Masterpieces of contemporary (art) music. Recommended popular pieces.
When people hear the term “contemporary music,” I suspect the vast majority don’t even know such a genre exists.
Even if they know a little about it, many probably feel it has a high barrier to entry and seems difficult to grasp.
The influence of contemporary music is deeply rooted across many fields—not only in classical music, but also in minimal music, avant-pop, free jazz, and noise avant-garde.
With celebrated works of contemporary music as the axis, I’ve selected tracks spanning a wide range of genres.
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- Masterpieces of Celtic music. Recommended Irish music.
- Western pop music popular with Gen Z. Hit songs.
- Famous piano masterpieces in Western music. Recommended popular songs.
- [Tango] Famous Tango Songs: Recommended Popular Tracks
- [Classical] Masterpieces of oratorios. Recommended classical music.
- A cappella masterpieces: Recommended songs where beautiful harmonies shine (Western and Japanese music)
- K-POP Masterpieces & Best Hits [Latest and Classic Popular Songs + Editor’s Select]
- Famous Western songs everyone knows: a roundup of classic tunes you’ve heard somewhere before
- [Classics] Famous waltzes: recommended popular pieces
- [2026] Iconic musical numbers: from the latest releases to timeless classics!
Masterpieces of contemporary (art) music. Recommended popular pieces (11–20)
fullmoonSakamoto Ryuichi
Professor Ryuichi Sakamoto needs no introduction—he is one of Japan’s greatest musicians, celebrated worldwide.
The reason I chose to feature Sakamoto’s work under the theme of contemporary music is that, while he mastered the fundamentals of music theory and created many magnificent songs within those formats, he also awakened to contemporary music in his teens and continued composing without being bound by existing forms or rules.
The track fullmoon appears on async, his first original solo album in eight years, released in 2017, and it features vocals.
It’s also intriguing that the lyrics quote text from the novel The Sheltering Sky, for which Sakamoto composed the film score.
The album as a whole carries the concept of a “soundtrack to an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film,” making it a work that strongly evokes cinematic imagery.
Try to set aside as many preconceptions about music as possible, and approach it with an open mind.
Un tranquillo posto di campagna, Pt. 11Ennio Morricone
On July 26, 2020, Ennio Morricone, one of the most important composers in the history of film music, passed away at the age of 91.
Born in Rome, Italy, in 1928, this great maestro, since his debut as a film composer in the early 1960s, continued to create remarkable pieces that have gone down in cinema history.
He provided scores that were not mere accompaniments, but at times shone like leading characters, helping to bring masterpieces to life.
While Morricone is known for his poignant early themes for spaghetti westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars and for the melodious, beautiful style of works like Cinema Paradiso, he also had a distinctly experimental side.
The piece introduced here is from the soundtrack to A Quiet Place in the Country (1969).
Listening to its thoroughly contemporary sound, performed by an improvisational ensemble to which Morricone himself belonged, will surely upend the common image many have of him.
Including Morricone’s own trumpet performance, it reveals a new facet of the maestro—one capable of crafting music that is complex and uncanny, tribal and primal, like a festival of sound.
Take this opportunity to discover it!
A Rainbow in Curved AirTerry Riley
Terry Riley is recognized as one of the leading composers of minimal music, alongside Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and La Monte Young.
It’s still fresh in our memory that in February 2020, Riley came to Japan’s Sado Island for a new project and, influenced by the pandemic—and at the age of 85—decided to relocate to Japan.
Today I’d like to introduce the title track from his two-piece masterpiece released in 1969, A Rainbow in Curved Air.
Built on the minimalist technique of repeating a single phrase, its more-than-18-minute sound world—crafted with overdubbed electronic organ, harpsichord, and tambour—radiates like a rainbow-hued psychedelia.
The hint of exotic atmosphere is another key point.
Considering the anecdote that Pete Townshend of The Who was inspired by this piece to create the classic “Baba O’Riley,” you can grasp just how great this work is.
SinfoniaLuciano Berio
Composed between 1968 and 1969, Sinfonia was commissioned to commemorate the New York Philharmonic’s 125th anniversary.
The composer is Luciano Berio, a renowned Italian figure in contemporary music.
Though he was active as a pianist and clarinetist, he injured his right hand during his military service; afterward, while developing an interest in so-called serial music, he moved toward electronic music in the 1950s and later turned to opera in the 1970s—an extremely prolific composer who worked across many fields.
Berio’s Sinfonia, scored for orchestra with eight mixed voices and structured in five movements, assigns an intriguing theme to each movement.
To keep it brief: it opens with a quotation from the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; the second part can be seen as an homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.; and there is a collage that weaves together Mahler’s Symphony No.
2 “Resurrection,” various other classical works, and lines by poets—an avant-garde orchestral work that unfolds a thoroughly unusual world.
It’s even more enjoyable if you recognize the sources, so you might want to look up the pieces quoted in this work before listening.
Jeux vénitiensWitold Lutosławski
Witold Lutosławski, known as an avant-garde contemporary composer from Poland in the postwar era, is regarded in Europe as part of the so-called “Polish School” and is celebrated as one of its representative composers and pianists.
He is also highly esteemed in Japan, having received the 9th Kyoto Prize in the Arts and Philosophy category.
Although he began with a neoclassical style, he adopted techniques unconstrained by tonality.
For example, he was deeply influenced by John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and throughout changing times he continuously sought new means of musical expression, pursuing a distinctive personal idiom.
Among Lutosławski’s works, this time I would like to introduce Jeux vénitiens, composed in 1961 during what is often called his transitional period.
It is an orchestral work said to introduce “controlled chance,” which may seem to leave freedom to the performers, yet is in fact rigorously controlled.
By allowing chance—under the name of improvisation—to exist only within carefully governed rules, he constructs a precise and intense sonic world that is not a chaotic jumble of sounds.
It may be an utterly avant-garde work, but perhaps don’t worry about such labels; why not dive headlong into this torrent of sound?