This is a recording

[calimac]

athenais asked what simple things make us purely happy. I thought of musical things, and named among mine "a modulation by Bruckner" and "a cadence by Mozart, or by Nielsen," they being composers who have a knack for doing these things in peculiarly satisfying ways. I especially like the way Bruckner's modulations seem to shift the entire world underneath them. And Mozart can signal his cadences more than any other composer: I can often tell they're coming from way off. Listening to one is like cresting a hill on a bicycle and coasting down into a deep valley, or the part of a peaceful airplane flight from the moment the seatbelt sign comes on: you're just floating down to what Aristotle would call the natural level.

I'm musically literate enough to figure out Mozart's chord progressions from a score, but not learned enough in theory to understand exactly what's significantly different about his progressions from the way other composers do it. So now I just listen.

Besides that kind of deep satisfaction, I also go to music for thrills, which I get from different things: tense moments and sublime beauty. Favorite tense moments might include:
The dramatic pauses in the opening of Haydn's G Minor Symphony (no. 39)
The mighty castle Beethoven builds out of Lego blocks in the first movement of his Fifth
The incessant repeated figures in the opening theme of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet - this has the effect New York minimalism is aiming for (and often achieves)
The marcato variation in Schumann's Andante-Variation Quintet, Op. 46 (consumer warning: he took this out of the 2-piano version of the work, I have no idea why)
Bruckner's majestic chorales and codas, all over his work
The really effective use Kurt Atterberg makes of simple sequencing in the development of the first movement of his Sixth Symphony
The climax of the slow movement of Shostakovich's Fifth (and the motorized toccata in his Eighth, and the absolutely terrifying depiction of the Winter Palace massacre in his Eleventh: Shostakovich raises more hair than any other composer)

And some favorite moments of sheer beauty? There's many - here are some that prove that there's plenty of beautiful classical music from the 20th century:
"On the beach at night alone," Vaughan Williams's demonstration in A Sea Symphony that it's possible to make Walt Whitman poetry sound beautiful - I'd never have believed it till I heard it
The meltingly lyric slow movements of Sibelius's Third and Atterberg's Sixth (again! there's a little-known masterwork for you)
Almost anything by Alan Hovhaness
The moment in Gorecki's Third where the soprano finally reaches the fifth note of the scale
Stefania de Kenessey's somber Wintersong, the one work I know that's less than 15 years old that I'd call a masterpiece

Looking over my CDs to make these lists, I noticed there's another quality I value in music that I find more often than I thought, and that's charm. I'll write about that another time.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Damn how can I lock this post? There are bunch of things on here I have never heard, and now want to seek out (just as I want to seek out the single R.V.W. thing, that rapsody, that Ben was talking about in The Rotters Club--one of the few V.W. things I haven't heard.)

Sigh, off to swelter at work.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Sartorias - I believe if you mark it as a favorite you will be able to view it for the foreseeable future. I'm doing that.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Thanks--I have just done that.

[spikeiowa.livejournal.com]

For me... a contemporary composer. Messiaen. "Turangalila Symphony" and the opera Saint Francois d'Assise. His music is transcendent, ecstatic.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Messiaen is not one of my canonical composers - sometimes his music works splendidly for me, sometimes not at all. I haven't figured out why the difference.