To the Editor:

I read with great interest Terry Teachout’s three-part series, “Musical Masterpieces of the Century” [April, May, June], and while I agree that the time of atonality has surely come and gone, what about cacophony? Tonality alone is insufficient in discussing the development of 20th-century music. For example, the Béla Bartók pieces Mr. Teachout recommends are both tonal and cacophonic. When I was a boy, my mother took me to Carnegie Hall to hear the Young People’s Concerts, conducted from time to time by Dimitri Mitropoulos. That maestro often pretended to play modernist music when in reality he was doing nothing more than warming up the orchestra. I think that says a lot.

In my opinion, with only one or two exceptions even from Mr. Teachout’s own list, I would guess that 200 years from now, the entire period of 20th-century music will have been relegated to the dustbin—it is that painful to listen to.

James Harrison Cohen
New York City

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To the Editor:

I found Terry Teachout’s “Musical Masterpieces of the Century” enjoyable and interesting, but because he limited himself to dead composers, perhaps it might have been better titled “Musical Masterpieces of the First Half of the Century.” Mr. Teachout has chosen only seven works from the second half of the century, and they are pretty much the weakest pieces on his list, a reflection of the fact that most of the great composers of the earlier period were either dead or past their prime by 1950.

No one, of course, can be satisfied with anyone else’s list of the best music of any period, but I found most of Mr. Teachout’s choices sound and a few of his less expected ones excellent—it was good to see such relatively neglected works as Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5, Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and Leoš Janá?ek’s Glagolitic Mass. But a few choices struck me as bizarre: Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins rather than The Threepenny Opera; William Walton’s bloated though occasionally impressive Symphony No. 1 instead of his lovely Viola Concerto; Olivier Messiaen’s endless Turangalîla-symphonie rather than his “Quartet for the End of Time”; Samuel Barber’s sentimental Hermit Songs rather than his Violin Concerto or Medea ballet. I cannot imagine what Miklós Rósza is doing in such august company, and I think Mr. Teachout greatly overrates Francis Poulenc and the late work of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Inevitably, the selection is arbitrary in another way. In order to make the list more interesting, Mr. Teachout seems to have decided to limit the best composers to four works. I do not blame him, but it would be easy to find ten or even twenty pieces each by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, and perhaps Sergei Prokofiev that are better than any one piece by most of the other composers listed.

More seriously, I am troubled by Mr. Teachout’s oversimplification of some of the stylistic and ideological questions of our era. Yes, after 90 or so years, we can say that atonal music has turned out to be much more limited than we had previously thought, but this does not mean that tonality is essential to comprehensibility. The few atonal works Mr. Teachout includes are comprehensible (well, up to a point), and so are such masterpieces as Edgard Varèse’s Octandre, Anton Webern’s Das Augenlicht and Variations for Piano, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.

Mr. Teachout is also off base in lumping together Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter with John Cage, and all three with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. I do not think the music of Babbitt and Carter can in any sense be called “antitonal” rather than atonal or nontonal. Whatever one thinks of their music—and I think each composer has written at least a couple of masterpieces as well as a lot of highly problematic, even bad, work—it is serious and not an “evasion,” masking an “inability to renew and refashion the musical tradition [the composers] had inherited,” as Mr. Teachout claims. Similarly, whatever one thinks of John Adams, his music is by no means as “simple-minded” as that of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

I count myself one of the composers Mr. Teachout refers to who have been influenced by such figures as Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Aaron Copland, but it is still an open question whether this new trend will lead to music of real significance, and it is certainly premature to predict that the new tonalism will become “the prevailing classical-music style of the 21st century.”

Finally, I think it is Mr. Teachout’s desire to politicize the issues that leads him to call his list a “counter-canon.” In fact, it is not very different from what most music-lovers would choose. While his choices might not be considered politically correct in the academy, music departments are less influential in the music world than he seems to think, and in any case even they have been changing. Still, Mr. Teachout is to be commended for bringing up important questions and, I am sure, provoking a good deal of discussion among both musicians and nonmusicians.

Steven R. Gerber
New York City

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To the Editor:

It is inconceivable to me that of Mahler’s symphonies only the Ninth made Terry Teachout’s masterpiece list. All but Mahler’s first two symphonies were performed in the 20th century.

Noah Daniel
Brooklyn, New York

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To the Editor:

I could argue with Terry Teachout about some of the works he included in his list of masterpieces, but one exclusion I consider unforgivable: Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo. It is in my opinion the greatest cello concerto written in the 20th or any other century. My two favorite performances of it are by Zara Nelsova and Leonard Rose.

Eliezer Greisdorf
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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To the Editor:

I am a bit surprised that Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is not on Terry Teachout’s list. Orff is the most tonal of modernists. In fact, harmony is more important than melody in his music.

George Jochnowitz
Staten Island, New York

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To the Editor:

I much enjoyed Terry Teachout’s series, but I wonder why he did not consider Paul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis even worthy of consideration. I have long thought this work one of the great pieces of 20th-century music.

Stephen Burant
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Congratulations to Terry Teachout on some of his selections. I am particularly impressed by his recognition of Miklós Rózsa as the second most important Hungarian composer of the century, after Béla Bartók. I disagree with some of his choices, of course, but everybody will. I have always felt, for example, that the recognition given to Aaron Copland smells a little of political correctness, the American patriotic brand. I have no qualms, however, with Mr. Teachout’s selection of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, clearly the best and perhaps the only considerable American opera.

I am more concerned by Mr. Teachout’s view that “After Stravinsky, the 20th century’s foremost composer was Béla Bartók.” For me, it is increasingly hard to deny the preeminence of Shostakovich in the 20th century. Stravinsky was good, and Bartók’s second place behind him is well deserved. But Shostakovich was a giant.

Andrew Sanders
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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To the Editor:

Thank you for a great series on modern music. I appreciate the work Terry Teachout did in selecting a series of major works composed in this sorriest of centuries. I will listen to the pieces he chose with much pleasure in the coming months.

I was sad to see, however, that the name of Darius Milhaud does not appear on the list. Not only was he a great composer, but his influence reached far, to the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and, if I am not mistaken, to Gershwin’s Cuban Overture.

In addition, though I do not endorse serial music, I enjoy Elliott Carter’s Quartets. Whether or not they belong on the list, I cannot say. I can say, however, that a couple of Schoenberg pieces do belong there: Verklärte Nacht and his opera Moses und Aran.

Alain Lerner
Arlington, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

I have read Terry Teachout’s music criticism for years, but the idea of working up a list of masterpieces was an inspiration. It did a real service on a number of levels. I am about as conversant with classical music as a nonspecialist can be, so it was an exceptionally exciting treat to find items on his list that I had not previously discovered. Please accept my thanks for alerting me to Maurice Duruflé, Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments, Janá?ek’s mass, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp.

On another level, I am elated by the news Mr. Teachout has brought back from the front—namely, that the dominance of sterile, ugly atonal music is ending. The courageous stance that he has taken from the bully pulpit of COMMENTARY has no doubt hastened this long overdue change in the aesthetic climate.

Finally, however, I must ask why Mr. Teachout did not include on his list Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 and his Three Pieces in Olden Style? Or Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5? Maybe even some piano pieces by Erik Satie, or Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings?

Bruce M. Gans
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

Thank you for Terry Teachout’s provocative series. My main reaction was shock that I was unfamiliar—completely unfamiliar—with so many of the pieces he listed. I am going to get Aaron Copland’s piano sonata and try again on the fifth Bartók string quartet.

I certainly agree with Mr. Teachout’s inclusion of Mahler’s works. He and Shostakovich are, I think, the top 20th-century composers. I also agree that the atonalists have ruined many a concert: how often I have gone to hear 20th-century music, hoping to find something melodious and noble from my own era, only to encounter what Mr. Teachout aptly describes as composers’ “futile attempts to mask their own inability.” When the sound stops, you do not know whether to applaud, be silent, or keep dozing.

The one piece I was surprised not to see is Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. This is certainly a “masterpiece of permanent interest” and has continued to illuminate listeners over the years.

George Hazard
Columbus, Mississippi

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To the Editor:

Terry Teachout’s critical guide to 20th-century musical masterpieces is a public service and a reminder of how musically brilliant this century has in fact been, the efforts of the atonalists notwithstanding. The survey has the added virtue of endorsing my own judgment at many points.

I saw immediately that Mr. Teachout was on the right track when his first selection began with Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Ravel’s elegant String Quartet. Mr. Teachout’s use of the qualifier “perfect” for this latter work is noteworthy because Ravel, to my mind, is one of the few composers in whom that concept does not suggest “facile.” But for gossamer perfection in composition and orchestration, one could hardly do better than Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye. Mr. Teachout is also to be applauded for recognizing the greatness of Prokofiev’s violin concertos, although I favor the more lyrical and accessible Second Concerto over the First, which Mr. Teachout lists.

I awaited the second installment of the series with anticipation to see if it passed the test of acknowledging Leoš Janá?ek’s breathtaking Glagolitic Mass, with its singular blend of muscularity and soaring beauty. Another gold star here. Readers might, however, try the recording Sir Charles Mackerras made (on Chandos) with the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in 1994, a few years after the Michael Tilson Thomas recording that Mr. Teachout recommends. Mackerras was the first to use the composer’s original score, which treads closer to the edge than the previously standard performing version

Alas, not all is faultless in Mr. Teachout’s gathering of gems. How does one explain the surprising neglect of Carl Nielsen? A. list including Kurt Weill should have had room for one of this century’s greatest symphonists.

The injustice to Nielsen notwithstanding, I will continue to look for Terry Teachout first when each new issue of COMMENTARY arrives.

Carol Staswick
Berkeley, California

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To the Editor:

An enormous thank-you to Terry Teachout for his marvelous survey and his recommended recordings. Some may take issue with his fundamental attack on nontonalism. Alas, nontonalists, like leftists and original sin, may be all but inexpungeable. But just as few leftists ever lived in the Soviet Union, I doubt that many proponents of nontonalism actually listen to it in the privacy of their homes.

And now, on to the great good fun of making my way through the many unexplored pleasures on Mr. Teachout’s list.

Lawrence Fossi
Houston, Texas

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Terry Teachout writes:

I wish I could persuade James Harrison Cohen to give 20th-century music another try. It is hard for me to imagine that one who appreciates Beethoven would be unable to hear anything but “cacophony” in Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. What surprised me, though, was that Mr. Cohen was the sole correspondent to voice such views. I was delighted to find that virtually all of the exceptionally large number of readers who were moved to comment on the series shared my love for the masterpieces of tonal modernism, and I was immensely gratified by the intensity and seriousness of their response. It is no secret that the American audience for classical music is shrinking, but letters like these indicate that there is ample reason for hope.

Revisiting my list several months after I drew it up has been a salutary experience, and to those who wonder why their favorite works were not included, I can only say that some of them probably should have been. Nearly every piece mentioned above is a favorite of mine, even the much-maligned Ludus Tonalis. Henryk Górecki is still alive, though, which accounts for the absence of his Third Symphony.

Alas, all lists are by definition incomplete, just as their authors are imperfect; I am embarrassed to confess, for example, that I recently heard for the first time a well-known piece that certainly should have been included, Arthur Honegger’s Third Symphony, and I have no doubt that there are other compositions as yet undiscovered by me that are every bit as good as the ones on my list.

In this connection, I want to thank Steven R. Gerber for his thoughtful letter, which goes beyond the mere disputation of taste to make a number of valid and challenging points about the conceptual basis of my list. Though I do not think he is quite right to argue that one could easily name twenty pieces by Debussy or Bartók that are “better than any one piece by most of the other composers listed,” it is certainly true that much of (say) Prokofiev is better than most of (say) Walton, and I did indeed deliberately draw up my list in such a way as to obscure this fact, preferring instead to stress the richness and stylistic variety of 20th-century music.

I do take issue, however, with Mr. Gerber’s claim that it was my desire “to politicize the issues” that led me to call my list a “counter-canon.” The problem, as he is no doubt aware, is that the issues have already been politicized, and then some. In one of the various discussions of “Musical Masterpieces of the Century” that have taken place on Internet-based music forums in recent weeks, a homosexual writer went so far as to declare that my belief in the superiority of tonality was the aesthetic equivalent of a right-wing politician’s praising “family values.” Perhaps he spoke more truly than he knew—close readers may have noticed my reference to “the natural law of tonality”—but the inclusion of such famously homosexual composers as Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, Francis Poulenc, and Aaron Copland (the last of whom was both a homosexual and a Communist) surely suggests that I know the difference between art and politics, sexual or otherwise.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks to all those who have asked me to turn “Musical Masterpieces of the Century” into a book. I am thinking about doing just that.

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