The Essential Canon of Classical Music

by David Dubal

Overview

The ultimate guide to classical composers and their music-for both the novice and the experienced listener

Music, according to Aaron Copland, can thrive only if there are "gifted listeners." But today's listeners must choose between classical and rock, opera and rap, and the choices can seem overwhelming at times. In The Essential Canon of Classical Music, David Dubal comes to the aid of the struggling listener and provides a cultural-literacy handbook for classical music. Dubal identifies the 240 composers whose works are most important to an understanding of classical music and offers a comprehensive, chronological guide to their lives and works. He has searched beyond the traditional canon to introduce readers to little-known works by some of the most revered names in classical music-Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert-as well as to the major works of lesser-known composers. In a spirited and opinionated voice, Dubal seeks to rid us of the notion of "masterpieces" and instead to foster a new generation of master listeners. The result is an uncommon collection of the wonders classical music has to offer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466807266
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	800
Sales rank:	859,249
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

David Dubal is an acclaimed pianist and a professor at the Julliard School. He has won several awards, including the Peabody Award and an Emmy for the documentary The Golden Age of the Piano. The former classical music program director at WNCN, Dubal is currently a broadcaster on WQXR. He is also the author of many books.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from The Essential Canon of Classical Music

We can only speculate about the origins of music, but its seemingly magical qualities must have been apparent early in human prehistory. Primitive music of some sort probably preceded speech by thousands of years. Those with unusual vocal abilities may have used their power in rituals or to convey messages over a distance. These ancient singers, like their brothers the cave painters, may even have been privileged members of the clan. But it was a long time before people started making vocal utterances in intervals, thus creating melodies that could be repeated again and again.

The first musical instrument, if you can call it that, was the pursed lips of a whistler (no doubt first used in an attempt to imitate bird calls). Early peoples thereafter developed banging, twanging, and scraping instruments, most of which were used, with the dance, to practice magical and sexual rites and to worship the sun and the moon. Charles Darwin was convinced "that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex."

As the concept of pitch developed, those with good musical ears could start to imitate sounds. The pitches they heard, however, were not those that we have come to know. Each area of the world developed a different vocabulary of sounds. We do not know who the first musical geniuses were, or when they first organized sound into a musical form. How interesting it would be to go back in time and hear the music used for prehistoric funeral and marital rites, or the humming and singing (if any) that accompanied hunting andgathering!

Our knowledge of music in ancient civilizations is little better than that in the prehistoric world. We know very little about Egypt, and only a little more about the strides made in India, Persia, and the Far East. The five-tone or pentatonic scale was first developed in China around three thousand years ago. In ancient Greece music was almost held sacred, and the mythological musician Orpheus was feted. Pythagoras realized that music had healing agents, but Plato found it dangerous and enervating. The Greeks made great advances in musical theory, developing scales or modes; but only a few fragments of their music survive. This gifted civilization was probably the most musically expressive up to that time.

It was with the emergence of Christianity that the Western musical tradition began. Gregorian chant, named for Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), had its roots in Jewish liturgical chants. In addition, psalmody, hymns, antiphons, and so forth became part of a common liturgy that spread through the Christian world. For several hundred years after Gregory, theory and practice slowly evolved together (for creativity could not blossom until theoretical problems were solved).

The Middle Ages saw the birth of polyphony, a revolutionary new form of music based on two or more parts, or melodic lines. Polyphony made possible the mass, the chief musical ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. It also saw the birth of a secular musical tradition, alongside the liturgical. Wandering minstrels, known as troubadours, based their popular melodies on poems of courtly love. They made creative use of new musical instruments to accompany their chivalric stanzas, which were usually written in the vernacular languages and not in Latin.

The vernacular was making rapid progress in the other arts, especially after 1300, when both Dante and Petrarch started to write verse in Italian. Their poems expressed emotional states not previously addressed by the arts. (Petrarch, for example, dedicated his sonnets to his lady love, Laura.) Music could not yet rival the flexibility of poetry, but Petrarch's contemporary Guillaume de Machaut brought music to a new rhythmic complexity through syncopation. Like other composers, he worked for the Church, but in his ballades he codified a new type of secular song in courtly language, accompanied by an instrument, with sections of ornamental freedom. The ballade form would retain its popularity for a century.

As it did with the other arts, Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, developed a flourishing musical culture, especially after 1450. While Giovanni Bellini was painting his incomparable madonnas, Italians were reveling in madrigals, a mostly secular polyphonic form using two to as many as eight vocal parts. In the humanistic Renaissance, as one scholar put it, "music was not a set of compositional techniques but a complex of social conditions, intellectual states of mind, attitudes, aspirations, habits of performers, artistic support systems, intracultural communication, and many other ingredients which add up to a thriving matrix of musical energy." Beauty in art and craft was a highly valued element of life. The artist of the Renaissance was in fact more integrated into general society than he would ever be again.

Italian and English musicians were artists of the highest cultivation. Performances were constant and lively, and for the first time notated music was
f0published. New instruments were created in abundance and were of exceptional beauty in their ornaments: organs, harpsichords, cornetti, shawms (forerunners of the oboe), sackbuts (early trombones), viols (cousins of the modern violin, cello, and viola), flutes, lutes, and dozens of others. Like many noblemen, Henry VIII of England, who considered himself a fine composers had a splendid collection of instruments (nearly four hundred by 1530).

By the late sixteenth century, any person of rank or pretension was expected to have musical proficiency. Most were excellent sight-readers. The reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603) was a golden age for the arts, and music thrived in the home, at church, and in the theater. Shakespeare used song prolifically in his plays and showed not only his love for the art but his knowledge of it. He may have played the recorder. In his 128th sonnet, he wrote of "jacks" that part of the virginal (keyboard) action that makes possible the plucking of the strings:

I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.

In Italy madrigals continued to rule the secular musical scene in the later Renaissance. Both Claudio Monteverdi and Carlo Gesualdo provided greatness to this form. The madrigal is the neglected glory of the Renaissance. Two close contemporaries, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus, were giants: Palestrina's masses, with their beautiful euphony, are among music's purest, most angelic manifestations. The versatile master Lassus fulfilled the motet form, the villanella, and the chanson. These and many composers in other lands -- such as the Swiss Ludwig Senfl, the Dutchman Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria, and the Englishman William Byrd -- make the sixteenth century a time of high musical adventurousness. Composers had never had more options in vocal and instrumental expression. Most of all, conflicts between polyphony and melody grew. At the end of the sixteenth century, a group of Florentine dilettantes, poets, and musicians plotted the germ of a new art form. They rejected polyphony as unsuited to accompany song in drama. Jacopo Peri's Dafne (1598) may be called the first drama to be completely set to music. It signaled the birth of opera -- and of the Baroque era.

Copyright © 2001 David Dubal

--From The Essential Canon of Classical Music, by David Dubal (Illustrator). © October 2001 , North Point Press used by permission.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part 1 - The Medieval, Renaissance, and Elizabethan Ages
Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume Dufay
Josquin Desprez
Thomas Tallis
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Orlande de Lassus
William Byrd
Tomás Luis de Victoria
Giovanni Gabrieli
Carlo Gesualdo
John Dowland
Claudio Monteverdi
Gregorio Allegri

Part II - The Age of the Baroque
George Frideric Handel
Johann Sebastian Bach
Domenico Scarlatti

Other Baroque Composers
Girolamo Prescobaldi
Heinrich Schütz
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Dietrich Buxtehude
Arcangelo Corelli
Henry Purcell
Alessandro Scarlatti
François Couperin
Tomaso Albinoni
Antonio Vivaldi
Jan Zelenka
Georg Philipp Telemann
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Alessandro and Benedetto Marcello

Part III - The Age of Classicism
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Franz Joseph Haydn
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven

Other Classical Composers
Francesco Geminiani
Giuseppe Tartini
Thomas Arne
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
William Boyce
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Pietro Nardini
Antonio Soler
Luigi Boccherini
Domenico Cimarosa
Muzio Clementi
Luigi Cherubini
François-Adrien Boieldieu
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Fernando Sor
Mauro Giuliani

Part IV - The Romantic Age
Nicolò Paganini
Carl Maria von Weber
Gioachino Rossini
Franz Schubert
Gaetano Donizetti
Vincenzo Bellini
Hector Berlioz
Felix Mendelssohn
Frédéric Chopin
Robert Schumann
Franz Liszt
Richard Wagner
Giuseppe Verdi
Charles Gounod
Jacques Offenbach
César Franck
Bedrich Smetana
Anton Bruckner
Johann Strauss II
Johannes Brahms
Alexander Borodin
Camille Saint-Saëns
Georges Bizet
Modest Mussorgsky
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Antonín Dvorak
Edvard Grieg
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Gabriel Fauré
Leoš Janácek
Sir Edward Elgar
Giacomo Puccini
Hugo Wolf
Gustav Mahler
Frederick Delius
Claude Debussy
Richard Strauss
Jean Sibelius

Other Romantic Composers
Daniel-François Auber
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Franz Berwald
Albert Lortzing
Adolphe Adam
Mikhail Glinka
Otto Nicolairi
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Franz von Suppé
Édouard Lalo
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Karl Goldmark
Amilcare Ponchielli
Henryk Wieniawski
Léo Delibes
Mily Balakirev
Max Bruch
Hermann Goetz
Emmanuel Chabrier
Arrigo Boito
Sir Arthur Sullivan
Jules Massenet
Charles-Marie Widor
Pablo de Sarasate
Henri Duparc
Vincent d'lndy
Engelbert Humperdinck
John Philip Sousa
Anatoly Liadov
Ernest Chausson
Ruggiero Leoncavallo
Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov
Gustave Charpentier
Edward MacDowell
Isaac Albéniz
Charles Martin Loeffler
Anton Arensky
Pietro Mascagni
Alexander Glazunov
Carl Nielsen
Paul Dukas

Part V - The Age of Modernism
Alexander Scriabin
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Arnold Schoenberg
Maurice Ravel
Béla Bartok
Igor Stravinsky
Alban Berg
Sergei Prokofiev
Paul Hindemith
George Gershwin
Francis Poulenc
Aaron Copland
Dmitri Shostakovich
Benjamin Britten

Other Modern Composers
Erik Satie
Ferruccio Busoni
Umberto Giordano
Enrique Granados
Scott Joplin
Hans Pfitzner
Albert Roussel
Franz Lehár ardAlexander von Zemlinsky
Max Reger
Gustav Holst
Charles Ives
Josef Suk
Reinhold Glière
Fritz Kreisler
John Alden Carpenter
Manuel de Falla
Ernö von Dohnányi
Ottorino Respighi
Frank Bridge
Nikolai Medtner
Ernest Bloch
George Enescu
Karol Szymanowski
Joaquín Turina
Percy Grainger
Zoltán Kodály
Anton Webern
Sir Arnold Bax
Alfredo Casella
Edgard Varèse
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
George Butterworth
Marcel Dupré
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Jacques Ibert
Bohuslav Martinu
Frank Martin
Arthur Honegger
Ferde Grofé
Darius Milhaud
Walter Piston
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Carl Orff
Virgil Thomson
Howard Hanson
Roger Sessions
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Roy Harris
Silvestre Revueltas
Carlos Chávez
George Antheil
Kurt Weill
Harry Partch
Gerald Finzi
Joaquín Rodrigo
Maurice Duruflé
Sir William Walton
Aram Khachahirian
Dmitri Kabalevsky
Sir Michael Tippett
Elliott Carter
Olivier Messiaen
Grazyna Bacewicz
Samuel Barber
Alan Hovhaness
Gian Carlo Menotti
John Cage
Morton Gould
Witold Lutoslawski parGeorge Perle
Milton Babbitt
Alberto Ginastera
Lou Harrison
Leonard Bernstein
Karel Husa
Iannis Xenakis
György Ligeti
Ned Rorem
Luciano Berio
Pierre Boulez
Hans Werner Henze
Karlheinz Stockhausen
George Crumb
Toru Takemitsu
Rodion Shchedrin
Krzysztof Penderecki
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Alfred Schnittke
Arvo Pärt
Philip Glass
William Bolcom

A Brief Glossary of Musical Terms
Source List
Name Inde

Editorial Reviews

. . . something for everyone, from the beginner to the sophisticated listener. It has a permanent resting place on my CD player.

Tony Randall

No one writes more cogently on music than David Dubal. I learned a lot. Dubal instructs even as he entertains.

Ned Rorem

[Dubal] reminds us once again . . . that . . . classical music must be preserved as an integral part of our modern lives.

Peter Rosen

an engaging, informative listener's companion. It will help to introduce the beauty and extraordinary legacy of the classical music repertoire.

Joseph W. Polisi

For the serious music lover, The Essential Canon of Classical Music tells it all in the most elegant prose.

Margaret Mercer

. . . a fascinating mix of the familiar and the very unusual, but always exciting, performances that we all treasure.

Emanuel Ax

With wit and concision, David Dubal brings a sensibility to the study of classical music that both enlightens and entertains.

Peter B. Goodrich

Readers will grow to rely on his splendid array of facts about composers, their lives and work . . . together with recommended recordings.

Garrick Ohlsson

To attempt to cover the range of serious music is a herculean task from medieval polyphony to the minimalism of Arvo P?rt and Philip Glass, offering insights, biographical information on dozens of major and minor figures, and even finding room for moderately useful, if necessarily incomplete, discographies, Dubal has brought it off better than might have been expected. As a teacher at the Juilliard School and with 20 years as a classical program director at New York's WNCN radio station, he brings strong qualifications to the job, and since he writes decently, if sometimes rather bluntly, and has thought through his organization clearly, the book is probably the most useful of its kind now available. He divides music into the traditional five periods, and lists the significant composers as well as a host of lesser figures chronologically within those. In each case, he offers a few biographical snippets (more extended portraits for the great figures), provides a sense of where the composer fits into the scheme of things, then lists significant works and some chosen recordings. These are likely to be the most controversial aspects of the book, though Dubal is careful to point out that his choices offer a range of approaches to the seminal works. He does seem to have vast affection for the recordings of Sir Thomas Beecham and, more recently, for the work of Charles Dutoit; and inevitably some will question his priorities: nearly twice as much space for Richard Strauss as for, say, Sibelius? For Paul Dukas over Carl Nielsen? But the book's usefulness and comprehensiveness cannot be denied. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this entertaining and informative book, Dubal gives himself the difficult challenge of addressing two audiences simultaneously: listeners new to classical music and more experienced listeners who would like a guide to creating a "lifetime listening plan." A professor of piano literature at Juilliard and a former, longtime classical music programmer for WNCN in New York, he brings strong credentials to the task--and, for the most part, he succeeds. The scope and attention to detail are very impressive, and the engaging writing style makes for pleasurable browsing. Dubal includes 240 composers in five chronological sections and categorizes them by date of birth within each grouping. He considers 60 to be major and, therefore, worthy of lengthy biographical entries and substantial listening lists. The remaining 180 receive about a page or less of prose, with only a handful of recordings listed. While he is relatively generous to the 20th century (more composers are included in this section than in any other), he ends his survey with William Bolcom (born in 1938), thus ignoring the many significant composers younger than 62. On the other end of the chronological spectrum, Dubal's pre-Baroque listings include only 13 composers, represented by a mere 14 recordings--a woefully inadequate representation, given the explosion of early music recordings in the last quarter century. Despite these flaws, the book is a valuable resource for those interested in expanding their collections of classical music recordings. Recommended for all public libraries.--Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is a music literacy handbook packed full of useful information that every musician and music lover needs almost daily” —The Tampa Tribune

“The Essential Canon of Classical Music is a terrific book. David Dubal's spirited essays are wonderful introductions to the composers, and his vivid descriptions of the music and recommendations of recordings are invaluable. This book has something for everyone, from the beginner to the sophisticated listener. It has a permanent resting place on my CD player.” —Tony Randall

“No one writes more cogently on music than David Dubal. I learned a lot. Dubal instructs even as he entertains. And he cares deeply.” —Ned Rorem

“A true classic of the genre . . . Dubal's solid book is a valuable work of reference, and a musical education in itself.” —National Review

“The book will please those systematically assembling a library of classical recordings and those simply wanting help at the music store.” —Houston Chronicle

“David Dubal is a truly gifted explainer of the classical repertoire.” —Buffalo News

“Rich and instructive.” —New York Observer

“Provides useful guideposts for the lay reader.” —Symphony

“Here at last is a work that bears nothing in common with the arid machinations of the academic encyclopedists. Instead Dubal offers adroitly written vignettes about every major and more than a few minor composers. Obliterating both myth and shallow idolatry with his keen wit, lively prose and comprehensive scholarship, Dubal minces no words, revealing in every case much of his subject idiosyncratic peccadilloes.” —The Times [St. Petersburg Florida]

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