47 new of 156 responses total.
It doesn't just mean common. As applied to music -- e.g., La mer, to the person who refused to attend the concert - it's definition 4 from Merriam-Webster: "a : lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste : COARSE b : morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate : GROSS c : ostentatious or excessive in expenditure or display : PRETENTIOUS." Definition 4c probably comes closest. 108 is just me.
"Common" has the the same definitions (among others). In both cases these are matters of personal judgement. I prefer to use the term "common", as it is not laden with the "uppity and elitist" insinuations we usually attach to "vulgar". Common, adj, 5. Commonplace; not excellent or distinguished in tone or quality; banal, coarse; vulgar; low. La mer is a fine piece of music, in my opinion, not common, much less vulgar. Si gustibus non disputandem est.
I'm sure Debussy rests easier now. ;-)
Debussy is dead and gone. I hardly think that any classical music that caused a near riot at its premier can be called either common or vulgar.
Why not? (Just asking -- I mean, I love La mer whether or not anyone thinks its vulgar. I didn't even bring the subject up. I'm just curious what relation you think "causing a riot" has to "not being vulgar." The two things don't seem related.)
Classical audiences don't riot at the common or vulgar, they go to sleep.
Shoot, they go to sleep even during the sublime.
Uh... Le sacre du printemps (spelling may be off) caused a riot at its first performance, specifically because it was 'vulgar'.
Speaking of vulgar: I picked up a CD with three pieces that meet all the requirements I listed above: simple obvious melodies, galumphing rhythms, repetition in place of development, overly broad gestures, rampant heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, soap-box appeal to the masses, and the composer shoving his own personality forward. Specifically, thee works for organ and orchestra: Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings and Tympani; Pierre Petit's Concertino for Organ, Strings and Percussion; and Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva, which is a 16-minute work for organ and full orchestra. (Well, I don't know if Pierre Petit is shoving his personality forward in his Concertino because it's the only music of his I've ever heard and I have no idea what his musical personality was like. But Barber and Poulenc are all over you like a couple of big dogs when you walk in the door.) The Poulenc piece appealed to me greatly when I was much younger but not so much anymore. It's a little too calculatedly melodramatic, too Phantom-of-the-Opera. The Petit piece is tuneful and listenable, but that's about it. Barber's Toccata Festiva is mostly a dark gnarly piece of music, with a few passages that the liner notes describe quite accurately as "ravishing." This piece is a textbook example of Barber's genius with cadences -- of sending a tune on its way and then bringing it back home in the most utterly satisfying manner imaginable. He is on a par with the greatest composers of all time in this one respect. The Toccata is in loose sonata-allegro form with a brief cadenza after the development section. This cadenza is the Toccata's Achilles heel. It's for pedals only, and hasn't a trace of Samuel Barber in it -- in fact, it might not even have been written by him. (My private theory is that Thomas Schippers wrote most of it for him.) But over-all this is one of the gems of Barber's middle period, along with the Piano Concerto and the opera Vanessa. This performance, by Dame Gillian Weir at the organ and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard, stands up well to the original recording by E. Power Biggs and Ormandy/Philadelphia. 16'20" -- a dollar a minute at Harmony House, well worth it.
I'd be tempted to say that's what you get with music for organ and orchestra. Murphy's law tells me that now someone will come out of the woodwork with a tasteful, refined and inobtrusive organ and orchestra piece, but something tells me that's not too likely.
I went to Harmony House Classical in Royal Oak to see what their going- out-of-business sale looks like. 25% off everything. People were buying *stacks* of CDs. I picked up the new release of John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music and the Abbado recording on DG of Pelleas et Melisande. I have Pelleas twice on LP, by Ernest Ansermet and by Pierre Boulez, but not on CD yet. I still like the Ansermet best. The new John Adams piece is [looks apologetic] kinda boring. Sorry. I mean, if I'd never heard any of his other music I might find this fascinating, but it's just the same old same old. I dunno, maybe I should lsten to it more. Adams is one composer I really want to like. The guy behind the counter said they're going to be open for a few more months, so I didn't buy a stack of CDs on the spot myself.
Did I mention how much I love Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande? I've been listening to my new Abbado CD and am enthralled by it all over again. Can you convert from an American to un Francais? I mean, not move there, just change my ethnic heritage? How about if I brush up my French and start shrugging a lot?
I had to be in Royal Oak yesterday so I stopped in on Harmony House Classical again. Everything is now 40% off, but there isn't a lot left in stock. I picked up three CDs: Wm. Schuman's Violin Concerto, New England Triptych, and Variations on "America"; Edward MacDowell's two orchestral suites and a Hamlet & Ophelia piece; and Jaarvi and the DSO performing Copland's 3rd and Harris's 3rd. I really like Jaarvi's way with American music. His Barber performances are excellent. On this CD, he's more crisp and less rhapsodic with the Harris 3rd than I'm used to hearing. I need to listen to it some more. The Copland 3rd is wonderful, though. Very powerful and monumental, as if Jaarvi is throwing himself into it. The Schuman Violin Concerto is new to me. It needs more listening than I have time to give it right now, alas, but I'll get there eventually. The MacDowell suites are teenage favorites of mine that still have a lot of charm in them, at least for me. The liner notes are a little disparaging, though. Chatting with one of the sales guys (who used to be an announcer on WQRS, which explains why his voice soinded so familiar), I learned that some investors are looking at Harmony House Classical, if not at the whole chain, so there is slight reason to hope that they'll keep their jobs there and that we'll keep our best retail shop of that kind in our area.
I certainly hope they find some way to continue! I was there last weekend and came away with almost a shoeboxfull of cds... way more than I could reasonably afford but I couldn't help it. That Jarvi recording is very enjoyable, and it did take me a few listens to accept the crispness of the Harris 3. One of the new cds I picked up, actually, was Bernstein doing Harris 3 with New York: needless to say, quite different from the Jarvi.
An old Bernstein recording of the Harris 3rd is on the flip side of Benstein's "Jeremiah" Symphony on an LP that I still have somewhere. It must date from around 1960, if not earlier. I have a more recent version of Bernstein conducting the Harris 3rd on CD, coupled with with Schuman's 3rd. I really never imagined there was another way of performing it until I heard that Jarvi/DSO CD. Jarvi/DSO did a CD with music by some African American composers I've never heard of, that Harmoney House had several copies of. Have you heard this one? Worth having at 40% off?
I think I did hear that CD you mentioned, I believe the Ann Arbor library had if you'd like to take a listen before deciding on it. From what I remember (it was about 2 years ago) I did enjoy the recording, but I never gave it a good critical listen. I had mainly checked it out for the Elligton piece on it, "The Three Black Kings," because an orchestra I was in was playing the MLK section of it. Sorry that's not a very helpful review! The Harris recording on the Bernstein CD I just got dates from 1962, so I wonder if it's the same one...
Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet. Kronos Quartet with Aki Takahashi. A recent poll on one of my Feldman lists showed this to be the most popular Feldman recording with the members. It’s an hour and twenty minutes of piano arpeggios and ghostly string chords, played pianissimo throughout. Every once in a while one of the instruments will play an isolated note or small series of notes. About two-thirds of the way through, the music changes character and becomes a series of evenly spaced chords by the string quartet against isolated piano notes that are gradually revealed to be the familiar arpeggios in slo-mo. The music finally reverts to an "older and wiser" version of the opening sounds. Feldman didn’t think his music was “minimal,” and he didn’t regard himself as a minimalist. And in fact, his music doesn’t remotely resemble that of any of the minimalists when you hear it played, only when you read descriptions of it like this one. So don’t listen to it if you’re a Glass or Reich or Adams or Riley fan looking for more of same. Here’s what it is: You know the kind of music you sometimes hear in the background of a movie when the heroine opens the door to an attic filled with mysterious objects, light from a window streaming in through the dusty air, the whole scene enigmatic but not especially menacing or foreboding. Silence. A quiet piano arpeggio in no recognizable key over a hushed string chord. Silence. Repeat. Silence. Repeat. Now turn the movie off and let the music go on like that by itself for 80 minutes.
I was looking to buy my first Feldman recording about a month ago and considered this one that you're talking about, but I decided ultimately on a recording that featured Coptic Light, Piano and Orchestra, and Cello and Orchestra. I didn't know what to expect, never having heard Feldman before, only having heard about him, but I was still very surprised by the music. It's really not like anything else I've heard. Very hypnotic. I don't know that I initially liked it, but once I withdrew and listened to the music on a different time scale I really began to enjoy it. I guess in that sense the composer it most reminds me of is Gavin Bryers, though with a certain added complexity and sophistication.
Good choice. I like all three of those pieces, but I'm crazy about Coptic Light. I think I might've entered an intemperate rave about it up there somewhere.
"Piano and String Quartet" is the Feldman work I know best, and the work that originally sold me on this composer. I picked it up in the first place because I like the quintet for piano & strings as a combination of instruments. For what it's worth, it strikes me, while listening to it, as very much resembling, and in the same spirit as, the music of LaMonte Young, the original minimalist, and a good bit of Terry Riley's too. It's far closer to their work in style and spirit than any of them are like Glass and Reich. Broadly speaking, these three composers are out to contemplate the universe, slowly; while Glass and Reich are urban jitterbugs. (Riley's "In C" may at first sound like an urban jitterbug work, but not taken as a whole.) None of this is to deny Feldman's distinctive individuality, that all great composers have, or to claim that anybody necessarily influenced anybody else. Of course Feldman denied being a minimalist. So have Riley, Reich, Glass, John Adams ... all with equally good reason. It's a broad brush that would call Beethoven, Weber, Brahms, and Wagner all "Romantics". Nevertheless it's a useful box and it will continue to be used. Whether you like the term or not, Feldman and the canonical minimalists were all equally part of a startling revolution towards simplicity, of making minimal means serve for maximum effect, in complete opposition to, and against the vehement objections of, the highly complex expressionist orthodoxy of their day. In that, all these composers are alike, as much as any group of individual geniuses can be alike, and really no two more alike or unalike than any other two.
The October BBC Music mag has a review of an Abbado/BPO live performance CD of Mahler's 9th in which there is 40 seconds (!) of silence after the end of the adagio before the applause starts. Jeez.
[With five minutes to spare before I had to leave for the evening, I logged on to enter the above comment about the Abbado/BPO Mahler CD and there was dbratman's thought-provoking response about Feldman-as- minimalist. I hate it when that happens. Anyway... I'll enter a new item where we can resume this fascinating (at least to me) discussion.]
I'd like the occasional company of concertgoers with the combination of respect and awe evident in the description in resp:130 I find that, after a really moving and gripping performance, an interval of, not 40 to be sure, but maybe 5 or 10, seconds often elapses during which I collect myself before I'm ready to applaud. Needless to say, many of the rest of them are well into it by then. Worse still are the ones who start applauding before the piece is over, particularly with "fake-ending" works like Sibelius's Fifth or Weber's "Invitation to the Dance". Fortunately that habit is a bit on the decline, at least in concerts I attend. Partly this decline is due to conductors being more careful to communicate via body language that it ain't over yet.
Sometimes after a piece like the Mahler 9th one clap in the silence is all it takes to break the spell and get everyone started. I never like to be the one to start the applause. Let someone else take that responsibility. On the other hand, I don't think I could've resisted in this case. I'd've cracked after 20 seconds, tops. 40 seconds after the end of Mahler's 9th I'd've had my coat on and been out the door alfreakinready.
Oh, well, if you're going to be that way <g>, if it was Mahler's Ninth I'd not have been at the concert in the first place.
Good, more room for me. ;-)
More room for Mahler, too; he sprawls all over the place. Mahler is the musical equivalent of the guy on the bus who sits with his knees so far apart he pushes his neighbors off the program.
I'll take a guy who lets his legs fall wherever they may over one who keeps them crossed, anyday. Guys who cross their legs while seated spend too much time contemplating which socks to wear. Mahler tells stories. Long stories. Maybe too long for most.
It's not length. It's sprawl. "Tells stories" may be the clue, because music that tells stories tends to sprawl. (Think: opera.) Music that just is, like sculpture, tends not to sprawl, however long it may be.
Morton Feldman: Violin and String Quartet. Rangzen Quartet, with
Christina Fong playing the third violin. It's a two-CD set on the
OgreOgress label, packaged in an attractively flimsy paperboard and
plastic folder from which a "Free Tibet Now!" sticker fell when I first
opened it. ("Rangzen" evidently means "independence":
http://www.rangzen.org/ is the web site of the International Tibet
Independence Movement.)
Two CDs, because this one-movement piece is two hours long. It's
typical late Feldman: little one-, two- or three-note figures in the
soloist against scraps of chords in the quartet, very slow and
deliberate, pianissimo throughout. You have to be willing to let the
music work on your mind at its own pace.
Looks like Harmoney House Classical is staying open a while longer, as is the bigger store down Woodward from them. I picked up three CDs at the classical store last week: the latest Samuel Barber CD in the Naxos series, a Naxos Kabalevsky CD, and a two-CD set of Robert Casadesus playing Ravel. (I guess that makes it four CDs in total.) Anyone who is old enough will remember Columbia's three-LP set of Casadesus performing Ravel's complete piano music. The three LP slipcovers (sleeves? dust jackets? what did we call them? I've forgotten already) were a familiar sight to me when I was a kid. One was pink, one was yellow and one was blue. 1950-style graphic of wire- figure seated at piano. Huge word "ravel" in lowercase while letters. Anyway, I had to have this CD remastering, and I'm not disappointed. The sound is excellent and Casadesus is in top form. He is joined by his wife Gaby on Ma Mere l'Oye and by Zino Francescatti on the Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Faure. There is also a performance of the "Left Hand" concerto with Ormandy/Philadelphia which I had never heard. Not a great recording of that piece (I like Boulez/Entrement), but the solo piano music is wonderful. These recodings were originally released in 1947, 1948 and 1952. The Barber CD has the Piano Concerto, Die Natali, Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, and the Commando March. Barber, who was a competent pianist but hardly a virtuoso, played the last movement of the piano concerto at half speed while he was composing it. He didn't believe it when the soloist, John Browning, said it was impossible to play at the indicated tempo. Barber took the score to his friend Vladimir Horowitz and asked him what he thought. Horowitz pronounced the finale unplayable. Barber (probably grumbling all the way) rewrote the worst parts of the finale to accomodate Browning. It still sounds unplayable to me, despite the evidence of my ears. I have all of this music on LP, even the Commando March, but the CD is still worth having. The Kabalevsky CD has Colas Breugnon, The Comedians and Romeo & Juliet. The Colas Breugnon overture is famous, but the rest of the piece isn't as good, imho, and isn't heard as much. The Comedians is an absolutely wonderful piece of light classical music. It's like a little anthology of Soviet mannerisms. Romeo and Juliet I don't like as much. The liner notes reveal that Kabalevsky was something of an informer and a backstabber during the Stalin era. More evidence that bad people can write good music.
White paper dust jacket inside colored cardboard sleeve? Most used records have them both facing the same direction so you can get the record in and out faster, which of course lets the dust in.
I've heard some of Kabalevsky's symphonies and other major concert music. If you haven't, you're not missing too much. He had a minor gift for lighter stuff, and "The Comedians" is indeed delightful (better even than most of Shostakovich's work in that vein), but Kab seems never to have matched it. I don't think I've heard the rest of Colas Breugnon, but the overture is played by itself enough to make one suspicious that the rest doesn't measure up. Of the class of exceedingly obscure larger works with exceedingly famous extracts, the one case I know where the larger work is definitely as good as the extract is the "Suite algerienne" by Saint- Saens, from which comes the "French Military March". The rest of the suite is good too, but it's remarkably hard to find.
A CD called "Silencio" featuring Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata
Baltica. Here is a review of it from a German web site which I ran
through the AltaVista Babel Fish translator, which is all this piece of
crap deserves. I agree with the deutschesreviewer entirely, aber the
Part as unlistenable as the rest of it I found.
Silencio
Gidon Kremer (violin), Tatjana Grindenko (violin), Eri Klas, Kremerata
Baltica
Nonesuch/Warner Classics 0 75597 95822 5
(68 min., taken up 9 & 11/99)
---------------
I must carry out for the Philip Glass apology instaendig geschmaehten
by me. Yes, I admit it, I him as the most boring all boring composer
had always regarded. When hearing "company" the piece mentioned on
these CD was also first confirmed mine for judgement irrefutably held:
the usual cloudy-intimate Einheitsgedudel for Streicher. Then however I
was instructed painfully, very painfully, a better one: by Vladimir
Martynow and its work "Come in!". Flauschig sweet harmonies to hit
terribly sentimental melodies, which refuse constantly, possibly a way -
in addition troestlich the Celesta rings in regular intervals. Film
scenes urge itself up: After had giving family puts Smith in the
Christamas Eve blessedly to the peace. And then the whole is repeated
also still painful siebenundzwanzig minutes long around other time.
According to introduction text this music represents the search
for heaven in own. The ticking wood block then probably symbolizes a
knocking on the sky gate. May with this Erbauungskitsch become blessed
who wants, I recommends him instead of Schaefchen count as a falling
asleep assistance.
One could check off these CD provided in the supplement with
artistically guaranteed terribly valuable black-and-white photos and
meaning meanings quotations from Kremer to Cage as typical product of
the Meditationswelle, would contain her not also of Arvo Paerts "Tabula
rasa". In these 1977 Paert a masterpiece completed Concerto grosso well-
behaved composition created, whose suggestive strength it later never
reached more. Certainly, also in the second sentence of "Tabula rasa"
nothing develops, but Paert succeeds it here with extremely economical
means to evoke a condition from absolute timelessness to hypnotisch,
asketisch, as it were entmaterialisiert. That is mile far distant for
fashionable music motivated religiously by the devotion float so many.
, here a fascinating bringing in of large mental clarity, which
can be considered from now on as reference, succeeds to the dedication
carriers and interpreters of the premiere, Gidon Kremer, Tatjana
Grindenko and the conductor Eri Klas. But I would have rather seen it
in better neighbourhood.
On a lighter note, I got a deal on a CPO label CD of Roland Kluttig conducting the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin in a performance of Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett. A chamber piece for 23 musicians, For Samuel Beckett is one of the last things Feldman wrote before his untimely death in 1987. The winds and strings play overlapping blocks of chords while the tuned percussion tinkle away arrhythmically and atonally. It is in the same genre as Coptic Light, but the sound is more solid, less ethereal. It occurred to me as I was listening to it that in a weird way it resembles some of the music of Alan Hovhaness, of all people. Not much, but it's there. But it's true, as one critic put it, that Feldman was "an unreconstructed modernist," so if you think Hovhaness is the cat's pajamas you'll probably find Feldman unlistenable.
Re the German review, anyone with that strong an antipathy to minimalism is useless at reviewing a CD of minimalist music, the same way someone who hates eggs would be useless at reviewing the quiche or omelet offerings at a restaurant. "Einheitsgedudel" is a wonderful epithet, much more colorful than its English translation (which would be roughly "mechanical doodlings"), but an essay on "why I hate minimalism," using a given CD as an example, says nothing about whether it's good as minimalism. My own reaction is that anything hated so much by someone who hated "Company" that much, has got to be good. "Company", which of all Glass's works is surely the one least susceptible to a charge of being too long for its musical content, is a delicate, poised and balanced work -- and, ironically, it's Glass's music for a play by Samuel Beckett. In your own voice, you note that Feldman's Beckett resembles Hovhaness a little, but you add that "if you think Hovhaness is the cat's pajamas you'll probably find Feldman unlistenable." Well, I'm very fond of Hovhaness, less so of Feldman, but I hardly find Feldman unlistenable; and I wonder if anyone who thinks Hovhaness is the antithesis of modernism has heard the aleatoric string crescendos that were a regular feature of his work in the 1960s. In the same weird way, they resemble something by Scelsi.
I used to love Hovhaness' music more than I do now, but I still like it a lot. It's been especially gratifying to see the Schwarz/Seattle series come out with all those pieces I never heard programmed or recorded. The first thing I ever heard of his was a concert performance of his Mysterious Mountain symphony back in the 1950s. It had a powerful effect on my young mind, partly because it proceeded from the same Renaissance polyphony as Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, which I was already smitten by. Talk about lush! But this wasn't the tedious chromaticism of Strauss or Mahler or the rest, it was as clean and bracing as the cold mountain water that ripples throught it in those celesta figures. (When Sibelius was composing his 6th Symphony, which starts with a limpid Palestrina-like passage, he said it would be "like a glass of cold spring water," as opposed to the "colored cocktails" being served up by Strauss at the time.)
Michael - yes, that's the distinction I was making in my recent post in the Bartok topic. I first came across Hovhaness in a purely abstract way. The development of my tastes in 20th-century music consisted of a running battle with the musical orthodoxy of the time, which was circa 1970. The composers being pushed in the books on modern music I read - the Impressionists, the Second Vienna school, the Darmstadt school - I mostly detested. And the modern composers I liked - Sibelius, Shostakovich, the Cheltenham school, the American "prairie" school - were mostly dismissed sneeringly in the books. I had noticed that being dismissed by the academics didn't keep the second group from prospering in the record catalogs. And I also noticed that the second group tended to write lots of symphonies, and the first group mostly didn't. So I took to discovering modern composers by scouring the Schwann catalog for symphonists; and that, O nobly born, is how I discovered Hovhaness, who had already written over 20 of them, had a long column in Schwann, and wasn't mentioned in the books on modern music -at all-. With a record like that, I knew his music -had- to be good, even before I ever listened to any of it.
(In subsequent years I found that this technique did not always work. For instance, there is Richard Nanes.)
I bought the "Silencio" CD when Harmony House had their massive clearance sale last fall, and have been quite pleased with it. I especially liked Tabula Rasa, and in fact it might be my favorite Part work [that I've heard]. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. I used to love Hovhaness's music a lot, but some of its charm faded on me after playing one of his compositions. When playing this piece (Lake Samish), instead of gaining a greater understanding and respect for the work (which is often the case when I play pieces, e.g. Beethoven 9, Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1), it started to mean less to me. I'm not sure why, but I think it was that some of the passages were just unnecessarily awkward, both technically and compositionally. Granted, this piece was unpublished and so perhaps is uncharicteristically unpolished (I had to speak to Mrs. Hinako Hovhaness to obtain the score and parts). It's still a beautiful piece to listen to, but it was a very different experience to perform it.
Even that short-tempered German reviewer seemed to like Tabula Rasa. Whatever is in there, I guess I'm just not hearing it. Hovhaness wore thin for me when I realized what a small bag of tricks he had. Same thing with William Schuman.
A dismaying number of composers have small bags of tricks. I've even found Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven to be predictable at times. The answer is not to spend too much time listening to any one composer. Also, if you're expecting a composer to surprise you, what do you do when you listen to a work for the second time? My pleasure in relistening to a work is not solely dependent on noticing new things about it I'd previously missed. A work can have nothing new to say to me at all, and yet still be enjoyable. As for Hovhaness, his bag may have been small, but he carried different things in it at different times. More than many lesser composers, his work of different decades can be distinguished fairly easily on blind listenings. Perhaps a sense that he had little to say may have come from too much listening to works of the 1980s and 90s, by which time he had indeed rather run short on things to say. But his earlier music retains a freshness.
I seldom get that feeling with Mozart, and never with Bach or Beethoven. The one indisputably great composer I am sometimes surprised to find myself getting impatient with is Bartok. "Yeah, yeah, Bela, we know. Same-old same-old." Merely inhabiting the same "sound world" or writing in an instantly recognizable style isn't enough, though. Anyone might want to hear something other than Beethoven after listening to a couple of symphonies, but that's not at all the same thing. There has to be a sense of a failure of inspiration, of the composer repeating the same tropes and gestures -- William Schuman's scurrying prestissimo passages, "blue note" dissonance, kettledrum solos and massive brass chords, or Bartok's ebullient modal folk-dances or umpteenth little descending minor third figure -- that helped make some earlier work memorable, only without the same indispensible creative spark, and it has to be repeated in lots of compositions, not just a few potboilers. How can you listen to the opening of the Mount St. Helens symphony and not realize that you're listening to the opening of Mysterious Mountain, only without the "spark from heaven"?
With a lot of these earlier composers, I can not only "smell" the cadence coming a mile away, I know exactly how they're going to get there. Mozart in particular engaged in some dreadful note-spinning in some of his lesser works. Be careful what you call "potboilers," lest you wind up defining it as "those works with predictable characteristics" and whisk the problem away by tautology.
Okay, I'll be careful. ;-)
Grabbed a buncha Naxoses over the weekend. John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. I've always liked Cage's prepared piano music. It's the classical counterpart of "novelty" music. Lots of fun, no deep thought required. I would say ignore the liner notes chatter about Zen, only "no deep thought required" *is* Zen. Arnold Bax, Symphony #6, "Into the Twilight" and "Summer Music." The 6th symphony is very dramatic, and the two tone poems are really lovely. Bax was a fine orchestrator, but I don't find his music awfully memorable. Sheila Silver, Piano Concerto (1996) and "Six preludes pour piano, d'apres poemes de Baudelaire" (1991). Silver, whom I'd never heard of, is an American composer born in 1946. The music on this disc is all very listenable. The Piano Concerto is a strange piece of music. Silver is apparently going for an eastern European "Jewish" sound in places, but it comes out sounding a little like Bartok, a little like Prokofiev, a little like Leonard Bernstein. There are also repeated figures that sound slightly minimalist. Over-all, I liked it very much. The six preludes are the stars of the CD, in my opinion. Highly recommended.
I don't find Bax very memorable either, and have never felt I really grasped his music. I couldn't tell you if I liked any of his symphonies better than the others, for instance. Thanks for the recommendation of Silver.
You have several choices: