My musical interests are broad and eclectic. I’m happy with Renaissance composers, Baroque masters, Classical, Romantic, 20th century folken. I have stuffed a lot of music into my noodle over the decades. But I’m neither indiscriminate nor happy-go-lucky inclusivist in my enthusiasms. I have little to no patience for music written to agendas (as is the case with the bulk of serialist music) nor do I have much truck with flimsy stuff meant for quick entertainment—i.e., most early-Romantic concertos, bel canto operas, or hardcore nationalistic jobs along the lines of Frederika’s Magic Dirndl.
Without question I’m a traditionalist; my heroes are Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Debussy. I have a long-standing fascination with Stravinsky, Britten, Shostakovich, Handel, Vivaldi, etc., etc. My tent is big. My passions are intense.
But there are some composers whose music simply does not engage me, or at least the bulk of it does not. I’m going to limit myself here to those composers who are not part of some lock-jawed movement; hence, I will not be taking a cudgel to the usual serialist villains. As far as I’m concerned those guys cerebralized and agitpropped their way out of any proper consideration as composers. Nor do I intend to pick on the mediocrities who have wandered into my auditory radar. No. My targets are real composers who were writing real music and who have their place in the mainstream, but whose work I just don’t get. I’ll make a few stabs at understanding why, but in all likelihood there is no why. Like attraction, like love, like food vendettas, it just is.
Albert Roussel
Roussel was a B-list composer at best, but he has his well-heeled and well-trained enthusiasts, including master conductor Jean Martinon. I’ve tried, really I have. I gave some hard attention to the symphonies and ballet scores. Can’t remember a note of any of them. Recently I picked up the Martinon/Chicago Symphony recording of the Bacchus and Ariadne Suite No. 2, probably Roussel’s most popular piece.
Despite a spectacularly fine performance, recorded to a T by RCA Red Seal, it leaves little impression save an overall sense of needless complication overlaying colorless banality. My problem with Roussel is that he’s neither fish nor fowl; somewhat modern, somewhat Debussy-ish, somewhat Romantic. But nothing ever snaps into focus. To my mind he belongs on the same shelf as those mostly obscure chaps who cranked out quasi-Debussy/echt-Les-Six “concours” pieces for the yearly juries at the Paris Conservatory. Come to think of it, Roussel was one of those chaps.
Franz Liszt
I may be a pianist—well, sort of—but I just don’t get Liszt. I find his concertos ridiculously fustian and overbearing, the tone poems unfocused and boring, the religious music glumly uninspiring. I’ve never cared for any of the piano music, especially not those gut-buster jobs that so many pianists seem to yearn for with a lust that I find frankly inexplicable. What, on earth, is even remotely attractive about the Spanish Rhapsody? Do these same pianists enjoy watching Andrew Dice Clay videos? Do they think it’s funny when old ladies fall down? Do they swoon in ecstasy over Wayne Newton? Crass is as crass does.
My ennui in regards to Liszt was an early indicator that I wasn’t temperamentally cut out to be a full-time virtuoso pianist. Even after all these years, I go flat fast around Liszt’s music. I have never performed a note of Liszt in public. I have presented exactly one piece of his, and that was his woefully lackluster Hamlet as part of a session on tone poems based on Shakespeare. To say that the Liszt Hamlet compared poorly with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is the understatement of the year.
Frank Martin
On those vanishingly few occasions that I willingly listen to a Frank Martin piece, I have the same reaction as I do to your typical resentment-soaked Berkeley store clerk: hey there sonny, is that blasé indifference of yours real, or merely a defensive mechanism? Is there a living, breathing human in there somewhere?
Martin seems to attract more than his share of pompous twits—you have been warned—so God help you if you don’t give his last name the proper Frenchified pronunciation. Mahr-TAN, never MAR-tin. I don’t know if plain old Frank is OK, or if you should go for broke and christen him Frahnque.
Not a composer to warm up to. Chilly isn’t the half of it. Frigid is more like it. Everything coiffed and arranged. Not a note out of place. Nary a lip left uncurled. Frostily elegant, punctilious, supercilious.
If I’m listening to a Martin piece while home alone, I like to fart as loudly as possible, or if the plumbing won’t cooperate, then see if I can conjure up a nice loud belch at least. Balance.
Edgard Varèse
I won’t go on very long about this guy. I don’t like ugly music. And, nom d’un chien, did he write ugly music!
His music may not really belong on this list. It’s not that I don’t get it. I just don’t like it. I really, really don’t like it.
Frédéric Chopin
The Grand Finale is also a Big Surprise—yes, that Frédéric Chopin. A super-duper A-plus composer winds up on my “meh” list. Chopin just doesn’t float my boat. Hoist Chopin up my flagpole, I don’t salute. I don’t find any of his music actively repellent or anything like that, but he just doesn’t fluff out my sails. (Oh, all right. I’ll ix-nay with the orny-cay etaphors-may.) I haven’t played a Chopin piece in, oh, twenty years. I never listen to Chopin when I’m at home. A lot of that has to do with my overall aversion to solo piano music: I just don’t like it. (There’s another little tip-off that a life as a full-time piano virtuoso wasn’t in the cards.)
I don’t really know why. But there it is. Chopin’s writing does not reach me at any personal level. It passes through without making much of an impression, neither good nor bad, sort of like steamed tofu or your typical episode of Antiques Roadshow.