Neologistics→ Music → Selah → Buying Records → Influential Composers |
Below is a lineup of some of the most influential composers in the world of modern music during the twentieth century, though be no means all of them. These are the ones I mentioned that had a significant influence on me in my early musical thinking, shown in the chronological order in which I became aware of them.
John Cage is perhaps the most important musical
philosopher of the twentieth century. Most of his music
was more significant for the viewpoint it expressed rather
than how well it sounded. Cage introduced randomness and
unpredictability into music, a concept that was foreign to
the aesthetic of the Western world. Most people simply
hate listening to most of what he wrote, but the fact
remains that there is hardly a composer in the world today
who was not in some way directly impacted by what he did.
|
Charles Ives is the earliest modern American
composer, and a true original. His music shows influences
from many resources, and also an individuality that was
unmatched at the time. He did things that were utterly
unlike anything that was being done by any his composers
in either Europe or the US.
|
Elliott Carter can claim roots from the line of
Americana school composers that others such as Aaron
Copland also came from, although listeners who don't know
otherwise often associate most of his music with the realm
of serial composers that came from the line of
Schöonberg through Webern. Beginning in the forties,
Carter's music became increasingly complex, and his
musical language and techniques highly individual.
|
Edgard Varèse is another composer I became
acquainted with through a recording first heard in Paul
Siebenmann's record store, an album conducted by Igor
Stravinsky's protegée Robert Craft. Later there was
a second volume. The two together constitute most of the
output of this composer, who was also active as a
conductor and organizer of new music concerts in the US
for many years.
|
Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the two principal
students of Olivier Messiaen. It is fair to say that no
two compositions of Stockhausen bear any resemblance to
each other. I've often described it as being as though
Stockhausen reinvents music from scratch with each new
work.
|
Pierre Boulez is the other principal student of
Olivier Messiaen. His music is highly serialized, and his
technique has not ranged into as many different venues as
has Stockhausen's. Again, my first exposure to his music
was through a Columbia recording of his most well-known
masterwork, Le Marteau sans maitre which I
heard at Paul's record store.
|
Luciano Berio has always been one of my favorite
avant garde composers, because I consider his music deeply
emotional any intensely lyrical.
|
Morton Feldman is certainly one of a kind. Almost
all of his music is so extremely sparse that you wonder if
the musicians are actually playing, or are just getting
ready to play, with only occasional quiet sounds separated
by long silences.
|