Maurice Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit – This work, with its extreme complexity for solo pianists, often is mentioned as a technical masterwork. This status, however, means that the harmonic features of the work are often left behind outside of academic analysis. Ravel’s piano triptych is a great way to encounter early 20th-century harmonies that are not necessarily consistent with the more Germanic expansion of dissonance associated with the Second Viennese School. Here the harmonies are not conventionally tonal and there are moments of extreme dissonance, but the treatment of that dissonance by Ravel helps listeners hear alternatives to the harmonic structures found in works by Wagner and Stravinsky. This is also a great companion work to the Debussy sonata mentioned in the text.

Arnold Schoenberg – Verklätre Nacht – Pushing the boundaries of late Romanticism, this work is a great companion to Wagner’s Tristan. The double string quartet heralds emerging theoretical ideas surrounding free atonality and contains harmonies used for color rather than function. While the work is quite conservative compared to later Schoenberg compositions, it is an excellent entrée for listening to Schoenberg and other turn-of-the-century composers who stretched and eventually broke traditional harmonic guidelines.

Anthony Braxton – Creative Orchestra Music: March – Combining conventional marching band music with avant-garde jazz, this work is part tonal harmony and part jazz exploration. First performed by an ensemble made up of the greatest jazz players of the era, this work gives listeners both familiar and unfamiliar harmonic material. Much like Charles Ives a generation before, Braxton’s larger works for the orchestra in the 1970s often experimented with sound displacement, aural affect, harmonic contrast, and multiple harmonic textures.