Guilty Pleasures

1. Here’s a question for anyone who feels like answering, just because I’m curious, in light of all this discussion: would you like or not like your music to be considered someone’s “guilty pleasure”? As in, if you read your name mentioned by one of the commenters above, would this make you happy?

2. oops…wrong! the herman’s hermits song carol king wrote was “i’m into something good.”
   “a kind of hush” was written by some guys named reed and stephens.

3. “okay, okay. i confess: “there’s a kind of hush” by herman’s hermits. fo’ real.”

   how can you feel guilty for liking a carol king song?

4. okay, okay. i confess: “there’s a kind of hush” by herman’s hermits. fo’ real.

5. And here’s an LP I thought I’d never see or hear again, something I bought when I was about 14 or 15 years old:

   http://schizolipstick.blogspot.com/2007/01/professor-meyers-associates-provocative.html

6. Gimme Dat Ding – http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/wma-pop-up/B0000657XA001022/ref=mu_sam_wma_001_022/002-1206571-5595254

   OK, I’ll come clean. I did in fact buy this CD – but it is one of the weirdest 60’s moog synthesizer albums ever – The In Sound from Way Out! Perrey & Kingsley :

   http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000000EJ3/002-1206571-5595254

7. Until someone comes out and professes their undying love for “Gimme Dat Ding” by the Pipkins, you win.

   “Gimme dat ding, gimme dat, gimme gimme dat / gimme dat ding, gimme dat, gimme gimme dat / gimme dat ding, gimme dat, gimme gimme dat / gimme gimme gimme dat ding!…”

   Hey, positively art-music next to Deano signing “That’s Amore”, or anyone’s version of that “Tomorrow” song from Annie!

8. “It can definitely be a moral thing.”

   Can be, but guilt is all about context. Like the central question of “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” if you don’t feel guilt, are you guilty?
   I don’t think the Spanish Inquisition exists anymore. At least, I’m not expecting it.

9. “My guilty pleasure? Robert Farnon. Top that.”

   Until someone comes out and professes their undying love for “Gimme Dat Ding” by the Pipkins, you win.

10. It can definitely be a moral thing. At least it could back in the bad old days of the 20th century, when modernism was very ideological. The problem with Hohvaness, from that perspective, isn’t that he’s uncool, it’s that he’s reactionary. The friends I mentioned in my earlier post felt the same way about Stan Getz. In both cases there were opposing camps fighting over the same (shrinking) bit of cultural turf–that’s what really stirs up the moralizing aspect. The ideological energy was along the lines of what the Dixie Chics stirred up, though it obviously wasn’t as blatantly political.

    Based on the original post, I’m guessing Jerry was around back in the day when people could get very worked up if you started showing reactionary tendencies, and that’s why he asked about “non-pop music” and owned up to liking Hohvaness. An aspect of cool/uncool was built in, as Tom points out, but, especially for a creator (as opposed to a consumer), there was more at stake than just how good your taste was.

    Now, as far as uncool goes, the link that Andrea posted a few hours ago is great fun, and a classic.

11. Ok, I thought of one: The Blue Danube. Ever since “2001: A Space Odyssey” it’s been a favorite…with guilt.

12. Some observations…

    1. In previous generations the vogue was to assert one’s intellectual superiority by adhering to a relatively narrow band of Romantic/Modernist aesthetic preferences that purportedly put ones tastes beyond criticism. Today the vogue is to display one’s intellectual superiority by asserting a constantly shifting set of guiltless/valueless preferences, the clear implication being that this somehow puts ones tastes beyond criticism.

    2. Andrea is the band fag of the century. I am in awe.

    3. My guilty pleasure? Robert Farnon. Top that.

13. Well, it’s mainly about bucking social pressures. Nobody likes to face derision from their friends. Saying that something is a “guilty pleasure” shields you somewhat by placing a perceived barrier of irony between you and the object of your affection, rather than embracing it wholeheartedly and earnestly.

14. It’s not really guilt, not a moral thing, is it? More of a perception of high/low, cool/not cool, and mainly finding you like something you thought was un-cool. Then, if you’re lucky, you get over it and decide it is cool and make a case for it. I remember being slightly embarrassed to really like an ABBA single, then finding several of my hipster friends liked it, too and then reading an interview with David Thomas of Pere Ubu, who said ABBA was his favorite band. They were cool, after all! Of course if you don’t have the guts to like what you instinctively like, then what good is listening?
    It’s ephemeral stuff.

15. No need to feel guilty about ’70s prog — it is just plain awesome. I used to be embarrassed about my love for it but slowly came out of my shell as more and more of my musician friends copped to being Yes fans. The final death knell was when I was driving up to a rehearsal retreat with four of my fellow choral singers in C4 this past fall and three of them, upon discovering Jethro Tull’s “Thick As a Brick” in my iPod (not the 3-minute single version, the 43-minute album-length track), insisted on playing it and singing along at top volume. Recently, I’ve gotten into Rush again–the lyrics are unbelievably awful, but at some point I decided I just don’t care.

16. ooo, one more link, very specifically about guilty pleasures:

    http://www.moistworks.com/2007/02/only-good-die-young-billy-joel-stranger.html

    cheers.

17. I’m with Seth and Jeff and other similar commenters: ain’t no such thing. I’ve never really thought of the moral terms as relating to one’s intellectual pretentions, but more of a work-vs.-leisure thing, as it relates to active or passive listening. (Most of the “guilty pleasures” listed would lend themselves more to the passive.) I wonder: if you could poinpoint the time when the idea of a guilty pleasure first came into being, would it correspond to the time that passive experience of artworks first became more prevalent than active ones—when “pop music” began to mean something more than just music that was popular?

18. “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers. The harmonic progression generally and the uncanny stroke-of-genius effectiveness of the first couple of bars of the refrain just kill me, together with the remarkable vocals. But, oddly, I’ve never listened to the words for meaning and have no clue what the song is about.

    This should explain everything you need to know.

19. Any other AudioScrobblers out there?

    http://www.last.fm/user/idealord/

    That’s exactly what I’ve listened to in realtime. Cool system… plus you can find your fans – that is if you ever get listened to by AudioScrobbler listeners!

20. Sorry to join in late, and I don’t admit to any guilt, anybody that knows me knows I’ll just as soon talk about X as Y but just as interesting and offbeat music, I’ve noticed that because of my obsession with mashups, that my knowledge of very recent pop has become very warped. That is, I only know these new songs, like Gnarls Barkley et al, from their warped and manipulated manifestations. So now when a guy at work asks me if I know that song I don’t have to lie, and I know the words, etc. I just don’t know how it begins, ends or climaxes. 😉

    Favorite current mashup:

    team9 vs bloc party vs clipse – the prayer vs wamp wamp

    Team9 rapping over neo-80’s wave anthemic.

    And I’ll admit that when I’m with composers, I rarely talk about my obession with 60’s and 70’s funk – currently it’s the Curtis Mayfield SuperFly album. Now that is great airport/flying music! Talk about multi-layered funk man oh man…

21. Andrea/Steve: actually the comments in question were marked as spam. I de-spammed one of them, and hopefully it will learn not to do this to you again, Andrea.

22. The music of Loop Guru is mine; techno-electr-acoustic-foundsound-etc and etc music: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=56067543

23. Or maybe “remind” them before you “remend” them… (Arrgh… Hey Jerry, you know the latest upgrade to WordPress adds a spell-checker…)

24. Hey Andrea, the site has an auto spam filter running; it’s set to shunt things with more than a couple links into a moderation queue to be approved before posting (since most of the autospam bots post things with a bunch of links in them). You can still write a comment with a lot of links, but you may need to drop a line to Jerry or David S. remend them to check the moderation queue. (I can moderate over on the Composer Forum page but not the main page.)

25. Well, I still think Nyman has the best setting of the word “dodedecahedron” out there (and I do like the opera, too.)

    I think my guilty pleasure sides more towards Anthony Cornicello’s: Keith Emerson. I also will go with the soundtracks of Stewart Copeland.

26. hmm. maybe it doesn’t like links. here’s the pseudo-linkless version:

    fingers: matt glassmeyer marching band has a lovely version of that tune, free for the downloading: http://www.meadownoise.com/index1.html (scroll down) that album has been a guilty pleasure for me for a while.

    i share my father’s affinity for sousa. i’m a band fag; dad’s a republican. crazy, but true.

    this week’s guilty pleasure has been belle & sebastian’s “the blues are still blue” which i’ve been listening to at least once a day for the past week:
    chemistryclass.blogspot.com/2007/01/songs-of-year.html

    guilty but happy.

27. once more, with feeling:

    fingers: matt glassmeyer marching band has a lovely version of that tune, free for the downloading: http://www.meadownoise.com/index1.html (scroll down) that album has been a guilty pleasure for me for a while.

    i share my father’s affinity for sousa. i’m a band fag; dad’s a republican. crazy, but true.

    this week’s guilty pleasure has been belle & sebastian’s “the blues are still blue” which i’ve been listening to at least once a day for the past week:
    http://chemistryclass.blogspot.com/2007/01/songs-of-year.html

    guilty but happy.

28. okay, wordpress is acting like my comments are posting, but then nothing shows up in my browser, even after a million refreshes. so, i’m sorry if i’m being redundant and i’m sorry if this post makes no sense whatsoever. i’m just so sorry!

29. Sounds like somebody listened to WNYC’s “Sound Check” a couple days ago – they had a big segment on this very topic.

    Alex – I think what you’re talking about is a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement, and I’m sure it applies to composing. That’s the one where the number of times you have to do the action before you get rewarded varies, and it’s the most powerful of the four standard types of reinforcement schedule. It’s also the one that makes gambling so addictive. . .

    I don’t think I have any classical music guilty pleasures – in fact I take a certain perverse pride in being one of the few composers who thinks Vivaldi is good. In pop music I feel no guilt at all about, for instance, having thought that Russian pop group T.a.T.u. from a few years ago were great, or having liked some of the Britney Spears songs, or thinking that Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” is a bona fide American Standard. I do feel some guilt for liking Coldplay, and profound guilt and self-loathing for having liked a couple of Dave Matthews Band songs. I used to feel guilty (contra Sound Check) for liking some Beatles songs, but I’ve mostly gotten over that 🙂

30. “What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers. The harmonic progression generally and the uncanny stroke-of-genius effectiveness of the first couple of bars of the refrain just kill me, together with the remarkable vocals. But, oddly, I’ve never listened to the words for meaning and have no clue what the song is about.

31. I have found that something that is incongruous to one’s habits is a sort of “guilty pleasure” (for examples, Milton Babbitt’s love of Broadway showtunes, or Morton Feldman’s raving of Sibelius’ fourth symphony). I remember when I was in undergrad school, I had a reputation for listening to lots and lots of the Second Viennese School, but then throw a boner by putting on DEVO. These days I challenge myself by listening to that are hard to grasp. I will still try to take my time to listen to, for example, the string quartets by Michael Nyman (I swear that he blatently weaved “Unchained Melody” into his first sq (track 16 on the Balenescu release)) or George Rochberg, but I always come back to Feldman and Volans. And I have no regrets saying that I was keen on Chicago (when they were good, that is, before Terry Kath’s death, and I never liked their ballads like “If You Leave Me Now” and “Colour My World”; their odd numbered LPs were much better; after that: avoided) or The Yes Album/Fragile or the first couple Emerson Lake & Palmer (LLP) albums. Lately I have ocassionally been turning to Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream” (despite the cover) and “Going Places” albums. (I am listening to Nyman’s 2nd String quartet; do I detect “Rock-a-by Baby” in the 1st violin?)

    And classical? Gilbert & Sullivan!

32. This is the craziest thread ever.

33. “does anyone else remember “Pepino the Italian Mouse?”

    Insomniacs of a certain vintage might remember Lou Monte used to be featured in late night TV commercials for Lenny’s Clam Bar.

34. In pop, maybe the first couple Chic albums

    Steve, in about two weeks the magazine that employs me is going to publish an issue annointing NYC’s Top 50 performers and bands of all time. (I hasten to add that classical music was completely omitted, much to my chagrin and loud complaining; we may live in a rockist/poptimist world, but such a list with no Lenny, Cage or Reich has no meaning to me.)

    Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because you might be pleasantly surprised, if not amazed, by how high Chic places on that list. In the Top Five. I kid you not.

    As for me, I, too, refuse to feel guilty about any of my personal obsessions, be they Birtwistle or the Bangles.

    (Okay, maybe Kiss. But without the early intervention of that band, I literally would not be here.)

35. For me, it’s 70s prog-rock. Very cheesey, I know, quite pretentious, but it’s still fun. Some of it – I was amazed, upon recent listening, how bad some of Rick Wakeman’s recordings (and his solos with Yes) were!

    While we’re on the Alvin and the Chipmunk thing, does anyone else remember “Pepino the Italian Mouse?” It featured a similarly sped up voice, this time Lou Monte. About half of it is in a strong Calabrese dialect, so it may be lost to most of you. But, it is funny.

36. “And that David Saville’s real name was Ross Bagdasarian.”

    …who played the composer in Rear Window

37. Frank! You guessed it: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” tops the list of my musical guilty pleasures.

    Why guilty?

    You must admit the vocal writing gets really slopping — especially for the soprano. One of her early arias, he has her so high and so jumping around that the poor singer can barely get any of the (too many) words out. Now she is supposed to be agitated at the time, but it just sounds like a passage wherein Nyman had a cool-sounding musical idea and he was going to write it and be damned if it sopranos can’t sing it well.

    Nyman is also anxous to set in lyrics what earlier appeared as an instrumental line. Even when it doesn’t work. The example that comes to mind are the opening quintuplets. They underscore Dr. Sach’s opening monologue. At the end, Dr. Sachs sings words on them. And it sounds so, so stupid.

    And Nyman has a little narcissistic moment in the libretto (“That’s Numan. Can’t mistake his body rhythm.) A little less than classy.

    But. But. But. I still dig it because certain sections are just so damn beautiful. Even when they’re sloppy at the same time. Guilty, because the work really is very uneven in quality. I like certain moments, and my liking of those moments carries over to the work as a whole.

38. I get the good humor behing the “guilty” bit, but I’m with the camp that can’t really see anything “guilty” in liking what I like (by the way, I’m ho-hum on most Nyman but pretty indulgent towards Hovhaness). Hmm… maybe Ruichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack to “The Sheltering Sky”? 19030-40s Copland picks up a lot of “knowing” sneers nowadays, but still think it’s pretty lean, colorful and vivid. In pop, maybe the first couple Chic albums, Cameo, and all that 80’s Danielle Dax? (But I’ll proudly own up to having a virtually complete collection of Cocteau Twins!)

39. And that David Saville’s real name was Ross Bagdasarian. Forgot that part for a moment.

40. And, yes, I know that it’s not “Alvin and the Chipmunks” but David Saville and the Chipmunks and that David Saville was William Saroyan’s cousin and that together they wrote the Rosemary Clooney hit “Come On-a My House” which, I suspect, is somebody’s guilty pleasure, although not mine.

41. Aw, c’mon, folks: as for the few indignant replies farther above, lighten up on Jerry and thaw out your iced-up sense of humor. He’s just posting a little something to get us thinking of something different, and clearly, he’s managed to nudge us effectively.

    My guiltiest pleasure is listening to my own music. Sometimes it’s a guilty pain (oooh, I could have managed that transition better! Damn, I didn’t develop that section thoroughly enough!) and other, less frequent times, it is indeed a pleasure. Kind of an S&M thing.

    In psychology, there’s a great phrase: intermittent behavioral reinforcement. You know: the rat in the cage who hits the bar with his little hand and either gets a sugar pellet or an electrical shock. A life in music can be remarkably similar. We persist in doing things that sometimes result in distress, because we know that once in a while it feels really, really, REALLY good.

    Zing. Ouch! Ahhhh….

42. Maybe we shouldn’t take the word “guilty” too seriously. It’s just fun, and very interesting, that musicians sometimes enjoy things one wouldn’t suspect. One composer I knew — who was writing rather gnarly music at the time, and was widely considered a first-class musical snob — told me that he adored Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of that. (Of course, finally finding ground on which I could out-snob him, I had to go and argue how much better Rogers and Hart was instead…)

    I also don’t think there’s anything wrong in recognizing that things you like may not be, from a certain point of view, especially profound. A lot of the people I’ve played Mertens for think the music is trite. I kind of see the point. But it doesn’t matter; it’s musical, winning, and beautiful to me.

43. “Karen Carpenter kicks Cathy Berberian’s ass any day!”

    That’s crazy talk!

    Now for guilty pleasures…

    nothing beats Prince, Stevie Wonder or Tori Amos,
    but for classical music give me Paul Creston or Barber.

44. Guilt is self-imposed. I don’t think I should feel at all guilty for listening to anything. Jerry, Music with Changing Parts is a classic (and I still have the original Chatham Square LP set). No need for anyone to feel guilty for listening to it, or anything for that matter.

    Should I feel guilty for listening to Varese and liking it? Hindemith? Veruca Salt? One might not choose someone else’s choices of music for him or herself, but that has nothing to do with guilt. So I think music should be guilt-free, like most things.

45. I am guilty of not finding pleasure with Philip Glass.

    Guilty pleasure? Reading (and contributing to) Sequenza 21! I should spend more time working.

    As to music, I’m with Scott Unrein. No such thing. I’m proud of all my favorites, and ashamed of all my dislikes.

46. For my part, I find particularly interesting the by-now-reflexive disavowal of any hint of “pretension.” I think we too often forget, however often it gets repeated, that the “classical music crowd” (let alone the “new music crowd”) does not have a monopoly on accusations of pretension from without among niche musical communities, and attempts to be unreflectingly all-inclusive strike me at least as protesting too much.

    Anyway. I like Chevelle. and that Smokey Robinson song that Gwyneth Paltrow sings with Randy Newman. (don’t think I’ve ever admitted that one in public.) And I’m going to see Music and Lyrics with my wife tomorrow night, and looking forward to it.

    And yet I’m still a pretentious $(%*.

47. Bjork. All of it. I hate that I love her so much.

    And early 90s trance-techno. Now that is shameful.

48. I don’t see what there is to be guilty about when it comes to enjoying music. That just sounds completely foreign. If you’re ashamed about enjoying a particular music, I’d look at why you are ashamed rather than blaming the music.

49. Wow! Very disappointed to read Jerry’s initial post. Strange to hear it framed so condescendingly. Those kinds of overt put-downs are a real disservice to your community – reinforcing any pretentious vibes that outsiders might have already encountered.

    Nice to see that many readers do not share Jerry’s attitudes.

    Karen Carpenter kicks Cathy Berberian’s ass any day!

50. One of the distinct pleasures of leaving grad school is the end of the Daily Snipe. Somewhere, somehow, you knew were you going to get one (or give one). Like this one, when I was chatting with the student librarian as he checked out my scores:

    Me: What are you doing your dissertation on?
    Librarian: Luigi Nono
    Me: Cool
    Librarian: Snorts and looks disdainfully at the score for Virgil Thomson’s ‘Family Portrait’
    Me: (Cluelessly) What?
    Librarian: (Incredulously) Virgil Thomson?!
    Me: Yeah, it’s a good piece.
    Librarian: Well, I don’t know it. (Beat) Because it’s by Virgil Thomson…

51. Oh, I almost forgot: Sarasate. And Doppler (my wife plays flute).

52. There’s definitely some Wim Mertens on the list of fluffy music I love very much.

53. Cute topic. It does seem sad and even kind of pathetic that musical taste can so easily be seen as a moral issue. Shows how strongly we’re wired to keep the in-group in and the out-group out, I guess. I wonder if there’s a positive side to it, like, without guilt to stiffen his backbone maybe Berg would have turned into another Strauss.

    The urge to belong is strong, though. I remember when I was studying jazz at CalArts in the 80s, hanging with a crowd who thought Stan Getz was pretty much the devil. So Getz was a guilty pleasure for a while. It’s funny in retrospect, especially considering what a superb and searching musician he was.

    Having young children around the house breaks down a lot of self-imposed barriers. I’ve become awfully fond of The Sound of Music, parts of both Fantasias, and the great Dan Zanes. So far I’ve somehow resisted Barney.

    On the classical side, it took me a while to admit to myself that the reason I kept listening to Barber’s Knoxville Summer of 1915 wasn’t just because I was thinking about how to set a free-form text.

    The flip side is equally telling–the pieces you’re supposed to like but don’t. That’s for another thread, though…

54. Allow me to preface this statement by stating, unequivocally, that I am, and shall always remain, an intensly intellectual person. I often times listen to Bach, Charles Wuornen and Elliot Carter simultaeously because, quite frankly, listening to them seperately is simply not adequately aurally challenging. I need at least 40-50 separate melodic lines occurring simultaneously to pleasure
    me intellectually. Then I’ll begin reading as I listen (to truly challenge my intellect!) Maybe Kierkegard in Arabic or Nietsche in Japanese. You know, something light.

    And I like to eat ‘Funny Bones’

    But, come close and I shall whisper to you my dirty little secret…it is…
    Nestles Quik and Barney. A sip of this sweet nectar and I coo with pleasure.
    And, Oh!, how that soft purple creature comforts me with his masculine yet delicate voice.

    I shall give you Nyman and Hovhaness. They are of no interest to me. (Honestly, I thought that you, fellow Sequenzers, were above such musical tastelessness)

    But, please, please, leave me my Barney and chocolate drink.

55. Jay – can’t believe someone else out there knows about the accordion Petrushka recording. Definitely a guilty pleasure for me. And stunningly wonderfully so. Although I’ve never compared it to the orchestra version – for me it’s just a different animal.

    I sometimes feel guilty about how much I respond to the surface sound of music, especially French, from Machaut to Murial. I’ve got a lot of German family heritage so I have this hard-headed idea I’m supposed to be into the structure, urline, gestalt, etc.

    But let’s face it, we can all guilt ourselves over and into just about anything. Our American heritage says we should feel guilty about pleasure in any form.

56. I flat-out refuse to feel guilty for anything that gives me pleasure.

    That said, I may feel stupid for some of them…

57. Some rather old and rickety guilty pleasures, but well worth anybody’s attention or so it seems to me at least. (“Wisdom is bodily decrepitude” — Yeats)

    “Somebody Loves Me.” Kate Smith.

    “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” Guy Lombardo.

    “Variations on ‘Pop Goes the Weasel'” arr. Lucien Caillet. Fiedler/Boston Pops.

    “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Rose Murphy.

    Rachmaninov. Symphony No. 3. Ashkenazy/Royal Concertgebouw.

    “Do It Again.” Jane Russell.

    Duende and significant form, that’s what they all have in common. Well, you did ask, didn’t you?

    rb

58. I almost threw the CD of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat out of the window of my car. I bought it for $1 and felt completely ripped off.

    Foolish economic move. It’s actually been out of print for years and could have fetched you some $ on eBay. As for your not liking it, tehre’s ultimately no accounting for taste. I still don’t understand why any listening pleasure would be guilty. Sounds oh so Puritanical to me.

    I’m a period instrument devotee, so perhaps my having enjoyed Lars Vogt playing Beethoven’s first piano concerto with the New York Philharmonic in concert last week was some sort of guilty pleasure, but I would prefer to think of that as being willing to listen to people with opinions that are different from my own.

    Admittedly I haven’t warmed up to too many “sounds of the 80s” no matter how much wine I drink. But, for me, whereas Talking Heads, XTC, Gang of Four, early Sonic Youth, and the Jesus and Mary Chain are unguilty pleasures, bands like A-Ha or The Cure are just plain annoying. But maybe I’m wrong. I reiterate: there’s no accounting for taste.

59. I can understand the idea of Nyman being a “guilty pleasure.” I almost threw the CD of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat out of the window of my car. I bought it for $1 and felt completely ripped off. Couldn’t stand it.

    Anyhow, most of my guilty musical pleasures come from pop music. Every so often I switch my car stereo from NPR to classic rock or sounds of the 80s or some such thing. Nothing is more dangerous than the iTunes music store after too much wine. I bought a lot of Journey one night.

    Otherwise, I have this awesome recording of two accordions playing Petrushka and Pictures at an Exhibition. That is a guilty pleasure. I enjoy their performance more than the piano or orchestral versions.

60. I would hardly call Nyman or Hovhaness guilty pleasures.

    Nyman’s opera The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is brilliant as are his disturbing scores for the equally disturbing Peter Greenaway films A Zed and Two Noughts and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and her Lover. Few moments in recent music are as bone chilling as the boy soprano singing “Have mercy on us.” If memory serves, it was music originally created in memory of a death from a stampede at a soccer game and Greenaway liked it so much that he cut his film to the music. How many film directors show that much care for the music that appears in their films?

    As for Hovhaness, I can think of few wind band pieces as satisfying as his Symphony No. 4 which is one of the all-time great Mercury Living Presence recordings, and his piano concerto Khaldis is a fantastic listen as well.

    Both composers not only wrote emotionally engaging, tunefully-memorable music plus their sound is immediately identifiable as well. Is enjoying such music really a guilty pleasure?

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