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composers beginning with "P": a meme
Oct. 20th, 2010 05:26 am1. Serge Prokofiev.
The greatest composer ever to begin with a P. (Partisans of G. Puccini need not apply.) The very first piece to be entered on my personal classical hit parade, at about the age of 8, was by Prokofiev, and this is it: the March from The Love for Three Oranges.
2. Arvo Pärt.
Estonian, of all things. Here is his Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, reaching the deepest of profundity using the simplest of materials. Strings, bell, descending A minor scales. That's it. Nevertheless, the greatest work of music composed in my lifetime.
Cantus has been used in several films, including Hiroshima and Fahrenheit 9/11, usually to accompany the most somber and bleak of scenes.
3. Harry Partch
Probably the most purely indigenous composer the U.S. has ever produced. Invented his own musical scales, and his own instruments, too. This piece is as eccentric as its title: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California, 1941, and the language is not drawing-room fashion, at all.
4. John Playford (compiler).
Renaissance dance music. Yum.
5. Hubert Parry.
And now for something completely different. Parry's hymn Jerusalem (words by William Plake) is so iconic in the English choral repertoire that it can afford to be treated like this in a Monty Python sketch.
The greatest composer ever to begin with a P. (Partisans of G. Puccini need not apply.) The very first piece to be entered on my personal classical hit parade, at about the age of 8, was by Prokofiev, and this is it: the March from The Love for Three Oranges.
2. Arvo Pärt.
Estonian, of all things. Here is his Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, reaching the deepest of profundity using the simplest of materials. Strings, bell, descending A minor scales. That's it. Nevertheless, the greatest work of music composed in my lifetime.
Cantus has been used in several films, including Hiroshima and Fahrenheit 9/11, usually to accompany the most somber and bleak of scenes.
3. Harry Partch
Probably the most purely indigenous composer the U.S. has ever produced. Invented his own musical scales, and his own instruments, too. This piece is as eccentric as its title: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California, 1941, and the language is not drawing-room fashion, at all.
4. John Playford (compiler).
Renaissance dance music. Yum.
5. Hubert Parry.
And now for something completely different. Parry's hymn Jerusalem (words by William Plake) is so iconic in the English choral repertoire that it can afford to be treated like this in a Monty Python sketch.
