the criteria of any particular kind of music, just tossing everything into the melting pot and starting from scratch.

Consideration of the relative importance of elements within genres helps us understand how taste and preferences vary. Personally I get a big kick out of analysing a piece's structure. Many people get their enjoyment out of rhythm and/or melody, which is why pop music is what it is. As Chuck Berry said in “Rock and Roll Music”:

I got no kick against modern jazz

Unless they try to play it too darned fast

And lose the beauty of the melody

Until it’s sounding like a symphony

Only half-accurate, perhaps. Neither modern jazz nor the best symphonic music find their main driving force in melody. If melody is what you want from music try a different genre.

Indeed Tagalie indeed. What you call the X factor I would simply call magic, because it´s something unexplainable, supernatural, oh that reminds me of that wonderful old Bluebreakers tune with the young and incredible Peter Green, some people might use the word aura, but that´s a word I have never been able to use because I just keep hearing Frank Zappa singing ´can I touch your aura Dora¨ and fall around the place in hysterics. This magic seems somehow much more primeval in rock and jazz than classical.

I heard a similar story to your Mingus antidote about Elvin Jones, apparently in a group in his post Coltrane days the sax player asked if they could play something other than standards because it was getting boring playing the same stuff night after night. Elvin apparently wasn´t impressed and told him if you are a musician, and you play with soul, everytime you play a tune it´s different, something unrepeatable and always new.

Stravinsky said that music expresses nothing; fundamentally I agree, and it is what allows me to listen to Wagner without a guilty conscience. Where the magic happens is where music, these notes, connect with us and create something wholly new within us, or between us and these sounds, some unexplainable synthetic vibration of sound, structure, time, body and mind. What this is exactly is different for every individual. It´s all about confoming to or defying our expectations. Some people listen to music for a particular reason, but for me the real magic, is when something happens to you, but it´s just all too strange to explain it. These sounds create separate universes into which you want or need to travel, or can´t avoid being drawn into.

For example a contributor in another thread when speaking about Sibelius talked about fjords and forests, and white winter skies. That´s what it expresses to him, but not to me, for one I never knew there were fjords in Finland, but when I listen to Sibelius I just feel this incredible sense of overwhelming power expressed in an incredibly organic and transparent way. Speaking of knowing what to leave out, don´t you feel the last movement of his Second Symphony, would have been better if he had pulled the plug about 5 minutes earlier?

What Are The Most Significant Works Classical Music?

There's been a lot of very good comments on your question, so I can't pretend anything I'm going to say is original, but here goes.

The first thing that struck me about your list was I wouldn't recommend trying to go through it all piece by piece - it would be rather like trying to eat 50 main courses at a Michelin-starred restaurant. They might all be significant works, but you'd give yourself overload if you tried to listen to them one after the other.

Another point to make is that for some clearly 'significant' works , you need to work your way up to them - Mahler's 8th is a great work, but you need to get used to him first with something more accessible such as his 1st or 4th symphonies. If you go straight to the 8th, you'll probably find it incomprehensible (not to say exhausting). In the same way, I adore the late quartets of Beethoven, but they are the last place to start from - you should get into his symphonies and concertos first before looking into his piano and string sonatas and the middle period quartets.

My second point would be that you should think less about works than specific performances/recordings - a bad recording of anything is likely to put you off for life, whilst an excellent recording will really let you hear and understand why works are considered to be significant. To take an example, I've known Handel's Fireworks and Water Music for years, but it wasn't until I recently heard the 1992 recording by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra that I really realised how fantastic they were.

My main point is that you need to explore what's available to listen to and discover what sort of music you like - the degree of difference between say Purcell and Philip Glass is enormous and it might be a little ambitious to aim to like everything. Once you've found out that you like the symphonies of Sibelius say or the Bach cantatas, you can explore more and more music in that category and (who knows?) start ticking off your list of significant works.

I got into 'classical' music by having access to an excellent record library and a copy of the Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music which gave me a pointer to what to listen. And it allowed me to be totally eclectic -  Shostakovich string quartets followed by a Bruckner symphony, then some Faure piano pieces with perhaps a choral work by Szymanowski or Gorecki  to follow. I can't say I liked everything, but at least I got some sense of the range and quality of what out there to be listened to.

Hope this is useful.

It was purely because I managed to pick up a copy of the Penguin Guide at a second hand book shop and I've been hooked ever since. All a matter of taste I suppose, but I trust their judgement - and so I've stuck with it.

If you can find them the old Pelican guides, particularly those dealing with the symphony and concerto, were a superb intro for classical neophytes.

From there you get into far greater detail on individual composers but the best are still eminently readable and very helpful even for the musically semi-literate like myself. The ones I’d recommend are:

Girdlestone on Mozart’s piano concertos – a classic and still a benchmark 60 years after it was written.

Macdonald on Brian’s symphonies. If you’re Brian-curious, it’s all in here

Simpson on Neilsen

Simpson on Bruckner

Mann on the Strauss operas

Mann on the Mozart operas

In general, look for books that deal with a composer’s works ‘vertically’ i.e. a complete, end-to-end examination of Beethoven’s 4th  with lots of short-score examples, rather than ‘horizontally’ i.e. Mozart’s use of harmony, Bruckner’s sense of form.

On the same subject, if anyone knows of a good in-depth treatment of Mozart’s quartets and quintets, I’d love to hear from them.