I finally put together a listening list for my 20th-century music survey course, and, in best masochistic blogging tradition, I provide it here – not in the least because I’m proud of it, but simply to add my two bits’ worth to the mountain of evidence that creating a decent listening list for a one-semester course covering an entire century is impossible. I guarantee, if you blogged your listening list for your course at your own college, and it matched mine piece for piece, I would turn away from it in scorn, just as you will here. I’m shocked at the names I omitted: Hindemith, Thomson, Maderna, Branca, J.L. Adams, Lauten. But in my (weak) defense, the course isn’t a straight survey, but is entitled Progress Versus Populism in 20th-Century Music. The focus (since I needed some focus just to winnow out a few pieces and movements) is the effect of politics on issues of elitism versus politically-motivated accessibility. Electronic music is poorly represented, since its politics are somewhat different than the public ones of concert performance. My aim is to address the issue of making compositional and stylistic choices in the age of commercial democracy, and thus I begin with World War I, when the aristocracies that supported Romanticism were wiped out. Politically-charged figures like Cardew and Eisler will loom large, even though no specific pieces of theirs are on the roster. And this is only a small sampling of the music I’ll actually play. I promise to cover a lot more bases, but the list is already inconvenient lengthy:
Charles Ives: Three Places in New England, 2nd movement
Igor Stravinsky: Le Sacre du Printemps
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms
Arnold Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra
Bela Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Darius Milhaud: La Creation du Monde
Anton Webern: Cantata No. 2
Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3
Aaron Copland: Billy the Kid
George Antheil: Ballet mecanique
Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 10
Harry Partch: Barstow
John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes, Sonatas I & II, Third Interlude
Olivier Messiaen: Turangalila Symphony, movements 1, 4, 6
Milton Babbitt: Philomel
Pierre Boulez: Pli selon pli, 2nd movement
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Mantra
Luciano Berio: Sinfonia, movements 2 & 3
Pauline Oliveros: I of IV
Frederic Rzewski: The People United Will Never Be Defeated
Morton Feldman: Why Patterns?
Robert Ashley: Perfect Lives, “The Bar”
La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano, disc 1
Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach, “Bed” and “Spaceship” Scenes
William Bolcom: Songs of Innocence and Experience, movements 3 to 8
Clarence Barlow: Variazioni e un piano meccanico
Claude Vivier: Lonely Child
Daniel Lentz: The Crack in the Bell
Laurie Anderson: O Superman
Mikel Rouse: Failing Kansas, movements 1, 2
Maria De Alvear: Sexo
I’m proud to have included Shostakovich and Vivier in there, which, for me, represent branching out. My post-1975 European music (counting the Canadian Vivier as European) does lean toward the accessible side, but that’s in keeping with the topic of the class. You can’t paint an oil painting of 20th-century music in four months, but if anyone can squint at this rough charcoal sketch and think it looks remotely the same shape as the era, I’ll be pleased enough. My textbooks are Paul Griffiths’ Modern Music and After and my own American Music in the Twentieth Century. I also include as required reading the following articles:
Milton Babbitt: “Who Cares If You Listen?”
Pierre Boulez: “Schoenberg is Dead”
John Cage: “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” “Lecture on Nothing,” and “Lecture on Something” from Silence   Â
Cornelius Cardew: “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”
Kyle Gann: “Making Marx in the Music” –
Charles Ives: Essays Before a Sonata, Prologue and Epilogue
Pauline Oliveros: “The Contribution of Women Composers”
George Rochberg: “No Center” and “The Composer in Academia” from The Aesthetics of Survival
Arnold Schoenberg: “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style, and Idea”
Elmer Schönberger and Louis Andriessen: “1966-Requiem Canticles,” “No Copyright Problem Here,” “Ordeals of the Memory,” and “On Influence” from The Apollonian Clockwork
As for your comments, compliments will be ignored as insincere, complaints as redundant. Remarks are welcome.
[UPDATE in response to comments: As I should have made clearer, the pieces on the list are only a small fraction of the music I’ll be playing – they’re the pieces I’ll be sending the students to the library to listen to. I’m already afraid it’s more than they can handle. And since we have an excellent jazz program, and I’m only an amateur in jazz, I wouldn’t presume to teach it when there are top-notch experts down the hall: nor popular music, about which I know very little. I promised no one would be happy with the list, which reflects what some may consider my too-specialized body of knowledge.]