Dear Matt:

I have been looking through my past assignments to you and I’ve discovered a flaw in my approach.

From the start of this project, each of us has been trying to guide the other into unfamiliar musical territory. As you’ve pointed out a couple of times, we’ve generally been providing fairly non-standard entry points. That’s to be expected given how nerdy we both are, and it’s part of what keeps this so interesting.

But as I scanned our oeuvre thus far, I couldn’t help but think that my assignments have been borderline perverse. Nobody has ever suggested Van Der Graaf Generator as a possible ‘in’ to prog — let alone Magma. And, even my assignments drawn from the pool of ‘standards in their genre’ — Red and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady come to mind — have tended to be the sort of music that’s become standard specifically because of how it plays against the conventions of its genre.

This all goes double for my approach to classical music, so far. Come to think of it, I haven’t assigned you anything that can even be called ‘classical’ without some heavy qualifications. (Bartok, maybe. But even that’s a stretch.) Perhaps I ought to defer a bit more to the broader public’s notions of ‘the essentials.’

Yes, I like the sound of that. You need a firm grounding in the basics, Matt. You need ‘core repertoire.’ You need something that is, for us classical concert hall types, utterly standard to the point of monotony.

You need Beethoven 9.

(You can tell a real classical type by whether they refer to symphonies by cardinal or ordinal numbers, i.e. ‘Beethoven’s Ninth’ vs. ‘Beethoven 9.’ Incidentally, that’s the same way you can tell an old-school Doctor Who nerd from a Nu-Who fan: ‘the Ninth Doctor’ vs. ‘Nine.’ In either case, both options are acceptable nomenclature.)

What shall I say about Beethoven 9? Well, I suppose the most important point to bring up is that there’s more to it than ‘Ode to Joy.’ That may seem obvious. But then, that melody is so synonymous with the phrase ‘Beethoven’s ninth symphony’ that it may indeed come as a surprise for some that the ‘Ode to Joy’ doesn’t even crop up until over 45 minutes into the piece.

And when it does, it’s one of the most gratifying moments in all of music.

To my ears, even the most familiar parts of Beethoven 9 don’t have the whiff of mould about them that, say, Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ does. Or Beethoven 5, even. I can’t begin to speculate as to why that is, or if it’s true for anybody except me. But for all of my bluster about how the classical repertory is strangling the modern concert hall and silencing living composers, I would never question the common wisdom that this symphony is one of the best things ever accomplished by a human.

A colleague of mine, who isn’t really that much of a classical music person, once opined that Beethoven 9 is the best piece of music ever written because anybody can listen to it and enjoy every part of it. It isn’t my personal favourite piece, nor even necessarily in my top ten. But I find it hard to disagree with my colleague’s assessment. In modern parlance, Beethoven 9 is chock full of hooks.

Okay, enough eulogizing. You need context. This is Beethoven’s final symphony. It is the only one that he wrote during what’s thought of as his late period, premiering a full decade after his eighth. It was the first symphony of note to use voices and text — the ‘Ode to Joy’ is a setting of a poem by Schiller. There’s no overstating what a massive deal that was. Wagner would later interpret this as Beethoven proclaiming that instrumental music had run its course, and he used that interpretation to justify his decision to only write operas (or Gesamtkunstwerken, if you insist).

A quick word about the recording I’ve chosen: it’s a classic performance from 1962, by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Herbert von Karajan. Karajan was an old Nazi (no, an actual Nazi — though his sincerity has been questioned) who led the Berliners with an iron fist and a contemptful scowl for over three decades. By the end of his career, he’d shaped the orchestra into a slick monolith that sounded the same in Debussy as in Wagner. But early on, he made some recordings that are still considered the gold standard. This is one. (And for what it’s worth, it has sold massively well, over the years.)

Beethoven and Karajan were both angry, serious and unpleasant men, but this music is none of those things. It is effervescent and powerful, and has no desire to alienate anybody but rather to reach everybody. I hope it reaches you.

— Matthew

Dear Matt,

I’m still reeling from my unexpected reaction to the Offspring. I’m assigning you orchestral music to rebuild my sense of self.

In your response to my Brooklyn Rider assignment, you thanked me for starting you out with a quartet, since it lacks the flash of a soloist or the bombast of an orchestra. And, while I may chafe at those characterizations of venerable art music genres, you’re clearly right on both counts. I mean, the first ensembles that we could recognize as orchestras developed in the only place where they feasibly could have gathered the forces: 17th-century Central European royal courts. It doesn’t get more bombastic than that.

But at the same time, thank god that art is like that sometimes. Occasionally, when you put a creative genius at the helm of truly massive forces, great things happen. I don’t want to live in a world without Ben-Hur, or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or BioShock Infinite or any of the other great decadent works that obviously had huge amounts of money poured into them. I think that the symphony orchestra is one of the best things that humans have ever invented. And, the fact that the logistics and finances of it dwarf those of a chamber group is part of the appeal.

To wit, here is the greatest contemporary argument for why orchestras are still a good idea: John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean.

Adams has been the composer of the moment since he won the Pulitzer for Become Ocean last year. He’s lived in interior Alaska since 1978, and all of his music is written as a response to that landscape. This is a guy who used real-time data taken from the position of the sun in the sky, the fullness of the moon, the presence of minor seismic events, and the strength of the Aurora Borealis to produce a computer-driven audio installation at the University of Alaska.

But, as conceptual as Adams’ music can get, it never veers into territory that makes it unappealing to listen to. It’s powerful, cerebral stuff — but never obscurantist. Adams cites some frightening figures as influences: the player piano innovator Conlon Nancarrow, stochastic musician Iannis Xenakis, and that arch-avantgardist John Cage.

But possibly his most important influence was Morton Feldman, who practiced a sort of alternative minimalism that focusses on creating spare, spacious music rather than the driving rhythms of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. For my money, his Rothko Chapel is one of the most gorgeous pieces of the 20th century. And Adams’ music sounds a lot more like Rothko Chapel than anything by Cage or Xenakis.

(Around this point, it’s traditional to explain that there are two well-known American post-minimalist composers named John Adams. John Luther Adams is not the guy who wrote the hit opera Nixon in China. That’s John Coolidge Adams. He got famous first, so he doesn’t need to use his middle name in his credits.)

Become Ocean is Adams’ reflection on the rising sea levels caused by climate change. As Adams put it himself, in one of the more succinct program notes you’re ever likely to read: ‘Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.’

Clearly, instrumental music is a strange medium by which to approach such specific themes. But, Adams isn’t being didactic in this piece. He’s doing what modern composers do best: expressing vague notions, sensations and anxieties by way of sound.

The work is a single, 42-minute composition (I know, I know, I know) for large orchestra. It is purely textural music — I believe that when I first discussed this album with you, I described it as ‘drone music for full orchestra.’ I basically stand by that. But as with the inventor of drone music, Richard Wagner (not trolling, listen to this), Adams employs a wealth of textural effects that intermingle to bring the music to crashing peaks and tense troughs — brought to life beautifully in this premiere recording by the Seattle Symphony and their brilliant musical director Ludovic Morlot.

Certainly, Adams would never deign to incorporate anything so vulgar as a melody. But I think that the side of your taste persona that’s into droney electronic music (a taste attribute that we share) will also appreciate this different sort of droney music — a drone made more vibrant for being played on acoustic instruments and orchestrated by a master. Feel free to zone out during this music. It’s approachable on a number of different levels of attention.

One of these days, I’ll assign you some proper core orchestra rep. But as much as I love Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Brahms, they’re not coextensive with what is erroneously called ‘classical music.’ John Luther Adams is, to me, just as central to that tradition. I hope you enjoy this.

— Matthew

P.S. This New Yorker profile of Adams by Alex Ross is one of my favourite pieces of music journalism. Just, as an aside.

Dear Matt,

Let’s have a change of pace. This week, you’ll be listening to something brand new.

Bryce Dessner is the guitarist from The National (the band, not the newscast), a group that I think you and I have about equal experience with — that is, not much. However, Dessner has been on my radar for a while in his other capacity as a composer. He’s written music for the Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can, and even the LA Phil. Nothing I’d heard of his really hit home — until this past May.

Music for Wood and Strings is a 35-minute composition for the New York percussion quartet Sō Percussion. Sō is a group with a similar spirit to our old friends Brooklyn Rider. They fall broadly under that nebulous umbrella of ‘art music’ — they’re a bunch of Yale grads — but they’ve got a sense of adventure and a penchant for working with composers on developing new repertoire. (I’m especially fond of their recording with Canadian composer Nicole Lizée.)

This collaboration with Dessner has the added dimension of being written for entirely new instruments. Dessner and the instrument maker Aaron Sanchez (from the DIY pop duo Buke and Gase) designed a contraption that they’ve creatively named the ‘chord stick.’ It’s kind of like an amplified hammered dulcimer that you’re meant to approach much more as a percussionist would than a guitarist. Sō strikes their four chord sticks with everything from drum brushes to the pink erasers at the ends of lead pencils.

I’m not going to say a whole lot more, because I’m still processing this music myself. I have to say, though: a few listens in, I’m totally sold. This is the best new music I’ve heard all year. You’ll recognize a distinct influence from minimalism, but composers of Dessner’s relatively recent vintage tend to use the innovations of people like Steve Reich and Michael Nyman as one ingredient in a more complex stew.

I think you’re going to like this. I’ve already recommended it to a few people, and I’ve only had positive responses. I wonder how your first impression will compare to mine?

— Matthew

Dear Matt:

Let’s not bury the lead, here: this week, you’ll be listening to neo-classical minimalism played on accordions.

Alright. Now, let’s take a few steps back. Michael Nyman is an English composer whose career took off in the 70s. I think of him as England’s response to Philip Glass. Both are generally classified as composers of ‘minimalist music,’ though Glass disdains the term. Nyman is thought to have coined it.

Minimalist music, to oversimplify ludicrously, uses small amounts of musical material animated by obvious patterns. It can yield strikingly varied musical results, depending on the bag of tricks possessed by a given composer. Steve Reich does minimalism by way of phasing. Glass does it (in spite of himself) by way of additive and subtractive processes. Nyman tends to do it by swiping bass lines and chord progressions from the likes of Purcell and Mozart and just repeating them over and over again with textural variations. The source material makes it feel more ‘classical’ than any of the other minimalists, but it still has the same directness and drive.

Nyman writes a lot of music for his own band, which has a really distinctive sound that informs the way he composes. A big part of that sound is that they do not play in tune, to such an extent that I can only assume it’s deliberate. Their terrible intonation gives the impression of a troupe of Saturday morning cartoon characters having found themselves in a Victorian novel and trying to act naturally. It’s fascinatingly grotesque.

The esoteric little album I’ve chosen for you this week does not feature the Michael Nyman Band, but I feel that you should know what they sound like, just for context. So, I’m appending a 12-minute prelude to your assignment proper. (After last week’s tripartite Amon Tobin marathon, I feel no guilt whatsoever.) That prelude is the tremendous funeral march, Memorial.

Like most of what you’ll be listening to this week, Memorial appeared in a film by Peter Greenaway, a director that Nyman collaborated with on 11 films. Greenaway’s directorial sensibility is so painterly that in the movie Memorial appears in — The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover — he had his actors wear different costumes in different rooms so that they’d fit the colour scheme. His movies represent a perfect blend of the very modern and the very Baroque, making Nyman the perfect musical counterpart.

(Apparently, Greenaway is at least partially responsible for Nyman’s constant Baroque references. He often requested that Nyman reference very specific pieces by composers like Heinrich Biber.)

Now. On to Acoustic Accordions. The Motion Trio are three Polish accordion players who you’re more likely to find playing Penderecki than polka. This album finds Motion playing Nyman’s music with the composer himself plunking along on the piano (with occasional interjections from Nigel Barr on trombone and euphonium). It mostly consists of music that was originally written for the Nyman Band and featured in Greenaway’s movies.

There are two notable exceptions: Nyman takes a solo piano turn on “The Heart Asks Pleasure First,” which is from the movie The Piano (very much not directed by Greenaway) and is probably his most famous melody. And, the album’s final track, “Silence,” actually has nothing to do with Nyman at all, except in an anxiety-of-influence sort of way. It was written by the Motion Trio’s own Janusz Wojtarowicz, an accomplished composer in his own right. Wojtarowicz is also responsible for the arrangements on this album.

I have lots to say about this music. I could get really analytical. But, it strikes me that this album, obscure as it is, comes completely unencumbered by cultural baggage. So, let’s run with that. I’ve given you the context; I’ll let you supply the opinions.

As always, I do hope you like it.

— Matthew

Dear Matt:

Let’s pick up where we left off before last week’s concert excursion. You had me listen to some loud, crazy punk rock because the time had come for me to confront my fears and doubts. Now, likewise, that time has come for you.

This week, you’ll be listening to classical music. (Well, nominally “classical,” anyway. Someday I’ll bore you with a lengthy diatribe about why that label is stupid, but I’ll spare you for now.) And, just as you offered me a deeply unconventional way into punk, I’m going to be shooting you far off into the outer limits of classical — where the canon fears to tread. Well, kind of.

Your assignment is to listen to A Walking Fire, the 2013 release from the string quartet Brooklyn Rider.

You may be shocked, once you’ve listened to this album, by the notion that some classical music listeners would find it difficult. But you’ve got to understand the fundamental difference between the classical side of the music industry and the rest of it: most major classical releases contain no new music. Instead, they feature new interpretations of old (sometimes very old) music that has been recorded before (sometimes hundreds of times).

So, an album like this, where two of the three works presented are premiere recordings by living composers with unfamiliar names, is not entirely conventional. I, for one, wish that it was. Because, recordings like A Walking Fire are way easier to recommend to adventurous non-classical-fans such as yourself than, say, a recording of Mozart’s 40th symphony.

So, what exactly is on this?

The first piece, Culai, is by a Russian-American composer named Ljova, who isn’t enormously well known, in spite of having written for Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet. The last piece, Three Miniatures for String Quartet, is by one of Brooklyn Rider’s violinists, Colin Jacobsen. Both of these were written specifically for Brooklyn Rider, and that’s kind of the point of them: they’re custom-made vehicles for the explosive sound of this quartet, which is unlike any other in the world.

The work that’s sandwiched in between them is different in that it’s 100 years old: Béla Bartók’s second string quartet. Ask any string player who the top three quartet composers ever were, and you’ll probably get some permutation of Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók. Mozart and Schubert might enter the conversation soon after. Of those five, Bartók is the most recent by nearly a century.

Part of why I’m giving you this album is because I’m interested in how you’ll react to the Bartók in relation to the newer music. This album demonstrates two different models of classical music: the “futureproof masterpieces” model in the Bartók, and the “music for now” model in the other pieces.

My feeling is always that music need not stand the test of time before it can be dubbed “good.” It’s remarkable how uncommon that opinion is in classical circles, but I suspect I don’t need to justify it to you.

Anyway, the point is: classical music has lots to offer aside from the earnest pursuit of everlasting beauty. It can also be just casually awesome. That’s the kind of classical music that I’m most attracted to these days, and there is plenty of it on A Walking Fire.

I think you’ll find something to like in this. If not, no worries. I’ve got plenty of other potential classical gateway drugs lined up.

— Matthew