Discover: Modern Classical Masters
Photo: Philip Glass
Ever had your mind blown by some thrilling, strange new sound and wondered, “Where on earth can I find more music like that!? Look no further. The following Modern Classical Masters, all recorded for the flagship classical label Deutsche Grammophon, are some of the most influential musicians you may have never heard of; together, they have served as muse to the likes of Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Michael Stipe and Lou Reed and made explosively creative music that appeals to every palette.
Felt goosebumps on your arm from an eerie avant-garde film score? Meet Gyorgy Ligeti. Hugged a speaker at a rave? Get lost in the mazelike patterns of Steve Reich‘s Drumming or Philip Glass‘s hypnotic repetitions. Had your heart broken by South American gypsy songs? Get mesmerized by Osvaldo Golijov.
If “classical music” still means “powdered wigs and dinner parties” to you, than we’re jealous — you’re in for a wild ride…
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Picture tendrils of smoke drifting off the ground after a nuclear Armageddon, and you're not far from the eerily beautiful music of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. He loved to build clusters of clashing notes until they hovered like cancerous clouds, suggesting frozen horror and the ominous heavings of the subconscious it's no surprise that Stanley Kubrick made excellent use of his music in films like The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey. His music isn't all house-of-horrors, though: many of his pieces have a sardonic, ghoulish wit. Ramifications is a wonderful place to get lost in his free-floating menace.
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Along with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young, Steve Reich was one of the earliest practitioners of minimalism, a movement that stripped music back down to simple pulse and tone. Listening to Reich's music feels like observing a bustling city square from a skyscraper observation deck; you can watch all the activity that makes up the whole without losing sight of the larger patterns. The pieces on this album evolve so gradually and gracefully that you feel the subtle changes without hearing them. Reich's liquid take on minimalism has seduced countless minimal techno producers and electronic musicians; hear why.
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You hear one single, sharp drum. Then, that one drum magically splits into two, and then two, just as disorientingly, become three. Soon, you are being buffeted by a wondrous hailstorm of percussion, one that will recalibrate your body's internal rhythms. If you've ever lost track of time listening to raindrops hit a hard surface, this is your Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
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Toru Takemitsu was a Japanese composer whose music struck a serene balance between West and East. His music sounds like a hushed, enchanted forest at dawn, alive with small sounds of life. "In An Autumn Garden" is full of charged silences, which he punctures with muted, spine-tingling bursts of hard-to-identify instruments he was a master at incorporating traditional Japanese instruments into Western classical music, and in finding odd new colors in Western instruments.
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Double bassist Edgar Meyer is the kind of musician whose curiosity can't be satisfied within one genre: given the week, you might find him genially plunking away with a bluegrass trio, backing up a jazz combo, or performing one of his works solo in front of a 60-piece orchestra. Part of his diversity is due to necessity: he is a virtuoso of a somewhat ungainly instrument, one with only a handful of established roles in the music world. So he invented some for himself. On this album, the Emerson String Quartet (if you see their name on a record, you can relax it's good) perform a gorgeously liquid, flowing string quartet Meyer composed. It pours out as warmly and naturally as morning sunshine flooding a window. The other work on this album is by the witty, erudite composer Ned Rorem, who resembles a particularly arch New Yorker cartoon come to life. His music is as generously pretty as Edgar Meyer's, but with a subtle, sardonic bite.
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Magnus Lindberg, a Finnish orchestral composer who was drawn to punk rock, Japanese drumming and other avant-garde concerns in his early years, loves a good bang and clang his orchestral pieces tend to be craggy, mountainously immense things, and they can be riotously overwhelming. "Aura in Memoriam of Witold Lutoslawski" might remind first-time listeners of the sort of busily malevolent orchestral score that accompanied old noir films like Laura or Double Indemnity.
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Osvaldo Golijov writes gypsy music from an undiscovered country. The 40-something Argentinean composer has caused a mini-sensation in the classical world by melting together Jewish, Mediterranean, South American and Arabic folk music into his own instantly arresting hybrid. His music is expansive and unafraid of sentiment: if you need a big, sweeping tune to fill the rafters of your mind, Golijov will definitely oblige. Soprano singer Dawn Upshaw is his partner in fearlessness; this dynamic duo have gone to some incredibly dark places together. (In one song cycle, Golijov had Upshaw sing beatifically about a mother roasting and devouring her child.) This album is a pungent platter that showcases the kinds of worlds Golijov and Upshaw create together.
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Lutoslawski was a Polish composer who walked a tricky line separating on-the-spot improvisation and old-fashioned pen-and-paper classical composition. His music is dense, somewhat imposing, and occasionally impenetrable. But hold on tight: something startling will happen if you stick around, something very worth the effort a space will clear in the thick music, and a single, singing instrument will emerge, like a figure in a dream sequence giving you specific, life-changing instructions. If you were ever glad you toughed it out through a long, brilliant novel, you owe Lutoslawski a shot.
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The Estonian composer Arvo Prt writes music that is almost frighteningly beautiful. It is also profoundly simple: no mathematics degrees required, just a clear mind. His grave, songful, and profoundly mystical works have the cleansing feel of ringing bell; they are unabashedly spiritual, and they have attracted a fanatically devoted cult for that reason. Tabula Rasa is a perfect introduction: a quiet, meditative piece for violin and orchestra that has a shattering power.
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This American Contemporaries album showcases two composers. One is John Harbison, an early prodigy with a host of imposing accolades he won the prestigious BMI Student Competition at 16, studied at Harvard, has a Pulitzer to his name who writes music that unfolds like a political thriller: you can't sit back and take it in passively, but the concentration is worth it. Richard Wernick's string quartet, meanwhile, operates according to its own steely, severe logic; moaning swoops, rigidly bouncing bows, and bird-peck plucking all circle loosely and tumble over each other like flapping, cawing crows.
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David Del Tredici's music is not here to comfort you. It is equally uninterested in being ignored. Szygy, the first piece on this album, is a glacial, menacing creep: flutes chatter nervously, low drones hum with ominous intent, and soprano Lucy Shelton intones words low and dark in the mix like bleak prophecy. It makes for spectacularly gripping feel-bad music; if you're hosting a low-budget horror-movie festival at your place, I guarantee this album will raise hackles higher than the film's actual soundtrack.
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Oliver Knussen is a British composer who has scored the unlikely hat trick of finding a style that is equal parts recognizable, inviting, and audacious. His music thrills new-music specialists without presenting a steely, closed door to the uninitiated. The demented children's-book artwork and transportingly fantastic work titles give a good hint of what to expect from his aesthetic. He's a conductor, too, and here is leading the London Sinfonietta in his own music.
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Esa-Pekka Salonen. That's quite a mouthful for a "household name," but this reserved, wry, and understatedly hip Finnish composer and conductor has managed it. For nearly 20 years, he was the leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and under his leadership, the orchestra went from a decent regional ensemble to the most forward-thinking, fascinating, and downright cool orchestra in the United States moving into Frank Gehry's steely, swooping Walt Disney Concert Hall didn't hurt. Salonen is also a fantastic composer. His works have the corded, springy rhythmic muscles of Stravinsky as well as his fondness for shockingly intense gestures and high drama. His music will light up your mind with vivid, filmic images if you surrender to it.
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The viola is chunky red-headed stepchild of the stringed instruments; the butt of unfair jokes and subject to a perennial "neither-here-nor-there" awkwardness. Which only makes it more thrilling when a composer sees and realizes its rich, dramatic potential, as on Giya Kancheli's Styx. Here, the viola embodies the titular river of Hell, the one separating life from death, and it shines in the juicy role. Kancheli's music has a dreamlike, beckoning feel to it, and it floats by here like mist. Sofial Guibaidulina's Viola Concerto, meanwhile, is a scenery-chewing showstopper: witness the viola go mad onstage, as it gasps, sobs, gibbers and growls.
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Sofia Gubaidulina wrote this piece for the internationally renowned violinist Gidon Kremer. Kremer is a blood-and-guts kind of violinist: he wants you to hear the music with the pulp and the seeds, all messy, visceral stuff still attached and trailing. His playing on this album positively digs into your veins: none of it is so facile as to be "pretty," but all of it will burn itself into your synapses.
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Peter Lieberson, a Santa Fe composer who died just last year from lymphoma, wrote music that was a curious blend of brainy and spiritual. He studied composition under some of the most fearsomely cerebral composers of the last century figures like Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, whose works often felt like they required security clearance to comprehend. But Lieberson was also inspired and motivated by Buddhism. These two impulses collided in busy, agitated music that frantically urged you to look up at the skies.
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If you know one name on this list, you know Philip Glass. He's the closest thing modern composers have to a bona-fide celebrity, enough that his name can be used as a punch line on South Park. Ironically, his actual music doesn't travel as widely as his name, which means it's probably time you got better acquainted. His Violin Concerto is one of his most iconic pieces; the Second Movement might be the loveliest and most alluring things he ever wrote. Gidon Kremer digs into it lustily, carefully holding on to its hypnotic quality without making it sound overly smooth or, well, glassy.
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Nels Cline? Get out of here. Thurston Moore? Step aside. You haven't heard how freaky a guitar can get until you've absorbed the works on this album by the fearless guitar soloist Leo Brouwer. It's modestly named: Modern Guitar Music may be the least descriptive album title in history. But what you get is a survey of some of the gnarliest corners of the guitar universe. Behold: the guitar as a mechanical spider dancing the fandango ("Serenata por chitarra")! The guitar as hypnotic, never-ending hell-spiral (Brouwer's own vertigo-inducing "La espiral eternal")! And there are lovely pieces as well: Sylvano Bussotti's "Rara" is like a Bach suite turned in on itself.
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The Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke once wrote, "The goal of my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my neck in doing so." Close your eyes and imagine the semi-demented music such a sensibility might produce: it will still fall short of the real thing. Schnittke's music was heaving, turbulent, and bizarrely antic, a gruesome carnival atmosphere where clowns in running makeup leer at you from dark corners. His Concerto Grosso No. 1 is a pitch-black, sardonic masterpiece of gallows humor.
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Luciano Berio was an Italian composer, but he will not remind you of Puccini, and his Sinfonia for 8 Voices is not for the faint of heart. Test it out: you will either recoil in disbelief or gape in fascination. He was noted for his experimental work on the very cutting edge of electronic music; if there is a single white-lab-coat, forbidding composer-scientist figure on this list, it is Berio. His music is, quite honestly, extreme: proceed advisedly. But if you're tempted by the outer reaches of what modern composers have attempted, please do proceed.
