The most profound piece of classical music is...?

[lukeottevanger]

The subjectivity is implied by the very nature of message boards. Man, did you get up on the wrong side of the bed today? 

Well, doesn't that depend entirely on what you mean by 'wrong'? 

With all due respect to that last post, btw, I think Bruce's first answer is as close as can be to a non-subjective answer, in that 4'33" is the only piece who's degree of profundity is not on a slidable scale. It either is the most profound piece, or it is the least profound one. So, as with Bruce, it gets something like a vote from me.

But so do a number of other pieces, Janacek's 2nd Quartet among them, not only because it is one of my favourite pieces, but for more specific reasons.

[pjme]

Ok- one more time ( Luke, I know you know...)

"Although often described as a silent piece, 4'33" isn't silent at all. While the performer makes as little sound as possible, Cage breaks traditional boundaries by shifting attention from the stage to the audience and even beyond the concert hall. You soon become aware of a huge amount of sound, ranging from the mundane to the profound, from the expected to the surprising, from the intimate to the cosmic –shifting in seats, riffling programs to see what in the world is going on, breathing, the air conditioning, a creaking door, passing traffic, an airplane, ringing in your ears, a recaptured memory. This is a deeply personal music, which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4'33" the same way. It's the ultimate sing-along: the audience (and the world) becomes the performer."

From :http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html
Peter

Oh, my god! The spell is w..or...k..ing all re ady....ahhhhh

[MN Dave]

Ok- one more time ( Luke, I know you know...)

"Although often described as a silent piece, 4'33" isn't silent at all. While the performer makes as little sound as possible, Cage breaks traditional boundaries by shifting attention from the stage to the audience and even beyond the concert hall. You soon become aware of a huge amount of sound, ranging from the mundane to the profound, from the expected to the surprising, from the intimate to the cosmic –shifting in seats, riffling programs to see what in the world is going on, breathing, the air conditioning, a creaking door, passing traffic, an airplane, ringing in your ears, a recaptured memory. This is a deeply personal music, which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4'33" the same way. It's the ultimate sing-along: the audience (and the world) becomes the performer."

From :http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html
Peter

I think we all know that. It's sort of a zen thing.

[pjme]

4'33" was written in the summer of 1952 just after Cage returned to New York City from Black Mountain College, where he had been invited to participate as a teacher and composer in this rural, private-school environment, and worked with other important figures in the art world. It was here that Rauschenberg did his White Paintings (1951) and Cage first saw them, provoking 4'33". It was here that the first multimedia "happening" occurred, Cage's Theater Piece No. 1, in which many of the faculty participated. It was also here that Cage planned work on Williams Mix and first used the time bracket notation that became so prevalent in his later music.

[ChamberNut]

Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106  Hammerklavier

[c#minor]

Beethoven - Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106  Hammerklavier

Ahhh what a great one. Hell why not say all the LvB piano sonatas.

[lukeottevanger]

I yield to no one in my love for op 2 no 3 (perversely, one of my favourite LvB sonatas) but profound? I tend to think not... 

[Wanderer]

...Or any setting of the "De Profundis" lament.

Or any piece for basso profundo...

[Norbeone]

The Chaconne from Bach's Partita No.2 in D Minor for Solo Violin BWV 1004.

[Haffner]

I'd usually say opus 132. But that's at least partly because it's my favorite piece. But after listening thoroughly, continuingly, and in an ongoing, "seem-to-gain-something-new-from-it-each-time-I-listen" fashion to both the Ring Des Nibelungen and Parsifal, I think we have a tie here folks.

[quintett op.57]

BTW, I listened to it last month for the first and last time. The most boring piece of music I know.

because you don't care about orchestration. I dislike judgement at first hearing.

[quintett op.57]

I'm a huge fan of Boléro, too, and I could also see it being someone's choice for "most profound," believe it or not.  It must be one of the first Western examples of minimalism .

Except that the themes are not really "minimal" and that there's no variations.
I don't regard Bruckner as a proto-minimalist either, as he's a motivic developer, in a pure austrian tradition.

[Don]

because you don't care about orchestration. I dislike judgement at first hearing.

I agree.  How someone can make a difinitive judgement based on one hearing astounds me, particularly when I think about all the works and performances I didn't like on first hearing that I eventually came to love.

[Robert Dahm]

Ok- one more time ( Luke, I know you know...)

"Although often described as a silent piece, 4'33" isn't silent at all. While the performer makes as little sound as possible, Cage breaks traditional boundaries by shifting attention from the stage to the audience and even beyond the concert hall. You soon become aware of a huge amount of sound, ranging from the mundane to the profound, from the expected to the surprising, from the intimate to the cosmic –shifting in seats, riffling programs to see what in the world is going on, breathing, the air conditioning, a creaking door, passing traffic, an airplane, ringing in your ears, a recaptured memory. This is a deeply personal music, which each witness creates to his/her own reactions to life. Concerts and records standardize our responses, but no two people will ever hear 4'33" the same way. It's the ultimate sing-along: the audience (and the world) becomes the performer."

From :http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html
Peter

Oh, my god! The spell is w..or...k..ing all re ady....ahhhhh

Except that 4'33" calls into question a number of things, not least of which is authorship. While I understand that it depends on how you define music in the first place, I would humbly submit that if you are talking about a 'piece' of music as a discrete entity, then that piece must have been 'composed' by somebody ('somebody', in this context, meant in the loosest possible sense in order to include cultural aggregation of folk materials, etc).

Otherwise, what defines 4'33" from any given four minutes and thirty three seconds in the day? It's contextualisation within a concert situation? I'm not certain that declaring that something should take place within a concert is enough to make it music.

The contents of any given performance of 4'33" were not defined by Cage, nor were the parameters of what could be acceptable in any given performance. Arguably, the performer has much more influence on the aural result as a 'curator' than the composer did. On the other hand, had Cage specified that the piece consisted of 'actual' silence (rather than the sounds audible to the audience) then this would have actually a piece of music. The Ligeti Bagatelles are, for this reason, legitimate as music (even they are a piss-take) in a way that Cage's work is not.

There is no question that Cage produced a work of art, but I don't think it can be deemed 'music'. Therefore, not the 'profoundest' piece of music.

High on the list for me would be the Scriabin late piano sonatas (nos 8–10), the last three Beethoven sonatas, Bach's Goldberg variations, Schubert's Winterreise, Schumann's Dichterliebe, Wagner's Parsifal, Stravinsky's Les Noces, Biber's Harmonia Artificiosa Ariosa, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Mahler's 7th Symphony, Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, Alkan's minor key etudes, and a bunch of others that aren't slipping into mind right now.

[Haffner]

Except that the themes are not really "minimal" and that there's no variations.
I don't regard Bruckner as a proto-minimalist either, as he's a motivic developer, in a pure austrian tradition.

I recently discovered Bruckner. Like Mahler, he moved on from Wagner...but different from Mahler, in the extremely interesting way.

[max]

For me if there were such a thing as a cosmic background music it would be Bruckner's 8th and 9th symphony.  These works - include the Te Deum! - are cosmic cathedrals in sound. The universe is more akin to music than to language or anything which language may express! Most would acknowledge this as an ancient idea both mystic and mythical! If, as Goethe said, architecture is frozen music then the cosmos would need to be it's final DYNAMIC expression. In Bruckner's late symphonies, God and Cosmos are inseparable whether he believed them to be or not.

Of course there are candidates of equal value! It all depends on how you synthesize or metabolize the so-called profound in music or in whichever art FEELS most like music.

[Christo]

Arvo Pärt, Kanon Pokajanen - comes to mind. I've been listening to the whole 90 minutes of it many times, last winter, and it's rather profound indeed. As music about repentence and resurrection should be.

[val]

Beethoven's piano Sonata opus 106 or the 15th String Quartet.

[ChamberNut]

Haydn - The Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross, op. 51

Especially the 3rd mvt. Sonata II: Grave e Cantabile

[Symphonien]

There's another category of works that I just thought of, that would probably be quite "profound" when listened to in their entirety. Those long marathon pieces like:

Sorabji - Opus Clavicembalisticum (4 hours)
Finnissy - The History of Photography in Sound (5 hours)
Feldman - String Quartet No. 2 (6 hours)
Rzewski - The Road (10 hours)
Stockhausen - Licht (29 hours)
Cage - Organ²/ASLSP (639 years) [not that this one is actually possible to listen to in its entirety ]