Cody Fry's Top Five
In anticipation of his new album, Cody Fry selects his classical favourites in this exclusive playlist.
Read more…Holst’s Mars has inarguably had a massive impact on modern orchestral music in the form of film scoring. You can hear the echoes of this seminal work in basically every epic movie ever made. I’ll never forget the first time I listened to Mars and understood how powerful the orchestra could be. My father had The Planets on vinyl—the Berliner Philharmoniker recording with that mesmerizing yellow image of Saturn. I can still see the worn edges of that record jacket in my mind.
My list could not be complete without at least one Debussy selection. His harmony and painterly orchestration style is something I aspire to emulate in my own music. I’m a big fan of the impressionist era generally, and Debussy is my favorite of the time. I could do a whole separate list for ol’ Claude, but I went with Nuages. One of my goals as a composer is to create images with music, and this piece does exactly that by capturing the foreboding but beautiful nature of clouds. What is it about the harmony and orchestration that sounds like grey skies? And why? I lay up at night thinking about these questions.
I cried the first time I heard Lux Aurumque. Whitacre’s clustered harmonic style opened my mind to broader and more colorful definitions of dissonance and consonance. From the first ten seconds of Lux I get chills down my spine. Every singer should have the opportunity to experience performing Whitacre with a choir.
The Brahms quintet is a new discovery for me and I am enamored with the harmony in this piece. Brahms’s voice-leading is achingly elegant and he uses suspensions to maximum effect. I wrote my song “Waltz for Sweatpants” after being inspired by this piece.
The rest of the list is owned by Ravel, the master orchestrator. Daphnis et Chloe is currently my favorite orchestral piece of all time. It’s followed closely by the selection from Miroirs. One of my favorite things to do is to listen to how Ravel expanded piano works for full orchestra, so as a bonus I included the piano version of the Miroirs III. I feel like listening to the two in succession really give the listener insight into the genius of Ravel.