David Bentley Hart: preference

Transcript context

…I think it’s a wonderful period for music. I think it is, too. It was a period of extraordinary riches. I love Takemitsu Tōru. I think the wonderful thing about the 20th century was it was an age of global music. It was an age in which composers were allowed to draw on the past and, at the same time, work in new idioms. Benjamin Britten would write neoclassically; he even wrote some serial pieces, you know, a twelve-tone row. He would write atonally. All sounds like Benjamin Britten. It’s all wonderful. Then, for “The Prince of the Pagodas,” he would draw on Javanese gamelan. I love the music, the great composers of the 20th century. There was some rubbish. You couldn’t pay me to listen Stockhausen. And there are all these wonderful composers that get overlooked because of the decline of the cultural centrality. Figures like Nikos Skalkottas and others in Greece, or Weinberg in Russia, Henze in Germany. No, I don’t have a single favorite composer. Messiaen might be one I love. Sure. And for more recent church music, what would you look to?…

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