Moot Thoughts & Musings

(per Stina's request) okay, I started this entry on Sunday night, but I've been battling this permanent headache and haven't felt much up to blogging, but I may as well finish it

Being the resident musicologist around here I will offer off the top of my head, 10 classical must-have's. These, in my opinion, are 10 CDs that will give adequate breadth to classical music, historically (duh, I'm a musicologist!) and hopefully genre-wise, too. This is entirely arbitrary, and I probably can be argued out of anyone of them, because, really, to distill all of music history into 10 CDs? I've also tried to link recordings that I would particularly recommend, even if I didn't mention the performer information per se.

Sadly, I will skip a medieval era. Though if you really want something from the Middle Ages, this CD of motets by Guillaume de Machaut, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble is a good place to start. In some ways the fourteenth century motet is the quintessential medieval genre: the multivalence, the symbolism, the non-linearness. But this doesn't count as one of the 10.

Okay, so Number One!
Renaissance. Josquin, Motets and Chansons, Hilliard Ensemble. Don't be confused with the Machaut motets, because, though they are called by the same name, they're practically a different genre. A Renaissance motet is a sacred genre with a polyphonic texture. Josquin uses imitation and textural contrast to create vivid musical imagery and to enliven the text. An example of a motet could be either a psalm setting, such De profundis, or a Marian antiphon, such as, Ave maria...virgo serena, which is also one of my favorite Josquin pieces to teach, because of its rich musical content.

Baroque. I'm going to choose J. S. Bach because of the impact he's had in more recent times, not because of his music as representative of style and/or popularity of his own time (neither of which was very high). He's at the VERY end of the Baroque era and in so many ways isn't really like the rest of the period. Bach's music, though, is undisputably interesting and complex, though.
I think I'll choose his Mass in B Minor, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, a masterful choral work, which probably requires a more concentrated listening to. For something a little easier to listen to (and which I would kind of prefer to recommend anyway) go for the Brandenburg Concertos (this recording by Boston Baroque).

Addendum--I just can't let the Baroque go by without recommending some Monteverdi--either Vespers of 1610 or his opera The Coronation of Poppea.

Classical. Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Any of Haydn's London Symphonies (I like the recording by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. I prefer Haydn for an example of a symphony. The ways he deals with themes I think is more developed than Mozart.

Beethoven gets his own period, since he's sort of transitional. Symphony No. 5. I prefer this one out of all the symphonies to recommend on a "basics" list because of its cyclicism--the way the four movements are tied together with the short-short-short-long rhythmic motive that opens the symphony.

Romantic. Schubert, Lieder (There's nothing like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's recordings of these.)
Token opera example: Verdi's La Traviata or Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Depends on if you go for the more lyrical Italian style or the big orchestral German style.

More recent eras.
Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring.
Debussy's ballet Prelude l'apres-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun).
And to round it off may as well choose Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring.