"Emotive" composers since 1950

[swanekj]

Who would you consider composers since 1950 that "wore their heart on their sleeve"?  I'll suggest an odd one to begin with...Lokshin.

[Delicious Manager]

By 'composers since 1950', I presume you mean those who wrote music after that year rather than those born after 1950. Of course, the perception of such a thing is very subjective and will vary with every listener. For example, I find the music of Rodion Shchedrin very emotive and often with its 'heart on its sleeve', but have recently seen him dismissed as irrelevant to this forum, presumably because some consider him too 'modern' (strange how people lap-up new literature, new visual art, new theatre and new films, yet balk at 'new music'!).

Other composers active since 1950 who I would suggest fit your criteria might include:

John Adams (eg 'Harmonium', 'El Dorado')
Malcolm Arnold (listen to the slow movements of the 2nd or 5th symphonies, for example)
Samuel Barber (he wrote plenty after 1950)
Leonard Bernstein
Michael Daugherty
Einar Englund
Benjamin Frankel (eg the Violin Concert 'In Memory of the Six Million')
Górecki (from the mid-1970s onwards - eg the  'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs')
Jón Leifs (eg 'Dettifoss', 'Geysir', 'Hafís', 'Hekla')
Kancheli
Arvo Pärt
Penderecki (what could be more emotive the the 'Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima'?)
Allan Pettersson (highly emotive, but very difficult)
Zbigniew Preisner
Shostakovich (I would suggest that some post-1950 works were emotive in the way you suggest - eg the 11th, 12th and 14thSymphonies, 'The Execution of Stepan Razin', the 8th and 10th Quartets)
John Tavener
Veljo Tormis
Mark Anthony Turnage (a more emotive composer it would be hard to imagine, but discussions about his music would not be welcomed here, I suspect)
Pēteris Vasks
Eric Whitacre

[swanekj]

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Tell us about Turnage's, what...10?, concertos?  What do they sound like?

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[eschiss1]

I'd add Edmund Rubbra (sometimes dry but often not ) and even some late works by Walter Piston and William Schuman. Also Miecyzslaw Weinberg's symphony no. 6 (1963) and many other works of his; late symphonies of Eduard Tubin's (esp. symphony eight)... (alas my favorite Vermeulen is from the 1940s or I'd suggest him too... though he's certainly emotive and well worth it.)
Eric

[swanekj]

I was thinking about Weinberg/Vainberg as well, but "feel" more from Lyatoshynsky/Liatoshinsky.

John Adams in "Looking at the Ceiling..." feels quite in-sincere to me, as does much of Bernstein [remember Leonard is the fellow who mis-IDed early Hovhaness as "filthy (sentimental) ghetto music"]. 

Arnold is very obviously emotive in his horrific 7th Symphony, dedicated to his own children.

Górecki of course.

Penderecki's "Threnody" frankly sounds like he was trying to mix audio suffering with audio radiation.

[Delicious Manager]

I had also considered names such as Schuman, Hanson, Diamond, Weinberg - even Holmboe and Robert Simpson (two of the best symphonists of the 20th century), but I wanted to stick to those I hear as truly 'emotive', rather than simply 'acceptably conservative'.

As for Turnage - you could try works such as:
Drowned Out (incorporating stylised football chants)
Etudes and Elegies
Momentum
Night Dances
Three Screaming Popes (inspired by paintings by Francis Bacon)

Concertos? Yes, indeed:
Another Set To (trombone)
Five Views of a Mouth (flute)
From the Wreckage (trumpet)
On Open Ground (viola)
Riffs and Refrains (clarinet)
Your Rockaby (saxophone)

[eschiss1]

As you said, it's subjective - the 9th quartet and 9th symphony especially of Holmboe, and several works especially of Weinberg (starting with the 6th symphony and maybe the 7th and 10th quartets), communicate much emotion here.
I'd add of course Prokofiev (who barely falls into the post-1950-active category and whose post-1950 works include the nostalgically emotional 7th symphony, completed in 1952), Dohnanyi, Martinu, and Milhaud (some of whose operas incl. "David" and other major works date from the 1950s and after. Though admittedly one work of his said to contain a great emotional charge, the 2nd violin concerto, dates from 1946- an appropriate date; another, the Service Sacré, from 1947.)
Edit: (though my own list is probably a bit long and I should try to keep it brief- but still.) Those who have a taste for the aftershoots of Russian Romanticism should look into some of Myaskovsky's students - for instance, Vissarion Shebalin, whose string quartets used to be available on Olympia. They're all fairly conservative (somewhat- the 9th quartet uses some 12-tone material and high dissonance, I think; Myaskovsky's music around 1930 incorporated such things too) but I at least find especially those in minor-mode (and some of those in major) highly communicative and (to overuse the adjective) emotive.  The less-recorded music of another Myaskovsky pupil, Evgeny Golubev (some of his symphonies and string quartets, particularly - only a piano sonata and piano concerto, I think, are on CD) has some of the same qualities - the late quartets in a somewhat different style.
George Lloyd might also be mentioned, especially of course the best of his music. And the late works of Vaughan Williams belong here- the finale of symphony no. 9 may sound a bit like film music to me sometimes, but that's definitely strong emotion of a kind. (Let me not deceive- I enjoy and admire a lot of his music - including symphony no. 9!)


Eric

[giles.enders]

Some of the composers mentioned sound as though they wore their daggers on their sleeves not their hearts.

[eschiss1]

Some of the composers mentioned sound as though they wore their daggers on their sleeves not their hearts.

(1) This is subjective, again!!!

(2) I was going by the title of the thread and forgot your first post in the thread. Emotive means, strictly, of or relating to emotion (and that covers very many composers, since most have regarded that as their first or at worst second or third (close in) objective, including the much-derided members of the Second Vienna School and the succeeding modernists; communication of emotion through musical ideas.  Several polemics by Schoenberg focused on composers who thought they could and should avoid emotion in music.  But that's a debate that could go on awhile, and there are the parameters of this forum to consider.)

[chill319]

In college I was impressed by a lecturer's claim that while cultures without any recognizable visual art have been discovered, the same cannot be said of cultures without music -- the most primitive being one where music consists of two stones hit together (rhythmically?). Might some aging couple in that culture recognize "their" song in the rock smashing? Perhaps -- I do believe music is as ubiquitous as spoken language because fundamentally it communicates emotional structures and patterns, whether a cone-headed composer like Babbitt wants it to or not. Just an opinion.

Not pertinent to this forum, perhaps, but as the music appeared, I found the struggles between tonality and atonality in works of Iain Hamilton to be emotionally motivating. The tribute to Dag Hammarskjold, "Markings" by Ulysses Kay was deeply moving, too. Not merely "gestural." Upon further consideration, perhaps there is a small place in this forum for appreciation of works by the earliest composers who had the nerve to jump ship from the H.M.S. Serialism.

[swanekj]

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Interesting.  Of course, music that appeals to children is obviously appealing to their emotions and not their "intellect".  In that regard, Orff's Music for Children (including the vinyl-only Angel version in English), focusing on simple rhythms (with percussion instruments with many tones) and melodies, might be highly emotive to people not using too much of their intellect...

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