What Composers Are You Currently Exploring?

[Mirror Image]

Here's a fun thread and will give us a chance to see what we're all interested in at the moment.

Here's my current roster of composers I'm exploring at the moment: Beethoven (!!!), Dvořák, Rubbra, Berlioz, Grieg, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Schumann. Several of these composers I haven't spent enough time with and some of them I know already pretty well but it's been ages since I've really sat down and listened to their music.

[Autumn Leaves]

Im planning to do surveys of the Symphonies and Chamber Music of Mahler, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky and Vaughan Williams.
I want to do some comparative listening as I have a few different versions of their key works so it should be a fun exercise.
Normally I do binges of one Composer but this time to keep it going I will listen to works from all 6 Composers depending on mood.
I had thought of including Bruckner and Stravinsky as well so may expand the project to include them at a later stage.

[aligreto]

Antonio Locatelli, 1695-1764. Until relatively recently his music was very sparse in my collection but I have bought a number of CDs and I am quite enjoying the odyssey.

[some guy]

Exploring is fun.

I remember when I was exploring Prokofiev. Each new piece I heard sounded the same, weak, thin, tepid.

I think that Divertimento, which is not a big, famous, major piece by any means, was the first Prokofiev in a long time that I heard and liked right off. TPeter and the Wolf, from my childhood, I had liked right off, and the scherzo to the fifth symphony, which I heard in high school, I liked right off. The rest of them? No. But fortunately, I found that each weak, thin, tepid piece I heard turned magically into something strong, and full, and fascinating with only a couple of listens. So I learned very quickly that my first impressions were wrong and would fade.

But inevitably, once one has explored all the older stuff, then the only thing left is the newer stuff. Fortunately, for me, once I had heard Bartok's Concerto for orchestra in 1972, I was all over the newer stuff. I would have wanted that even had I not already explored all the older stuff. (No, "all" does not literally mean "all." It means "enough to mean there are no more surprises." Berlioz was probably the last big surprise for me. I had always liked the Symphonie fantastique, but nothing else seemed memorable or interesting. Incroyable. But I think I understand why. Berlioz did not rely on a cantus firmus, so when his music sounds, it sounds over nothing, literally nothing, whereas Germanic musics always had a something or other going on underneath the music. If you know what I mean.

Well, eventually, I got over that and suddenly liked everything by Berlioz all at once. That was an overwhelming experience.

But newer stuff. Yeah. Also inevitably, once one has gotten through the more accessible (i.e., commercially available) stuff, one is left with stuff that's really outside any system of vetting. For those of you who like their music to be thoroughly vetted, this is not an enviable position to be in. I highly recommend it, however, even for the "greatness," "masterpiece," "high quality" crowd, which I sometimes think is everyone but myself. It's not, but boy howdy does it often seem so, especially on-line. But here's the thing. With really new and relatively unknown music, you are really on your own with it. There is no history, there is no critical agreement--there is no critical anything, not yet, anyway--there is no consensus, there is nothing but you and those sounds, which will, for a time at least, be coming at you without precedent.

Now there's excitement. There is genuine exploration. Not treading paths that others have already tread (but which you are treading for the first time), but treading pathlessly. What fun. Will you get masterpieces? No. Will you get great music? No. Not because the what you're getting is in any way inferior--it's just that terms like "masterpiece" and "great" and "inferior" point to a reality quite alien to the reality you're now in, exploring. Your experience is what is "great" now. Or at least genuine, genuinely yours. There is little or nothing to come between you and the music, to mediate your experience, to soften the edges, to make the bewildering comprehensible. This is raw, with all the advantages and, I suppose, disadvantages to that state, a state in which you become simultaneously more and less important. You are alone with the music, so supremely important. Your tastes, desires, and expectations, however, no longer apply here. So in that sense, you are less, much less.

It cannot last, of course. If you explore everything, then everything will become familiar. Heigh ho. Someone, somewhere will come up with something, eventually, that will rock me back on my heels. I trust that that will be so.

In the meantime, it is fun to listen to music anyway, and if the fun, now, of listening to Lionel Marchetti is the same, now, as the fun of listening to Haydn or Bizet or Mahler or anyone else also utterly familiar and safe, then "oh well." Listening to utterly familiar things is still good, clean fun. It genuinely is.

[Christo]

Lack time for real explorations, but there are always one or two 'new' composers lumbering around, here. And in my mind.

At the moment Eivind Groven's two symphonies, a little before the William Schuman and Henri Sauguet cycles. And in between some ancient music.

[Madiel]

Beethoven 1798-1800
Dvorak (piano music)
Shostakovich chronological
Chopin chronological
Sibelius more-or-less chronological now that I've got past the bit where he truly wrecked the opus numbers
Nielsen symphonies (a bit sporadic)
Szymanowski chronological (ditto)
Tubin symphonies (ditto)
Vine symphonies
Bach cantatas chronological (veeery gradually)
Schubert instrumental works that he bothered to finish
Faure song cycles
My Mozart collection by a tricky method designed to make me hit on random unexpected things.




The proposition that it's only "genuine" exploration if other people haven't got there before you is just tosh, though it's exactly the kind of tosh I'd expect from some guy. That's like saying it's not worth going to see a great building or painting because other people saw it first and told you they loved it. Given that music is designed to be heard, not written about, my own reactions to what I hear are infinitely more relevant than whether my reaction matches the reaction of large numbers of other people.

[Mirror Image]

Beethoven 1798-1800
Dvorak (piano music)
Shostakovich chronological
Chopin chronological
Sibelius more-or-less chronological now that I've got past the bit where he truly wrecked the opus numbers
Nielsen symphonies (a bit sporadic)
Szymanowski chronological (ditto)
Tubin symphonies (ditto)
Vine symphonies
Bach cantatas chronological (veeery gradually)
Schubert instrumental works that he bothered to finish
Faure song cycles
My Mozart collection by a tricky method designed to make me hit on random unexpected things.




The proposition that it's only exploration if other people haven't got there before you is just tosh, though it's exactly the kind of tosh I'd expect from some guy. That's like saying it's not worth going to see a great building or painting because other people saw it first and told you they loved it.

Very nice list, orfeo. Agreed on your comments about some guy's uninformed opinion.

P.S. Would be very interested in reading your opinions of Nielsen's symphonic cycle once you've finished it. Please share your thoughts on his thread.

[Madiel]

Regarding "genuine" exploration: there's also the minor detail that if you are able to purchase a recording of a work, you are logically not the first person to get to know it. Genuine exploration would actually consist of unearthing manuscripts.

[Madiel]

P.S. Would be very interested in reading your opinions of Nielsen's symphonic cycle once you've finished it. Please share your thoughts on his thread.

I clearly have no choice but to go to my preferred streaming service and crank up Symphony No.3 immediately.

[Mirror Image]

I clearly have no choice but to go to my preferred streaming service and crank up Symphony No.3 immediately.

Got to love the Espansiva! Happy listening!

[some guy]

So we are agreed? We are going with orfeo's distortion of what I said, never mind what that actually was?

Well, OK. I have to say, though, since we're trading expectations, that I wouldn't have expected anything else from the likes of Mirror or orfeo.

Heigh ho.

[Spineur]

I am mostly doing a random walk through music.
Perhaps I am dwelling a bit more on Russian composer these days:
Mussorsky, Rimsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich mostly
but also those USSR composers which have been kept in the bottle: Chaporin, Sviridov, who are the spiritual descendent of Tchaikovsky and Mussorsky  Armenian music (Katchaturian, Komitas) is also a sidekick
Other areas of interest: British music (Britten, vaugh Willaims, Elgar)
and of course the french repertoire.

[Florestan]

Currently Edvard Grieg (you are to blame for that, John!...). I plan to listen to the complete Lieder, chamber and piano music (Victoria Grieg Edition), complete orchestral works (Ruud) and complete chamber music (Brilliant).

In the last month:

Tchaikovsky (finished the complete piano works with Victoria Postnikova, excellent), Francois Couperin (finished the complete chamber music with Musica ad Rhenum, most charming), Anatol Lyadov (finished the complete piano works with Marco Rapetti, very enjoyable), Camille Saint-Saens (chamber music, concertos, symphonies with various artists, ongoing), Luigi Boccherini (Brilliant Edition and Goritzki complete symphonies, ongoing), Giuseppe Tartini (complete violin concertos, Federico Guglielmo, ongoing).

Scheduled in the near future: Carl Loewe, Louis Spohr, Dvorak, Granville Bantock, Cyril Scott, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Edouard Lalo.

[Ken B]

Currently Edvard Grieg

A simple land with a few small peaks and much flat terrain.

[some guy]

I think it's a "land" with many fascinating surprises.

I'd say give it another visit!

[Ken B]

So we are agreed? We are going with orfeo's distortion of what I said, never mind what that actually was?

Well, OK. I have to say, though, since we're trading expectations, that I wouldn't have expected anything else from the likes of Mirror or orfeo.

Heigh ho.

Other shoe, meet other foot.

[nathanb]

I <3 some guy

[Sergeant Rock]

I <3 some guy

Is that a heart or a ballsack? 

Sarge

[some guy]

:-)

[vandermolen]

Here's a fun thread and will give us a chance to see what we're all interested in at the moment.

Here's my current roster of composers I'm exploring at the moment: Beethoven (!!!), Dvořák, Rubbra, Berlioz, Grieg, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Schumann. Several of these composers I haven't spent enough time with and some of them I know already pretty well but it's been ages since I've really sat down and listened to their music.

Rubbra is a favourite of mine. My favourites are symphonies 4,5,7,8 and 10. I also like the Piano Concerto. Let us know what you think John.
As for me:
Jean Cras (thanks to Drasko on this Forum)
Kabalevsky: Piano Concerto 1 has been a revelation.
Arthur Butterworth (can't wait for the new Lyrita issue of the sibelian Symphony 4).