13 days
13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 13:<br>November 4, 1964: Premiere of Terry Riley's "In C"
The premiere of Terry Riley’s “In C” at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. This piece, and the minimalist outpouring that it sparked, were a reaction to the rigid strictures of serialism and the stranglehold of the academic composers of the time.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 12:<br>January 28, 1936: Stalin Condemns "Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk"
The publication in Pravda of the article, “Chaos Instead of Music,” signaling Stalin’s displeasure with Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and leading to the composer’s “redemption” in his 5th Symphony. A program about Shostakovich and the sometimes mutually beneficial, sometimes terrifying relationship between music and the totalitarian state.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 11:<br>January 10, 1931: "Three Places in New England"
“Three Places in New England,” by Charles Ives, is performed for the first time to mild applause at a concert funded by the composer himself. Mild applause, but Ives’s music was revolutionary. Before him, American concert music was almost entirely based on European models. After him, through Copland, Cage and beyond, American “classical” music found its own voice.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 10:<br>December 26, 1926: Premiere of "Tapiola"
The premiere of “Tapiola,” the tone poem by Sibelius, his last major work before 30 years of silence, during which the world waited for an 8th symphony that never came. Sibelius in his time was seen a nationalist along the lines of Grieg, but we now hear his music as radical and astonishingly prescient.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 09:<br>May 29, 1913: Premiere of "The Rite of Spring"
The premiere of the ballet, “The Rite of Spring.” Stravinsky’s completely original instrumentation, rhythms, and his use of dissonance, have made this work one of the most important of the 20th century, not to mention the riot and ensuing scandal that caused this premiere in Paris to be one of the most shocking in all of performance history.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 08:<br>January 25, 1909: Richard Strauss' "Elektra"
The premiere of “Elektra,” Richard Strauss‘s farthest out work and perhaps the only piece from the days of early modernism that retains its ability to shock today.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 07:<br>May 6, 1889: The Birth of "World" Music
The opening day of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, when Debussy first heard gamelan music, and “world&rdqou; music became a part of Western European classical language. Composers before and after Debussy frequently turned to vernacular sources for inspiration, whether Brahms, Mahler and Bartok incorporating folk melodies, Copland and Gershwin using the rhythms of Latin dance, or Steve Reich quoting West African drumming.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 06:<br>August 13, 1876: Launch of the "Ring" Cycle
The launch of the first “Ring” cycle at Bayreuth. A program about the danger and appeal of Wagner’s full-immersion mythology, and why the composer was so important, even to those who hated him.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 05: April 7, 1805: Premiere of Beethoven's 'Eroica'
The first public performance of the Beethoven‘s “Eroica”, the symphony that changed our idea of what music could express. Instead of classical form and rarified beauty, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 lays out the full range of human feelings, from joy and love to hopelessness and pathos.
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13 Days When Music Changed Forever - Program 04: August 8, 1803: Beethoven and the Piano
The date when Parisian piano maker Sébastien Érard gave one of his sturdy new creations to Beethoven, and the composer was able to set aside his forte piano and write more expressive and emotional music, beginning with the “Waldstein” Sonata. New instruments and new technologies have unalterably changed music many times, but the pace of change quickened in the 20th century, with the record player, the computer and the Internet.
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