What's the strangest classical music you've ever heard?

I just heard this one, "The Unanswered Question" by Charles Ives.

Weird.

by Mozart

loosely translated as "The Hell of Vengeance that is Burning in my Heart"

It's an aria about how the evil Queen of the Night wants her daughter to not just kill Zarastro, but make him feel the "pains of death". And if the daughter doesn't kill him, then she will be SORRY!

The strangest for me might be Harry Partch's works or some of Stockhausen's stuff (his Helicopter Quartet, for instance).

Takemitsu writes some pretty odd and wild pieces, as well as Xenakis and Tan Dun.

Tan Dun's Water Passion (after the passion of St. Matthew) is a gloriously beautiful piece of music, but not in the normal tonal sense. Makes exciting use of water as an instrument, as well as singing and regular instruments.


And of course, one has to give absolute total props to George Crumb, the master of modern music.

And I LOVE "Circus Band March"

There is nothing fun about the "Robert Browning Overture."

check out Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise". It lends some interesting insight to 20th Century music...of various genres. :hi:

Instead, it felt like being slapped from several different directions, one at a time, but randomly.

After the first rehearsal I spoke to a friend of mine who played in the opera orchestra.

He said the hardest part about learning the music was that you couldn't tell if you played a wrong note.

:)

It was really dark and moody. It made Wagner sound like Abba. I liked it. :)

...a realization of Ives' unfinished "Universe Symphony" by Larry Austin.

Ives' uncompleted Universe Symphony carried the independence of musical groups to the point of visionary impossibility in a work that proposed to set multiple choruses and orchestras playing from valleys and mountaintops.

The version I heard consisted of a greatly expanded orchestra augmented with a Synclavier system (digital synthesis). There were four conductors on stage, as parts of the orchestra were playing in many different tempos at certain points.

The most remarkable thing to me was not the effect it had on me while listening, but how differently I heard the everyday environmental sounds that reached my ears as I walked home after the performance.

:P

The piece was crap but I got to hear the huge pipe organ and see (and photograph) the console.

I saw the score for it once - amazing!

Love it. Really captures the pain and awfulness of a city being wiped out by a nuclear bomb.

When I was a kid, in 68, 69, 70, we had season tickets to the Houston Symphony.
Andre Previn was the conductor (until he got fired for chasing Mia Farrow).

He played the Threnody. He said they would play it again after the regular program was over so we could get used to it.

About 3/4 of the audience left after the first playing. We stayed.

The weirdest thing I remember is the celli sounding like droning B-29s. They did something weird with their vibrato.

It was interesting.

I've heard weirder ones, but this earworm spoken word fugue has stayed in my head since I performed it in college.

I tried to get a youtube, but it's got to be in the original German to sound right ("Ratibor, und der Fluss Mississippi, und die Stadt Honolulu, und die See Titicaca"), and with a big chorus.