About those landmarks

To date, over the past almost-six years, I've written about 46 personal musical "landmarks" on this blog.  These are not exactly items in the usual "best of" list, but pieces that stand out, for one reason or another, as landmarks in a musical autobiography.  Most of the pieces I've lived with for a longer time, but some — the most recent of which is an orchestral work by Richard Ayres — are new discoveries, Eurekas! from first hearing.  With one exception (the Buckinx 1001 Sonates, of which I've only heard a fraction, as the whole lasts about 24 hours!), I've heard all the concert works live. Some I've performed myself, in most cases I've spent time with the scores, and with the electronic pieces, I've spent hours with the recordings.  Charles Shere recently reminded us on his blog of the traditional sense of the term "Discrimination has to do with specific choices, not categorical ones." And discriminatory the list is, indeed, made of specific choices, allowing complete works only in the case of Machaut and sets of works in the case of the Purcell viol music.   The only meaningful categories under which these landmarks fall is my own biography and taste, so it is a bit of an indulgence, but it seems the process of list-making has a life of its own and inevitably starts to assert its own set of rules.  One of the rules has been that I have avoiding, to date, naming a single composer twice.  This has been very hard in some cases (among them Monteverdi, Debussy, Ives, Cage, Lucier, and Young) and in one case, Berlioz, indecision over which piece, exactly, to include, has long kept me from adding a work even though it is insanely obvious that a half-dozen pieces by Berlioz ought to be long overdue for inclusion.  In a couple of cases, the personality of the composer gets in the way of a piece I treasure — is Ruggles's racism a roadblock for Sun Treader or Angels, for example? (I did put Hyperprism on the list, knowing about the anti-semitic streak in some of Varese's letters, so I'm not altogether consistent on this score.)  Finally, for all of the diversity on this list, it's definitely a western-classical-tradition-based assemblage and there certainly aren't enough women.  I can only defend myself here in that in the cases of non-western repertoire that I value highly, even with years of exposure, I don't believe that I am always able to really discriminate wisely among the repertoire. Etenraku is a gorgeous piece, one that I've known since High School, but it's the one piece people know of Gagaku when they know only one piece of Gagaku and including it would be more a marker of my ignorance of a repertoire I don't know well enough.  In the case of Javanese music, which I know much better, the more I know about fantastic pieces like Gadhung Mlathi or Gendhing Bonang Tukung, the more obvious it is how little I really know.  And then, in many other cases, for example South Indian classical music or Diné (Navajo) ceremonial music, using a term like "composition" or "work" or "piece" seems so clumsily inaccurate.   Finally, the list is getting close to the number 50; while it would be easy to name 100 or many 100s of landmark pieces, I think that an honest number — of pieces that I know well enough to stand behind them as a musician — has got to stop around 50 or 60, otherwise it's the equivalent of teenage boys bragging about the size of their record collections.  Anything more than that would be presumptuous.  Or maybe, once I reach 50 or so, the better idea would be to keep that total as a limit and then, if I decide to add anything, I have to strike something else off the list to make room...