Ian Crisp:

>Not necessarily the "best" pieces ...
>Not necessarily the most influential...
>The pieces that, in your judgement, best exemplify "twentieth-century
>music".  ...The ones you would quote if you had to oppose the motion "The
>twentieth century has produced no characteristic and distinctive music".

At first this survey reminded me of one Landmark Theatres did recently
asking for my five favorite foreign language films (a difficult choice,
let me tell you.) In this case, being able to ignore considerations of
best, favorite and most influential, if desired, in favor of most
characteristic or, to twist it a bit from extra-musical considerations,
most *characteristic* of the century, allowed me to list five without
doing too much violence to myself or the question, and I came up with:

(1) Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.  "Romantic excess" or not, this piece
has 20th century written all over it, most notably in the fierce jagged
rhythms that so much expressed the departure from illusions of security,
comfort and civilized behavior that so much of the 19th century thought had
arrived in Europe at least.  Its prominent rhythmic innovations inspired
much of the rhythmic inventiveness characteristic of so much music in the
20th century, in many forms.  Its dance like elements contrast and depart
from the songfulness of so much 19th century music also.  (I would expect
this piece to come out #1 in the survey, BTW.)

(2) Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.  A favorite
piece and a great one, frankly.  It represents the percussive quality of
much 20th century music; its harmonic characteristics reflect much of the
mid-century period when it was written (late thirties); it also represents
a departure from traditional forms and from the formerly dominant place of
German music in the Western classical tradition.

(3) Britten's War Requiem.  A powerful and poignantly moving work.  No
radical departures, stylistically, but shows some influence of Berg, among
other things.  The texts are from the First World War and it was written
by a war-resistor in the Second.  Before WWI, war was generally glorified;
this shows more than disillusionment, so prevalent in 20th century culture.

(4) Shostakovich's 13th ("Babi Yar").  Another powerful and moving work
by a composer influenced by Mahler.  No overstatements.  Expressions of
outrage and biting sarcasm; a (suppressed) commentary on suppression,
tyranny, anti-Semitism, mass murder, totalitarianism.  What could be more
20th century than this?

(5) Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.  OK, the title may
have been a publisher's idea, but so were some of Beethoven's famous and
surviving titles.  Representative of the 20th century avant-garde at its
ripest, its many divided strings providing a wall of sound that only
expressive of an atomic blast but even resembling one (I've heard a
recording of same.) Symbolic of the shadow over much of 20th century
consciousness that that represents.

This leaves out my forty or fifty other favorite 20th century composers,
many of whose pieces I'd much rather hear than these.  Tough.  These will
do for a statement from me.

Jim Tobin