A Classical Record Photo by Melissa Richard

Another Century List
© 2000 by Frank J. Oteri

A year ago Chamber Music Magazine published "The Century List," a compendium of 100 suggested recordings of 20th century repertoire for classical radio stations originally created for the American Music Personnel in Public Radio in Los Angeles. The list did not make an attempt to judge the 100 greatest pieces, and was not always even my 100 faves. It was simply an exercise designed for radio programmers to think about music using three criteria:

• Is it by someone alive or dead?
• Is it by someone from this country or from somewhere else?
• How long is it?

On other radio formats, these answers are loud and clear. Music is mostly by living people from here and everything is very short. Therefore, the list divided music into 4 groups, which, for simplicity sake we'll label Live Americans, Dead Americans, Live Foreigners and Dead Foreigners. Each had 25 suggestions. Of those 25, 20 were under 20 minutes, with 15 of the 20 being under 15, 10 of the 15 under 10, and 5 of the 10 under 5. The remaining 20 were "long" - lasting between 20 and 40 minutes - yet shorter than most Romantic symphonies.

For people unattuned to classical music, suggesting that only a quarter of the music should be of the here and now and that a full quarter should be by faraway dead folks seems far-fetched. Imagine a quarter of your friends being dead and in other countries. But our classical music "friends" are mostly long dead foreign gentlemen. Everyone included on the Century List, both living and dead, is someone you or someone who know could have met. Do you know anyone who could have met Mozart?

Since I put the list together a great deal has happened, not the least being we're no longer in the 20th century (2001 millennium-start believers notwithstanding)! Since the list was suggestive--not prescriptive--and the idea was to give as many choices as possible, I thought it might be fun to compile Another Century List, using the same rules as before with a few new ones thrown in.

This new list cheats by presenting a 100-item list with 120 choices. Each sub-category contains 6 items where there should be only 5, which hopefully will encourage individual embellishment. As before, no composer appears twice, but also no composer who appeared before appears here despite numerous temptations. And since people assumed rank from the numbers, the numbers are gone. (If you would like a hard copy of this list for "handy" reference, this second Century List has just been published in the June 2000 issue of Chamber Music Magazine. Due to space limitations, they were only able to run 105 of the 120 choices. Thanks to "virtually" infinite text space on the Web, all 120 choices are here. Can you identify the additional 15?)

I can't tell you how many times people came up to me and said, "Why isn't <insert_work_here> on the list?" "Great," I'd say, "Add it to the list." Better yet, make your own list! Based on discussions people were having at the most recent Chamber Music America conference, I've even compiled a Third Century List for works outside the domain of what is conventionally perceived to be classical music in the hopes that blurring these perceptions allows for greater musical understanding. (You can still access the original 1998 Century List online.)

Out of curiosity, I totaled the timings of the entire contents of all three lists offering some 320 pieces of music by 320 different composers of the 20th century. The total came to less than 96 hours, which is only 4 days! Considering that there were 36525 days in the 20th century, 4 days out of 36525 amounts to a little over a hundredth of one percent, which is hardly a lot of time to allot to the music of our time on classical radio stationsƒ

But hopefully these are the last lists of 20th century music that I'll compile. After all, shouldn't we now be on the lookout for the radio repertoire for the 21st century?