# What will become part of 'standard' repertoire



## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Consider new music written for a medium to large sized ensemble (i.e. large chamber orchestra or more), the reality is that the majority will have maybe a handful of performances and then mostly disappear. There will be a much smaller percentage which will gain a small toehold on the fringes of the classical world - perhaps due to the influence of a single performer, and only a relative handful which will make their way into what we call the standard repertoire. So... imagine that that you are looking at the 2040 season schedule of a dozen of the top orchestras in the world. What works that have been premiered in the last 25 years do you think might appear somewhere in those schedules? Clearly your decision should not be based on your personal opinions of the individual works, rather from a realistic assessment of what is likely to last.

This question was prompted by a comment made recently when I mentioned having been listing to Hans Abrahamsen's _Let Me Tell You_, a work which I think will survive.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Speculating about this may be a fun game of clairvoyance, but I'd imagine the thing that truly matters is which works get recordings released and thus enter the immortality of Google Play.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Eh. I guess works like _Let Me Tell You_ and John Luther Adams' _Become Ocean_ might survive, at least for a while, in the same way as Dvorak - a friendlier version of what other composers are doing. And if anything from the last 25 years survives, I think Gérard Grisey's _Quatre chants_ will. And Boulez's _Notations_ for orchestra. And a lot of people got excited about Georg Friedrich Haas' _in vain_ - we probably won't hear the last of that for a while. By the same token, maybe something by Saariaho (_Laeterna magica_? _Circle Map_)? And I bet something by Adès will still be played in the Anglophone countries - let's say "Polaris" - not because he's any good, but because we love our boring Brits (who's up for a Delius festival?).

But all this presupposes that there even is a repertoire in 2040, which is not obvious to me.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Some that wouldn't surprise me, going back to 1992 (which by my surprised math is about 25 years ago): 

- Aho: Symphony #12 (or any of his later symphonies) 
- Anderson: Book of Hours 
- Berio: Ekphrasis
- Carter: ASKO Concerto
- Carter: Clarinet Concerto
- Carter: Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei 
- Chin: Piano Concerto 
- Chin: Šu for sheng and orchestra
- Ge: Shanghai Reminiscences 
- Gubaidulina: Canticle of the Sun
- Haas: In Vain 
- Hovhaness: Symphony #66 
- Kurtag: Stele 
- Ligeti: Hamburg Concerto
- Ligeti: Violin Concerto 
- Lutoslawksi: Symphony #4
- Rautavaara: Symphony #7 Angel of Light
- Rihm: Deus passus
- Rihm: Jagden und Formen 
- Salonen: Violin Concerto 
- Romitelli: Index of Metals 
- Stockhausen: Helicopter string quartet* 

* The OP wrote, "large chamber orchestra or more," and in order to indulge myself in including this work, I am going to count a helicopter as more than a large chamber orchestra. There were a few more "ordinary" chamber works that I was a little bummed about not being able to include by not finding a way to regard them a more than a large chamber orchestra. I excluded opera, but I couldn't resist Romitelli's work.


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

I know it gets a bad rep (why?), but *John Adams'* Absolute Jest should thrive in the future. I don't see why current orchestras could not program Beethoven and Adams together. The thing is a fitting romp of Beethoven's mad, beautiful character. Plus, have the quartet play No. 16 before the piece, or play the transcribed version for orchestra before Adams. It would be great fun for the audience to note all the melodies and themes that Adams quotes and develops. A totally new and engaging listening experience.

Hell, do it tomorrow!

Also: I think *Schnittke's* Symphony No. 1 finds it day, someday. It is so entertaining. Obviously, I like going with the "quoting" the classics route, but developing and transfiguring the stuff. Hyper-realist-post-post-modernism, something like that.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

science said:


> - Carter: ASKO Concerto
> - Carter: Clarinet Concerto
> - Carter: Symphonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei


Oops, forgot about him. Throw the flute concerto in there, I guess.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Out of curiosity I consulted the results of my TC polls, and found that the top two works of the past 25 years are Messiaen's _Éclairs sur l'au-delà…_ (1991) and Takemitsu's _From Me Flows What You Call Time_ (1990). Both of them were liked by exactly 50% of voters.
Which other works have exactly the same level of popularity on these polls? Bruch's 1st violin concerto, Gershwin's _An American in Paris_, Hindemith's _Symphonic Metamorphoses_, Rachmaninoff's _Isle of the Dead_, Saint-Saëns's 1st cello concerto, and Szymanowski's 1st violin concerto.
Now looking at the 2015/16 US concert season, all of those older works have been programmed, some more than others (Szymanowski once, Bruch 13 times); the Messiaen and Takemitsu haven't.
What can we conclude from this? Probably nothing!


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## Chronochromie (May 17, 2014)

Nereffid said:


> Out of curiosity I consulted the results of my TC polls, and found that the top two works of the past 25 years are Messiaen's _Éclairs sur l'au-delà…_ (1991) and Takemitsu's _From Me Flows What You Call Time_ (1990). Both of them were liked by exactly 50% of voters.
> Which other works have exactly the same level of popularity on these polls? Bruch's 1st violin concerto, Gershwin's _An American in Paris_, Hindemith's _Symphonic Metamorphoses_, Rachmaninoff's _Isle of the Dead_, Saint-Saëns's 1st cello concerto, and Szymanowski's 1st violin concerto.
> Now looking at the 2015/16 US concert season, all of those older works have been programmed, some more than others (Szymanowski once, Bruch 13 times); the Messiaen and Takemitsu haven't.
> What can we conclude from this? Probably nothing!


That the US concert halls need a good big dose of late Messiaen.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Standard repertoire is by definition what stays over time as established/accepted concert pieces. The consistency over time is the one defining feature. Unless tastes change, I cannot see any reason why standard repertoire might fade.


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## Lyricus (Dec 11, 2015)

My official prediction is that orchestral movie/game soundtracks from Williams, Zimmer, Uematsu, etc. will be mainstays in the future. They're already big and they're bound to get bigger.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

My prediction is they won't (though I'd like to think that some of Yoko Kanno's songs can be kept alive), and come to think of it, that makes them useful for demonstrating how good Gershwin's concert works (which entered the repertory immediately and are still there) really are.


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

Arvo Part's Symphony no. 4, maybe. 

I don't think what survives will necessarily be what I personally would want to survive (not that I dislike this work).


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Oh right, that's another composer I always forget about. Yeah, we'll probably keep some of him around too for a while, though among pieces eligible for this thread, I'd bet on _Tabula rasa_ and the Te deum before the fourth symphony.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Magnus Lindberg's orchestral works.

Unfortunately some of the best music of the last 20 years probably won't make it - too difficult.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

isorhythm said:


> Unfortunately some of the best music of the last 20 years probably won't make it - too difficult.


What are you thinking of? (And haven't we established by now that difficulty is no obstacle? I mean, Schönberg clearly isn't going away. Though maybe you can say he's not exactly part of the standard repertory, either.)


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

My time frame was wrong, should have said 30 years.

I was thinking of Ligeti's piano and violin concertos and Boulez's Sur incises when I wrote that, but I'm sure there are others.

The best works from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s haven't really become standard repertoire in the U.S., and I don't see that trend reversing itself.

I could see Unsuk Chin's concertos becoming standard, which would be good.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

isorhythm said:


> The best works from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s haven't really become standard repertoire in the U.S., and I don't see that trend reversing itself.


They have in many cases been frequently recorded, however. How many versions of Berio's Sinfonia are there now? We might have to rethink what "standard repertoire" means now and will mean in the future.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Blancrocher said:


> They have in many cases been frequently recorded, however. How many versions of Berio's Sinfonia are there now? We might have to rethink what "standard repertoire" means now and will mean in the future.


ArkivMusic lists 7 recordings of the Sinfonia. Maybe that's a strong number, maybe not.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Bulldog said:


> ArkivMusic lists 7 recordings of the Sinfonia. Maybe that's a strong number, maybe not.


It'd be nice if there were an easy way to get lists of most-often recorded works from particular decades. Not for any reason, really, aside from idle curiosity.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Lots of Schnittke is going to be standard: Third Symphony, Seventh Symphony, Concerto for Piano and Strings, Concerto Grosso no. 1, String Quartets 3 & 4, and others.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

EdwardBast said:


> Schittke


Hooray for serendipitous puns.

When the Bolsheviks are called to account on judgment day, not least among their crimes will be reckoned the fact that when they came in, Russian music sounded like nationalist Stravinsky, and when they left it sounded like that.


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2016)

Maybe "L'amour de loin" opera by Kaija Saariaho. It is being played at the Met next season in a Robert Lepage production and is one of the few operas written in the last 10-15 years being produced numerous times. 

You have to pick something that appears on programs on a more regular basis. Ligeti, maybe?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Bulldog said:


> ArkivMusic lists 7 recordings of the Sinfonia. Maybe that's a strong number, maybe not.


Certainly a strong number if those are all available on CD or digitally. Even good stuff like the works of Roger Sessions are lucky to get a single CD release. And there's a huge step from "one good recording available" to "more than one", because at that point it's no longer only about charity but also about whether it makes financial sense to produce new recordings of the same works.

For something as invisible to most people as Berio, and we're talking about a work that's 30 minutes long and has several soloists and an orchestra - not a trivial matter to produce - seven different recordings available is flat-out legendary. It will be remembered by the initiated as one of the supernatural wonders of the world for ages to come.


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> Certainly a strong number if those are all available on CD or digitally. Even good stuff like the works of Roger Sessions are lucky to get a single CD release. And there's a huge step from "one good recording available" to "more than one", because at that point it's no longer only about charity but also about whether it makes financial sense to produce new recordings of the same works.
> 
> For something as invisible to most people as Berio, and we're talking about a work that's 30 minutes long and has several soloists and an orchestra - not a trivial matter to produce - seven different recordings available is flat-out legendary. It will be remembered by the initiated as one of the supernatural wonders of the world for ages to come.


I think, in the case of Sessions, it's sort of a "scene" thing. Generally speaking, I don't think American serial/stochastic/spectral/etc music does all that well because American ensembles aren't quite as interested in performing the stuff. Sure, you've got Carter. Wuorinen does ok for himself. But I think Berio, in addition to composing a masterwork, was in the right places at the right times.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Hooray for serendipitous puns.
> 
> When the Bolsheviks are called to account on judgment day, not least among their crimes will be reckoned the fact that when they came in, Russian music sounded like nationalist Stravinsky, and when they left it sounded like that.


So what Schnittke do you know, Harold? And why on earth are you blaming the Bolsheviks?


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

One of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 18-19th centuries was opera.
One of the most popular forms of entertainment from the mid-20th century to the present is....FILM.
Do we have to limit our speculation to Stockhausen/Penderecki/Ligeti and the like? No doubt those people will have at least SOMETHING remembered. For me personally, I think that when people look back on our music 200 years from now, the first thing they'll see is John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, James Horner, etc. 
I see film becoming much like opera is today- "antiquated" in a sense, but still popular, and I think it's fair to say we still live somewhat in the "early" years of film, at least compared to what generations in the distant future will see.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

I've said it before, I'll say it again. It's not film that replaced opera as far as music goes, it's the popular music record. When people look back in 200 years, they won't see John Williams, they won't even see Bernard Herrmann, but they might see the Beatles.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

A great number of Corigliano works will be programmed. His Symphonies, and "Red Violin" Concerto. He seems to have lasting value with audiences, and he's personally among my favorites living today even though I haven't really done in depth study of him.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> ...but they might see the Beatles.


Well,in that case, it's nice to know that the music of the 20th century that will be most remembered actually had memorable melodies.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

DaveM said:


> Well,in that case, it's nice to know that the music of the 20th century that will be most remembered actually had memorable melodies.


They might see Boulez too. Of course he has memorable melodies too, but some people who are wrong think he doesn't.


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Gordontrek said:


> One of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 18-19th centuries was opera.
> One of the most popular forms of entertainment from the mid-20th century to the present is....FILM.
> Do we have to limit our speculation to Stockhausen/Penderecki/Ligeti and the like? No doubt those people will have at least SOMETHING remembered. For me personally, I think that when people look back on our music 200 years from now, the first thing they'll see is John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer, James Horner, etc.
> I see film becoming much like opera is today- "antiquated" in a sense, but still popular, and I think it's fair to say we still live somewhat in the "early" years of film, at least compared to what generations in the distant future will see.


Most film music I've heard isn't very satisfactory as a piece of music divorced from the film it belongs to.


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## Adam Weber (Apr 9, 2015)

I'm seeing the Seattle Symphony perform Berio's Sinfonia on the 6th. Hopefully part of a larger trend?


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## Guest (Jan 29, 2016)

Who actually listens to a CD of orchestral film music? And more importantly, who listens to orchestral film music from 50 years ago? Is this music being recorded again, divorced from the film? No. 

Whether people 50-100 years from now will care about John Williams will depend more on whether or the movies he wrote music for are still popular. 

Occasionally orchestra programs pot-pourris of famous movie scores, but that's more a desperate attempt to reach a wider public who doesn't otherwise attend classical music concerts.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

DoReFaMi said:


> Who actually listens to a CD of orchestral film music? And more importantly, who listens to orchestral film music from 50 years ago? Is this music being recorded again, divorced from the film? No.


And yet...
http://www.tributefilmclassics.com/


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Many critics and musicologists talk gloomily about the alleged "ossification " of the classical repertoire, but they are dead wrong .
In fact, the repertoire is in constant flux , never the same any given concert or opera season . 
There is a certain canon of lastingly popular works which has been established over the centuries from Haydn andMozart through the 20th century , but every year numerous new works are premiered , and 
long neglected ones from the past are revived .
The vast majority of the orchestral works written through the ages have proved to be ephemeral, but you never know when any of them might be revived . Certain works go through long periods of neglect and then begin to be played more often, and this is totally unpredictable .
For example, the symphonies of Louis Spohr )( 1784 - 1859 ) were widely played in the first half of the 19th century , but they have completely vanished from concerts today even tough they have all been recorded in recent years by several conductors interested in neglected repertoire .
Spohr was a very important musician in his day , a prolific composer, leading violin virtuoso and one of the first conductors in the modern sense of the word , and if I remember correctly, the first to use a baton . But today, his name is known only to musicologists and hard core classical music enthusiasts who listen to a wide variety of repertoire and read about music history .


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> And yet...
> http://www.tributefilmclassics.com/


Key words: "for the first time," which is a pretty good start for defining what's _not_ in the repertory.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

superhorn said:


> Many critics and musicologists talk gloomily about the alleged "ossification " of the classical repertoire, but they are dead wrong .
> In fact, the repertoire is in constant flux , never the same any given concert or opera season .


I think what we have now is metastasis of the repertory. Even composers who've just barely had time to start dropping out are being Reevaluated - e.g. Gounod - and of course we keep adding more and more obscure ones from the 18th century (anything to fill out the radio playlist now that people have heard everything by Mozart too much and we're still scared of anything harder than _Petrushka_).

Maybe the end game here is that we stuff the repertory so full that all but the very greatest get lost in the crowd, and so ultimately, effectively, we end up reducing it to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven - just as Ancient Greek literature now means, to non-specialists, Homer and maybe the three tragedians.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> I think what we have now is metastasis of the repertory. Even composers who've just barely had time to start dropping out are being Reevaluated - e.g. Gounod - and of course we keep adding more and more obscure ones from the 18th century (anything to fill out the radio playlist now that people have heard everything by Mozart too much and we're still scared of anything harder than _Petrushka_).
> 
> Maybe the end game here is that we stuff the repertory so full that all but the very greatest get lost in the crowd, and so ultimately, effectively, we end up reducing it to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven...


Seems to me that a re-evaluation of previously unfairly unappreciated 19th and 18th century composers and their addition to the repertory and playlists could lead to the exact opposite 'endgame'.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

DaveM said:


> Seems to me that a re-evaluation of previously unfairly unappreciated 19th and 18th century composers and their addition to the repertory and playlists could lead to the exact opposite 'endgame'.


Meaning what? - they _don't_ crowd the repertory? Or they replace people who are already there? Because that's not going to happen. You can't make Albinoni and Glazunov sound better than Vivaldi and Stravinsky- never mind Mozart and Beethoven - you can only give them some of their betters' oxygen.

There are no more unappreciated composers.


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## Gordontrek (Jun 22, 2012)

violadude said:


> Most film music I've heard isn't very satisfactory as a piece of music divorced from the film it belongs to.


Well yeah, if you take the track being played when x character and y character are trying to shoot each other up, you're not exactly going to have anything worthy of a concert hall (maybe with some exceptions). But I see no reason why a main title, or end credit music, or a character's theme, wouldn't be mentioned alongside classic opera overtures and recitatives and arias in the future. 
I hope you don't mind if I provide some examples of my favorite snippets from film music which hold up beautifully outside of the film:








 (this is from my favorite film score of all time)




 something "modern-sounding" if you will.





There are a LOT of others that I'm probably stupidly forgetting.



DoReFaMi said:


> Who actually listens to a CD of orchestral film music? And more importantly, who listens to orchestral film music from 50 years ago? Is this music being recorded again, divorced from the film? No.
> 
> Whether people 50-100 years from now will care about John Williams will depend more on whether or the movies he wrote music for are still popular.
> 
> Occasionally orchestra programs pot-pourris of famous movie scores, but that's more a desperate attempt to reach a wider public who doesn't otherwise attend classical music concerts.


One thing I want you to notice about the pieces I linked- NOT ONE of them comes from the film's original score. They all come from a later performance of the score by another orchestra, and the last one (with Elmer Bernstein) was even played at the Proms. 
I own a ton of the Erich Kunzel/Cincinnati Pops movie score CDs and I've gotten no end of pleasure from them. There's also a substantial amount of film music from the City of Prague Philharmonic, although I don't recommend it because that orchestra is unusually terrible. Kunzel/CPO blows them out of the water.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Harold in Columbia said:


> Even composers who've just barely had time to start dropping out are being Reevaluated





Harold in Columbia said:


> There are no more unappreciated composers.


Seems that there are those that disagree.


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## Harold in Columbia (Jan 10, 2016)

No it doesn't. If you're being reevaluated, you aren't unappreciated.

If you're being reevaluated today, you're probably (definitely) over-appreciated.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

nathanb said:


> I think, in the case of Sessions, it's sort of a "scene" thing.


Well, his piano concerto was recorded by no other than James Levine, so there's been a major conductor who has promoted his music. Personally, I don't see why someone wouldn't listen to Sessions if they truly do enjoy late Schoenberg. I don't think you can say Sessions was any worse (I actually prefer Sessions myself). Partly I'm sure it's to do with lack of awareness. Schoenberg is such a well-known name, and Sessions is someone you need to search for to find. So, people are just being lazy, I think?


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