Seeking Recommendations for Modern Classical Composers?

[absurdquit]

Hello everyone,
I'm relatively new to the world of classical music and have been exploring the works of the great composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. However, I'm now curious to discover more modern or contemporary classical composers who are still active or have composed in the 20th and 21st centuries. Could anyone recommend some names or specific pieces that are a good starting point for someone used to traditional classical music? I'm especially interested in works that maintain emotional depth and melodic structure, rather than purely experimental styles. Looking forward to your suggestions and thanks in advance for your guidance!

[Karl Henning]

Hello everyone,
I'm relatively new to the world of classical music and have been exploring the works of the great composers like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. However, I'm now curious to discover more modern or contemporary classical composers who are still active or have composed in the 20th and 21st centuries. Could anyone recommend some names or specific pieces that are a good starting point for someone used to traditional classical music? I'm especially interested in works that maintain emotional depth and melodic structure, rather than purely experimental styles. Looking forward to your suggestions and thanks in advance for your guidance!

Welcome! They've shuffled off this mortal coil some time since, but a few 20th-c. composers I'd recommend are the Finn, Jean Sibelius, the Dane, Carl Nielsen, and the Russian Sergei Prokofiev. 

[Mapman]

Welcome!

Karl gave some excellent suggestions.

I'd recommend (from the 1940s) Leonard Bernstein's Symphony #2

And here's something that premiered this year. This is one of the recent compositions that impressed me the most. Jimmy López: Symphony No. 5, "Fantastica"

https://livefromorchestrahall.vhx.tv/2024-25-4k-uhd/season:11/videos/jimmy-lopez-symphony-no-5-fantastica-detroit-symphony-orchestra-co-commission

[AnotherSpin]

Apart from the usual fiddling with form and style, the dominant trend in twentieth-century music was a sort of cheerful dismantling of everything wholesome. Composers became rather keen on highlighting the more painful corners of human existence. Fear, despair, illness and various sexual eccentricities were all enthusiastically represented, as if writing something beautiful had become terribly unfashionable.

If, however, one preferred healthy music - calm, clear and still on speaking terms with the classical tradition - one might have turned to Sibelius, Messiaen, Richard Strauss, Arvo Pärt, Vaughan Williams, Nielsen, Górecki. They had not yet decided that beauty was a crime.

[steve ridgway]

I'd recommend having a listen to a mix of 20th century music in general as it's very varied. I found a lot I unexpectedly liked with a very cheap download of Pierre Boulez – The Complete Columbia Album Collection (67 CDs).



You could look at this link as a list of works to stream and see if anything appeals -

https://www.discogs.com/release/10002496-Pierre-Boulez-The-Complete-Columbia-Album-Collection

Download store (in Czech) -
https://www.supraphonline.cz/album/229961-pierre-boulez-the-complete-columbia-album-collection

[Mandryka]

I'm especially interested in works that maintain emotional depth and melodic structure, rather than purely experimental styles. Looking forward to your suggestions and thanks in advance for your guidance!

Wolfgang Rihm

Jean Louis Florentz

Wilhelm Killmayer

Philip Glass

Arvo Part

Harrison Birtwistle

[DaveF]

Fear, despair, illness and various sexual eccentricities were all enthusiastically represented, as if writing something beautiful had become terribly unfashionable.

Oh, now you can't leave that there - examples, please, examples!  (Perhaps we need a new thread: Sexually Eccentric Music.)  I must say that the first one that occurred to me was the incest and necrophilia in the opera by that healthy fellow Richard Strauss.

Thread duty: a couple of British composers active into this century, one squarely in the classical tradition, one squarely out of it:

(I hope you persevere with the Birtwistle, which is strongly melodically-based, despite how it may at first sound.  And this is the best performance I know of what has become a 20th-century classic.)

[71 dB]

Here's two suggestions:

Salvatore Di Vittorio (b. 1967)
David Maslanka (1943-2017)

[Karl Henning]

as if writing something beautiful had become terribly unfashionable.

We've all heard that whining a hundred times before.
Nuts to Music needing to be safe as milk!

[pjme]

Hi, Karl, Mapman, Another Spin, Steve R., Mandryka, 71Db and Dave F have given you already quite a tasty variety of large and small(er), easier and more difficult works to tackle...

I hope you were already able to listen to music of some of the more famous composers (not yet mentioned....) of the last 125-150 years: Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alban Berg, Ottorino Respighi, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger, Aaron Copland, Heitor Villa Lobos, Hans werner, Henze, Benjamn Britten, Kaaja Saariaho, Henri Dutilleux...

Today, I'll simply stick to (basically lesser known/forgotten ) composers from Belgium and the Netherlands who I think "maintain emotional depth and melodic structure, rather than purely experimental styles.".  As far as I understand, they did not "dismantle everything wholesome" and enjoyed writing often beautiful, healthy music. Surely, they may have been (un)certain about their sexual orientation, been addicted to unsavoury politico-religious beliefs, claimed to be devout vegetarians or hardcore carnivores...but it would be very difficult to hear these  assertions in their music.😊😊

Flemish composer Arthur Meulemans (1884-1966)  was a very prolific composer (15 symphonies!) who witnessed in his long life many artistic changes (Debussy – to Stockhausen...), 2 wars and ....quasi oblivion.
His third symphony (1930), "A symphony of the firs" is an ode to the (once) wooded surroundings of Aarschot, his hometown. Scored for large orchestra it definitely shows influences from French Impressionism (Debussy, Ravel) and is expertly orchestrated.

In the same year, Dutch composer Matthijs Vermeulen (1888 – 1967) wrote incidental music for an ambitious open air play based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman. As far as I know, the complete score (chorus + orchestra)  has been resurrected only once in recent times, but that performance is not commercially available. A fragment, Passacaille et cortège, has been recorded. I have no difficulty in calling Vermeulen a nonconformist, even if his 7 symphonies (songs, chambermusic) were written for conventional instruments..  Try symphonies 2,3 and 4. The 5th  is at 45 minutes the longest and the most relentlessly difficult.

Daniel Sternefeld (1905-1986) had a brillant carreer as conductor. In the archives of Belgian National Radio (VRT/RTBF) countless recordings testify to his commitment in performing music by many famous 20th century composers (Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Milhaud, Honegger...) and Flemish and Walloon composers. As a result, he wasn't a prolific composer himself, but both his symphonies and the ballet "Song and dance at the court of Mary of Burgundy" (adaptations & orchestrations of 15th century dances) show his superb skills. His first symphony dates from 1943 and evolves from darkness and fear to defiance and light (cfr. other wartime music by Honegger, Vaughan Williams, Tippett...)).
Let us know what you think of all these suggestions...!

Of a younger generation I definitely want to mention Dutch composer Joey Roukens.
Do check out his violin concerto and the concerto for two pianos and orchestra!

https://youtu.be/ur0D9SfyJwo?si=XX6lQqi1ctyPDzOx

https://youtu.be/wQ-Wc9lPD6I?si=fDxVr8tKFXcYC6Rh

[Florestan]

Oh, now you can't leave that there - examples, please, examples!  (Perhaps we need a new thread: Sexually Eccentric Music.)

Some of the most joyous, melodious and life-affirming pieces of music were written by homosexuals (for instance, Tchaikovsky and Poulenc) or sexual eccentrics (for instance, Percy Grainger). Not to mention that prostitute-addicted freak, one Johannes Brahms.

My recs for the thread: Nino Rota, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

[Mandryka]

Oh, now you can't leave that there - examples, please, examples!  (Perhaps we need a new thread: Sexually Eccentric Music.) 

[pjme]

that prostitute-addicted freak,

I feel that this needs a bit more exploring. I found this in a 1998 article in the "New York review" - prof. Swafford and Charles Rosen:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1999/03/18/aimez-vous-brahms-an-exchange/

"...... so that the elderly Brahms preferred frequenting brothels to marriage, but this is not horrid enough for a modern biographer. We need a further speculative leap: How about sexual abuse by sailors?It is proper for a biographer to speculate, but not to take his speculations for proven fact and to keep returning to them throughout the book in order to explain his subject's psyche. My own theory about Brahms's inability to achieve a satisfactory love affair or a marriage was his early passion for Clara Schumann: he wrote to Joachim that his love for her made it impossible for him to be interested in younger women. As an ambitious twenty-one-year-old composer, nevertheless, he may well have drawn back from marriage to an internationally famous pianist with eight children when Robert Schumann died. For years afterward, however, she was clearly jealous of any interest he showed in another woman, and yet his attachment to her endured, even if they rarely saw each other. My theory is not lurid enough for some tastes, and it is speculative, too, but at least it does not require the baroque construction of Professor Swafford."


Sorry, Absyrdquit for this disgression..... ...GMG can be full of unexpected turns and twists....
here's a gentle recommendation  - Honeggers Summer pastorale, in a a "classic" recording

French composer (compositrice) Camille Pépin is -apparently - quicly becoming a new "chouchou" of French audiences. 

what I've heard is atmospheric and well orchestrated in an impressionistic () vein....But do listen to Birthwistle also!

[steve ridgway]

The Decca / DG series "20C - Greatest Composers of the 20th Century" looks like a pretty balanced list covering a variety of styles.

https://www.discogs.com/label/580117-20C

[DavidW]

These are the composers that I find those new to 20th-century classical respond well to:

Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Sibelius

[hopefullytrusting]

I'd recommend this disc, personally: 14 hours of music for 7 bucks (but I like Brilliant a lot for the kind of performances I am looking for)



https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8607264--theodore-kuchar-dvorak-shostakovich-smetana-nielsen

[steve ridgway]

These are the composers that I find those new to 20th-century classical respond well to:

Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Sibelius

I started with Ligeti and Varèse, although to be fair I was coming from Krautrock .

[hopefullytrusting]

I started with Ligeti and Varèse, although to be fair I was coming from Krautrock .

Varese is a sweet place to start, especially if you love rock music, I think.

[AnotherSpin]

I started with Ligeti and Varèse, although to be fair I was coming from Krautrock .

Not sure the years of being into rock music led directly to classical, but if they did, a line might be traced from Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis. Maybe even from Zappa, though that turned out to be a dead end, as I moved away from Zappa but never quite made it to Varèse.

[steve ridgway]

Not sure the years of being into rock music led directly to classical, but if they did, a line might be traced from Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis. Maybe even from Zappa, though that turned out to be a dead end, as I moved away from Zappa but never quite made it to Varèse.

Oh yes, I never got into Zappa but read that he enjoyed Varèse. I like Yes, ELP and Genesis to a certain extent but not their classical influences, it's more 20th century stuff like Art Zoyd, Univers Zero and Henry Cow.