First Encounters with Memorable Music

I just finished reading Joshua Kosman’s Sunday Datebook article in today’s Chronicle. The title of his piece is “My first encounters with memorable music;” and I realized that this is a game worth playing, particularly when current encounters must contend with the slings and arrows of pandemic conditions. Kosman probably knows enough about me by now to know how our tastes differ; so I feel it appropriate to begin with the one selection with which we are in furious agreement, even if he saved it for the last item on his list. That composition is Franz Schubert’s D. 956 string quintet in C major.

Kosman’s first encounter was due to an assignment given in a music history course. My own was a happy accident. I was living in Israel in the early Seventies, teaching computer science at the Technion in Haifa. Radio service was, to say the least, disappointing, particularly where classical music was concerned. As a result my FM tuner was locked on only a single frequency, and I would flip the radio on to see if anything interesting was being broadcast.

So it was that, one afternoon, I had my first encounter with the Adagio (second) movement of D. 956 (preceded by a few concluding measures of the opening Allegro ma non troppo movement). The experience was like not being able to put down a book after having read a few sentences. Having no idea of who the composer (or, for that matter, the instrumentation) was, I remained riveted to that Adagio. My curiosity sustained me through the remaining movements, after which I finally learned the identity of the composer. The way in which that movement seemed to connote time standing still brought to mind John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy;” and, to this day, I am as hooked on that Adagio as I was almost 50 years ago.

I was glad to see that Steve Reich was on Kosman’s list with the ECM recording of “Music for 18 Musicians.” However, my own memories reach further back to Reich’s work at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Among the creations during that period, “It’s Gonna Rain” still reverberates in memory, probably because the energy level was so intense. Similarly, while Kosman remembers the performance of Meredith Monk’s Atlas in 1992 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), my own most memorable BAM encounter was the performance of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha about a decade earlier.

I suspect that my strongest disagreement with Kosman is over Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia.” Like many that have listened to this piece, Kosman called out the collage that Berio had concocted, creating a foreground whose background was the Scherzo movement from Gustav Mahler’s second (“Resurrection”) symphony. However, by the time Columbia had released the New York Philharmonic recording of this composition, I had been involved with collage as both listener and composer for about half a decade. Every now and then a performance of this piece arises (one of which was by the San Francisco Symphony); and the music no longer registers as anything other than a tired old joke.

On the other hand, Mahler is another matter. My first serious encounter with his music came about when an uncle of my mother’s gave me an album of his fifth symphony. I was hooked on that music from the opening measures of the first-movement funeral march, the same way that I was hooked on Schubert’s Adagio. These days I find myself relishing in the diversity of interpretation of this music that I have encountered through the many times it has been recorded. I suppose this is my response to Kosman’s endorsement of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, which I certainly appreciate but not enough to merit a position on my list.

Similarly, while Kosman and I seem to agree about the merits of Benjamin Britten, that composer’s solo oboe composition consisting of “Meditations After Ovid” (Kosman’s preference) does not rise to the level of memorability. For me that place is held by the serenade that Britten composed for a string ensemble with solo parts for tenor and horn. This is not only an extraordinary ride through a diversity of genres for the individual movements but it is also a thoroughly memorable tour of British poetry. I first encountered this music because it was on the “flip side” of the Purcell variations (“Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”), which I had to study for my orchestration class. There are more engaging elements in the serenade, however, than I can possible enumerate without boring the reader!