Top 5 Pieces of Music

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

(in no particular order)

City Life - Steve Reich

This was the piece that made me fall in love with Reich. It made me view minimalism in a new way, and appreciate it all the more. I love the 'speech melodies'. Check it out, the first movement, is great if you wanted to... well... check it out...

I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky - John Adams

I'll be the first to admit that as a whole this opera/musical is rather shit. However, the opening 'I was looking at the ceiling...' is addictive, and there are some truly gorgeous and inspired moments... '¿Donde Estàs?', 'Dewain's Song of Liberation and Surprise' and '¡Este País! (This Country)' to name a few.

De Staat - Louis Andriessen

This, along with City Life, were two of the pieces that really stuck with me when I studied Music in Modern Times at the Conservatorium. I love the political persuasion of the piece and the way the grinding and dissonant brass keeps evolving and turns into a brilliant chorus in Ancient Greek in consonant minimalism.

Peter Grimes - Benjamin Britten

A new addition to the repertoire I listen to a lot. I heard amazing things about the Opera Australia production earlier in the year and decided I needed to see it. When I managed to get a ticket, I was stunned. This is a phenomenal work of art and so, so touching. It's the first opera I've ever been able to fall in love with.

The Infinite Heartbeat - Stuart Greenbaum

A simple, short (only 5 minutes long) minimalist piece (can you tell that I thoroughly enjoy minimalist music?) by Australian composer Stuart Greenbaum, but so amazingly moving. I weep nearly every time I hear it. The solo pianissimo pizzicato which opens and closes the piece, the subtle key changes introduced by the unending piano accompaniment... it's the nuances in this piece are what makes it so beautiful and so intimate.

Lux Aeterna - Martin Lauridsen

I was first introduced to this piece in 2007 when I sang the third movement, O Nata Lux, with the Sydney University Music Society and a touring choir from Harvard University. This is such a beautiful piece to be a part of in performance. Every time I have performed it in the years since, I think back to when I moved to Sydney away from my family and friends and had this piece to rehearse and perform to keep me company.

Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel - György Ligeti

I love this piece purely because it is so insane. Ligeti's music has always attracted me in an indescribable way, and this is the only work of his where I've been able to pinpoint a reason for loving it... its sheer insanity and humour. I played this piece to my Year 1 class when I was prac teaching last month and it made one girl cry because it was so foreign to her young ears... she didn't know how to deal emotionally with the sounds she was hearing.

Oblivion - Astor Piazzolla

The most intimate and sexually fulfilling of all pieces of music. Written for violin, violoncello and piano, the tango sounds as though the instruments are making tender and passionate love. I cannot help but be overcome when listening to this piece. Ute Lemper, one of my favourite singers, has written lyrics for it and Katie Noonan (yep, she's back...) performed it with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (them again too) in their most recent collaboration, Luminous, which was accompanied by photos from one of my favourite artists/photographers, Bill Henson. The experience was truly magical.

Summa for Choir - Arvo Pärt

I stumbled upon the music of Arvo Pärt by complete accident, picking up a $10 'Best of Arvo Pärt' CD in a dump-bin from a now-defunct CD store on Glebe Point Rd on the offchance of discovering something new and wonderful. Oh, how I did. His Summa has been arranged for many different ensembles, including string orchestra and is a gorgeous example of his own compositional style, 'tintinnabuli', where two voices co-exist, one moving in arpeggios on a tonic chord while the other moves diatonically in a step-motion. Just amazing. Other works of Pärt which should really be here as well include Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten as well as his Fratres, also arranged for many different ensembles including violin and piano as well as string orchestra and tuned/untuned percussion.

Cloudburst - Eric Whitacre

A highly complex choral work accompanied by piano and both tuned/untuned percussion and involving body percussion to emulate the coming, being and departing of a storm. Sung in Spanish, the lush and unexpected chords are beautiful and Whitacre's signature tonal clusters along with an aleatoric section make this piece both a unique experience for performer and responder alike. I was supposed to be singing this in the Canberra Inter-Varsity Choral Festival in January next year until I had to pull out due to commitments to work and Sweeney Todd, which is very sad (but Sweeney Todd will be amazing, so it's okay!)

TOP 5 PIECES OF MUSIC

5. Song for Athene - John Tavener

Performed, and brought into significant international attention as a result, at the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales, this piece fluctuates between tonic minor and tonic major, reflecting both the light and dark feelings one experiences when a person close to their hearts dies. The piece for a capella choir is held consistent through a low drone from the beginning of the piece as it builds gradually through repetition and an increase of intensity to a liberating climax, celebrating the freedom of the deceased's soul into a better place. This builds to the dramatic, textural and dynamic climactic point of the entire piece, and then falls abruptly away into pianissimo where we here that familiar drone quietly and one of the initial Hallelujah sections is repeated so quietly it's almost impossible to hear and in a major key. It's as though the deceased person is still with us, one hand on our shoulder assuring as that everything is okay, but they are only there quietly. I love this piece purely for it's beauty. It really has no great personal significance for me, particularly as I am an atheist, but if I do have a religion, it is music.

4. Symphony No. 2 - Philip Glass

Pure minimalism in its most obvious form... Philip Glass. If you've been observant, indeed if you've read anything more than a few sentences on this post, you'll notice that I am quite a big fan of minimalism, particularly American minimalism. In fact, 4 of my top 5 pieces of music are minimalist, and the odd one out (number 2 on the list) has many minimalist influences. This symphony is a wonderful example of Glass' work, his repetitive fifths and chords, straight and consistent rhythms, varying emphases. The opening movement of the symphony holds particular significance for me. In Year 11 Drama we were split into groups and required to create group devised performances on the topic of 'warfare' each in the style of a different practitioner which was assigned to us. My group did an excellent piece in the style of Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, but it was another group which had some very close friends in it who did their piece about the Holocaust in the style of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty that grabbed me. I was obsessed with it and the style of theatre... how wonderful to not only have an excuse, but to be required to figuratively smack an audience across the face and abuse them. The piece of theatre was phenomenal... nearly everyone who ever saw it cried and was terrified by it. My friends asked me for my assistance in presenting the performance and I assisted them with some sound design and ran all their audio/visuals. Part of this performance was the opening of this symphony... those repeating arpeggios and intervals and that haunting oboe melody over the swelling chords in the strings. To this music, the actors performed a sick and disturbing choreographed movement sequence displaying the relationships they had with other prisoners in the camp and their hopes for escape. One particular tableaux in the piece consisted of all actors reaching as high as they could towards a central point on stage... this mirrored a photograph the group found in their research of actual prisoners of war in a gas chamber, all reaching towards the one single vent in the ceiling in their final moments, desperate to escape from the gas surrounding them. At the conclusion of this movement piece, each of the actors lined up and performed an eerie swaying movement, before settling and being shot one by one, before the slide '...we must never forget.' flashed up on the screen behind them. This performance both haunts and excites me to this very day. It was spectacular and I find myself pulling out the DVD every now and again to experience it yet again. It was in doing this assignment, and helping this other group, that I knew I wanted my life to never be bereft of life-altering performance and theatre. I plan to teach drama (as well as music) when I graduate and go out into the 'real world' and I think that this performance was the main reason that I want to do that.

3. Ice Man - Stuart Greenbaum

The first time I heard this piece was when one of the movements, The Dream, was played in a student HSC music concert in high school. Part of the Music 2 Syllabus is the compulsory component, 'Music of the Last 25 Years: Australian Focus' where all students must perform a piece written in the last twenty five years, preferably an Australian composition. Often this means students procure very obscure pieces from bizarre places. One of these pieces was The Dream. When it was performed at my school, nobody seemed to know where the music came from so every time a Music 2 piano student wanted to play it for their HSC they couldn't because nobody knew where the piece came from or who the composer was... but everybody loved it so much. Then, when I was in year 12 doing my HSC, even though I was majoring in voice, I decided that I loved this piece so much that I too wanted to play it (I've done my 8th Grade AMEB in piano as well) so I sought out a copy and began to learn it. I was helping a fellow music student from another school with his Music 1 performances and one of the pieces he was accompanying another student for (The Infinite Heartbeat) sounded almost familiar... and then he performed another piece, Affinity, which was the closing movement of Ice Man, and instantly I knew I had found the piece from which The Dream came from. It was such a serendipitous moment of realisation I had to keep myself from bursting out into a fit of laughter. Ice Man has stayed with my ever since, and I managed to track down a copy of the score from the Conservatorium library and have ever since been teaching myself the entire half-hour work. It is so beautiful. Iove its gorgeous use of the sustain pedal, the way the notes fade and the overtones meld into each other to create this disparate mood of emptiness. Greenbaum, an American-born Australian composer who is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Head of Composition Studies at the University of Melbourne, wrote the piece about fellow Australian James Scott who was trapped in the Himalayan snow for 43 days. The piece reflects the emptiness and loneliness he felt and is hauntingly beautiful. I'd love to perfect this piece and one day perform it in recital... but that's just one of my many dreams. For now I need to work on being able to play it on an actual acoustic piano instead of the digital piano I have at home which doesn't do sustained notes or overtones very well.

2. Carmina Burana - Carl Orff

This piece in itself is prolific enough to not need a description. It was the first classical piece I ever saw in performance when the Sydney University Music Society (SUMS) performed it in the University of Sydney Great Hall in 2004. I was in Year 10 and my music teacher was in the choir and had insisted we all came and saw it. I was hooked. I went and bought the Naxos recording the next week and listened to it over and over. It was this performance I saw that set me on the path of classical music as a career path. I didn't realise it was possible to still work in amateur choirs once school had finished. The year after I graduated, despite not being successful with my application for the Conservatorium, I still moved to Sydney and joined SUMS. Everything came full circle when earlier this year I performed Carmina Burana with SUMS... it was an affirmation of my decision to follow the path of music and performance for the rest of my life. This piece stands as almost the contract of the commitment that I made to myself to do this. Aside from this, it's just an awesome piece with some excellent moments (obviously the opening and closing movements, O Fortuna are highlights that immediately spring to mind) but the gorgeous baritone solos and soprano solos are also what make this piece so special to me. It might seem a tad clichéd to have this piece on my list, especially at number 2, but hopefully this story gives you some insight as to why it's so special to me.

1. Symphony No. 3 'Symphony of Sorrowful Song' - Henryk Gòrecki

The most-sold classical piece of all time, in terms of recordings. There is a reason for this... and that is that this piece is just the most heartwrenchingly beautiful work of art. If you've never heard this piece before, you need to find a recording of it (I suggest the Naxos recording with soprano Zofia Kilanowicz and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra - it's my favourite), sit in the dark or near-dark with a glass of red wine, close your eyes and listen. I found this piece in a very backward way. One day when I was listening to Triple J doing mindless work I heard the song Cotton Wool by Lamb and decided I really liked it. I then looked it up online and downloaded it and found that every site I read talked about a Lamb song called Gorecki so I downloaded it too and fell completely in love (you might remember it was number 1 on my Top 5 Songs post). I read all about this song in the liner notes of the Lamb CD I rushed out and bought immediately, and saw that Lou Rhodes and Andy Barlow wrote the song about a shared experience they had had when they heard Gòrecki's Third Symphony for the first time, so I picked up the aforementioned recording of this piece. I listened to it without stopping on my discman in the car on the way to the South Coast that afternoon and wept. I had never heard anything more beautiful in my whole life. Such despair, so beautiful this torturous agony in this music. A intensely slow, gradual build of sound to a climax of soaring soprano notes over luscious strings. To read the story behind the composition of this piece then furthered my intense appreciation for it. The text used in the first movement is a 15th Century Polish lament of Mary, mother of Jesus,the second movement a message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during World War II and the third movement a Silesian folk song of a mother searching for her son, killed in the Silesian uprisings. I can't say too much more than you need to experience this piece yourself to understand why it sits here at the number one spot on this list. It runs for about an hour, and if you haven't heard it before (or even all the way through) you owe it to yourself to first read up on the story behind the composition (a good place to start is the piece's Wikipedia entry) and then listen to the piece from beginning to end with no interruptions. You will be a changed person for the experience.