Your Top 10 Favorite Composers

[(poco) Sforzando]

Beethoven I've really come around to and I absolutely love now. He really should be in my 'Top 10' nowadays.

Yay!!!

[Florestan]

They equal 'academic' to me because finding this kind of enjoyment in the music alludes to the academic/analytical side of things.

Maybe, but in the end it´s the effect of music on the listeners that counts, and this is anything but academic. 

As you say, I am a hopeless case because there is no hope at trying to get me not to fall head over heels for his music.

That´s what I mean! 

[James]

Here's my latest list in chronological order:

Anonymous. Plainchant from the 9th century, and before.
Anonymous, also Leonin/Perotin. Organa, sequentia and conductus from 10th - 12th century
Troubadours, trouvères.  Lyric poets or poet-musicians of France in the 12th - 13th centuries.
Machaut
Dufay

Some beauty to be found no doubt, but Zzzzz

Bach .. Stravinsky

Enter vital, joyous, life-giving motor rhythms, and further elaboration thereof .. more like it!

Cage
Feldman

Then you head back into Z territory, naivety ..  and without the beauty.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

HMMM lets see who my recent favourites are

Boulez
Aperghis
Mozart
Liza Lim
Birtwistle
Helen Grime
Rihm
Rautavaara
Penderecki
Schumann

[nathanb]

HMMM lets see who my recent favourites are

Boulez
Aperghis
Mozart
Liza Lim
Birtwistle
Helen Grime
Rihm
Rautavaara
Penderecki
Schumann

Ugh it's a good disc but why do people have such a hard on for Helen Grime???

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Ugh it's a good disc but why do people have such a hard on for Helen Grime???

Do you think her compositions are overrated? Perhaps they are......I listen to her music often, and I think the fact that there isn't a lot to listen to just yet means that I have become very very familiar with 9 of her compositions (counting the violin concerto which can be heard on youtube). Maybe is this familiarity that gives me a sense of comfort in knowing her style as well as excitement when there is a new work of hers available that I hadn't yet heard—like when I listened to her violin concerto for the first time. Perhaps it is also the case that I find her orchestration extremely compelling, and I can hear things in it that already remind me of other composers I have grown up enjoying very much. As is usual for me, my top 10 favourite composers predominantly features Boulez, Grime, Lim, Birtwistle and others depending on what my recent mood for music has been......and then gradually my interests may change over a longer period of time when I may hardly listen to any Grime and instead you could be complaining about me always going on about, idk, Chris Dench or Caerwen Martin or another composer who hasn't had a huge amount of recorded releases.

[Mirror Image]

Let's see...

Sibelius
Nielsen
Vaughan Williams
Ravel
Bartók
Mahler
Martinů
Elgar
Ives
Rachmaninov

[arpeggio]

In another forum someone asked a similar question and I responded with a list of fifth-seven composers.  One person complained that Haydn was missing from the list.  Schubert, Handel and Mendelssohn were also missing from the list yet I listen to these composers all of the time.  So far no one has complained that Carter, Webern and Schoenberg are on the list.

[nodogen]

I'm still a neophyte at this game, but even with my limited exposure I have now moved from struggling to come up with ten to struggling to reduce my list to ten.

Anyhoo, after some scribbling and teeth gnashing I've come up with (in no order, other than Scriabin plus nine)

Scriabin
Takemitsu
Ravel
Vaughan Williams
Kurtag
Ligeti
Murail
Scelsi
Szymanowski
Sorabji

[schnittkease]

7/5/2017

Schnittke
Schmitt
Toch
Bentzon
Krenek
Nordheim
Tveitt
Myaskovsky
Jongen
Fibich

[nodogen]

7/5/2017

Schnittke
Schmitt
Toch
Bentzon
Krenek
Nordheim
Tveitt
Myaskovsky
Jongen
Fibich

Good grief me, I've only heard of two of these 😳

[Turner]

7/5/2017

Schnittke
Schmitt
Toch
Bentzon
Krenek
Nordheim
Tveitt
Myaskovsky
Jongen
Fibich

Niels Viggo B is an unusual choice. Any particular, favourite works?

[schnittkease]

Good grief me, I've only heard of two of these

First off, this is today's list, influenced by the past week's listening. Tomorrow may very well be a different story (although Schnittke, Schmitt, and Toch are constants). Which are the two that you have heard of? I can give you some recommendations for the other eight if you want to start exploring.  

Niels Viggo B is an unusual choice. Any particular, favourite works?

Bentzon's (The) Tempered Piano arrived a few days ago; I've been binge-listening to the 15-hour journey. Past favorites include piano sonatas nos. 3 & 5, which have apparently become staples of Danish piano literature (and it's not hard to see why, if the astringent tonality doesn't throw most listeners). Symphonies nos. 3 and 4 "Metamorphosen" are again classics - I return to them every once in a while. The violin and cello concertos are fine. Niels Viggo Bentzon has shown mastery in all the genres that shape his diverse oeuvre (including IMO one of the 20th century's most important piano works + 12 SQs yet to be recorded), making him one of my go-to composers.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Let's work out an arbitrary list of 10 composers I enjoy very much at the moment

Boulez
Stockhausen
Mozart
Liza Lim
Reimann
Janacek
Henze
Neuwirth
Berio
Schreker

[Turner]

Bentzon's (The) Tempered Piano arrived a few days ago; I've been binge-listening to the 15-hour journey. Past favorites include piano sonatas nos. 3 & 5, which have apparently become staples of Danish piano literature (and it's not hard to see why, if the astringent tonality doesn't throw most listeners). Symphonies nos. 3 and 4 "Metamorphosen" are again classics - I return to them every once in a while. The violin and cello concertos are fine. Niels Viggo Bentzon has shown mastery in all the genres that shape his diverse oeuvre (including IMO one of the 20th century's most important piano works + 12 SQs yet to be recorded), making him one of my go-to composers.

I like the relatively early piano works in particular, as you say it´s a pity he hasn´t yet been that much explored by the DaCapo label, or other ones. There´s a real lot missing in the discography, as illustrated by the WiKi list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Niels_Viggo_Bentzon,
and not much literature about him (he was a painter too, and worked with several artistic genres):
at least 16 string quartets, 31 piano sonatas, 24 symphonies, many concertos etc.

The lack of recordings and performances also makes it difficult to establish key works in this huge oeuvre consisting of at least 664 opuses. A good deal of the later works seem rather sketchy, but on the other hand, thorough Brahms was one of his favourites.

And then of course there´s "The Flight of the Meat Ball across the Fence"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kXW0WGBfrc
played here during a long television programme portraiting Ole Schmidt.

[Alek Hidell]

J.S. Bach
Mahler
Sibelius
Beethoven
Shostakovich
Feldman
Martinů
Haydn
Vaughan Williams
Bruckner

... I think. There's still so much I have yet to even listen to - including some pretty marquee works like Beethoven's late quartets (or Haydn's Paris and London symphonies!). Other composers who threaten to crack this very tentative list include Brahms, Messiaen, Debussy, Nielsen, Boulez - and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. (In the case of most of these, it's because I've liked what I've heard but have only scratched the surface of their works.)

And, boy, that list is sure tilted heavily toward the 20th century, isn't it? I really need to identify more faves in earlier periods ...

[schnittkease]

I like the relatively early piano works in particular, as you say it´s a pity he hasn´t yet been that much explored by the DaCapo label, or other ones. There´s a real lot missing in the discography, as illustrated by the WiKi list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Niels_Viggo_Bentzon,
and not much literature about him (he was a painter too, and worked with several artistic genres):
at least 16 string quartets, 31 piano sonatas, 24 symphonies, many concertos etc.

The lack of recordings and performances also makes it difficult to establish key works in this huge oeuvre consisting of at least 664 opuses. A good deal of the later works seem rather sketchy, but on the other hand, thorough Brahms was one of his favourites.

Completely agree; I think that prolific composers like Bentzon and Hovhaness are further obscured by the fact that so little of their work has been recorded. In this regard, Bentzon has been more unfortunate. I like that you touched on trying to 'extract' the key works of such a large oeuvre - it gets to the point where, if it's on CD, it's considered a significant work. You'd think that record companies wouldn't waste their time with the theoretical "2-minute piano piece, op. 519b". In my experience, however, Bentzon's most important works are the symphonies, piano sonatas, and the Tempered Piano. But who knows? New gems keep 'popping up' every few years... 

[nodogen]

Amen to those in particular 

Several on your list were ones I had to scribble out and gnash teeth over, especially Xenakis and Bartok.

[nodogen]

For me currently, it's a bit of a transitional period with personal stuff, so it's rather different:

Lassus
Lutoslawski
Stockhausen
Herrmann
Bartok
Webern
Debussy
Mahler


(Overall in my whole life with music, it's still the previous list on the last page)

This list only contains 8, not 10, so it doesn't count! 🤓

[nodogen]

J.S. Bach
Mahler
Sibelius
Beethoven
Shostakovich
Feldman
Martinů
Haydn
Vaughan Williams
Bruckner

... I think. There's still so much I have yet to even listen to - including some pretty marquee works like Beethoven's late quartets (or Haydn's Paris and London symphonies!). Other composers who threaten to crack this very tentative list include Brahms, Messiaen, Debussy, Nielsen, Boulez - and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. (In the case of most of these, it's because I've liked what I've heard but have only scratched the surface of their works.)

And, boy, that list is sure tilted heavily toward the 20th century, isn't it? I really need to identify more faves in earlier periods ...

There's so much, it's a major endeavour to do more than scratch the surface! Our tastes seem quite similar.