Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) changed the sound of Western music three times in his career and lived long enough to see his own early work become historical. The Rite of Spring (1913) — premiered with a riot — is the most famous single piece of music from the 20th century, and it earned that status not through beauty (though it has it) but through the shock of its rhythm and noise. The opening bassoon melody, the stampeding ostinati, the dissonant clusters — it sounded like nothing that had come before, and audiences at the premiere agreed.

Before the Rite, Stravinsky was a competent Russian nationalist composer in the Rimsky-Korsakov mold. The three Diaghilev ballets — The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913) — made him the most discussed composer alive, and he spent the next decade wrestling with the composer's dilemma: how do you follow something that changes everything? He didn't solve it — he kept changing instead. The Symphony of Psalms (1930) and the opera The Rake's Progress (1951) are as different from each other and from the Rite as possible, linked only by their precision and their author's complete refusal to repeat himself.

He spent the 1920s as a neoclassicist, stripping his language back to Bach and Mozart and writing music that sounds deliberately dry and impersonal. This phase produced some of his best work — the Octet, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, the Symphony in C — but it also produced a running war with Schoenberg and the twelve-tone school, who thought Stravinsky was selling out to populism. Stravinsky thought they were writing math disguised as music. Both were partly right.

StyleRhythmic modernism and neoclassical restraint, sometimes in the same piece. Acute awareness of past styles; refusal to let listeners forget them. Hard-edged orchestration, motor rhythms, deliberate dislocation.

Listen: The Rite of Spring (original 1913 version, not the 1947 revision). Then the Symphony of Psalms. Then — if you want to understand the neoclassical period — the Ebony Concerto for Benny Goodman.