The Kent State shootings happened while my mother was attending nearby Oberlin College. Oberlin’s response was to engage the entire student body in a performance of Mozart‘s Requiem in Washington DC.

I was in college when 9/11 happened. Remembering my mother’s story, a handful of students and I organized a performance of the same piece. We managed to engage so many students that our school was forced to shut down for the day, and some of our esteemed faculty even donated their voices to the cause.

Requiems have long been a regular part of church music. It’s not until Mozart, though, that they became a dramatic personal statement. After him, Berlioz, Brahms, Faure, Verdi, and Durufle wrote their own, and more or less solidified the concert Requiem as a standard form of composition. Still, when you talk about great Requiems, Mozart’s is the one by which all others are judged. And why not? It’s one of the most stunning things ever written. And it helps us express the many complex emotions that come with a tragedy like the one that happened in the US fifteen years ago.

There are two big myths surrounding this piece (and contributing to its popularity) – both were started by Mozart’s widow. First myth: a mysterious stranger (or a rival composer) commissioned the work. Second myth: Mozart believed he was writing his own funeral music. But they make for smashing good stories, anyway.

As an organist, and a masochist, I love the music of Max Reger – he penned one of my favorite organ works. His music is often so complex and busy that it was said that, instead of writing black notes on white paper, he would start with black paper and just while out the parts without notes.

In the realm of composers, though, he’s probably on the C-list, so many people haven’t heard of him unless you’ve encountered his music – and if you have, you either love it or hate it. Consequentially, there are some truly scathing famous criticisms of Reger’s music (all taken here from Nicolas Slonimsky‘s Lexicon of Musical Invective):

“This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. In listening to these works … one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger … that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ-bench. There is something repulsive as well as pedantic in this art. His works … are like mathematical problems and solutions, sheer brain-spun and unlyrical.” – Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits

“Reger’s [String] Quartet … looks like music, it sounds like music, it might even taste like music; yet it remains, stubbornly, not music. … Reger might be epitomized as a composer whose name is the same either forward or backward, and whose music, curiously, often displays the same characteristic.” – Irving Kolodin, New York Sun

“[Reger’s ‘100th Psalm’] is enough to split the roof of the theater with the skull of the audience.” – Pall Mall Gazette

Reger, however, had the last laugh, with this popular quote which he sent to one of his critics:

“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!”

Sergei Diaghilev, head of the Ballet Russes (a French organization, despite its name and artistic director), is responsible for the creation of the finest works of the early 20th century. While the most famous production is no doubt Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, you can read the list of other works which the company commissioned here – and it’s pretty amazing.

One of those works is The Three Cornered Hat by Manuel de Falla. The music, derived from traditional Spanish dances, is nothing groundbreaking. However, being composed just after the end of World War I in 1919, it does demonstrate how the conflict triggered a sudden return to a more conservative musical style. (More proof of this can be seen in Stravinsky; he caused quite a ruckus with The Rite in 1913, but composed the docile, neoclassical Pulcinella in 1920.)