Basic Listening

I’m often taken aback by how little of the standard repertory your typical music student knows, so I decided to throw caution to the winds and write up a guide to basic musical literature, a list of the pieces every musically-literature person should recognize. One wouldn’t think this would be such a courageous act — why on earth would I need to, as I say, throw caution to the winds — but actually I’ve gone seriously ballsy. I assembled this list all alone, without asking anybody’s advice, without requesting input or feedback, without consulting any colleagues, without forming a committee or a task group. The mere thought of collectivity gave me mental hives: all those hands stirring the soup, all those agendas (conscious or not) coloring opinions, endless axes to grind, unceasing discussion and debate and discourse spiralling down and down and down and down and down.

After all due consideration, I concluded screw that and got to work. My own biases are more than plenty for me to deal with, after all.

Biases — sometimes masquerading as ‘enthusiasms’ — are the bane of creating something like this. Obviously nobody can come up with an absolutely perfect, not-an-argument-in-the-bunch guide to the most basic compositions. I was acutely aware that I have my own likes and dislikes, and those are bound to be reflected in whatever list I make. But I challenged my biases by asking myself the same question in regards to every candidate: is this really something your basic educated concert-goer is likely to know? Or is it just there because I THINK it should be there? Such a mental test couldn’t weed out every inappropriate piece, but it sure made quick hash out of, say, including the Shostakovich Eighth just because I’m obsessed with it at the moment.

I divided my guide into categories: Symphonies, Concertos, Other Orchestral, Solo Instrument (or with accompaniment), Chamber, Vocal (excluding choral), and Choral.

I’ve already given a copy of the list to my students. The next step in the project is to write short introductions to the pieces and perhaps the composers as well.

What’s emerging is a Music Appreciation guide, but one with a twist. Most Mus-Apprish books select individual compositions as representative of a composer’s output, and include full-length works only rarely. But this guide is complete works only, lots of them, and the pieces are selected by virtue of familiarity, and not because they illustrate some aspect of an era or a composer. Nor do I give a rat’s ass about including stuff from all eras. Furthermore, I’m aiming the thing squarely at folks who know a hawk from a handsaw, musically speaking.

One of my students remarked that my guide contained very few 20th century compositions. That’s precisely the mindset I was trying to avoid — shouldn’t there be plenty of modern works? No: I’m not recommending pieces that *I* think people should know. I’m listing the big-ticket items, those works that are so elemental to Western music that a lot of experienced musicians and concert-goers might actually overlook them. For that very same reason there is nothing earlier than Bach. The bulk of it hovers about the Viennese Classical and Romantic eras. But that’s where so much of the oh-so-standard repertory resides: it’s Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Chopin, et al.

Certain genres gave me more trouble than others. Chamber music was particularly dicey, considering that your basic concert-going person doesn’t really know much chamber music, when you get right down to it. I recognized a bias at work (there goddamn well SHOULD be some chamber music), allowed it, and included some archetypal or ‘representative’ pieces — a Beethoven quartet to represent the whole, selected works by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms.

The same problem cropped up with instrumental music: what are the, say, keyboard pieces that most ‘educated’ people are likely to recognize? That meant the first Bach prelude & fugue from the WTC, a few of the two-part inventions, the prelude to the E Major violin partita, the Allemande from the first cello suite, the organ Toccata & Fugue in D Minor. The “big name” Beethoven piano sonatas (Pathétique, Moonlight, Appassionata), the mainline chestnut Chopins (E-flat nocturne, Fantasie-Impromptu, first Ballade), and the like. I’m not at all sure that including the Franck violin sonata was a good idea, nor the Brahms Rhapsodies Op. 79; they might be a bit more esoteric than necessary.

And so it went, and so it goes. You can see how assembling this list collectively would engender incessant, unceasing, crippling debate.

For your reading pleasure and contemplation, I offer my basic listening list here as a PDF. Feel free to offer feedback if you like — but, of course, I won’t pay attention to a word of it.

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