# What's your most extreme piece of music you like?



## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

As in the title, what's your most extreme piece of music (as in avant garde, or closest to it as you could stomach) that you like?

I don't normally like weird stuff (it's all relative, I guess). But this one really gets me under its spell.


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

Probably Ligeti’s Atmospheres, which is my personal boundary line between “music” and “cool sound effects”


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## Highwayman (Jul 16, 2018)




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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

Penderecki's _Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima _is likely about as avant garde as I care to go. It actually starts to lose my attention about halfway through, but it is an interesting piece.


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

Perhaps Xenakis Persepolis, or Pithoprakta.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> As in the title, what's your most extreme piece of music (as in avant garde, or closest to it as you could stomach) that you like?
> 
> I don't normally like weird stuff (it's all relative, I guess). But this one really gets me under its spell.


Radulescu String Quartet 4


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Words like "weird" and "extreme" may prove rather unfair as assessments of musical art (or even of musical experimentation). Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Piano Sonata is rather "extreme", as is Bach's B Minor Mass, and Wagner's _Ring_ cycle. I'm sure some have suggested that those pieces are even "weird", especially in terms of their contemporaries. Yet, what is weirder than, say, Debussy's _Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune_ or Berlioz's _Symphonie Fantastique_? Perhaps Gesualdo's madrigals?

Of course, "extremism" and "weirdness" remain in the eyes (and ears) of the beholder (behearer), and one is entitled to his/her opinion.

I suspect many will find Schoenberg's _Pierrot lunaire_, Stravinsky's _Rite of Spring_, or George Crumb's _Black Angels_ string quartet to be "extreme" and/or "weird". I find each of these pieces beautiful and moving in an emotional sense (and even in an intellectual sense).

If one judges John Cage's _4'33"_ to be extreme and/or weird, I might still argue that it possesses an intellectual power and beauty, if not precisely an emotional one.

Then there are the widely contrasting works of individual composers. I prove a fan of the music of Peter Maxwell Davies and have worked at learning his beautiful (to me) _Farewell to Stromness_ by way of an arragement on my ol' guitar. It's a piece that a few folks who have heard me playing it have stopped to ask "What is that?" And they tend to like it.






Of course, Davies also wrote a piece titled _Eight Songs for a Mad King_. It may not be "easy listening", and it is certainly different in tone, mood, and expressiveness from _...Stromness_, but I feel unfair to term it either "extreme" or "weird". Let's just say it's different from many other musical pieces we're familiar with.






So I suspect I have little to offer to this thread. So perhaps I'll go off and practice a bit more on the guitar. Maybe try to learn an arrangement of Davies's _Eight Songs_ ... or perhaps just one of them, _for a Mad King_.


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## Ariasexta (Jul 3, 2010)

Good question. The border of my repertoir if you mean that? The string quintet and other solo violin or duo string music like Luigi Gattis sonatas for Violin and viola and Paganinis solo violin music. The largest post classical setting for the string is not beyond the quintets, I explore small string ensemble music without piano accompaniment untill modern age. No piano is my aeternal doctrine for all non-pop serious music. Also, I would like to encounter a few good modern sacred vocal music but not spending too much on the adventure.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

Probably something by Cage like Variations II, whose score looks something like this:


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## Comity (Nov 8, 2020)

Hermann Nitsch - Harmoniumwerk


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Nono's _La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura_ is extreme-ly good.


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## Kilgore Trout (Feb 26, 2014)

Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Comity said:


> Hermann Nitsch - Harmoniumwerk


Just read about Nitsch's art vision. He seems more well known in visual and performance art. He seems to have a fascination with blood that's rather disturbing to me. A lot of his paintings look like blood splatterings in a murder scene.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture...-gore-in-art-be-beautiful-nitsch-shows-it-can


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)




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## Comity (Nov 8, 2020)

Phil loves classical said:


> Just read about Nitsch's art vision. He seems more well known in visual and performance art. He seems to have a fascination with blood that's rather disturbing to me. A lot of his paintings look like blood splatterings in a murder scene.
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/culture...-gore-in-art-be-beautiful-nitsch-shows-it-can


Haha, yes, maybe I should have made it clear that I'm only a fan of his Harmoniumwerk. I've seen stills from performances (yick!) and heard his more traditional music (yawn . . . but it's been years).

The Harmoniumwerk pieces probably don't sound all that great via youtube. Lots of low frequencies.


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## Comity (Nov 8, 2020)

I read some interview with him in Wire (UK music mag) a long time ago. IIRC, he's been kicked out of some European countries. Maybe just Germany or Austria.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

I'm willing to go pretty far, and there are some very abstract works by the likes of Ives, Varese, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Sessions, Cage, and Boulez, and others; which I can now count among my favorites. I guess I draw my line in the sand when composers go 100% electronic. While Varese's _Poeme Electronique_ or John Cage's electronic works that are based on chance operations, demonstrate an interesting organization of sound, I can't relate to such music as _classical_ music. There are other purely electronic works by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Yuji Takahashi that I find pretty much un-listenable (although, Takahashi is also a very fine pianist who made a rare, but exemplar recording of Rzewski's _People United_). I do have some liking for the semi-electronic works of Mario Davidovsky, as long there is a violin, or a cello , or a guitar in there that represents some kind of human element.


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## EmperorOfIceCream (Jan 3, 2020)

Franck Bedrossian might be "extreme," ("saturated," noise, extended techniques, electronics) but his music is very very good, especially Epigrams and Itself. And he's writing a piano concerto !!!


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## Gallus (Feb 8, 2018)

Xenakis Persepolis, probably. Love the soundscapes. Huge fan of Xenakis in general.






It probably helps that away from classical I'm a fan of electronic music in general.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I'm afraid my most-far-out (which means it isn't really) composition would be Turangalîla. I felt very modern and brave uncovering it from the Uni library in the 1980s, and I used it effectively to shut the neighbours down if they ever had a late night drinks do that got a bit rowdy. But I never went more avant garde than that, which I thinks makes me, officially, an old fogey. Sorry


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I can go as far as any of the more barking late 20th century operas in my collection. Candidates include _Life with an Idiot_ (Schnittke), _Le Grand Macabre_ (Ligeti) and _Resurrection_ (Maxwell Davies). Certain works of Lutosławski and Boulez also inhabit the furthest edges of my own particular world.


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I'm afraid my most-far-out (which means it isn't really) composition would be Turangalîla. I felt very modern and brave uncovering it from the Uni library in the 1980s, and I used it effectively to shut the neighbours down if they ever had a late night drinks do that got a bit rowdy. But I never went more avant garde than that, which I thinks makes me, officially, an old fogey. Sorry


Even Turangalîla is too much for me, so you seem pretty hardcore in comparision! I'll have to go with something like the Grosse Fugue or Verklärte Nacht!!


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Phil loves classical said:


> As in the title, what's your most extreme piece of music (as in avant garde, or closest to it as you could stomach) that you like?


I don't think of music in the terms you describe. For me music is either of two kinds, the kind I like (which includes everything from very early music to the most recent, in a variety of genres), and the other kind.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I'm afraid my most-far-out (which means it isn't really) composition would be Turangalîla. I felt very modern and brave uncovering it from the Uni library in the 1980s, and I used it effectively to shut the neighbours down if they ever had a late night drinks do that got a bit rowdy. But I never went more avant garde than that, which I thinks makes me, officially, an old fogey. Sorry


I always think of a certain reptile when confronted with this Messiaen monster.









The _Turangalîla_ is indeed a monster which likely qualifies for this thread's poster's "extreme" and "weird" nomers. I've never been an overt fan of Messiaen's music, but I do appreciate it for its unique genius, and I do find the _Quatour Pour La Fin Du Temps_, truly a haunting work, spinning over the speakers in my listening room at least a few times each year. At the very least the _Turangalîla_ is strange.

I'm reminded that my literary studies revealed the contention of critic Harold Bloom that all great works of art possess a "strangeness" of some sort or other. Of course, Bloom was speaking largely in terms of literary works, those great _strange _masterpieces such as Homer's _Odyssey_, Dante's _Commedia_, Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, Cervantes's _Don Quixote_, Shakespeare's major plays, James Joyce's _Ulysses_, Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ .... The sense of strangeness extends, I contend, to great works in the other arts as well. In any case, the _Turangalîla_ is indeed strange, which makes it worthy of our consideration as a great work of art.

Indeed, looking over those works already mentioned in this thread, one senses a "strangeness" apparent in each. Which is why, perhaps, they get mentioned here. For lesser works, with lesser strangeness, simply don't make the cut and remain mired in that soup of mediocrity, sameness, and lameness that marks the bulk of art -- perhaps interesting for a moment or two, but lacking power of any meaningful lastingness, likely due to their less than strange nature.

Which makes me curious to revisit some Messiaen. Which I can do handily having added to my collection, some ten years ago, the Deutsche Grammophon Messiaen _Complete Edition_, catalogue number 480 1333, a box set compilation with strangenesses aplenty spread over 32 CDs.









Maybe it's music I wouldn't ordinarily have thought of listening to today, but because of this thread, and this web site, is now a gnawing priority. The power, and the "strangeness" of Talk Classical Forum strikes again.


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## Lisztian (Oct 10, 2011)

EmperorOfIceCream said:


> Franck Bedrossian might be "extreme," ("saturated," noise, extended techniques, electronics) but his music is very very good, especially Epigrams and Itself. And he's writing a piano concerto !!!


Him and Raphael Cendo, for sure. Awesome music.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

Finally "got" Xenakis' Synaphai











Quite simply a visceral experience..

The first avant-garde piece that I really liked was Ives' General Booth Enters into Heaven.






Thought it was cacophonous and horrible when I first heard it. Today it seems to me a highly melodic hymn of great beauty and colorful harmonies.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

^ Never heard that one by Xenakis. Could be my new favourite work of his (maybe because I like piano). It sounds like it could have been composed this century.


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## Sequentia (Nov 23, 2011)

I see your "weird", and I raise you the following:






I don't really dig Ustvolskaya's music, but she deserves to be mentioned in this thread:


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## Sequentia (Nov 23, 2011)

Phil loves classical said:


> ^ Never heard that one by Xenakis. Could be my new favourite work of his (maybe because I like piano). It sounds like it could have been composed this century.


If you liked _Synaphaï_, be sure to give _Keqrops_ a listen:


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

^ I never liked Keqrops that much. I feel the music and the piano part is not nearly as interesting.


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

adriesba said:


> ................


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

chu42 said:


> Finally "got" Xenakis' Synaphai
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Indeed, one of the great videos of music performance.

How'd I miss this one on MTV???


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

adriesba said:


> .....
> ................





pianozach said:


> ................


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................................. *

* Wasn't it John Cage who said, concerning 4'33", "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it,"?


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

SONNET CLV said:


> .................................
> 
> .................................
> 
> ...


Consider it said.


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## Comity (Nov 8, 2020)

A few more occurred to me, though the composers aren't as extreme as Nitsch

Luc Ferrari - Interupteur/Tautologos

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

Black Angels by Crumb
Violin Concerto by Ligeti
Nymphea by Saariaho 
In Tempus Praesens by Gubaidulina


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## nncortes (Oct 5, 2014)

Max Richter- Vivaldi's Four Season's Recomposed


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

Boulez - Piano Sonata 2


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

I don't know if it is either "extreme" or "weird" or both (or neither), but I have admitted elsewhere on this Forum that it took me a couple of attempts before I was able to sit through an entire playing of the Schnittke First Symphony. Of all the Schnittke I'm familiar with (and I have the box set of his complete symphonies in my collection as well as several other discs of assorted music), that First Symphony strikes me as the thorniest. Which, if I follow my Bloomsian argument of "strangeness", must point to this Schnittke First Symphony as a masterpiece. Which I think it is. But it is also thorny, and it took me a couple of attempts before I could savor the work from start to finish in a single sitting.

Just another piece to check out for those interested in the music on this thread.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

The first pieces that come to mind. I adore these chaotic but (to me) still highly listenable pieces.

Roslavets - Komsomoliya





Jón Leifs - Hekla





And here's a favorite noisy piece of electronic music:


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

This is a fascinating piece for classical guitar. I have the score...When it comes to experimental electronic music I discovered a piece called "Execution of Intelligence" by Zbigniew Karkowski. Noisy stuff there!


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## Highwayman (Jul 16, 2018)

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> This is a fascinating piece for classical guitar. I have the score...When it comes to experimental electronic music I discovered a piece called "Execution of Intelligence" by Zbigniew Karkowski. Noisy stuff there!


Does the score require performer to be barefoot?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> This is a fascinating piece for classical guitar. I have the score...When it comes to experimental electronic music I discovered a piece called "Execution of Intelligence" by Zbigniew Karkowski. Noisy stuff there!





Highwayman said:


> Does the score require performer to be barefoot?


Actually, the vibrations from the wood and the strings resonates down from the fingers to the toes and directly into the floor for what is essentially a so-good-feeling "buzz". No rubber soles to damp the vibrations. If you're a guitar player, you should try it.


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