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Mount Rushmore, the ultimate kitschy ode to one man’s ego and patriotism. How many faces can you name? They all have to be presidents, so no Ben Franklin (how is that fair?). Hmm, let’s see…Washington? Lincoln? Millard Fillmore? If I could carve my own personal Mt. Rushmore of music (preferably not steamrolling the rights of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux, this time), who should I choose to deface the side of a beautiful mountain? What would be my criteria? Fathers of American music? Most influential? Best string quartet composers? I’ll keep it simple and pick the four composers I reach for while cooking dinner. I’m sticking to classical so apologies to John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)
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In the pantheon of composers, Bach is Zeus, Vishnu, Buddha, and Yahweh all wrapped into one. No one takes me places as deep, no one is as spiritual as Bach. Pick anything - the first bars from the B Minor Partita for solo violin, the last movement of the St. John Passion, the opening to Brandenburg 6 - at the end of the day, nothing helps me shed the mortal coil as Bach, who Beethoven referred to as “the immortal god of harmony.”

‍Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)

If Bach is God, Beethoven is Man. Where Bach taps into deep veins of spirituality and eternal truths, Beethoven’s music speaks to the essence of what it is to be human. His music has heart in ways no one else’s does. From everything I’ve read, while he was an irascible and difficult person, he truly loved and cared for humanity. He meant what he said when he quoted Schiller at the end of the 9^th Symphony.

‍Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945)

If Bach represents the divine, and Beethoven the nobility and potential of humanity, Bartók, to me, represents the individual. His music is so deeply personal, expressing emotions we’ve all felt that are not always so noble – anxiety, loneliness and despair, insecurity, ecstasy sometimes bordering on the frantic, confusion. These are emotions that have always existed but it wasn’t until the modern era that artists and composers were willing to express them so directly. In doing so, they make us feel less of an island. No one had his pulse on the early 20^th Century like Bartók.

‍Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957)

As a young man, I spent a summer near the forest in Finland. Late one night, I walked to a local lake with my Walkman, lay on my back on the dock, looked up at the stars, and turned on the Sibelius violin concerto. Sibelius' music inevitably makes me feel the vastness of the cosmos and become aware of my infinitesimally small place in the universe. It is oddly comforting, and takes me beyond earthly cares. David Oistrakh’s luminous performance fills me with wonder.

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Here are some other very unscientifically compiled lists:

Most influential: Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg
Fathers of American music: Copland, Bernstein, Gershwin, Barber
Core repertoire of the string quartet: Haydn, Beethoven, Bartók, Shostakovich
Towers of opera: Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi
Masters of the Baroque: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Purcell
Most ravishingly beautiful: Ravel, Puccini, Debussy, Tchaikovsky
Most terrifying: Shostakovich, Ligeti, Penderecki, Crumb

I make no claims to these being definitive, but it was fun to put them together. There is an obvious Germanic bent to the history of classical music. Interestingly, I wound up casting my eye mainly to France when I wanted beautiful music and, for scary stuff, towards Central and Eastern Europe. In 2024, one also can’t help observing the list is strikingly lacking in diversity. Such is largely the case with the history of classical music, even as this has begun to change more recently.

David Yang, Artistic Director