Music thread: What is your favorite classical period?????

[aquaman]

I know, boring thread. I myself am a Baroque and Renaissance man.

[catzies]

1. If it's not Baroque don't fix it.

:P

[NaMeaHou]

2. I'm a pictoral kind of guy with two years of art history

I still liked burtolusconi? Mr. Realism.

edit: I know that's not right, I was having some fun, thanks for putting this interest out there. I'm there.

[cprise]

3. I bought the Switched-On Bach boxed set

I listen to it every week. Am I insane?

[aquaman]

6. I love Bach

My wife calls me Bach sometimes in the heat of things.

[REP]

4. I Like Some of All

But my heart belongs to the classics.

[starroute]

5. Split between your Baroque and Classical periods

More or less anything from Vivaldi to Mozart . . . but I'm not real big on the earlier Baroque and I get lost again somewhere around Beethoven.

[carpetbagger]

7. 20th C. had some incredible music.

Most of what the college music classes teach is how music progressed into noise (or in the case of Cage, lack thereof). However, this was the period that gave us late Mahler, Bloch, Suk, Szymanowski, Delius, Vaughn Williams, Holst, Barber, Copland, Thompson, Hanson, Walton, Hovhaness, and the whole Tavener/Part/Gorecki thing.

[Squeech]

10. Stravinsky!

For most purposes my favorite period of music coincides with Igor Stravinsky's lifespan. (Actually some really pretty stuff came out of the generation before Debussy, people like Gounod, Faure and d'Indy. But Debussy's La Mer was this incredible watershed, where whole new worlds became possible in its wake, and Stravinsky was a pioneer in many of those worlds.)

Misconceptions about the 20th century include the idea that it's all about noise. I would say that it's all about expression, as was the music of the Romantic period (which in some ways we're still in), but what we have to express is different. In particular, the generation that lived through the world wars had some pretty horrific stories to tell, and pretty, harmonically well-behaved music just wasn't going to tell those stories properly. So that's philosophically where you get the dense chords of Bartok, the banshee timbres of Varese, the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern (which last, I admit, is a little too stark and close to the bone for me-- although I really like, and recommend, Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra opus 16, from early in his career, and his A Survivor from Warsaw, from the end of it).

The last composer I really liked was Olivier Messiaen, who died in the '90s. He'd been in the French Resistance during the war, and got captured by the Nazis. Apparently they had a special prison camp for intellectuals, so they stuck Messiaen in there with other talented people, including a really well known violinist, a cellist, and a clarinet player. Somehow they acquired instruments, even a piano for Messiaen to play, and he wrote this piece called the Quartet for the End of Time. You might think, coming from a prisoner of war, it'd be either a snarl of defiance or a cry of despair, and there is some of that in there, but most of the music is in fact serene and achingly beautiful (albeit weird), long droney placid melodies reflecting the composer's conviction that God would provide. Highly recommended.

Since he died I know of no living composers I would recommend, or purchase new music by without hearing it first. Of course it's real hard for new composers to get access to orchestras anyway, so we'll never hear enough new symphonic music to capture the zeitgeist. Unless you want to talk about John "Star Wars" Williams, and I don't.

[Zuni]

8. I love music from all the periods

but there are some favorites. I love Tchaikovsky (I am Russian), Schubert, Beethoven.
I am not sure what style Franz Schubert would fall into. How would you classify him?

[carpetbagger]

14. I'd call Schubert early Romantic.

The music sounds, like much of Beethoven, like Classical, but his lyricism, use of Lieder, and some of his chromatic colorations and harmonic development places him at the beginning of the long Romantic arc. Had he lived longer, it would have probably become more manifest, as the norms moved towards that direction.

[Zuni]

9. Pre-Bach

Did you know Bach is the man most responsible for our modern musical system of keys and scales. Music Pre-Bach tended to revolve around modes, which are rarely used now, except in Jazz.
For some really weird modal music, check out Miles Davis's ESP.

[Cheswick2.0]

11. classical, romantic and 20th century

I love the Opera that was written in these periods.

Starting in the 1950 Musical theater composers were writing better music than Opera composers. I know this will be treated as sacrilage, but if you want Dissonant and edgy (and still something people will listen to), Sondheim does it better than anyone. If you want downright lovely melodies, harmonies and soaring duets, Rogers and Hammerstein.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. I absolutely love the choral music of

the Renaissance period: Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Schutz, Tallis, Byrd, and all those people. It is glorious to listen to and glorious to sing.

While I like most kinds of classical music (except for sugary waltzes), my personal collection consists mostly of Renaissance and Baroque (especially choral), Mozart and Russian operas, nineteenth and twentieth century chamber music, and a few selected twentieth century composers, such as Hovhannes, John Adams, John Tavener, Olivier Messiaen, Samuel Barber, Francis Poulenc, and Sergei Prokofiev.

The choir I'm now in does a lot of twentieth century English cathedral music (our director is from England), and I like that, too, especially the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells.

[carpetbagger]

16. You'd like Szymanowski's Stabat Mater.

Here's an excerpt:

http://acweb.colum.edu/users/agunkel/homepage/easter/stab6szym.ram

[oneighty]

13. Right now

I am fixated on Mozart. Hours at a time day and night. Went to a concert last Saturday, some Mozart, Sebelius, partos. Next concert is Beethoven, Mendelssohn.

180

[mitchum]

15. split vote for 20th Century and Romantic