If you are interested in music that helps us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, that broadcasts different, special ways of thinking and warns us about those who loathe forms of thinking that are not the same as theirs, if you are thinking of making a move – that pseudo-radical Mercury Prize list coming around like a Yo Sushi conveyor belt one more time driving you over the edge, or perhaps because of that fifth Maximo Park album, yet one more slice of R&B-infused pop, one more posting about the greatest live album of all time, the pop singers who also write cookbooks, the mock drama of the latest announcement of who’s headlining at Glastonbury, of pop groups from the past piling up on endless reunion tours, annually rewinding their forty-, fifty-, sixty-year-old novelty hits – here are eight ways of beginning, eight different doors into what is best thought of as life-enhancing, mind-bending outer space rather than the scary, once-and-for-all end of your pop-loving youth.
1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Masonic Funeral Music in C Minor (K. 477)
2. Debussy - Sonata for Cello and Piano
3. Berio –Sequenza V
4. Shostakovich – Symphony No. 10
5. Webern – Langsamer Satz
6. Earle Brown – Times Five
7. Sofia Gubaidulina – Sonata for Double Bass and Piano
8. John Cage – ORGAN/ASLSP