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What's Your Top 100 Of The Last 100 Years?

Composer Steve Reich, whose <em>Music for 18 Musicians</em> pulled out ahead of Gershwin, Shostakovich, Bartok, Ives, Berg and all others in last year's Q2 poll.
Wonge Bergmann
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Courtesy of the artist
Composer Steve Reich, whose Music for 18 Musicians pulled out ahead of Gershwin, Shostakovich, Bartok, Ives, Berg and all others in last year's Q2 poll.

For the past few years, member station in New York City has been enlisting listeners in a thought-provoking year-end poll. Forget the best music of the last year — what are the very best compositions of the last century?

What I really like is that by stipulating voters must choose music composed on or after January 1, 1915, a lot of what is still called "modern" music is ineligible: no more Rite of Spring, Pierrot Lunaire or Jeux. In this way, the conversation keeps evolving, year by year — and because the voting is open-ended, there's lots of room for a wide array of opinions to be heard.

So help us define tomorrow's musical canon by responding in the poll below. (If you're hankering for some suggestions, check out , with Schoenberg's String Trio at No. 100 and Reich's Music for 18 Musicians in the top spot.)

Voting closes Saturday, Dec. 20. Q2 will webcast the top choices during a marathon countdown at year's end, beginning Saturday, Dec. 27 — and they'd love to mention some of your comments during their marathon. If you'd like to be publicly identified, please be sure to include your name or Twitter handle in the poll. Happy choosing!

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anastasia Tsioulcas is a reporter on NPR's Arts desk. She is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity, and primarily reports on music. Recently, she has extensively covered gender issues and #MeToo in the music industry, including backstage tumult and alleged secret deals in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against megastar singer Plácido Domingo; gender inequity issues at the Grammy Awards and the myriad accusations of sexual misconduct against singer R. Kelly.