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composers beginning with "P": a meme
1. 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.
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I was pretty happy to find the collected Dancing Master at Boosey & Hawkes when I was there. I ordered more copies and gave them to my family as Christmas presents one year, thinking they'd be good for when we get together and want to play something. Dad's baroque ensemble used to play some pieces from that, but they'd been arranged into parts, saving some heavy lifting.
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I had a big thing for Purcell when I was a teenager, but when I go back to him now, I think it must have been some kind of affectation. He was good, but what was it that made me take his records out of the library over and over and over then? "Hail, Hail, Bright Cecilia" doesn't seem like something that should have fascinated me, but it did.
I like Arvo Pärt. I wouldn't list him right after Prokofiev at this point, but he might move up in my list as the years go by.
This is a pretty entertaining and odd approach to thinking about composers. Usually B is the only letter that gets this treatment.
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I don't know Pergolesi's work well, though I do have a recording of the Stabat Mater. For true religious experiences in music, I've found that Vivaldi's Gloria delivers the goods. And Bruckner: anything by Bruckner.
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(Anonymous) 2010-10-22 06:29 am (UTC)(link)-MTD/neb