All-time favorite pop song, film score, and classical piece?

What are your favorite pieces of music from these three categories? I just mean pop music in the most general, “popular” sense to distinguish it from classical music songs, so it can be anything from rock, metal, hip hop, a more specific type of pop, etc.

Song: “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys

Strangely, I only just recently made a list of my all-time favorite songs for the first time (posted in the top 10 songs thread). Looking at my list, this song stood out to me as the one I probably come back to the most – wonderfully orchestrated, texturally rich, harmonically complex but progresses in a way that still feels organic, melodically infectious, beautiful lyrics... and the vocal polyphony at the end is so magical and chill-inducing that I want it to go on forever. A perfect song under 3 minutes.



Film score: The Empire Strikes Back

I'd be lying to myself if I picked something other than a score by Johnny-boy here. The whole Star Wars saga will be remembered as his opus, and while the 1977 original is the landmark work, this one will always be my fav. Contains all of the iconic themes as well as some of JW's most memorable action scoring. It's a dense, exhilarating masterwork that yields new analytical discoveries every time I listen to it.



Classical piece: Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60

This was tough because while my pick was always going to be something by Brahms (my favorite classical composer), I could have easily gone with several of his other works. But I decided to go with this one because I prefer the intimacy of the quartet over a symphony, plus I have more of a personal connection to the genre than something like a solo piano work.

While this is stunning music on its own, it’s more affecting and poignant for me because of its surrounding context. In describing the work, Brahms himself wrote the words “Imagine a man who is just going to shoot himself, for there is nothing else to do" and said it was "perhaps an illustration for the last chapter about the man in the blue coat and the yellow waistcoat" - a reference to Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, which is about a man who shoots himself because of his anguished love for a married woman whose husband he admires... a scenario that uncannily mirrors Brahms's own relationship with Robert and Clara Schumann.

The whole piece is a whirlwind of emotions - from the wrenching, tormented first movement to the aching, yearning tenderness of the third movement. It sounds like someone pouring their whole heart out and letting it bleed all over the staff paper. I could go on and on in more detail about what an amazing piece of music this is... but I wouldn't want to subject everyone to that. 

Side note: I especially love watching a quartet of beautiful women perform this – a piece about a man’s love for an unattainable woman.

(There’s a dude at the piano in the video below, but close enough )