Confused by modern classics? Ian MacDonald plots a path through the discord and finds light at the end of the atonal. (From The Face, date unknown).

[Many thanks to Samuel Holloman (NMSU) for bringing this article to my attention.]

"Aimez-vous Schönberg?"

(The bluffers guide to 20th century art music)

ATONALITY Music without recognisable key. As "serialism", composing-method which defeats normal laws of musical perspective by giving all twelve notes of scale equal value (brain-child of Schönberg, not noted for his sense of humour). System inscrutable to non-musicians, being chiefly of value to academics who, by using it, can pose as composers on Radio 3.

SAMUEL BARBER Minor American, mainly known for angst-wracked Adagio, much favoured by film directors (eg The Elephant Man, Platoon). Only other masterpiece, tormented Piano Sonata,definitively waxed in screaming mono by Horowitz in 1951.

BELA BARTOK Hypersensitive Hungarian creator of twitchily neurotic nightmusic. Pain in the arse as person, his excruciatingly acute hearing (eg Fifth Quartet, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) driving him slightly barmy. Once big name, now chic to dismiss him with pitying wince while venturing weary tolerance for early Expressionist opera Bluebeard's Castle.

ARNOLD BAX Anglo-Irish Late Romantic in temporary vogue. Travelogue-rhapsodic effusions shaken with Celtic self-pity appeal most readily to the solitary inchriate.

ALBAN BERG Incredibly okay Austrian atonalist, depth-plumbing composer of harrowing operaWozzeck, harrowing Violin Concerto, etc. Weirdly combines Mahlerian emotional intensity with symmetrical obsessions, as in lurid late operaLulu (sexual jealousy embalmed in serial cryptograms). Hip to deny being bored by his Chamber Concerto.

LUCIANO BERIO Once fashionable Italian experimentalist, keen on collage, parody, chance, Post-music music. Claiming to be "amused" by his Sinfoniawill suffice in non-specialist circles.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN One-hit (West Side Story) perpetrator of some of 20th century's trendiest scores. Talent long since lost without a trace in bear-hug embrace of epic self-love. Currently devotes time to jet-set career as conductor, competing with Herbert Von Karajan to record slowest-ever versions of Beethoven/Mahler adagios.

HARRISON BIRTWISTLE Flavour of the season English avant-gardeist, demi-deified in intellectual circles, unknown to general audience. Humourless cross between Edgar Varèse and Havergal Brian - all rearing brass and brute atavism. Relatively gentle aspect recently revealed in operaYan Tan Tetbera, concerning sheep.

PIERRE BOULEZ Genial gallic modernist. Composes immaculately gnomic scores with fastidious slowness, earning rent by parallel career as conductor. Also director of Paris experimental centre IRCAM, in which world's most expensive sound-equipment is hired out to passing pseuds for pointless research programmes and solemn exercises in cerebral self-abuse.

HAVERGAL BRIAN Eccentric working-class composer rejected by English establishment. Wrote 32 suymphonies, 21 of them after his 80th birthday. Powerful lyric-tragic gift disrupted by involuntary puotations from other composers. Expect forthcoming premiere recordings of Third and Seventh Symphoniesto provoke hasty "reassessments" of his status.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN Internationally best established English composer since Elgar. Spontaneous, evocative, roaming restlessly between light and darkness in search of lost innocence. Often sneered at for facility by German types who believe compositional labour should show in completed score. Wrote last masterpiece of European tonal music (War Requiem, 1962). Best shot usually said to be operaPeter Grimes - though hipper to prefer Death in Venice or The Turn of the Screw(and hippest of all,Billy Budd).

FERRUCCIO BUSONI Obscure early 20th century pianist-composer currently hovering on verge of revival. Haunted twilight atmosphere permeates idiosyncratic piano oeuvre (e.g. Elegian), but main claim to fame is bizarrely original opera Doktor Faust, recently premiered in UK. Key figure in Neo-Romantic pantheon.

JOHN CAGE Plausible old charlatan, enthusiastically into randomness, entropy, and silence. Early pioneer of electronic music. If he didn't exist...

ELLIOTT CARTER American highbrow, composer of "densely-argued" atonal thickets of notes much admired by musicologists with similarly complicated mental processes. Chic name to drop in college-educated US rock circles.

CONDUCTORS Hip: Beacham, Cantelli, Furtwangler, Mangelberg, Mravinsky, Kempe, the Kleibers. Unhip: Ansermet, Barbirolli, Bohm, Karajan, Previn, Sinopoli, Solti. Up/downwardly mobile: Celibidache, Klemperer, Stokowski, Toscanini, Walter.

AARON COPLAND American middlebrow, chiefly responsible for coining cinematic sound-track clichés for Westerns through ballets like Rodeo and Appalachian Spring.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY Archetypal Impressionist, evoking resonantly blurred images from arrested chords, modal scales, pointilliste orchestration. Vast influence on modern music. So sophisticated and tasteful as to be beyond criticism in the era of style.

FREDERICK DELIUS The English Debussy, more earthy than transcendent, not as quick-witted or condensed. Famously irascible subject of Ken Russell's finest TVdocumentary. Extremely unhip.

SERGE DIAGHILEVBrilliant Russian impresario, director of Ballets Russes (Nijinsky, Karsavina, Pavlova, etc), commissioning masterpieces from Stravinsky (The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces), Ravel (Daphnis et Chloë), Satie (Parade), and Debussy (Jeux). Modern music's most influential non-musician.

HANNS EISLER German Schönberg-disciple and Brecht-collaborator, beginning to ride tail of current Weill success-wave. Tart satire of film-score suites likeliest to grab broad audience. Serious Communist, wrote East German national anthem.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC Synthetic-sound idiom, pioneered by Cage during WW2 and reaching early apogee in the Fifties with Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglingeand Varèse's Poème electronique.Fundamentally arid and inhuman, more a branch of modern architecture than contemporary music (thus often heard at design expos).

GEORGE GERSHWIN"Jazz-age" American lightweight. Classy songwriter, overrated by slumming uptown musicologists because managed to sompose opera (Porgy and Bess).

PAUL HINDEMITH Boring German pedagogue. Once solid reputation long since evaporated. Obscurity-points for pretending to enjoy opera Mathis der Maler.

GUSTAV HOLSTSchoolmaster-composer. Single popular success (The Planets) direct and ingeniously original, assimilating jazz-rhythms before Stravinsky and Gershwin. Unhip name, not to be flourished.

ARTHUR HONEGGER Clever Futurist image of hurtling steam-engine, Pacific 231, was this Swiss's early claim-to-fame. Later reacted with horror against modernity in grimThird Symphony. Bittersweet humour and lyricism of Cello Concerto probably representative of his true feelings.

CHARLES IVES Only real American musical genius. Unique emotional intensity and imagination (Decoration Day, Thoreau, Harvest Home Chorales, 2nd Orchestral Set) routinely overlooked in rush to admire technical innovations or deride chaotic brashness. Currently unfashionable, but to hell with fashion, right?

LEOS JANACEK Major Czech, music's most elemental spirit. Sinfonietta okay,Glagolitic Massvery okay, quartet Intimate Letters extremely okay. However, mainly celebrated these days for stage-works like The Makropulos Affair (pace Stravinsky, who called one Janácek opera "the thinnest, longest, and least succulent noodle I have ever tried to swallow.)

CONSTANT LAMBERTEnglish raconteur and jazz-buff, now forgotten but for his Wildean Music Ho!, world's wittiest book of music-criticism.

GYÖRGY LIGETIChic Hungarian, rocketed to fame after inclusion in 2001soundtrack. Went for scandal with '78 surrealist opera Le Grand Macabre.Currently flirting with Minimalism. A cedrtain silliness wafting about here. (Pronounced Liggerty.)

WITOLD LUTOSLAWSKI Adaptable Pole, stretching from tradition to atonality. Much-admired in current absence of genuine genuises (Messiaen excepted). Known to music college in-crowd as Luto, should you wish to include him in your culture-banter.

GUSTAV MAHLER Austrian Jewish visionary, key-figure in transition from Romantic to Modernist sensibility and heavy influence on (eg) Britten and Shostakovich. Long neglected - now conductors flock to record his enormous symphonies.

BOHUSLAV MARTINU Czech doyen of chattering neo-classicism. Too often baroque-bland, but scored heavily with furious, stricken Double Concerto, written in 1936 with Nazis about to invade his homeland. Cool to indicate taste for his Polkas.

PETER MAXWELL DAVIESComplicated English modernist into everthing from Catholic medievalism to foxtrot and happenings. Like Penderecki, recently started writing big, muddy, monotonous symphonies. Lives in Orkney. Known as Max. Newly knighted. No popular hits.

OLIVER MESSIAENGreatest living composer. Another Catholic medievalist, also fascinated by birdsong, ragas, colour-coding. Bee's-knees on college circuit, where less-inspired later stuff (eg Des canyons aux étoiles) preferred to early master-works likeLa Nativité de Seigneur, Harawi, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus. HisTurangalila-symphonie, vast (occasionally interminable) rhythm freak-out, now permanent fixture in international repertoire. (Stravinsky's verdict: "I could write like that if I had enough ink.")

DARIUS MILHAUDPeripatetic French sporter of every style-beret in the 20th century bag. Garrulously prolific, comprehensively unlistened to.

MINIMALISM Glass, Reich, Riley. Organised underachievement, faithfully (not to say doggedly) reflecting this age of short-term low-expectation. To be casually overheard whilst chewing macrobiotic food or skimming Christopher Lasch.

NEO-CLASSICISM Music's first post-Modernist initiative, warding off Late Romantic pomp and Great War stupidity with arch reserve and "time-traveling" style-games. All the rage in Twenties and Thirties; died of anæmia in early Fifties with Stravinsky's dessicated Rake's Progress.

NEO-ROMANTICISM Recent post-Modernist tendency provoked by revived interest in Mahler and Richard Strauss, late recognition of Zemlinsky, Busoni, Schmitt, Szymanowski, Medtner, etc. Lack of pertinence to contemporary culture leads to much aimless chromatic thrashing around, invariably terminated by portentous "dying fall" conlusions. English components include Nicholas Maw, Robin Holloway, Colin Matthews.

CARL NIELSEN Danish positivist. Scraped off early Brahmsian varnish to reveal a genuine original - energetic, uncluttered, occasionally simplistic.

CARL ORFF Hitler's proto-minimalist Master of Music. Scored solitary hit with paean to Goliardic greed, sentimentality and fatalism Carmina Burana, now ubiquitous in TV commercials.

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI Modish Polish modernist, briefly celebrated in Swinging Sixties for gimmicky St. Luke Passion. Acceptable face of avant-garde and recent convert to Neo-Romanticism.

FRANCIS POULENCGentle, derivative (from Stravinsky) French second-division mid-fielder, hung up on nuns.

SERGE PROKOVIEV 19th century Romantic tensed with 20th century steel. Early stuff sought scandal in outrage and ultraviolence. In Stalin's Russia, straightened up and penned some of century's most gorgeous music (eg score for the Holshoi's Romeo and Juliet). Greatest melodist since Tchaikovsky, more accessible than solleague Shostakovich (though not as deep, except for dark stuff like Sixth Symphony).

MAURICE RAVEL Dapper French exquisite with anarchic streak, Bolero and La Valstsatirising mindlessness of modern collectivism. Literary soulmate; Colette (their collaboration L'enfant et les sortilèges currently very hip). Stylist par excellence. (Satie: "M. Ravel has refused the Legion of Honour but all his music accepts it.")

ERIK SATIE French ultra-individualist, by turns mystical, satirical, inscrutable. Wrote mostly for piano, using Dadaist titles (eg Three pieces in the shape of a pear). Usually misunderstood by straight critics, who rarely recover from initial mistake of imagining themselves smarter than he is.

ARNOLD SCHÖNBERGBig cheeese of musical modernism, enjoys vast reputation without actually being listened to much by anyone. Began as ultra-intense Late Romantic (eg Verklärte Nacht), caught severe attack of Expressionitis, and ended up inventing his own musical system (Atonalism). Revered by friends and pupils for rigorous integrity. Described by Constant Lambert as "the most pedantic of modern composers". Good at tennis.

ALEXANDER SCRIABINMore than slightly crazed Russian decadent, composer of mesmeric flowers-of-evil piano pieces and grandiose orchestral experiments in synaesthesia (eg Poem of Ecstasy). His motto: "From lethargy to dematerialism." Anthony Hopkins is a fan.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH Intensely complex musical chronicler of secret life of Soviet Russia. Grim, ironic, haunting, essential.

JEAN SIBELIUS Once great white hope of the anti-Schönbergians, this purveyor of "cold spring water" to the cocktail-fuddled palate of the declining West has fallen out of critical favour since c.1950. A fondness for his Fourth Symphony is permissible in café society. On no account mentionFinlandia.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSENBarnum of modernism, drawing unusually large and attentive audiences to electronic/chance music through personal charisma and showmanship. Audio-collage epicHymnen a hit with esoteric hippies in late Sixties (see Beatles'Revolution Number 9). Since 1977 has been writing world's longest opera, Licht, designed to take a week to listen to. Le Corbusier of music, about equally revered and reviled. (Asked if he'd heard any Stockhausen, Sir Thomas Beecham replied, "No, but I trod in some once.")

IGOR STRAVINSKYPicasso of modern music - six-decade carrers covers waterfront of 20th century styles. "Russian" period (Impressionism meets folk-nationalism under a Cubist moon) produced the four great Diaghilev ballets, including seminal riot-instigatorRite of Spring, wigging out 1913 Paris with ferocious cross-rhythms and stone-age savagery. Subsequently turned to Neoclassicism, paralleling Picasso's Greek line-drawings (eg Apollo, Orpheus) and Guernica (Symphony In Three Movements). Confused audience in old age by going atonal. Master of musical disguise and deadpan wit, dominates the modern scene.

KAROL SZYMANOWSKIPoland's late follow-up to Chopin. Never clicked (nor likely to) with side audience. Neo-Romantics commend exotic Third Symphony (akaSong Of The Night). If remembered at all, will be for unearthly fervour of Stabat Mater.

MICHAEL TIPPETT Like Britten, gay and pacifist. Supremely conscientious, has done porridge for his beliefs. Early natural lyricism (eg Double Concerto, Corelli Fantasia, The Midsummer Marriage), later complicated by fussy intellect (eg The Knot Garden). Eccentric self-penned texts express sympathy for the underdog (Jews, Blacks, women), ensuring large following amongst young. Evergreen, has recently expressed penchant for early Police singles. Big in the States.

EDGARD VARÉSECurrently name much-dropped by cerebro-rockers. What we have here is art-of-noise incarnate - a composer who Likes Shouting At People. Whether intentionally or not, his percussion-fest Ionisationa scream. Along with Stravinsky, weighty influence on Frank Zappa.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMSQuintessential English pastoralist, about as unhip as you can get. Wrote history's greatest film-score for Scott of the Antarctic (akaSinfonia Antartica). Bluffers must know surprisingly violent Fourthand Sixth symphonies. If you like (eg) The Lark Ascending, keep it to yourself.

WILLIAM WALTON Fuelled by tightly-bottled anger, Walton's explosive talent went off the boil once he was happily married and away from the English class-system in Ischia. Basically, Elgar-meets-Prokofiev. Very unfashionable.

ANTON WEBERN Austrian serial pointilliste, composing tiny, quivering pieces with fewest notes possible. Neurotic acme of micro-infinitesimal sensitivity. Accidentally shot by nervous GI in last weeks of WW2. Totally ignored during lifetime. In Fifties, becamethe buzz-name in modernism, influencing Stravinsky, Messiaen, Stockhaused, Boulez. Sent up by Gerard Hoffnung inPunkt-Kontrapunkt.

KURT WEILL Impossible to be more à la mode at the moment. At best, inimitably mordant; at worst, a poor self-imitator. Currently ocerrated (but for brilliant Second Symphony).

YANNIS XENAKIS Greek architect-composer. Uses probability theory and graph-paper to write his pieces. Designed Philips Pavilion at Brussels Exhibition in 1958, deriving score Metastasis from same blueprint. (Stravinsky: "I admire the economy. I look forward to the days when Mr. Xenakis's successors are writing music that can at the same time compute taxes and regulate urban renewal.")

ALEXANDER ZEMLINSKYHung-out with Mahler and Schönberg in pre-1914 Vienna, but got no points for it. Chameleon oeuvre currently being rediscovered, 1922 opera The Dwarf causing European sensation in 1985. Other belatedly-saluted masterpieces include Lyric Symphony and Fourth Quartet. De rigeurto be "fascinated" by him.

ZERO ZUGZWANG There is, apparently, no such composer.

back to humor

back to A Joyful Noise (paper music homepage)