Thanks very much for the recommendation all unknown to me...

I will look for some...

For your friend albums i keep no more cd nor any vinyls...

 Me deepest thaqnks for interesting suggestions....

 

 

@mahgister I get weepy watching Bogart in In A Lonely Place which stars Bruckner's symphony no.5, 4th movement.  Most Bruckner symphonies have great meaning to me as well.  

I have an acquaintance who is 84 and in feeble condition who needs to dispose of his about 800 to 1000 renaissance choral LPs. I am not an aficionado and if you are interested in an excellent collection at low cost, I can provide you with his contact information.  

For some brilliant religious Jewish choral music composed by a jazz/classical pianist in both lyrical and dramatic vein, this link Aminadav Aloni provides some free and great music.  He was like Beethoven of modern choral Jewish music whereby he used traditional/required thematic lyrics and music structures but developed them in a modern harmonic and rhythmic structure, incorporating jazz, pop and other modern forms. Search – HMSI  The S'Fatai Tiftach 13 choral works begin shrouded in mystery and extend to heartfelt and heartrending beauty.  Always with a hummable melody.

There are other live/current Jewish music composers who compose in grandiose schemes such as Meir Finkelstein (you apparently know Lucas Richman) and all jazz themes (jazz pianist and arranger) Chris Harden and all genres, Michael Issacson.  

The problem with me is that music i loved i listen to it too often... Bach and Schutz and Monteverdi reach thousand of listening sessions each one during my long life... Jazz help me to break the spell...And falling in love with Bruckner, and scriabin helped me too ...

The music i like a lot, i listened to it more sparsely, but this music exceed vastly in numbers the music i love too much for sure than i could listen thanks to Persian and Indian music and Jazz other pieces than Bach or 15 and 16 centuries songs and choral music ...

In more popular music songs called pop, words and poetry matter very much at least if not much than music...

I like too much choral music to be immersed when young in pop music as were my friends...I prefered Dylan, Cohen and the french poet Leo Ferre to most because of poetry in these times ...

My first heard piece of music was small choral folks eighteen century french and anglo saxon songs picked at radio program each noon before even i can read... Choral music for me was beating everything else when young ...Obrecht and Josquin Des Prez put me in ectasy...All french flamish school in particular...

But i was excluded very young from the church choral because i cannot sang right; music is more a heart vibration some beat i felt or a a dancing geometry i look at more than a melody in time for me.... i guess that in choral works the beat as in Schutz Geistliche chor music, my favorite piece with the 8th book of madrigals by Monteverdi and all Bach choral music or the flowing geometry of the crowding voices in space were my obsession.

I imagine that my taste and journey and obsessions in music were caused by this handicap in music and my performance limitations.

I was fascinated and interested in acoustics more than in buying gear because of this habit of seeing music in space more than hearing it flowing in time ...Then i learned how to make any music stand up in space with headphones or speakers...

Bach beat all composers in geometric perfection, probably he wrote God music....Scriabin is a genius because he gave me a heart fractals demonically creative music he never used a recipe but reinvented his piano playings in this new fractals dimension space between tonal and atonal ... I was a Bruckner devotee because he pushed to perfection Bach geometry and cinematic almost movie like motivated music with a beat no one could ever recreated...Each Bruckner symphonies is for me a specific movie i can describe in details. I did it for the fifth the most "perfect" Bruckner symphonies... The most beautiful being the 6 the 7 the 8 and the 9... The 5 th was the most deep intellectually, for sure the 9th is the more tragic one... The 8 is between the 5 and 9 in beauty and perfection married together... The 6 and 7 are the more easy to listen and understand at first sight ...

Bruckner mastery of choral music was my introduction... At the Shubert level as Brahms...

😊

@mahgister I just heard several of the first posts, long dead Armenian composer, Persian song and Feinberg (I already have the Feinberg recording). All great, especially the Armenian choir. I read your Pop music interest. For me, I’m in love with 20th century pop music, 1900 to 1970 and then less so thereafter (my wife enjoys heavy metal up to Led Zeppelin-sounds great in my listening room but I’m not crazy about it). My pop music extends back to 1900+ dixieland, blues and tin pan alley and nearly all jazz periods including modern compositions (post bop, rock/jazz and country if pre-1960s) and especially close to my heart, Yiddish song. I have equally eclectic tastes. Through jazz, I am still discovering new interpretations of classic pop songs both vocal and mostly instrumental.

My only yiddisch inspired music love is The book of angels of Zorn... A genius for me...

 

Music as a spiritual experience is not always received in the same way by all people on all their paths.

Music is a galaxy if not a cosmos where any orbits define specific consciousness levels. Music is not reducible to taste.

Taste there is yes, but music is not about tastes.

It is about consciousness levels and there exist many mansions in the father realm said someone wiser than me.

Consciousness levels can not only be higher or lower compared to one another, they can be parallels. they even could be diverging and reconverging roads.

For me music is visible and invisible geometry.

Music is from the heart but even the heart has his own very precise geometry...I posted a video about the heart geometry and music in  the thread about sound and mystical experience .

 

This is so certainly beautiful if not sublime...

 

Certainly beautiful if not sublime...

 

 

 

This is stunning...

Maria Newman requiem..

I must say that i listened choral music since my child years...

And I understand that many will have reserve for the Buddah passion  , myself i listened oriental music for a long time...

 

Buddha passion is a masterpiece :

 

Now a genius much not well known here :

 

I like a lot this of Lucas Richman

 

 

Except for Glass who i like , i dont think we will argue much about music if i read your posts..

For the Busoni Faust i like it a lot because of Dietrich Fischer Dieskau who sing it at his peak... No other will have done better...

My best to you...

To defend Philip Glass stunning musical creativity i must say that i will never go to see this opera myself ..😁

Why ?

Because it is a series of few successive snapshop paintings without any dramatic continuously maintained drama tension as like in a theater drama where the action is going on with the music with not only singers but singers actors... ( Mozart sublime opera for example or Puccini)

In the Glass work the music is the main actor , not the one who read the few texts...

Then seeing it before listening to it you conclude rightfuly that it was a bad opera in the traditional sense of the word...

I did only listen to it as a stunning musical atmosphere recreation of the sacred impression behind life in Ancient Egypt. A piece of music not really an opera...

The Faust of Busoni is my favorite Modern opera withy the Kurt Weil three penny opera and even there where the little snapshops scenes goes on with one another the music serve the plot drama... In the Glass opera the music is the drama and the main character.

I understand your perspective and opinion then perfectly but luckily i only listened to it and i never waited to see a drama which cannot win much to be seen because it is a piece of music way more than an opera... A minimalist opera, here the label is right ... 😊

And on my playback system it is stunningly beautiful and mesmerizing...

The most important book that change the course of my life was a book about the temple of Karnak...Then...

Thanks for the Omar opera recommendation i will listen to it for sure...😊 I did not know it ...

 

Where I strongly disagree is the horrible (but presumtively great performance) of Philip Glass Akhnaten which I saw to my dismay, live at the LA Opera. From the opening bars where the idea is to create tension, it creates a negative energy like someone clawing their nails on a chalkboard. The ending with the death of the six daughters had no input from them and totally bizarre and uninteresting. No real sung libretto, just noise. The poor dancers rolling balls back and forth on the ground. REAL DRECK!

You are right...

I lost alas! my stunning version Of the "people united will never be defeated" by Rzewski himself... No other interpretation sticked with me...

I lost my cd ...

It is why i did not mention it by despair ...

I only had youtube version of him ...

@mahgister has many fine examples.

But he’s overlooked the finest composer for piano, and the finest virtuoso performer on the piano, of the latter half of the 20th Century.

But for now, I provide a link to what is my favorite composition of his, which is not piano.

I can recommend this Roslavets by Hamelin...

His cold playing is marvellous here :

 

I can return the accusation... Just dont assume that the Schoenberg school speak to most humans...It is ONLY your opinion that it is not a dead end ...( an interesting dead end for sure no one dispute that but a dead end )

My opinion is the same as the great Ernest Ansermet one of the great maestro, and if you dont know it author a huge book ( 1,200 pages)on the meaning and history and phenomenology of Music... " the foundation of music in human consciousness" i partake his opinion ... I studied his book and i studied the great Swiss philosopher Jean Claude Piguet, who is a disciple and collaborator of Ansermet ,was my philosophy teacher with his mammoth book , not in english translation alas! "the knowledge of the individual and the logic of realism"

Now take a referendum :

How many body-heart- humans not mere minds are moved by the Schoenberg Atonal algebra ?

You said it yourself, you like "thorny" music speaking mainly to your mind , i prefer music which speak to my body as tango or african rythms, or speak to my heart as Beethoven , and music which speak to my soul as Bach ... Better than that i look for music which spoke to my body, heart and soul and to my mind together : Indian rag music do the job or Persian modes ...Jazz too... Choral music is my main favorite music...

I appreciate music improvised by great musicians on not well known instruments in the west the most ...Way more than abstract rules of "thorny" music as serialism and other mathematical formulas using noise...

In my music listening habit i like to discover each week but i need to listen regularly my favorite pieces some hundreds of times...

Music which speak only a "thorny" abstract written language inherited from some rules as serialism and others formulas ( Xenakis for example or Stochausen or even Varese ) to my mind mainly dont seduce me much... They are "curiosities" not earth shattering experience of the spirit as a great concert of Ravi Shankar could be for me...

To each one his taste you are right on this but we express freely our opinion as such...

But when i give my opinion it is my opinion , as thorny music is your choice but for me it is a dead end most of the times... If you want to know why : read Ansermet book which is in french only alas!

«How does the musical phenomenon appear? It arises, says Ansermet, from the adequacy of the relationship of one tonal position to another, and from a rhythmic cadence. This, however, only constitutes a beginning of the musical imaging act: it is the musical cell, which only temporalizes by a passage from the beginning to the motif, which results in the taking of tonal perspective.»

 

 

@mahgister

Just because Schoenberg and the 12 tone method is no longer used, does not mean it was a dead end.

The history of classical music is littered with "dead ends" long before the 2nd Viennese school.

The 2nd Viennese school, has remained influential to this day. Just in ways not specifically 12 tone.

Just because you are unable to detect music that speaks to the heart from many contemporary composers, does not mean others are not able to.

You seem to have the feeling that your way of listening to music is the only way. And the only way to convey deep emotion and beauty, is to for the composer tp make it obvious.

Please don’t assume your personal prejudices are an objective fact.

You are right on this though there is some work that are very interesting here even moving ,,, I hate the idyosincrasic serialism of Boulez for example but i like Berg concerto for the memory of an angel ...But it is some of the rare  exception... I said it is a dead end because not much composers revendicate anymore strict atonality as a rule or even as the main inspiration ... I prefer Scriabin spontaneous  "atonal" /tonal frontier exploration with no recipe and no written rule ...

Now read me right, i consider the first and last Schoenberg as a genius... I am not completely stupid... 😊 i like Gesualdo music for example , totally and completely, but it is a dead end road as written , Monteverdi will go on a less ethereal road and i like him too at the same level ... I hope you will understand better my perspective now ...

Why not ?

The most important revolution in European classical written music by "composers" came in the last century with the official discovery by Bartok and others of the cultural roots of music... Before that many composers as Chopin with the mazurkas for example were influenced by popular grounded music in the cultural soil... It was even such in Bach times ...Then came the mixing of these roots all around the earth with classical european music but also the influences  all style  had over all others , not only with folklore transcription as in Bartok times but with recording easier process and play back system ...

This is why i own extensive collection of Persian and Indian music... Or fado etc ... Why not tango ?

But it is the OP thread and idea not mine ... I must shut up ... 😁

 

Can we consider nuevo tango as modern classical music? I’m thinking of Dino Saluzzi and Astor Piazzolla

I concur with Arvo Part suggestion ...

All these composers go out of the dead end road created by Schoenberg...

😊

Music must speak to the human heart or to the body metabolism or to the soul...When it spoke out of tonality or out of cultural grounded modes or out of articulated rythms as speech is , music begin to be a mind space only where we have nothing to eat and give to the heart, the soul or to the body...

You can heal someone with Bach or Beethoven i doubt you can do it so successfully and easily with the second Viennese school... The OM sound or the CHrist sound or Yoruba speaking drums will do it better ...😊

Finally in music there is tastes, we are each one of us different with our own history and biases, but ultimately music as acoustic is not about tastes..

Tastes there is, but tastes it is not ....

His first works with the "perfumed garden" are a must...Begin with that ...

His 100 transcendental studies too ...Buy Ullen here ...

Dont begin with anything else...

Sorabji is an obsessed mind creating 9 hours pieces...

It is in a way a genious lost in himself ...

it is the reverse of Scriabin who spoke to us...

His short pieces transform us ...

Sorabji dont transform me but propose his own inner world for the sake of it and is indifferent to the listener in a way Scriabin was not , Scriabin vouched to redempt and save humanity from himself , he is a mystic; Sorabji is not a mystic but a poet inspired by mathematics and geometry...A Bach without the center of God... but is geometry is astounding and ask for a focussed attention almost no one can give...And it is unplayable on piano not for the same reason than Scriabin short pieces... how to keep the intensity for 4 or 5 hours in the Clavicem ? Ogdon only do it...Ullen do a job without defect on the transcendent studies...

i like Sorabji and by moment love him ...

Anyway no other composer use the piano this way....And anyway he is unknown because he had  forbid people to play his works and anyway they are impossible to play because of duration...

 

@mahgister

Sorabji is intriguing. Will explore. Thanks!

Villa Lobos  is a composer who is neither traditionalist nor influenced by the like of the second  Viennese school ... It is a great composer as anyone must know ...

I will put it here  if the OP accepted  a dead man .... 😊

I dislike minimalism. If I want to listen to mind numbing repetition I can tune into pop music.

Ives is truly unique. For me, he is a composer that I tend to respect more than I love. I do like his Concord Sonata, and Central Park in the Dark. I enjoy the 4 symphonies but tend not to seek them out.

Not that familiar with Nyman

 

i feel the same as you in your last post...For Ives...

Save for minimalism...

I dont like all minimalist music first, second i can meditate and think write with minimalist music as a tool to guide my thinking process out of any distraction and keep it focused ... I will not listen most classical music this way , save Bach, and i had no use for any pop music ...I prefer jazz ...

Then some minimal music can be a tool for keeping consciousness on some trance like thinking mode... Some thinker more concentrated than me prefer silence... I myself like to alternate silence and music especially if i wrote... When thinking out of the silence hours, music give us a dream like states when our thought organize themselves without the conscious ego impediment ...Music is a thinking sleep mode where we go deeper without any ego to keep us at the surface of waters ...

Then i dont like minimalism for the sake of it generally , but as a necessary musical state in my listenings...( Glass for example is an exception we can call his music minimalism but it is more than that because of his rythmic sophisticated mastery and his content )

Pop music i had no use for it as in many hours listening sessions even for an hour ... I like to have a few minutes nostalgia on the radio in my car listening by chance a song that remind me my 20 years old... I dont see any other reason to listen pop extensively ... I prefer Jazz or  Persian or Indian music ( rag music is great as minimalism for thinking as well as Bach)  and other cultures music even fado to pop ...

I dont dislike pop ... Many pop singers and musicians had a deep impact on me... But i dont go for them out of the random moment in my life where by accident they remind me of the past...

For example "California dreaming " by Mamas and the Papas... I had 13 years old or 14... I walked in our new apartment too small for my poor family , and the rythmic irresistible hope suggested by the well done harmony transform my sadness in pure joy... how can i forgot that ? Each time this music play i feel young again .,..

The same is true at the same age for Otis Redding marvelous "dock of the bay" which create the opposite in me , a deep sense of my solitude on the dock of St Lawrence river ...how can i forget this special feeling of sadness being alone ? Each time i hear it i reenter in my young self ...

I remember the exact moment of my first listening of the group Cream  on the stairs  between two levels of the school House, or Jimi Hendrix or the first listening of Frank Zappa... Each pop music is for me a deep memory ... But i dont entertain ONLY AND MERELY  nostalgia when i listen music... I use music to dream, think, sleep , or meditate and contemplate the musical content...Nostalgia is great only by chance or for very short moment of choice ...

Very good post with which i concur from mahler123...

But even this distinction is not enough between more traditionals composers and modernists one...

Where is Philip Glass ?

Where is Sorabji ?

Where is Charles Ives ? Nor traditional nor modernist...

Where is Nyman writing music as Sangam inspired by non-european traditions of India or Persia etc in my book it is not traditional at all nor modernist as the  Viennese school which look already an "old" traditional school to me almost out of fashion as such ?

In neither of this 2 polarized classification...these two groups separate on two extreme limits... Creativity is not limited by ideological borders nor by history ...

 

Oups! i must delete all my posts then....

😁

The litterature of Piano will not be complete without the great Samuil Feinberg ...he died in 1962... This interpretation is the best over the colder Hamelin ...

 

 

I lost my box of Minoo Javan an Iranian singer mastering old Persian songs ...

For me this is contemporary...She died in 1978... And it remind me on a past persian reincarnation for sure ...😁

His box i lost i retrieved it on youtube :

I will recommend also:

Parsegh Ganatchian

 he died in 1967...

His songs are directly from eden garden as persian ancient music... He is armenian ... here his complete songs...Direct from Eden garden or near it ...

 

The OP has confined his query to currently living composers, which eliminates a lot of composers recommended here. I guess Jennifer Higdon or Lowell Lieberman come to mind, though neither get my pulse racing

 

Knowing you only by reading your posts i will give you as gift a Robert Simpsons symphony set or a quartet box...Perhaps you know him ?

I consider him a genius ...

As a safe gift i will gave you Silvestrov silent songs box...Moving as Schubert was but in his own minimalist way ...

I am as you very picky on contemporary composers... They must move me....

I will not give you Akhnaten though because i would be afraid that you put it in a drawer, it is minimalist repetitive music but so amazingly good that it is the ONLY work ressusciting ancient Egypt and it moves me beyond word ...

Read the autobiography of OM Seti or Dorothy Eady and AFTER that buy Philip Glass Akhnaten ...( Om Seti hated Akhnaten by the way and his explanation is very logical )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Eady

The book about her is made by long parts of his journal with encounters at night with the Pharaoh Seti his past lovers who come to see her out of time from eternity ... The story is moving beyond words... And she became self taught one of the greatest Egyptologist recognized by all as having supernatural understanding of everything in old Egypt impossible to get by reading books ... His story is impossible to fake ... Then listening the Philip Glass Akhnaten i discovered that Glass tuned to the ancient Gods like a sleepwalker under hypnosis ...

i insist here because the most stunning book which changed the course of my life was a mammoth book about Karnak temple by the late Schwaller de Lubicz i bought for 125 dollars in 1975... But this is another story ... 😊

 

The few exceptions in contemporary music i know was as in Sorabji case amazement by aspects of his obsessive long works that can be amazing to "see" ...

And some music dont moves me but i use it more as sound meditation as Jeroen Van Veen which dont play as Sofronitsky or Moravec in an emotional tuned playing field but is able to create his own cosmos in rythms ...

Nyman is a genius too in my book ...

many others i did know but ...

I am busy in jazz, persian music and Indian music and choral music before Bach...

Jakob Obrecht and Josquin Des prez were my "contemporary composers" when i was young till this day ... And all the Franco flemish school of choral music...With Bach ...

I listen music to be happy with jazz, or to be silent with choral, or to be meditative as with Peter Deunov a bulgarian music master and mystic which music is on youtube ...

He died in 1944...

His music is celestial as the last Liszt or the Bruckner Motets...

All the songs are here ...

 

Because i am almost  always serious i will wait ...

thanks for the thread...😁😊😋😉😊😎

 

@mahgister I’ll get back to you with my thoughts on your recommendations in about 6 months

😂

By the way, thanks for the Joey De Francesco recommendation... 😊

 

My first exposure to Michael Nyman was from movie score

"The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" by Peter Greenaway.

That was one of the most brutal movies I've ever seen.

My favorite Michael Nyman Pieces :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i like Nyman a lot too ...

But everybody must discover the 60 albums of Jeroen Van Veen :

 

The Ullen version of the 100 transcendent studies :

 

The version with Ogdon is supreme :

 

 

Sorabji one of the most interesting piano composer since Scriabin :

 

Add Philip Glass own genius...

My favorite work of him :

 

 

 

Add the great Robert Simpson ...

Anything from him ...

Symphonies or chamber music....

 

 

Silvestrov is a genius for sure ... I concur with the OP ...

Here my first album :