What Are The Most Significant Works Classical Music?

Hmmm - let me digest that.  Meanwhile, I've been reading Norman Lebrecht's Wikipedia entry....there does appear to be a problem.

'morning frostwalrus - sorry for not being clear earlier - I wasn't using Wikipedia  as a source of  musical criticism, but to see what it said about  Norman Lebrecht i.e.

'Although many eminent conductors from Vladimir Ashkenazy and Daniel Barenboim to William Christie and Franz Welser-Möst maintain cordial relations with Lebrecht and appear in his radio shows,[citation needed] an anonymous informant identified as "one of the world's leading conductors" told The Independent that Lebrecht had for years been getting away with "pompous, preposterous judgment" and "inept research".[2]'

This is relevant to the discussion here about music critics.

No kev, there's no official pecking order of critics although they do tend to establish a reputation over time. George Bernard Shaw was one of the more famous music critics, still quoted today although perhaps as much for his command of the language as for his views.

I just want to make it clear I'm not down on critics per se. All I'm saying is they carry the same baggage as the rest of us.

One of the easiest of biases to identify, and most prevalent, is a national one. If you've travelled widely, certainly if you've lived in more than one country, you'll know every nation tends to favour its own. Which is why I like to read reviews from different countries, to cancel out those national biases. 

Frostwalrus I would also recommend Discovering Music on BBC Radio 3.

Now you've got me up against a wall kev. There are so many parameters to consider it starts to sound like gut feel if I list them all, which perhaps it is.

If I badly want the work and a reviewer I respect has given it the thumbs up, then off we go.

If I badly want the work and there are no other recordings, I'm probably going to buy it regardless of reviews. Just about everything I have of Havergal Brian falls into this category.

If I want the work and it gets rave reviews from every source, it's a no-brainer.

In between these categories it's a kind of judgement call. And I'm not made of money. At Naxos prices, I take lots of risks. At the prices they're asking for some blu-ray opera dvds these days either Santa has to be good to me or I'll wait.

Craig M

I´ve read my last post again, and I don´t understand the confusion, but clearly you misunderstood me as you resorted to inferring many things to which I never remoletely intimated. So I shall try to be as clear as I can.

1. My last post was based on the fact that YOU SAID NOT ME that people don´t know how to listen, but that they should listen as much as possible. For me this is a contradiction, so I asked you before and I´ll ask you again to please explain.

2. YOU SAID NOT ME that it takes effort to listen. Now although effort and pleasure are not mutually exclusive, for most people they don´t equate. So why would people want to listen if it´s an effort, please explain.

3. The whole basis of this discussion was the difference between ENJOYING and UNDESTANDING classical music, because Frostwalrus clearly enjoys it but wants to understand it better.

Clearly there are lots of people who enjoy classical music, but how many of them understand it. 5 million people is less than 10 % of the UK population, and having Radio 3 on certainly does not equate with understanding what´s being broadcast. This in no way means that these people don´t enjoy the experience, but the difference between ENJOY and UNDERSTAND is the crux here. 

The same for concert goers, some go for the music, but I have no doubt that most people who go to concerts, of all types of music, go for the social experience, the music is secondary. How many times have you been to a rock festival, and you meet people who don´t even know what bands are playing, how many times have you been sitting in a bar listening to a jazz concert and all the people around you babble incessantly throughout the whole gig. Have you heard The Bill Evans Trio live at The Village Vanguard? Apart from the amazing interplay between the three musicians, the most striking thing for me is that throughout the whole concert the audience never shut up. I´m sure they all enjoyed themselves, but I don´t think any of them were listening, the same is true for a lot of great live jazz albums I´ve heard, even the Coltrane Quartet in their pomp. How many times have you been to a classical concert and the audience applaud vociferously and indiscriminately whether the music/performance is abysmal, mediocre or wonderful, again for me not great evidence that they are listening. Compton Mackenzie in one of his always wonderful editorials talks about exactly this point as regards Proms audiences. Again, buying a ticket, sitting in a chair and enjoying yourself, does not mean you are listening to or understanding what´s going on. How many times has someone told you they went to a cocert last night, and if you ask them what was on the programme they can´t tell you, but they enjoyed themselves.

4. I NEVER ONCE SUGGESTED that classical music is an elitist activity accessible only to those with formal music education. It is accessible to absolutely anybody who has an inclination to listen. What I did say is that until a few generations ago with the advent of universal primary school education and recorded music, classical music was only for the privileged few. CLASSICAL MUSIC ISN´T AND NEVER HAS BEEN POPULAR ANYWHERE. Michael Jackson was popular, football is popular in large parts of the world, but classical music, absolutely not, to say so is truly absurd.

You talk about the mass appeal of Puccini and Verdi, could you provide some statistics. Having arias played on barrel organs is not the same thing as mass appeal. What percentage of the Italian population in the nineteenth century ever heard one Puccini or Verdi opera from start to finish?, well because recorded music didn´t exist, and the price of an opera ticket, not to mention the formal dress which was mandatory equated to a month or a year´s salary for most people, I would hazard a guess at less than one percent. Likewise I grew up in a house were my father had a collection of 78s of Caruso, Gigli, and the great John McCormack of course. He never listened to an opera in his life, and when I asked him why he said that he didn´t understand opera he just loved the songs. Agian as I said enjoy/understand are different things.

5. YOU SAID ´but since when did wealth equate with education/learning?´ Sorry, are you having a laugh? if this statement is serious, it is so naive as not to merit a response. You proceed ¨let alone intelligence¨. Did I ever once refer to intelligence in this debate?, no I didn´t, yet another inference on your part, that has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Just for the record wealth has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.      

6. To say that people could understand the structure of a Mozart symphony because they had musical education is snobbery. Really, why? Could you explain, as I don´t see any logical connection whatsoever. Again YOU SAID just because this music wasn´t written for the masses it doesn´t follow that only the economic elite are capable of understanding it, couldn´t agree more, and never once said anything to the contrary. 

7. Talking of Stravinsky YOU SAID that the people at the premiere of the Rite Of Spring understood that he was tearing up the rulre book. How could they know he was tearing up the rule book, if they didn´t know what the rule book was in the first place? The Dylan analogy, just shows for me, how little interested these people actually were in listening to Dylan, and they were more concerned with their idiotic mantra acoustic good, electric bad.

8. To finish, I never once mentioned rigorous, scholarly technical analysis. What I´m talking about is reading what is on the back of every jazz and classical LP, and CD booklet, concert programmes, radio programmes, accessible books for people like me who have absolutely no musical education, and can´t follow a score except at an absurdly slow pace. Maybe you can understand a Razumovsky quartet simply by listening, if you can you have my sincere admiration and envy, I can´t, I can enjoy it, but if I want to understand it which increses my enjoyment enormously, I need all the help I can get.

Durob

I’ve clearly wound you up, which wasn’t my intention. There are also points where we disagree about what each of us was saying and I suggest there’s little to be gained in going back and trying to paraphrase what we said previously.

I think at the bottom of our disagreement (or more accurately the reason for being at cross purposes) is the meaning of ‘understanding’ a piece of music, or rather the  distinction which you make between understanding and enjoying it. Let me take a straightforward practical example – the second movement of Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto.

If you’ve listened to Mozart concertos, say, or others by Beethoven himself, you’ll know that a concerto is usually the opportunity for a soloist to demonstrate his technical virtuosity and you’ll also be aware that the second movement is slower than the other two, and it typically takes a theme which is played together by the soloist and the orchestra. But the second movement of the fourth doesn’t do that. Instead, the orchestra (just the strings to be precise) starts on its own and plays a spiky aggressive theme which ends with a moment’s silence. Then the soloist comes in – with a different theme of an entirely different character: introspective rather than aggressive, quiet rather than loud - and completely devoid of any technical virtuosity (I think even I could play it). It’s as if the soloist and the orchestra are playing in different concertos. This contrast between the two persists throughout the movement until the end when the two come together and (finally) play in unison.

That’s what you hear when you listen to it properly – not ‘random noise’ but something with a very simple structure which seems to disregard the rule book on piano concertos. No virtuosity, no soloist accompanied by an orchestra (until the very end at least) as you’d expect.

So why does Beethoven do this? One can speculate and remember that at the time it was written, he was stone deaf – which is a fairly major handicap for a professional composer and pianist – and you can draw an image whereby the lack of communication between soloist and orchestra is an expression of the isolation he was feeling at the time. I think that might be going a bit far, actually, but what the movement does show is how to use the concerto form as a sort of metaphor for the individual in society (a key theme of the Enlightenment). This is revolutionary: a Mozart or a Bach concerto can’t be said to have any ‘meaning’ (beyond the music itself), but here Beethoven is using music as a vehicle or mechanism with which to make a philosophical or even political statement about human individuality. This lead of course into the high romanticism of Maher and Wagner whose use of music as a form of intense individual expression is sometimes over the top and difficult to take. It also leads to the stretching of classical forms to breaking point – just as his use of a choir and vocal soloists in the ninth symphony leads to Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand which in turn lead to things like Messiaen’s Turangalila where the symphony has been extended so far that there’s no point in anyone trying to write them any more.

And this is all through listening - and I would say I have understood it perfectly well. OK, I admit I have brought a little external knowledge to bear here (Beethoven’s deafness, Enlightenment and Romanticism), but that is fairly minimal and – more importantly – would be irrelevant if I hadn’t listened to that movement properly. There’s nothing here about the technical aspects of music, nor have I read any great commentator on the concerto and haven’t read the score (or if I have it’s too long ago for me to remember).

That’s the point I was trying to make – there is no substitute for listening to music and there’s no special skill involved in doing so. Nor is there any need for special musical training  or technical analysis and neither are an adequate substitute for listening to it. Do you see my point now?