Symphony No. 4 by Charles Ives
I received a copy of Ives’s newly published 4th symphony and when I read it I instantly lost all hope for not only contemporary music but the future of music producing the pieces of power we’ve seen from composers like Mahler, Beethoven and Brahms. This piece has more power and emotion than any other contemporary piece I’ve seen; it’s structure and style are genius; but just because it uses more instrumentation (it even requires 2 conductors) than any other piece of music in its time and breaks away from all the other classical styles, all the symphonies refuse to play it. Even Ives said the piece is "a searching question of 'What' and 'Why' which the spirit of man asks of life". Yet it won’t get played.
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