i like ravel's "valses sentimentales..." and a few others, but i really don't know much of his music

Mahler
Ives
Copeland
Bernstein
Dvorak
Grieg
Rachmaninov
Sibelius
Stravinsky
Reich

Steve Reich. I need no other names as he is my favorite.

i've heard quite a bit about this man, but haven't yet explored his catalogue... what CDs do you suggest i begin with?

steve reich's recordings...


first get "Music for 18 Musicians"

then

"Drumming"


and then i don't know what, he has a lot of good cds

In the order that they dropped into my 1k brain:

Dimitri Shostakovich (The 10th!!!)
Felix Mendelssohn (Violin Concerto, the late symphonies)
César Franck (Symphony in D and organ organ organ)
Arnold Schoenberg (Verklärte Nacht and the Piano Concerto)
Arvo Pärt (Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten, De profundis)
Maurice Ravel (Concerto for the Left Hand)
Franz Liszt (Hungarian Fantasy, Liebestraum, etc)
Gustav Mahler (I still like the 1st quite a bit)
Georges Bizet (Pearl Fishers, Carmen)
Frank Zappa (Moe n' Herb's Vacation)

will do... researching this last night 'music for 18 musicians' seems to be widely regarded as his best work.
thanks

yes, it most definitely is

I bought a copy of his 10cd box set "Works: 1965-1995", and I'd recommend it to just about anyone if they can find it. (Although, it is quite expensive). If you listen to "Come Out", one of his first pieces, you'll see how experimental he was for his time. He took the phrase "come out to show me" and overlapped continuously until it became a mess of words and sounds and then backtracked and made it come back together again over about an 17-18 minute period. Very very repetitive and boring to some, yet you can appreciate the experimentalism (if that's a word ) of it all. He was also one of the first to use tape loops in his music.

wow... that sounds interesting, equinox. i'm siked. i just read more about him in another thread in the avant-garde forum.

in reading about this man and his music last night it seems that he's not only known as a strong mimimalist composer, but that his work is also characterized by a lot of complex counter-point and diatonic harmonies. they (classical.net) called his style 'deeply american in its roots' and said that its repeating melodic figures are often compared to be-bop.

i'm gonna hit ameoba today and see what they have

You live in L.A.? Lucky bastard.