Cover photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash

I’ve been hard at work on music lectures lately, with only a couple of weeks until I present Beethoven’s magnificent ninth symphony to an audience who just a few years ago had only heard the term ‘sonata form’ for the first time but hopefully now has some working idea of what it is and what it does.

Also, as a lover of lists, I’ve been working on curating the lecture lists for future seasons. Season 5 (Sept to Aug of 2025-26) is already locked in, season 6 might has one tentative placeholder (which Bartók quartet to choose for starters?), and seasons 7-10 are basically done (through 2031), leaving the more tentative seasons 11-16 (through 2037) still up for discussion. So instead of continuing to schedule music lectures and corresponding playlists 15 years into the future, I thought perhaps I could return to my beginnings and write about some of it.

In a zolpidem-fueled Google and GPT brainstorm, I thought about some of the previous pet projects I had featuring different composers and the feeling every now and then, grandiose though it now sounds, that I was “on to something” with trying to bring a certain composer’s work to a larger audience. Case in point: Mieczysław Weinberg. When his name came to my attention somewhere somehow, there was really very little to speak of in the recording library, but I was fortunate enough to get a series of recordings from Linus Roth of Weinberg’s violin works, and in the last few years, the likes of Gidon Kremer and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla have released recordings of his symphonies and concertos.

So then who’s ripe for (re)discovery? What weird pet project could I pick up, who could I dive into and champion and potentially make some sort of impact or difference in music that I really love and am happy to spend (that much) time with to devote study and analysis and research to that only might mean that I have something unique and/or new and/or relevant to contribute to the discussion of this person’s work? Let’s discuss some options.

1. Robert Simpson– absolute first choice. His music fascinates me in a way that I know wouldn’t necessarily translate to or resonate with broader audiences because he’s all about form and structure and more technical things, but even then, I find his music propulsive, urgent, compelling, and overall just incredibly interesting. Big output of symphonies and string quartets, some other chamber works, a few concertos. Lots here. There is the Robert Simpson Society, a rare case of one of those being established before the composer’s death, but his name certainly isn’t popping up on concert programs everywhere, nor in recording studios.
2. Nikolai Roslavets- Calls Scriabin to mind, but vastly less recognized. Lots of his work was lost or destroyed, and he was denounced by Soviet authorities. Also wrote an autobiography in which he intentionally misrepresented facts about his own life. Many points for mystery and intrigue.
3. Nikolai Myaskovsky- 27 symphonies, and fascinating because there’s a sort of inverse proportion between his youthfulness/daring and his maturity/experience. His early symphonies fascinate and seem neighbors to Shostakovich, but he caved to Soviet influence and while he became more experienced, he also became ‘safer.’ Interesting dichotomy, and lots to discover here with the symphonies, and quite a few string quartets and piano sonatas as well, a number of both of which I’ve listened to and greatly enjoyed.
4. Aulis Sallinen– Still (technically) alive (last I checked), some sort of a post-Shostakovich-esque Sibelius, outlived Rautavaara, and also has symphonies, string quartets, and concertos to his name. Enjoyed what I’ve heard of his.
5. Einar Englund– Limited exposure here, confined mostly to his first symphony and first piano concerto, but I very much enjoyed both and know there is quite a bit more to his catalogue. He died in 1999, and his centenary was in 2016, so that ship has sailed. (That’s the other thing, some kind of PR boost or significance to the ‘why’ of the narrative must really help, as we shall see with no. 7 below)
6. Jānis Ivanovs– 21 symphonies. Name another Lithuanian composer without looking it up. (Fun fact: Vytautas Bacevičius is Grazyna Bacewicz’s brother, and he decided to stick with the original Lithuanian spelling of the name rather than the Polified version his father accepted.) Ivanovs died in 1983, so like with many of these guys, it’s likely going to be difficult to get my hands on scores for study, but this is one I’d really like to get into.
7. Per Nørgård- Just died in May of this year (2025) at the age of 92. That said above about living or recently dead non-PD composers, I do have scores to all of Nørgård’s symphonies as well as some other things. Again, exposure here limited, but I found his first symphony a mesmerizing piece
8. Karl Amadeus Hartmann- Ditto low exposure, but also ditto a jaw-dropping impression of everything of his that I’ve heard, kind of like a very very accessible Shostakovich or something, dark without being such a challenge for the more casual listener.

Eight seems like a good number. There are others, including William Schuman, Walter Piston, Malcolm Arnold, and David Diamond, but as much as I enjoy the works of theirs that I’ve heard, I don’t know that they (along with some others) have the oomph to make their way into that upper echelon of composers or pieces that can stand alongside the current blockbusters of the repertoire. There’s this weird friend-zone area where they are/were recognized enough in academic circles or ‘the industry’ in some way during their career, but then… also lack the alluring obscurity or mystery of, say, a composer who was exiled or denounced by the Soviet Union and is thus primed for a dramatic rediscovery. (Vagn Holmboe would be another whose music delights, but is just sort of… there, and it makes me wonder about the supply/demand issue of an overabundance of music [from a capitalist/financial standpoint] and an ever-shrinking audience of concertgoers or listeners to consume it. That bleak outlook on the music industry may not be so bad as it is sometimes reported, but it probably is. Anyway…)

There are other names I’d throw into a lower tier of interest or whatever, like Schnittke, but he is by no means a truly neglected or terribly obscure composer, and those who would think he is would also likely think it’s for good reason. The late Paul Zukofsky told me once very curtly that he will not discuss Schnittke’s music. I get it. It interests me, but perhaps not for sustained listening or research, and there’s not really a lot there to … I don’t know; it’s very challenging in many ways and has perhaps as much audience as it’ll ever get, justifiably or not.

Hans Werner Henze would be another who I am at least tenuously interested in conceptually but that may not last if I were to spend a prolonged amount of time with his music. There are others.

So I guess my question is this: is there something here? Is there any interest or insight from any of my readers to say that one sounds more compelling than the others? I have my hunches of which of these few I’m most drawn to, and the prospect of deciding to devote potential years of study and research to a composer and their works is exciting but also not the sort of thing you usually decide to do ahead of time; it happens to you.

So maybe that’ll be a thing that happens. Hit the books, do the research, reach out to people and resources to get scores and documents and whatever else, and start contributing more to what is for many of these people, a very meagerly attended, relatively quiet conversation about their works.

We shall see. Stay tuned.