Eric S notapenguin's blog: "musicstuffs"

Just transferring the lists that were in the music section of my profile here, since they went well over the length limit... A:

• Charles-Valentin Alkan (French composer and pianist; his sonata Les Quatre Ages may have been one of Liszt's inspirations when that master wrote his B minor piano sonata.)
• Anton Arensky (Russian composer, friend of Tchaikovsky)
• Kurt Atterberg (Swedish Romantic-style - usually!! - 20th-century composer.)

B:

• Milton Babbitt (American jazz and modernist performer, composer, student of mathematics...)
• Grazyna Bacewicz (Polish modern - 1909-1969.)
• Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Johann Sebastian Bach had several great composer-children. CPE Bach, JC Bach and WF Bach are the three I know and most appreciate. Of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s works some solo keyboard music, some concertos, symphonies, some choral works - some influenced Haydn...- and a few others have come my way out of a very large output, and justify a greatly positive though mixed reputation.
• Johann Christian Bach (probably even more of an influence on Mozart than CPE Bach ever was, according to Alfred Einstein's book on Wolfgang :) ... and a close friend. And Mozart was right to mourn what music had lost in 1782 when JC Bach died. Too long underestimated as a composer of surface trifles pandering to the London public once he got there- his choral works and operas for Rome have been given their proper place at least by the few who know them- though to write them he did have to convert, which put him out of place in the Bach family ..! --
• Johann Sebastian Bach (reconciled the contrapuntal achievements of his predecessors with the melodic gains of his contemporaries and their instrumental gains, too, I believe- the ability of a Buxtehude or a Frescobaldi to write amazing music in contrapuntal style but mainly using the diatonic scale without chromaticism, was limited in part by the instruments and tunings of the day I gather- introduce the newer instruments and tunings, introduce a JS Bach with the ability to write a Well-Tempered Clavichord, a 6th Partita, an Art of the Fugue, hundreds of wonderful cantatas ... (..., ..., ..., ... ! - my 2nd favorite or almost a tie for my favorite composer for what that's worth does not have one best work, thank you.) -- and you have someone who could write music that takes advantage of all of this and does it well...
• Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (JS Bach had greatest hope for him among his composing sons, I think, and his small output suggests some reason for that- but he had little ability to hold down a job it also seems and even less desire?... :( ...)
• Samuel Barber (more later about this very fine 20th-century American composer but if you've seen the movie Platoon you've heard something by him)
• Bela Bartok (along with Debussy, Schoenberg and maybe Stravinsky one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.)
• Arnold Bax - 20th-century British composer of heavily Irish and Russian-influenced music in several genres
• Ludwig van Beethoven (and those who know no other "classical" music have a good chance of having heard the opening of one of his symphonies and parts of the close of one of his others. But there is so much more to say about this reluctant (?) pupil of Joseph Haydn, this great pianist and greater composer, this "brain-owner" (as he signed, I gather, a response to a relative who had signed a letter "land-owner"), believer in democracy, hearer of new sound and new form, - I will not right now try to sum up my thoughts on my favorite of composers when there are books that have attempted the same, though I'll probably come back and give it a go anyway.)
• Alban Berg (I first heard, I think, of Alban Berg when leaving the end of a good concert at Tanglewood at the Berkshires; with a math program I'd gone to that summer some of us attended two concerts there that summer, with symphonies by Dvorak and Mahler, a concerto by Prokofiev, an overture by Carl Nielsen... on leaving we passed through the record store, and I glanced at one of the LPs - Berg's violin concerto - peeked at the notes. I heard the concerto in a broadcast concert a year later but did not care for it at all - weird sounds and not Debussy's ideas of weird sounds either!... - noisy... - the summer after, I was at Interlochen Center for the Arts, working Food Service. I spent the hours between meals often at the library, and there I listened to the Berg again. And started absorbing what I along with many others have found to be a rather approachable but also intelligent and highly emotional piece, brought in part into being by commission but also by the death of the daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma (Werfel-Mahler-Gropius... Oh, Tom Lehrer....!!!!!!!!!!!!)
• Hector Berlioz (the one critic who figured out that Liszt and a violinist and violoncellist, were pulling one over on the critics by switching piano trios, one by Beethoven and one by a fellow, not a bad one but not Beethoven, named Pixis.)
• Franz Berwald (19th-century fine Swedish composer not really known in his country until later on. Four fine symphonies, chamber music, operas...)
• Ernest Bloch (Swiss composer of orchestral, choral, chamber - including five great string quartets and two piano quintets - liturgical music- concertos, one opera based on Shakespeare's Macbeth... emigrated to the US which was a great idea for Jews at the time *sigh.* but did lead to Roger Sessions, Quincy Porter and others having a better teacher than they might otherwise have had, too.)
• Alexander Borodin (composer of Kismet- I mean... er... of two symphonies and another left incomplete, two string quartets, an unfinished opera Prince Igor, other music, when he wasn't at his chemistry day job. The Wright-Forrest musical Kismet uses Borodin's wonderful tunes and their own lyrics- works surprisingly well really; when I heard Borodin's second quartet on the radio before my senior year of high school, my first thought seems to have been "Baubles, Bangles and Beads", the name of the Kismet song the music for which is the second theme of the scherzo second movement of that quartet. So- from one to the other, and... well.
• Rutland Boughton (known in Britain still, I think, for his Bethlehem and a few other works. He wrote three symphonies- one of them premiered late last year, more than a half-century after its composition, the other two premiered and recorded back in the 1980s- showing some influence of Elgar and Debussy. The 2nd symphony contains music intended for a ballet? incidental music? for Synge's Deirdre of the Shallows and isn't strictly formally structured the way one learns in school or comes to recognize after hearing many works by the best-known classical composers - but has an odd fantasy logic of its own that holds together, and which is appropriate as a backdrop to a nautical tragedy, foghorns ending two of the movements, even... it's a beautiful piece, sometimes angry and sometimes sad. The 3rd symphony seems more closely inspired by Elgar but - it's no copy either. The two were together on a disc that for the moment, is no longer available.
• Johannes Brahms
• William Havergal Brian
• Frank Bridge
• Benjamin Britten
• Max Bruch
• Anton Bruckner
• Ferruccio Busoni
• Dietrich Buxtehude

C:

• Frederic Chopin

D:

• Frederick Delius
• Josquin DesPrez
• Erno Dohnanyi
• Felix Draeseke (site devoted to whom, with some entire movements- and two entire substantial pieces last I checked - as samples, at http://www.draeseke.org.)
• Antonin Dvorak

E: Edward Elgar George Enescu F: Benjamin Frankel Robert Fuchs G: Niels Gade Friedrich Gernsheim Alberto Ginastera (had to be reminded, here. Thank you.) Alexander Glazunov Edvard Grieg H: Georg Handel Roy Harris Joseph Haydn Michael Haydn Paul Hindemith Vagn Holmboe Artur Honegger I: Vincent d'Indy Charles Ives J: Leos Janacek K: Zoltan Kodaly Ernst Krenek L: Franz Liszt M: Alberic Magnard Gustav Mahler Frank Martin Bohuslav Martinu Giuseppe Martucci Nicolai Medtner - Russian composer with a German background, ended up in England after the US and France (if I remember) after the Revolution. Close friend of Rachmaninoff. Erkki Melartin Ernest J Moeran Wolfgang Mozart Nicolai Myaskovsky N: Carl Nielsen Vitezslav Novak P: Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina Allan Pettersson Walter Piston Francis Poulenc Sergei Prokofiev Henry Purcell R: Sergei Rachmaninoff Joachim Raff Max Reger Anton Reicha Carl Reinecke Josef Rheinberger Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov Albert Roussel Edmund Rubbra S: Camille Saint-Saens Domenico Scarlatti Franz Schmidt Arnold Schoenberg Franz Schubert William Schuman Robert Schumann Alexander Scriabin Roger Sessions Dmitri Shostakovich Jean Sibelius Robert Simpson Wilhelm Stenhammar Igor Stravinsky Louis Spohr Josef Suk Karol Szymanowski T: Thomas Tallis Sergei Taneyev Pyotr Tchaikovsky Georg Philipp Telemann Michael Tippett Ernst Toch Eduard Tubin V: Ralph Vaughan Williams Matthijs Vermeulen Louis Vierne Heitor Villa-Lobos W: William Walton Anton v. Webern M. Weinberg Egon Wellesz Z: Alexander v. Zemlinsky