The Five Greatest Songs of All Time (Difficult Music Edition)

It's a little hard to claim any five songs are the GOAT when focusing only on Western popular music and ignoring centuries of classical music, much less Eastern traditions, Inuit throat singing, Indonesian trance music, the incredible sounds that have been coming from Africa since, like, forever, etc.  Well, there's nothing I can do about all that now, at least not in this one post, but it's time we expand a little bit beyond Western popular music and acknowledge what's been called "new music" or given the oxymoronic title "modern classical."  Some of it falls into the distinct subcategories of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist, although those labels are a little misleading - while the compositional process may be minimal, the resulting sound is often very intricate, dense and fascinating, and not spare-sounding at all.  Although there's actually a lot of fun and beauty in this music, it's admittedly not to everybody's liking and performance artist Laurie Anderson once described it as "Difficult Music."

I first became aware of this music around 1973 or so when I somehow came across a copy of the LP, The World of Harry Partch.  It literally blew my mind (just listen to the clip below), and it led me to begin exploring the work of the so-called Minimalists, such as Terry Riley's In C and the early Steve Reich recordings, as well as the drone music of LaMonte Young, the vocal stylings of Meredith Monk, and, of course, the work of John Cage.       

Today's Difficult Listening Hour starts with with an appropriate introduction by Laurie Anderson (aka the former Mrs. Lou Reed), banjo maestro Bela Fleck with modern chamber ensemble Brooklyn Rider (both of whom I'll be seeing this weekend), the trail-blazing, late, great, Harry Partch, the redoubtable Steve Reich (whom I once saw perform at Harvard University back around 1978 or '79), and finally the mystical Terry Riley, who looks like a cross between a Sufi master and a pot-head pixie and makes transcendent music that defies easy categorization or classification - A Rainbow In Curved Air was released in 1969 although it sounds like it could have been composed just last year.

So here we go - sit bolt upright in that straight-back chair and button that top button as we explore the five greatest difficult songs of all time.