The music we love to hate
Daily Comfort ZoneAnything that rouses us to love can also provoke the opposite condition. Music is no exception. There are works we detest almost as much as many others we adore. I am interested in why we loathe them.
Here’s a sampling of the music I hate:
1 Parsifal – when it keeps returning to D major or goes ultra-mod (pic)
2 Almost anything by palindromic Max Reger
3 The Beatles infantile #1 Please Please Me
4 Most of Delius, especially the Mass of Life
5 Tippett’s The Knot Garden
6 German-facing French symphonies – Gounod, Magnard, Chausson
7 Time-wasting American symphonies – Piston, William Schuman, Hovhaness
8 Boy bands, girl bands, the Spice Girls
9 Bob Dylan’s Saved album
10 Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus
What’s yours?
Don’t get me started on Messaien!
His saccharine and repetitive religiosity drives me to such distraction that I can’t even spell his name correctly.
Mess…. Mess…. for many people that’s enough.
But that does not diminish his greatness in his early organ music which is unique and very beaufitul. It was the birds who did him in.
So, Norman, does that mean you like Parsifal as long as it’s not in D major? What a ridiculous comment. (Good thing you didn’t choose A-flat.)
Life’s too short for negativity. Just move on.
I think we should narrow down “love to hate” only to music that is both loved and hated in equal measures by the same person at the same time, it’s the simultaneous contradiction that we can’t not listen to it but we hate every second of listening to it.
In that sense, on your list in the classical category only Parsifal really fits the bill.
For me, it’s Mozart 20th piano concerto first movement, it’s glorious orchestral music and it’s genial piano music, but together they make no sense at all, they are like oil and vinegar, and I curse Mozart the moment the piano enters, and I curse every pianist and conductor who can’t make it work, but I must listen to every recording to see if any one worked it out.
The remarks about Mozart’s explosive 20th piano concerto is very strange since it is a master example of entirely integrated music, superb in all of its aspects. Maybe you heard bad performances? Sentimental, dragging, romanticized versions with a woolly orchestra and elegantly smiling soloist and conductor? If so, then listen to this – a masterful recording on period instruments – including the piano:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rjSxlpUVso
(Some musicologists have suggested this is in fact an authentic recording of Mozart himself.)
PS:
The piano entry in the 1st mvt is contrasting with what has been heard before, but that is a typical trait of the classical style. In the baroque, a movement had to be in one ‘Affekt’, i.e. one type of material, one mood, one musical ‘colour’, which binds the whole together. In the classical style it is the key that keeps the material together and within that ‘box’ the composer may offer very different themes. So, there is much more contrast in that style, but kept together by key areas. This offered the composer much more freedom and Mozart was prodigious in inventing many contrasting ideas within one key area, and this gives his music that dramatic and sparkling touch, you fall from one surprise into the next. This was a complaint at the time from collegues who said: you hardly absorbed one idea or another comes along, and so forth, you have no time to digest all of that.
Good pianist, but a pity about the clangy, out-of-tune, instrument that cannot sing (1 second decay in piano).
https://youtu.be/zXcCFKsVlY4?si=UMWLhGCA-6speXB2
My lord, you do have a bad case of IES (Irritable Ear Syndrome) – see a doctor and take the prescribed drops.
My list –
1. Mahler (everything)
2. George Crumb Black Angels
3. Weinberg operas
4. = Lahav Shani conducting
4 = Neville Marriner conducting
4 = Zubin Mehta conducting
4 = Roger Norrington conducting
8. Nielsen’s Maskerade
9. Robert Simpson symphonies
10. Rubbra
1. Solo harpsichord is intolerable, and not much better in an ensemble.
2. Almost all Mozart. It’s insipid when not being deadly dull.
3. Serial, atonal, aleatoric music from mid-20th c “composers”.
4. Most of the Verdi operas.
5. Charles Ives’ 4th symphony.
6. Del Tredici: Final Alice
7. Virtually anything by Elliot Carter, Roger Sessions, Elizabeth Luytens, Xenakis, Stockhausen, Dallapiccolo, Nono…and yet I love the work of Humphrey Searle. Go figure.
Not in accord with your whole list, but it is nice to see someone stand up for Searle. I have seen his Hamlet, and would like to hear it again as I honestly do not remember much of it musically — but it was very impressive on stage.
Well said – an oasis of positivity in this dreary hate-list. Why can’t we have a list of undeservedly obscure composers instead?
School songs – Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory aaaaagh.
Also all background “music” infesting everything on tv. God forbid they break out a marimba.
Piazolla. A tripartite mess: trite, banal, and on an accordeon.
Bandoneon, if you please.
I like Piazzolla, but I love Latin American music in general. Orchestral and popular. Especially Brazilian, but also very much Argentinian and Cuban.
Well said. Another bit of positivity. I’d add to it by mentioning those amazing Mexican composers, especially works like Blas Galindo’s ‘Sones de Mariachi’ – superbly cheerful and upbeat. And Bernstein’s ‘El Salon Mexico’ – not the real thing but marvellous anyway.
Aaron Copland composed “El Salón México.”
Sorry, I was thinking of the Bernstein recording of Copland’s masterpiece when I wrote that!
The Galindo is creative, but to be honest I have listened to the Mariachi in Plaza Garibaldi and prefer that! And I prefer José Pablo Moncayo.
I hate all that classical music stuff, I only work here because of the salary, but I love Boulez because it calms me down after a whole day of having to deal with crazy performers.
Sally
Congrats for speaking your mind, and to your boss for tolerating you.
Yes sorry about that… I tried to fire her a couple of times but she comes back again & again.
Well good on you! She must be doing a good job.
Am I being thick? I don’t understand why you refer to Max Reger as palindromic.
Reger is not palindromic, but much of his music makes that impression. And for some people they tend to hear Reger backwards after a while.
He wrote many wonderful pieces that deserved to be played more. Try the Serenade Op. 95, the Romantic Suite, the Hebbel Requiem.
Couldn’t agree more, and there’s lots more – the Ballet Suite, the Boecklin Suite, the Violin Concerto and the Maria Wiegenlied – that would surely melt any heart, maybe even NL’s? And the lovely Clarinet Quintet, like Brahms’s, an autumnal, elegaic late work
You say ‘try the Serenade op 95’. Yes indeed; lovely, dreamy stuff. Surely anyone who loves Brahms would warm to this.
Worlds away from that are the Symphonic Prologue and the Piano Concerto; listening to them is like swimming through a stormy sea of warm treacle during a midnight thunderstorm.
His surname is!
Reger’s surname is palindromic. I know… (rolls eyes). Reger detractors, btw, might be surprised by his ‘Der geigende Eremit (The Hermit Fiddler)’ from the Böcklein Tone Poems.
Reger is the undisputed master of the unnecessary and annoying modulation.
So why did you type his surname backwards?
I think Stormin’ Norman it referring to Max Reger’s surname, which like all palindromes is the same whether it is read left to right or right to left.
The slippery and opportunist French politician Pierre Laval wa palindromic for the same reason. Contemporary wits said of the man that he was exactly the same whether viewed from the Left or Right …
Can’t agree with you about Parsifal or those American symphonies.
Pieces I hate:
– Piano concertos: Schumann, Grieg, Rocky 2, Liszt 2 (snore), Liszt 1 (not much better). Tchaikovsky #1 (but LOVE #2). Both Chopins; so little of the genius you hear in his other works.
– Pictures at an Exhibition (though I’ll listen to a non-Ravel orchestration just for the novelty).
– Cello Concertos: Schumann and Saint-Saens (don’t hate them, but could we PLEASE hear something else on occasion?).
– Enigma Variations (again, don’t hate it, but for U.S orchestras the only British works seem to be this and The Planets).
– Tchaikovsky R&J (but Berlioz or Prokofiev any time).
So agree about the Tchaikovsky R&J, and I also love the others.
And I have had Schumann up to here. I think I only like phrases from his entire oeuvre.
Time the US learned about Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton, to get them started.
If you include Bax, I may just join you.
Well, there are loads of other British composers I would like to see played more often, including Finzi, but I thought, this being America, we needed to start easily.
What about Pictures at an Exhibition in its original form, as a piano suite?
Personally I am stuck to the original version, can’t get Ravel’s orchestration. If the original works, why fix it?
Great pieces can work in many arrangements. I actually have no objection to Ravel’s Pictures; I’ve just heard it enough that I don’t care to hear it again.
I LOVE orchestrations of Bach’s organ works or the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet.
Stokowskyzed Bach is my guilty pleasure.
Orchestrated chamber music firmly belongs in my hate list: I miss the intimate character. Even Barber’s ubiquitous Adagio works much better in its original form, as a quartet.
I remember in the 80s watching Harrison Birtwhistle’s opera Punch and Judy on C4 (yes, they really had serious artistic ambitions at one time).
The music and the performances were actually driving me slowly mad, an oddly pleasurable experience.
I haven’t seen or heard it since, and I wonder if it would have same effect 40+ years later.
Recent research has shown that Birtwistle’s works have a detrimental effect on dementia. But one could hear that already without scientific evidence.
Seriously? I’m SO glad I’ve never heard of him. I’m trying to avoid dementia by following this fascinating blog. Is that the correct word?
I don’t know, I forgot.
Does that mean tha people’s memory gets beutter?
Check it out — so I don’t have to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjjswYcmjQU&ab_channel=rittelmann
Oddly enough I find a surprising amount of common ground there.
Delius…Anything longer than Cooking the First Hero or Walk to the Pub
Pretty much anything rediscovered on BBC R3 because it was written 1-300 years ago and then justly forgotten.
The entire output of Ludovico Einaudi ( past, present and future)
I’ll get my coat before the Einaudi hit squad arrives.
Pretty much anything by George Gershwin.
Blasphemy or a cruel joke, Bigfoot!
1. Pomp and Circumstance March, No. 1
2. Tchaik’s Variations on a Rococo Theme
3. Telemann
4. Philip Glass
5. Vienna Boys’ Choir
6. Oberkrainer music
7. The Jackie Gleason Orchestra
8. Siegfreid Idyll – (Yawn)
9. Очи Чёрные (Dark Eyes)
10. Anton Rubinstein’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (3 @ 4 are great)
You’re listening to some very odd stuff. But I couldn’t agree more about Очи Чёрные. I have loads of Dmitri Hvorostovsky CDs, including that one, and even he can’t save that song for me.
Definitely Rhapsody in Blue. Unless played by Marcus Roberts, anyway.
“hate” is too strong a word for my list but I’d say I have heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons ENOUGH ALREADY. And I sense it is about to get worse for me now that Milwaukee now has — after an absence of many years — classical FM radio again.
Again “hate” is not the right word by any means but I used to love the Schubert 5th Symphony and would often listen to recordings (and broadcasts) but then I played it in an orchestra and while I enjoyed the chance to perform it, that basically neutered my interest in the music (and perhaps significantly, playing Schubert’s “Unfinished” and “Great” C Major symphonies had no such effect: I still enjoy hearing them and play my recordings from time to time). Schubert’s 5th is now the only Schubert symphony I actively avoid.
Ditto on Four Seasons. There was a period when I Seemed to hear it daily, and I came to loathe it.
Four Seasons – otherwise known as “Your call is important to us”
Avoid the elevators! Try to walk the stairs and you’ll discover nobody plays Vivaldi there. It’s good for your health too.
1Percy Grainger Handel on the Strand English country gardens etc
2Wagners Ride of the Walkyrie
3Puccinis Madam Butterfly
4Muzak in lifts and supermarkets
5 Elton John
6 a lot of Tippet
7 Bright Eyes
8Lauper Girls just want to have fun
9 Madonna Material girl
10 Danny Boy
Some bright spark had the idea of using Grainger ‘s London Derriere as a hymn tune, unconscious of the fact that the melody goes higher … and higher … and higher. By the end of the penultimate line the congregation was silent and the basses were hitting top F sharps.
I have had the misfortune to have to conduct a ragtag and bobtail massed schools ensemble in that awful Grainger piece. Massed electric basses, serried ranks of saxophones. Over 150 in the band; just getting them on stage in some semblance of order took most of my time. Then another 150 or so in the choir that was behind me. “What choir in Grainger’s Londonderry Air?” I hear you ask. Reply: the one singing the choral section that we inserted halfway through, ostensibly to give the little kids some participation. In reality, to make their parents stay to the end of the evening, and not scoot off the moment the junior massed band had finished. One of the less glorious moments of my musical life, even if it was adored by the public. I could not abide Grainger before this, and this did not help.
Snippets (shards?) of Philip Glass, awful; repeated tediously and robotically, unlistenable. Probably the most wasteful use of Boulanger’s time in teaching.
Boulanger complained that Glass asked the same questions over and over again, which she tried to answer the same but in varied ways, until variation was exhausted together with herself.
Understandable comments about ‘boy’, ‘girl’ whatever bands, notwithstanding, recent articles show that the ‘product’ – not music – of various examples, are more AI and autotune than live music.
KPop blazing a trail, here.
I still like The Beach Boys.
Whoa! I was with you until you got to Ave Verum Corpus.
Mozart’s clarinet music; most of Brahms.
What is the music you LOVE TO hate?
Most people have ignored the words in capitals, so I will too. Here’s my hit list.
1.Delius: a vapid milksop.
2. Purcell: another milksop, who cannot hold a candel to Handel. Even worse is Purcell sung by Alfred Dellar*.
3. Piazzola: charmless and acidic.
4. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – that’s on everyone’s list, right?
5. John Adams: seems like a nice guy, but minimalism isn’t a genre**
6: Schumann’s Spring Symphony: it starts so promisingly but collapses into repetitive mush at the end of the exposition.
7. Elgar’s Violin Concerto: I’ve tried… and tried….but failed.
8. Bruckner 9: this baffles me, because Bruckner 8 is my favourite of all symphonies. But #9 is just implacably grim, glum and tuneless.
9. Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto – again, where’s the tune?
10. Schubert’s “The Shepherd on the Rock”: too perfectly pretty for me.
* huge kudos to Dellar for reestablishing the countertenor voice – I just can’t stand his swoony delivery.
** by which I mean, Reich invented it, Glass added maybe 10% which hadn’t been said by Reich, then Adams added 10% to what Glass had said. So Adams is a 1% irrelevance in the – thankfully – short history of minimalism.
The tune in Rachmaninoff’s Fourth (2nd movement) sounds like “Three Blind Mice.”
I find Purcell’s sacred music pretty impressive, actually. Same for his “Hail, bright Cecilia” if you can find the right soloists.
Purcell is a composer who IMNSHO has gained so much from the HIP revolution. Listen to Les Ars Florissant ‘s recording of “King Arthur” for example.
My list of over-rated music:
1) Almost anything by Berlioz, the least-greatest great composer, especially Les Troyens.
2) Thaïs. A weak opera
3) Most of what I heat from Florence Price, the new dsrling of classical radio. I applaud and welcome the entry of female and non-white composers into equal representation on the airwaves, but there are better choices than Price.
4) Mozart’s opera seria works; Clemenza di Tito et al. zzzzzzz…
5) Glazunov. Meh.
6) Coppélia and Giselle. Bleagh.
7) Haydn’s highly vanilla trumpet concerto.
9) I like Glass, but the vocal writing in Satyagraha for the role of Rustomji was excruciating. Stepped on my last nerve.
Morton Gould – American Salute,
but I like his Latin American Symphonette.
I love to hate the frequesnt pairings in concert of The 4 Seasons of Vivaldi AND Piazzola. Ugh. BTW, I hear the California composer John Adams is at work on a new commission for violin and bandoneon called “The One Season”.
1. English/Irish/Scottish/American fiddle folk music
2. Einaudi
3. Rodrigo guitar concerti
4. Julie-O
5. I have a hard time getting excited about Haydn. String quartets are the most compelling to me, but as a cellist I’d trade both extant concerti for a single cello piece by Mozart
I like the trumpet concerto, though not as much as I like Hummel’s.
I like most of his Masses.
Anything by Varez oh my poor ears
Tone rows
Voices of Ancient Children by George Crumb. Aauuuugh.
-Anything for string orchestra (that texture just annoys me after one minute, I need more instruments)
-Beethoven: 9th Symphony-Finale
-Mozart: piano concerti, all of them, they just bore me
-Some popular operas that are over-played and I’m sick of the famous arias (Carmen, I hate the ‘Habanera’, Traviata, “Sempre LIbera”)
-The Beatles: their stuff sounds like children’s music to me now, and I hate “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Field” in particular)
Unhappy teen years?
Pretty much anything by Karl Jenkins.
It’s the year 2080.
“Who’s your favorite American symphonist?”
“I dunno. There are so many good ones, Piston, Schuman, Hivh
For all its virtuosic complexity, Rach 3 always sounds to me like an afterthought to the 2nd, which still stirs me in a way the 3rd does not.
Carmina Burana blew my head off the first time I heard it fifty years ago but as time goes by there is something about it that makes me increasingly queasy. Not entirely sure why. Purely my own reaction – the great joy of music is that as a larger abstract art form there are no rights or wrongs to personal taste.
I’m the opposite; I love Rocky 3 but can’t bear #2. Maybe after watching “The Seven-Year Itch.”
Is Rocky 3 part of the Ring Cycle?
In “Carmina Burana”, Orff came so close to writing “Deep in the Heart of Texas” which would have made him an absolute fortune. Cf Mahler and “You Are My Sunshine” or Brahms and “Away in a Manger” …
Hate? Music? self righteous? shilling for clicks?
you caught my click — shame on me
Don’t be such a killjoy. This was a fun post, light reading for a hot summer’s day (at least where I am).
Bartok’s concerto for orchestra is awful in my opinion
I’m disappointed at all the disapproving votes on this subject. Surely, you’re allowed to acknowledge that there’s music that just doesn’t move you or speak to you, even if the general consensus esteems it. It takes some amount of courage to open yourself up to the judgement of the snobs on this blog and admit that there are simply some classics you can’t abide. How about giving a break to all the brave commenters — not to mention the owner of this blog — who have dared to confess their dark secret?
Yes, such confessions are merely embarrassing self-revelations. But it explains the general level of commentors on this site. It’s like a self-inflicted peep show.
I hate all music that wasn’t composed by Max Reger.
Top of my list is N Lebrecht’s Variations on a Theme.
For me it’s pee-in-his-pants Bruckner, Mahler’s glorified Schrammelmusik, all of Mozart except some operas and late symphonies, Boulez – all of it, any music defined by mathematical principles only, George Benjamin, and of course John Borstlap.
I agree with that, except Boulez.
Sally
I avoid:
Most Brahms (sextets excepted)
Most Tchaikovsky
Anything by Chopin or Schumann
Most Mendelssohn
A lot of Dvorak
Puccini Butterfly and Turandot (because of the libretti)
I listen to every week:
Most of Wagner (disfavor Parsifal)
Any opera by Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Handel, Vivaldi, Janacek
Most Shostakovich (especially the quartets)
Symphonies of Beethoven, Mahler, Prokofiev, Ives and Schubert
Most of Berlioz
Mozart piano concertos, Haydn masses and quartets Beethoven quartets
Anything by Offenbach
Toscanini and Furtwanger as conductors
Bach cantatas and organ works
I’m allergic to Symphonie Fantastique. I condition I carry from my childhood. I can’t do nuttin’ about it. Nutttiiiiiiiiin!!
Henze _”The Tedious Way to the house of Natasha Unghuer.” Why? Not that it is constantly on Classic FM.