FROM HAYDN TO ŠOSTAKOVIČ

Confidential guide to a classical disco

from the end of the eighteenth century to the Second World War

 

Once upon a time – let's say in the last half century – there were guides to the classic disco. Generally it was the commercial availability of music composed from the year 1000 to today: that is, ten centuries of European cultured music. Naturally they were the result of a generically musicological choice, often aimed at national repertoires, and they excluded everything the author did not consider to be part of a canon shared by the academies, that is, everything that was not considered serious . For this reason, for example, the repertoire of Strauss and that of Franz von Suppé was excluded. However, there was in them that method which made one think of the linear development of a music which, starting from the measures of Gregorian chant, progressed up to Stockhausen and Xenakis and towards a future in line with the trends considered more current at the time. Today, on a mass level, people have an absolutely primitive idea of ​​the concept of music. In general, the dissociation that created an irremediable rift between society and music production after the First World War contracted the universe of music to almost a single genre (song) and a single instrument (the guitar). So, having said that in the majority of cases people no longer have an idea of ​​what the evolution of music has been in the last thousand years, let's see what to do with that curious minority that still pays attention to this topic. Therefore, for those who have partial knowledge of music and would like to deepen the approach to the great authors through the disc or the download on the Net, this guide is born, in which we proceed in chronological order taking as reference the date of birth of the composer. So no national schools, aesthetic influences, historical appeals or creative genres: for this there are other guides and the general histories of music. Furthermore, only and exclusively the "great", i.e. those composers who boast a discography dating back a century now, and therefore a litmus test of at least four generations of performers. In fact, it should not be forgotten that this is not a guide to the construction of an all-inclusive, didactic-type disco, but only a review of indispensable works, focused on a series of truly essential authors: those who have demonstrated, through the disco phenomenon, that they possess a perennial topicality and a planetary diffusion capacity. As far as the "minors" are concerned, I did not intend with this classification to establish that certain authors are minors and others are not: this belongs to musicology. I only intended to place certain musicians in a special section in relation to the fact that they have a discography that is less nourished and less constant over time than that of the "greats", and without taking any account of recording trends of various kinds and aesthetic tendencies often induced by massive campaigns commercial type. Anyone who wants to learn more about the works of certain authors will have to go elsewhere. As for the technical side of the recording suggestions, I specify that I have practically never given indications relating to recordings made before 1950, often difficult to find and afflicted by a prehistoric sound recording support: the lacquered waxes of the 78 turns. On the other hand, I didn't go too far with the dates, thus avoiding the most recent recordings, let's say from the last twenty years. I remember exactly the record reviews of the 1980s, in which, at every turn of the page, they cried out to the miracle of a new production that would have invariably supplanted the old ones and, from that moment, would have acted as an absolute reference to a certain work: in the majority of cases, instead, they were recordings that would have disappeared in a short time, or that would have ended up in economic series on newsstands. Historical interpretations only become so over the years, and it is the ones I have referred to that are important. Finally and Fireside Conversations , or those confidences, those stories that are made by the fireplace. I don't like Anglophone quotations, but here it was essential, since an English mother-speaker, namely Franklin Delano Roosevelt, invented such conversations in the thirties to tell Americans, precisely by the fireplace, how he would get the United States back on track with the New Deal and the world with the war against Hitler. Well, I don't have to do much, but I tell the story of the masterpieces of disco music from the eighteenth century to today with the tone, calmness, passion and irony of a conversation by the fireplace. It can be a new way.

by Alessandro Nava

The complete guide can be downloaded for free here >>> GUIDE