Forward, into the past

As popular music has become “more a nostalgic, preservative practice rather than one anticipating and demanding change, classical music comes to fresh, forward-looking life,” longtime British rock critic Paul Morley writes in an essay for The Observer. Morley describes his migration to the classics as “a move to where the provocative, thrilling and transformative ideas are, mainly because modern pop and rock has become the status quo” . . .

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/21/pop-belongs-last-century-classical-music-relevant-future-paul-morley

His playlist: Mozart’s “Masonic Funeral Music,” Debussy’s Cello Sonata, Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza V,” Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, Webern’s “Slow Movement” and Earle Brown’s “Times Five.” The earliest of them, the Mozart, dates from 1785; the latest, the Berio, from 1966; and there’s nothing from the 19th century.

Plenty of thrills and transformations yet to come, it seems.

(via www.artsjournal.com)