10 Compositions To Challenge Your Listening Game In 2020

Brian Current, April 11, 2020

One of the joys of my life is to work with the outstanding graduate students of The Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School. We normally perform contemporary works like the ones below. However, due to the virus we’ve instead created a list of 10 tremendous pieces to live with during our physical distancing.  We would like to share these with you to inspire you, to move you, and to demonstrate that despite what seems like bewildering circumstances, beauty still exists in unexpected places. Listen along with us!

Many of us will not love this music at first.  Me included! When I was first introduced to contemporary music of this kind, I was baffled by it. It went against everything that I stood for. However over time I was able to develop new ways of listening.  These new ways opened a whole world of music to me, with thousands of musicians and composers all around the world. They inspire me every day. Contemporary music changed my life, and it can change yours.

What are these new ways of listening?

Texture: 2 or 5 or 100 melodies happening at once and we listen to the whole, and then how dense and sparse things become.

Colour: High overtones create bright colours and low overtones create darker colours. In some of these pieces, colour and harmony are the same thing. More on that later.

Electronic music as inspiration: Many of these pieces blur the lines between electronic sounds and acoustic sounds, and the distinction between these is becoming less and less important.

Extended Technique: Playing the instruments in a way that makes them sound completely unlike the instruments being played.

What else should I know?

They are not in any order so it’s not a top ten or a countdown.

For newbies and non-newbies alike, these pieces are the kind that usually require many listenings before they reveal themselves.

It’s not a list of ‘classic’ 20th century music by composers you may have heard about such as Boulez, Stockhausen and so on, who are a generation or so before this group. 

Claude Vivier (1948-1983) – Lonely Child for soprano and orchestra (1980)

Who was Claude Vivier?

Claude Vivier is one of the most inspiring, mysterious and sought-after international composers in contemporary music even though he left us only about 30 pieces when he died young in 1983. His music is both ground-breaking and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Why did he write this?

Most agree that Lonely Child is autobiographical. As an orphan, Vivier had a difficult upbringing and never knew his parents.  His work often feels as though he is finding his place in the cosmos.

What should we listen for?

Vivier said that he conceived of the piece as a single melody, with the string orchestra transformed into a halo of colour that moves with the vocal line.

He didn’t call his chords harmonies, he called them colours.  This is influenced by a technique we usually call spectrialism where the orchestra isn’t playing notes in a traditional chord, like the 3rd or the 5th, but rather overtones in a harmonic spectrum. So - and I hope this is a little bit mind-blowing - harmony and colour in lots of this music are the same thing.

Bonus fact:

Even though he was a world citizen, Vivier was proudly French Canadian. He remains so much part of the musical psyche of Quebec that many composers there can sing the opening A of the vocal line from memory, even if they don’t have perfect pitch.

2. Kaija Saariaho (1952) - Spins and Spells for Cello Solo (1996)

Who is Kaija Saariaho?

Kaija (Ka-ya) Saariaho is a world-renowned Finnish composer who has lived in Paris most of her life. She is known for creating outstanding music of all kinds, a lot of which either includes or is inspired by electronic sounds.

Much of her music has an emphasis on the slow transformation of dense masses of sound.

What to listen for:

Saariaho is admired for her colourful writing for string instruments and for using techniques that bring out bright overtones. For example, at the very beginning of this video, the cellist lightly touches different parts of the strings which produces beautiful pitches that are much higher than those usually associated with the cello.  

Saariaho also asks for an unusual tuning of the cello. The cellist fingers the notes normally, but they sound in different places than they do ordinarily. The score has two lines: the line above shows where the notes are played, and the line below shows where the notes sound.

3.  Louis Andriessen (1939-) – De Staat (1972–76) for Large Ensemble

Who is Louis Andriessen?

Louis Andriessen is regarded as the most influential Dutch composer of his generation and the father of Dutch minimalism in music.

Why did he write this?

At the time, Andriessen was interested in subverting the political establishment through his music.  The piece has the energy of pop and jazz. He requests that amplified voices sing the vocal parts and uses electric bass instead of acoustic bass.

What else?

Despite its anti-establishment feel, it is meticulously composed.

The text comes from Plato's The Republic and deals with the role of music in society including passages that debate how new chords and scales should be banned as they subvert politics (c’mon Plato!).

De Staat is regarded as a cornerstone work of the late 20th century but is not often performed because of its unusual and large instrumentation.

4. Sofia Gubaidulina (1935- ) - String Quartet No. 2 (1987)

Who is Sofia Gubaidulina?

Gubaidulina is an enormously respected Russian composer who has lived in Germany since 1992.

She grew up in the Tartar region of Russian, which has influences from both Western and Eastern traditions.

Why is her music important?

Every note of her work feels deeply religious. This is remarkably consistent throughout all of her music.

She has said that religion and music share the common goal of ‘restoring the legato of life’ and that ‘there is no more serious reason for composing music than spiritual renewal’.

Can something be repeated but also be different?

Good question! This is what the music plays with. Listen for how she uses repetition but plays with our expectations in a masterful way.

5. Murray Schafer (1933-) - String Quartet No. 2 "Waves" (1976)

Who is Murray Schafer?

When we talk about Murray Schafer, we talk about concert music, music theatre, music education, sound ecology, universal creativity and graphic notation.

Schafer took composer John Cage’s seismic idea that every sound can be understood as music and placed it in the wilderness.  Several of his pieces take place in remote wilderness settings, including an opera that is set on a lake at dawn. The opera is timed for the sun to rise over the lake.

Is this flaky?

No!  In fact, Schafer is one of the most meticulous, well-researched and disciplined contemporary composers that we know about. He showed throughout his career that excellence comes not just from talent but also from hard work.

Really?

Well, he has a 10-part opera cycle that is Wagnerian in scope.

He uses beautiful and detailed graphic notation in most of his scores. Some of these have appeared in art galleries. All his scores are written painstakingly by hand like illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages where monks laboriously decorated a single letter to show their devotion.

Benevolence has also been part of nearly everything that he’s done. He’s taught children around the world to sing beautiful clusters through graphic notation. He’s shown us that everyone from all backgrounds can create music by producing an opera with 150 of the residents of a small town with a population of 200 and has written go-to books about the ethics and importance of sound ecology.

Why did he write this quartet?

The now iconic String Quartet no.2 is part of Schafer’s impulse to preserve the natural environment in art before it disappears.

He and others analyzed the sounds of ocean waves on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America. The recurrent pattern of waves is always asymmetrical but the duration from crest to crest usually falls between six and eleven seconds. The gestures of the music, the ebbs and the flows, are based on these patterns.

6. Gerard Grisey (1946-1998) - Partiels for chamber orchestra (1975)

Who was Gerard Grisey?

The French composer Gerard Grisey was one of the pioneers of spectralism, or the idea that harmony and musical colour are the same thing.

Wait, what?

Yes! Play a loud low note on the piano and listen very carefully. You’ll notice that it’s not only the note that you played that sounds, but also many other quiet notes as well. These other notes are subliminal and infinite.  Put together, they create the colour of “the piano”. Other instruments have different overtone signatures.

Composers at the time measured these harmonics by feeding low notes through machines that showed their overtones in a visual display.  It was like discovering a hidden world! Grisey and others then used these lines - the overtone spectrum of a single sound - as layers in their orchestra music.  Each instrument was assigned an overtone, in effect creating mass colours with the orchestra.

Why is Partiels important?

The opening of Partiels vividly demonstrates this concept, which has influenced countless composers worldwide. It’s also incredibly beautiful. We hear a sustained low trombone note, followed by a chord or colour based on its overtone spectrum. This is repeated many times and is reinforced by the double bass an octave lower.

7. George Benjamin (1960- ) – At First Light for Large Ensemble (1982)

Why is this piece here?

It’s simply wonderful. Everything is clear. The music breathes and is always just the right density.  This is very difficult to achieve.   

This piece is also strikingly early in the cannon for this style, which pervades lots of music up until today.

He also obtains an enormous sound for an ensemble of only 14 players and gives the impression of a much bigger group of musicians. It set a standard for hundreds of pieces written for this size of ensemble around the world.

Who is George Benjamin?

He is a UK composer who has been at the forefront of contemporary music since being identified as a prodigy as a teenager. He is also a conductor and regularly conducts his own music and others.  

8. Unsuk Chin (1961-) - Double Concerto for piano, percussion and ensemble (2002)

What’s going on with the piano?

The piano is ‘prepared’, which means that different kinds of objects are placed on and in between the piano strings, and makes lots of the notes sound like percussion instruments. This idea has been around a surprisingly long time since John Cage started doing it systematically back in 1938, which he called an ‘exploded keyboard’.

So this is a Concerto for percussion and a piano that sounds like percussion?

Yes! Plus, there is an additional percussionist in the orchestra which acts as an extension of the solo parts.

There aren’t that many extended parts for the soloist alone.

In lots of 21st century concertos, the idea of individual versus society, or solo versus orchestra, is blurred. This concerto is a great example, as the solo parts are extremely virtuosic but not showy, and the orchestra acts as an extension of them.

Who is Unsuk Chin?

Unsuk Chin is in the top handful of the most admired and programmed composers in the world. Her music appears in all major festivals internationally and consistently shows evidence of enormous talent.

She was born in Seoul, Korea and after studies there was awarded a German government scholarship and moved to Europe in 1985.

Any particularly fantastic parts to listen for?

It’s all great music, but at 18:40, listen for how notes in the piano and the percussion are ‘bent’ by notes in the ensemble as if they were filtered through an electronic processor.

9. Philippe Leroux (1959-) - Voi(Rex) for soprano, six instruments and processing (2001-02)

What’s going on here?

Nearly everything in this piece comes from working with tech. To create the harmonies of the music, Leroux asked a performer to sing next to a gong which created a beautiful aura around her voice.  He analysed this and then used it as the harmonies in the piece. Lots of the acoustic ensemble writing also imitates studio electronic effects.

At 5:37 there is electronic processing on the voice that you can clearly hear, and this is used throughout the work in different ways.

What does the title mean?

Think of the letters REX as stacked vertically to create, when combined with “VOI”, the three words in French Voir, Voie, and Voix (or See, Way, and Voice).

Don’t sopranos usually sing in a more operatic style?

This kind of amplified voice is more and more favoured by many of today’s composers. There is a whole range of effects that are possible when amplification is used. However, it also introduces balance issues that are usually solved by the composer sitting at a mixing board.

10. Clara Iannotta (1983-):  Moult for chamber orchestra (2018-2019)

It’s always exciting to hear what prominent young composers are up to. Still in her 30s, Clara Iannotta was born in Rome and is now living in Berlin.

What am I hearing?

It’s a classical orchestra that sounds completely unlike a classical orchestra. Her scores begin with pages of instructions on how to prepare different instruments and incorporate objects like knitting needles, tape and music boxes into the playing. There are also details about holding violin bows and blowing through instruments in unusual ways. Part of the joy of this music is seeing how the musicians are creating the sounds.  It’s fascinating how she blurs the line between noise and tone, and between electronic and acoustic sounds.

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Thank you for exploring this music with us! We hope that it challenges you, inspires you, and is a reminder that despite the unusual circumstances that we find ourselves in, life and beauty is blooming, and that the unexpected is always upon us.

Keep well!

Spotify playlist (pieces 1-8 only):

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fXXQx0se3lG7VgK1tim2i?si=Kf_hBNSPQk2zUbWFAfhTzA