CLASSICAL: Tyler Cowen

37:10I'm going to play the song.

37:40I'm going to play the song.

38:11I'm going to play the song.

38:40I'm going to play the song.

39:07I'm going to play the song.

39:37I'm going to play the song.

40:07I'm going to play the song.

40:40I'm going to play the song.

41:11I'm going to play the song.

41:17I prefer that piece to the first one. He just gets better and better, Screab and... He's realizing more and more his vision. Yeah. It still feels aimless to me, but maybe that's part of his trip. That's part of his trip I think. Yeah, it feels like it's going somewhere, but never arriving. The piano Sonata is five through ten. I think are the greatest of Screab and works. works. And Stravinsky thought the best two were nine and ten, and that was nine that we just heard. So that's 1913. So in that year, culture in Russia is maybe more vital, more innovative than anywhere else. And people are really taking chances, you know, put out a piece like that.

41:57Pretty different. Absolutely. But it happened, and a lot of people were doing it. So you're Stravinsky. It sounds fearless. Yeah. It was the visual arts than dancing ballet was all quite fearless until a bit after the Bolsheviks took over. So that's one of the great cultural tragedies of human history, I think, is that all these traditions essentially were lost. So even Stravinsky, he's going to leave Russia at the time of World War I, a mix of not wanting to fight and not wanting to be in a country that might lose. And he goes to Switzerland later, he goes to Paris, much later, he ends up living in Los Angeles.

42:39But that whole environment was just torn apart by the two wars and the communists. Does his music change when he leaves Russia? Oh, absolutely. But with Stravinsky, it's changing every piece. So one thing Stravinsky does, he's stuffed with all this Russian music. He studied French music very carefully, knew all the classics Beethoven and so on. And like, what can you do that's different? So he and part wanted to rebel against Thai culture. So Rimsky, for instance, writes many operas, even Mazzorsky writes two operas. Covansina and Boris Kudinov and Stravinsky by doing ballet, which we now take for granted, but at the time it was a radical anti -establishment statement that we're not going to do opera.

43:30There's also going to inject ideas from French music and what was later called primitivism into his ballets. And furthermore, the ballets gave rise to artworks. So the people who would design the sets were some of Russia's greatest artists like Bach's and Benoit. And instead of doing paintings, they thought they're going to do something sort of low -class in art, which is just design ballet sets. But a lot of the greatest works of Russian art are these designs of ballet sets, which are not paintings, but quite incredible. And there's this whole movement to just do everything differently, which is peaking.

44:08You could say, you know, the 1910s up through First World War. So let's hear part of one of Stravinsky's ballets. This is the firebird suite. This is when he was still living in Russia. Yes. He revised a lot of his work. So what year exactly something was composed? But this would be a little bit before Scriab and Peace, which was 1912 and 1913. And here he's not fully radical, but you can see he's up to big changes. Here's a James Levine version. We'll play a bit of this. This was also in the Disney movie Fantasia. And this starts as slow and creeping. And then it's going to blossom into something a bit less.

44:51So you're going to hear a lot of Rimsky in this piece, too.

45:38This sounds more English. And Debussy is a huge influence and Rimsky, too.

45:53It's like pastoral.

47:09The fully radical move is going to come with right of spring, which is 1913. And it takes a little while for that piece to get going. But that's when Stravinsky really is breaking with this past and bringing primitiveism and just ritual and this idea of sacrifice into music. Some people have said this was a precursor of World War One. When it was first performed, the reports were that the audiences rioted in through chairs and made trouble and were violent. I'm not sure we know exactly how true that was or if it's apocryphal. But some weird things are going to happen. So let's let this one rip.

50:41You can see it's building.

51:22Now we get to the second movement.

54:39Now that the second movement of right of spring is maybe the most important movement in all of 20th century classical music. The idea that you take what was music and organize it as blocks of sound. It's a precursor to John Cage, precursor to Electronica, points the way for how classical music and later rock and roll might be integrated. Noise music comes from that. And Stravinsky had all that Russian music in his background and he came up with something that topped it. It was an original. Was this before George Gershwin as well? I hear the Gershwin in this. Absolutely. You hear a lot of music coming from it.

55:17Bernhard Hermann influenced by this. So just everything is coming from right of spring. A bit Patruska. And in particular that second movement is most obvious. You just hit someone with something so radical and sound that it falls them over. And if you hear that movement live, it's just phenomenal. And to see that performed with the ballet where people are basically performing ritual sacrifice, the whole visuals, the whole everything together, unbelievable. One of the best musical experiences of my life was to see that live. Fantastic. Where did you see it? The Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

55:59It was a good performance. The notion that terrible things were going to happen in Europe. You'll also hear in that music. And people just couldn't go back to making music the old way after they heard that. So they heard that. They heard Scherneberg and they heard Verez. Let me play you a little bit of Verez. Verez is coming from Stravinsky. And most people don't like it. But it's very percussive. And you can just see where Stalkhouse and Cage, many other things and classical music will be coming from. Here's a short bit from Emoryk. And then we'll do a short bit from ionization. But you can see where 20th century music is headed.

56:41And Verez would be from the 1920s.

57:19Very closely related.

57:33Then Verez thought, well, why even bother with melody at all? That's just organized the sound. Percussively, here's ionization.

58:28Is this at the time when the visual arts were getting abstract as well? Absolutely. And most people today don't like to listen to that. But Paul McCartney was a big fan of all the music in that direction, including Verez. And the idea that rock and roll would incorporate sound effects that were sound. And then John Cage, music is only sound, Brian E. Now. Coming through Verez, which came from Stravinsky, which is coming from their earlier Russian works, but with Stravinsky's own innovations. Can we listen to a late Stravinsky piece you like just to hear his arc? Sure. Let's listen to something from Stravinsky's neoclassical period.

59:08So Stravinsky and his memoir My Life, which is a fun book. He said, well, when I did write a spring, everyone hated it at first, but it actually fit the time. And within a month or two, people came around and they accepted it, and then they loved it. He actually made this career when he lived in the US. He'd go around and he wouldn't conduct his famous ballets. And that's what they paid him for, not actually for composing. But he so rebelled against himself. And there was a famous trip he had through Italy. In fact, he and Picasso were traveling together in a two -bed, there were no podcasts back then.

59:41Those must have been phenomenal conversations. And they heard some music, and Stravinsky did, starting in the 20s, what is called his neoclassical turn. He got fed up with his earlier directions, or he felt he had done everything with them that he could. And he said, my audience is always hated the neoclassical turn, even though it was quite melodic, and more of his sounded entirely normal. Let's see if we can find a piece from Puccinella. This was very stripped down music. So here's a one -minute segment called Tyrantella. You'll still hear some of the rhythmic propulsion and short sharp phrases of earlier Stravinsky, but it's turned into something quite different.

1:00:26And what year would this have been? Puccinella, he revised a few times. The first draft, I think, is 1920. The seminal draft, I think, is 1926, which one we're hearing now, I would guess 26, but it's the 20s. So 10 years later. Right.

1:01:10Was Tyrantella a dance? Yes. It didn't involve spinning. It involved spinning. In the beginning, fluency, or his Mozart, of course, in the 18th century.

1:01:51The fun piece, yes? Yeah. Just melodic, energetic. So do you think he was looking backwards and finding a new way to interpret what he liked about old music? That is what I think, but you still hear this Stravinsky, and it don't you? Yes. And I'll play you the opening bit of Puccinella, which he took from an early 18th century theme by Perger Lacey. And Perger Lacey was a great composer of his time. He died, I think, at age 26. Let's see.

1:02:52It feels more like whimsy. Absolutely. Is he mocking us? Is it satire? Is it synthesis? All of the above?

1:03:03Or maybe he just came around to realize that it was really fun.

1:03:14The rhythmic jolts are still in there, though.

1:03:34So I guess I interpret him as somehow in his head trying to bring all of music together. I need to skip on trying, trying, trying. And that meant every piece shifted and was quite different. And I've played just a few pieces for you, but you see, like, not a lot more like the other. His very last piece, I think he was actually conducting this in Venice. I think he died in Venice. He's buried in Venice. And this, in his whole life, he had this rivalry with Arnold Scherneberg, who was the other great innovator, a tonal music, a 12 -tone music, which for most of his life, Stravinsky, he either hated it or he claimed to hate it.

1:04:09But when he got to the very end of his life, it was where he turned. I'll play you a very short bit of this, Requiem Canticles. So Stravinsky is born in 1882, dying in 1971. And let's just do a short bit from Requiem Canticles. This is... How late was it written this piece? Would you guess? 1960s? Yeah. So he's active, he lives, you know, to be basically 90. And he's active his whole life. So the complete Stravinsky is about 23 or so compact discs. There's a box you can buy. It's conducted by Stravinsky himself. But this will sound really different. And you've listened to the entire, all of the Stravinsky by Stravinsky.

1:04:57And listen to it sequentially in order, which is a fascinating thing to do. And how many hours of music is it? 23 discs, 70 minutes on average of discs. Good ads on, right? So almost 30 hours. Here's Requiem Canticles.

1:06:01iosa That was quite good. Yeah, I like that piece very much, but again, not for everyone, but he was always experimenting and just to close before I need to get off to the airport to see Stravinsky's own influence on Russian music even through the age of Stalin. Let's hear a little bit of Shostakovich. Let's try the second movement of the String quartet number eight. And when would this have been from? About 1940. So Shostakovich called this the dread, and it'll maybe a little later, but during the war, he called it the Dresden quartet, and it was a kind of memorion to the suffering of victims of the war.

1:08:16Even the Tchaikovsky, am I right? Right?

1:09:51How do you describe the Russian music versus the European music of the era? I'd describe the differences. The rest of the European music is so much more urban oriented. So you have Bach going around to different cities, Monteverdi, being in Manchua, and it's court music of a kind, or church music, or urban, and the Russian music, it's earthy, it's drawing from the folk traditions, folk songs. I'll let's see if we can close with one Stravinsky song. I don't know if it's in your system, but it's called Kili -Bam. It's one of my favorite short Stravinsky pieces. There's a few versions of this. Here's a one -minute version.

1:11:24I'll let you know if it's in your system, folk songs. That's what Russian music has. A lot of other music stuff. And do you think it has to do with the conditions that lead to the writing of the music? I think so. Surrounded by all that folk music, late urbanization, there is a church music, but it's more purely liturgical. And something like Bach's Brandenburg Concertity, which is composed a long time ago, nothing like that is being done in Russia. So you have these primitiveist influences. You then have romanticism, nationalism, and a lot of weirdness and Russian culture. Very tolerant of weird, I would say, in a good way.

1:12:07So people like Skryabin and Stravinsky could do their thing, and then it's just all blossomed. Great. Thank you so much. My pleasure.