Those who know the work of Igor Stravin­sky will be famil­iar with the recep­tion the Russ­ian composer’s The Rite of Spring received dur­ing its first per­for­mance in Paris in 1913. The typ­i­cal descrip­tion for what hap­pened is that the bal­let caused a “riot,” though giv­en our usu­al asso­ci­a­tions with that word, it hard­ly seems like the appro­pri­ate term. As The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett notes, the respons­es, though bemused and irate, were gen­teel by most stan­dards of civ­il unrest. But there was vio­lence and the threat of vio­lence.

Accord­ing to a mem­ber of the orches­tra, “many a gentleman’s shiny top hat or soft fedo­ra was igno­min­ious­ly pulled down by an oppo­nent over his eyes and ears, and canes were bran­dished like men­ac­ing imple­ments of com­bat all over the the­atre.” What could cause such a scan­dal? Hear­ing the piece, above, it’s per­haps not obvi­ous why “peo­ple start­ed to whis­per and joke almost imme­di­ate­ly.” Both Stravin­sky and Russ­ian bal­let impre­sario Sergei Diaghilev sought to pro­voke the audi­ence, but both were tak­en aback by the vehe­mence of the reac­tions. As audi­ence mem­bers began to shout, “I left the hall in a rage,” Stravin­sky lat­er wrote. “I have nev­er again been that angry.”

Of course, the music alone, with­out Vaslav Nijinsky’s chore­og­ra­phy, only gives us half the sto­ry. Onstage, writes Hewitt, “there’s no sign that any of the crea­tures in the Rite of Spring has a soul, and there’s cer­tain­ly no sense of a rec­og­niz­able human cul­ture. The dancers are like automa­ta.” And yet, Stravin­sky seems to have intend­ed his music to alien­ate lis­ten­ers as well: “there are sim­ply no regions for soul-search­ing,” he said, “in The Rite of Spring.” It’s a com­ment that suc­cinct­ly sums up the composer’s icon­o­clasm and defi­ance of sacred musi­cal norms.

Stravinsky’s first bal­let, 1910’s The Fire­bird, fol­lowed Debussy in recu­per­at­ing the so-called “Devil’s Inter­val,” a tonal fig­ure avoid­ed for hun­dreds of years in reli­gious music for its sin­is­ter sound. But The Fire­bird’s exot­ic beau­ty charmed audi­ences, as did his next bal­let Petrush­ka.  And despite the Rite of Spring con­tro­ver­sy, many of Stravinsky’s sym­phonies are quite tra­di­tion­al next to the avant-gardism of his peers. His ten­den­cies of “regres­sion and restau­ra­tion,” writes clas­si­cal site CMUSE, “an amal­gam of the archa­ic and the mod­ern,” caused Theodor Adorno to describe Stravin­sky as schiz­o­phrenic in Phi­los­o­phy of Mod­ern Music.

Unlike his mod­ernist rival Arnold Schoen­berg, Stravin­sky is “in the same cat­e­go­ry as T.S. Eliot, as both were well-versed in literary/musical tra­di­tion and well aware of the cur­rent avant-garde move­ments, but main­tained quite a con­ser­v­a­tive approach to nov­el­ty.” Stravinsky’s con­ser­v­a­tive mod­ernism had a pro­found effect on anoth­er form of 20th cen­tu­ry music that looked both back­ward and for­ward: jazz. Artists like Char­lie Park­er paid trib­ute to him, and the com­pos­er very much appre­ci­at­ed it. “This cat,” said Park­er, “he’s kind of cool, you know.”

In the chrono­log­i­cal playlist above from Ulysses Clas­si­cal, hear the ear­ly sym­phonies and sonatas that inspired Diaghilev to hire him as the Bal­lets Russ­es first com­pos­er, and many of the bal­lets that enraged the Parisian elite, delight­ed Char­lie Park­er, and repelled Adorno. And find out why, as CMUSE argues, Stravin­sky may be “the great­est com­pos­er of the 20th cen­tu­ry.”

The playlist runs 32 hours. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Glenn Gould died young, in 1982 at the age of 50, but the Cana­di­an clas­si­cal pianist made great con­tri­bu­tions to the world of music in his short life. He did it in part by start­ing young — so young, in fact, that he first felt the vibra­tions of music played for him while still in the womb by his moth­er. She’d decid­ed even then to raise a suc­cess­ful musi­cian, and her plan sure­ly worked bet­ter than she could ever have expect­ed. Young Glenn had per­fect pitch, learned to read notes before he learned to read words, entered Toron­to’s Roy­al Con­ser­va­to­ry of Music at age ten, and grew into the very arche­typ­al image of a musi­cal genius: eccen­tric and often dif­fi­cult, but pos­sessed of almost oth­er­world­ly skill and dis­tinc­tive­ness.

Those qual­i­ties came out nowhere more clear­ly than in Gould’s rela­tion­ship with the music of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach, whom he described as “beyond a doubt the great­est archi­tect of sound who ever lived.” Even lis­ten­ers only casu­al­ly acquaint­ed with Gould’s work will know his record­ings of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions, the first of which, record­ed in 1955, shot him to star­dom and became one of the best-sell­ing clas­si­cal albums of all time.

Four years after that, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da doc­u­men­tary Off the Record, just above, cap­tured his play­ing on film in the clips at the top of the post. “When Gould is not on tour or record­ing,” he spends most of his time at his retreat, a cot­tage on the Shore of Lake Sim­coe 90 miles north of Toron­to. Here he works on the piano he favors above all oth­ers for prac­tic­ing: a 70-year-old Chick­er­ing with a res­o­nant, harp­si­chord qual­i­ty recall­ing the instru­ments of the time of Bach.”

There, in that cot­tage in the small com­mu­ni­ty of Upter­grove, we see the 27-year-old Gould play Bach’s Par­ti­ta No. 2, vocal­iz­ing along with the dis­tinc­tive mix of force­ful­ness and del­i­ca­cy issu­ing from the instru­ment that he nev­er chose, but mas­tered to a degree few had before or have since. “His ambi­tion,” the nar­ra­tor says, “is to make enough mon­ey by the time he is 35 to retire from the con­cert stage and devote him­self to com­pos­ing.” In fact Gould put live per­for­mance behind him just five years lat­er in order to pur­sue with more focus his own kind of pianis­tic per­fec­tion, which he con­tin­ued to do for the rest of his life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Glenn Gould Offers a Strik­ing­ly Uncon­ven­tion­al Inter­pre­ta­tion of 1806 Beethoven Com­po­si­tion

The Art of Fugue: Gould Plays Bach

Glenn Gould Gives Us a Tour of Toron­to, His Beloved Home­town (1979)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Image (left) by William P. Got­tlieb, image (right) by Library of Con­gress, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The his­to­ry of 20th-cen­tu­ry music offers plen­ty of sto­ries of lumi­nar­ies meet­ing, play­ing togeth­er, and some­times even enter­ing into long-term col­lab­o­ra­tion. But it typ­i­cal­ly only hap­pened with­in tra­di­tions: encoun­ters between rock and rock, jazz and jazz, mod­ernism and mod­ernism. And so it still thrills to hear of the time in 1951 when Char­lie Park­er added one more sto­ry to the most sto­ried jazz club of all by per­form­ing for Igor Stravin­sky at Bird­land. Alfred Appel tells it defin­i­tive­ly in his book Jazz Mod­ernism: From Elling­ton and Arm­strong to Matisse and Joyce:

The house was almost full, even before the open­ing set — Bil­ly Taylor’s piano trio — except for the con­spic­u­ous emp­ty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusu­al for Bird­land. After the pianist fin­ished his forty-five-minute set, a par­ty of four men and a woman set­tled in at the table, rather clam­orous­ly, three wait­ers swoop­ing in quick­ly to take their orders as a rip­ple of whis­pers and excla­ma­tions ran through Bird­land at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravin­sky. He was a celebri­ty, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanc­ti­fied mod­ern jazz by com­pos­ing Ebony Con­cer­to for Woody Her­man and his Orches­tra (1946) — a Covar­ru­bias “Impos­si­ble Inter­view” come true.

As Parker’s quin­tet walked onto the band­stand, trum­peter Red Rod­ney rec­og­nized Stravin­sky, front and almost cen­ter. Rod­ney leaned over and told Park­er, who did not look at Stravin­sky. Park­er imme­di­ate­ly called the first num­ber for his band, and, for­go­ing the cus­tom­ary greet­ing to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the open­ing notes, played in uni­son by trum­pet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck.

They were play­ing “KoKo,” which, because of its epochal break­neck tem­po — over three hun­dred beats per minute on the metronome — Park­er nev­er assayed before his sec­ond set, when he was suf­fi­cient­ly warmed up. Parker’s phras­es were fly­ing as flu­ent­ly as ever on this par­tic­u­lar daunt­ing “Koko.” At the begin­ning of his sec­ond cho­rus he inter­po­lat­ed the open­ing of Stravinsky’s Fire­bird Suite as though it had always been there, a per­fect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the num­ber. Stravin­sky roared with delight, pound­ing his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass send­ing its liquor and ice cubes onto the peo­ple behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked.

Park­er did­n’t just hap­pen to know a few bits of Stravin­sky to whip out as a nov­el­ty; he had, at that point, already deeply inter­nal­ized the work of the man who com­posed The Rite of Spring (1913), the most rhyth­mi­cal­ly com­plex piece of orches­tral music to date.

“Jazz musi­cians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music start­ed play­ing; he was speak­ing some­thing close to their lan­guage,” writes New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross in his book The Rest Is Noise: Lis­ten­ing to the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. “When Char­lie Park­er came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occa­sion by incor­po­rat­ing the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’.”

In a piece on why jazz musi­cians love The Rite of Spring, NPR’s Patrick Jaren­wat­tananon dis­cuss­es oth­er instances where Park­er quot­ed (or paid musi­cal trib­ute to) Stravin­sky: “A per­son­al favorite comes from 1947, when Park­er was a guest soloist on trum­peter and arranger Neal Hefti’s ‘Rep­e­ti­tion,’ as heard on a com­pi­la­tion called The Jazz Scene. Not only does Hefti’s arrange­ment quote the tran­si­tion­al horn motif which sig­nals the sec­ond half of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ move­ment from The Rite, but Park­er riffs on the same motif to start his solo.”

Dylan Thomas: A Cen­te­nary Cel­e­bra­tion con­tains a chap­ter by Daniel G. Williams on Dylan Thomas and Char­lie Park­er, which, in estab­lish­ing Park­er’s engage­ment in “reviv­i­fy­ing the vocab­u­lary of jazz,” gets into how that got him draw­ing from Stravin­sky, whose work Park­er called “music at its best.” Williams quotes Park­er’s trum­peter Howard McGhee as remem­ber­ing that Park­er “knew every­thing, and he hipped me to, like, Stravin­sky and all those guys. I did­n’t now noth­in’ about Stravin­sky.” When Park­er brought The Rite of Spring over to lis­ten to at McGhee’s house, he pref­aced the expe­ri­ence with these words: “Yeah, this cat, he’s kind of cool, you know; he knows what he’s doing.” And the more we learn about what went into Park­er’s music, the more we real­ize that he, too, knew even more thor­ough­ly what he was doing than we’d ever real­ized.

via Jer­ry Jazz Musi­cian/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music of 3 Char­lie Park­er Jazz Clas­sics: “Con­fir­ma­tion,” “Au Pri­vave” & “Bloom­di­do”

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravin­sky Con­duct The Fire­bird, the Bal­let Mas­ter­piece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Hear 46 Ver­sions of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 3 Min­utes: A Clas­sic Mashup

Stravinsky’s “Ille­gal” Arrange­ment of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” (1944)

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Visu­al­ized in a Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion for Its 100th Anniver­sary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

If you’re of a cer­tain vin­tage, you may at var­i­ous times have grooved to The Orb’s chill-out clas­sic “Lit­tle Fluffy Clouds,” the spaced-out sound­scapes of DJ Spooky, the avant-psych of Son­ic Youth, the locked grooves of Tor­toise, the bub­bling fugues of Björk, or the omi­nous rum­blings of postrock god­fa­thers God­speed You! Black Emper­or. And if so, you very like­ly know at least some of the work of min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er Steve Reich, which these artists either sam­pled or drew on for musi­cal inspi­ra­tion. Like many of his avant-garde col­leagues, Reich has “influ­enced gen­er­a­tions of pop, jazz and clas­si­cal musi­cians over the last half-cen­tu­ry,” writes Tom Ser­vice at The Guardian.

While many artists men­tion min­i­mal­ists like Ter­ry Riley, Philip Glass, or John Cage as sem­i­nal influ­ences, few of those com­posers have been as direct­ly woven into the fab­ric of mod­ern music through col­lab­o­ra­tion, sam­pling, and remix­ing as Reich. Ser­vice goes so far as to spec­u­late, “if you were to sub­tract Steve Reich from the total sum of today’s musi­cal cul­ture, I think you’d notice more of a dif­fer­ence than if you took away any oth­er sin­gle fig­ure.” That’s debatable—Reich’s influ­ence on pop­u­lar cul­ture is oblique. But it does describe the degree to which his musi­cal inno­va­tions have per­me­at­ed exper­i­men­tal, indie, and elec­tron­ic music and “giv­en the con­tem­po­rary musi­cal world a license to groove” while still get­ting plen­ty heady and push­ing con­cep­tu­al bound­aries.

Reich’s use of phas­ing effects, drone notes, polyrhyth­mic pat­terns, and “process music” lend each of his com­po­si­tions a trance-like atmos­phere that might be most famil­iar from his 1976 piece “Music for 18 Musi­cians” (top). Here, the “per­cus­sion­ists, string play­ers, clar­inetists, singers and pianists” cre­ate “an ever-chang­ing, kalei­do­scop­ic sound­world” that expands and aug­ments all of Reich’s pre­vi­ous tech­niques for sculpt­ing in time. If the piece sounds famil­iar, though you’ve nev­er heard it before, that’s because of the thor­ough incor­po­ra­tion of Reich into so much mod­ern music, includ­ing per­haps sev­er­al dozen sounda­like film scores and Bri­an Eno’s pio­neer­ing first man­i­fes­ta­tions of what came to be called ambi­ent music.

Reich con­ceived of music as a “per­cep­ti­ble process,” writ­ing in 1968, “I want to be able to hear the process hap­pen­ing through­out the sound­ing music… a musi­cal process should hap­pen extreme­ly grad­u­al­ly.” Indeed, stu­dents of his music have found ways to take apart and dupli­cate those process­es in their own work, some­thing Reich, who has worked with remix artists and Radio­head, appre­ci­ates. (Just above, see Radio­head­’s John­ny Green­wood per­form a solo ver­sion of Reich’s Elec­tric Coun­ter­point in 2011.) Like many of the artists he appre­ci­ates and inspires, much of Reich’s work deals direct­ly with sociopo­lit­i­cal themes, as Ser­vice notes, includ­ing “the Holo­caust, Mid­dle East­ern his­to­ry and pol­i­tics, and con­tem­po­rary con­flict” like the behead­ing of Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist Daniel Pearl.

In the Spo­ti­fy playlist fur­ther up, you’ll find a broad sam­pling of per­for­mances of Reich’s less­er-known ear­ly work—like the 1965 tape loop piece “It’s Gonna Rain”—and more famous com­po­si­tions like The Cave, Dif­fer­ent Trains, Music for 18 Musi­cians, Elec­tric Coun­ter­point, Drum­ming, Clap­ping Music, and much more. Just as we can hear the musi­cal process­es devel­op­ing with­in each com­po­si­tion, we can hear the process of Reich’s devel­op­ment over the course of his career as he incor­po­rates influ­ences from Bach to Coltrane to the songs of Kid A. As a con­se­quence of both his groovi­ness and his appeal to mod­ernists of every decade, Reich, writes Ivan Hewett at The Tele­graph, is “both aching­ly hip and a grand old man”—and a seem­ing­ly end­less source of musi­cal inspi­ra­tion since the 1960s.

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here. Below, you can see Reich talk­ing about his most influ­en­tial works in a CBC inter­view record­ed ear­li­er this year.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

Björk Presents Ground­break­ing Exper­i­men­tal Musi­cians on the BBC’s Mod­ern Min­i­mal­ists (1997)

The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cut­ting-Edge Com­posers, Includ­ing Stravin­sky, Schoen­berg, Cage & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Call them pro­to-punk, call them avant-garde, but the Amer­i­can ex-pat group the Monks would have been a tiny foot­note in rock music his­to­ry if it wasn’t for a slow redis­cov­ery of the group’s work. The above video is from their sum­mer 1966 appear­ance on Beat Club, a live pop music show broad­cast in Ger­many.

Enthu­si­as­tic teens bop away to the repet­i­tive stomp of “Monk Chant,” with its trib­al drums from Roger John­ston, a mul­ti-tam­borine attack, and a solo sec­tion which fea­tures both Lar­ry Clark’s man­ic organ and three band mem­bers attack­ing the strings of a prone gui­tar. There’s a sense that any­thing can hap­pen. These guys are glee­ful­ly crazy. (On oth­er songs, band mem­ber Dave Day Havliceck would fur­ther freak out audi­ences with his elec­tric ban­jo.)

Nei­ther ur-hip­pies nor beat­niks, the guys behind the Monks were five Amer­i­can G.I.s who were sta­tioned in Ger­many and first start­ed a more tra­di­tion­al garage rock band called the Five Torquays (not to be con­fused with the surf band from Orange Coun­ty). After one sin­gle, they dropped the cov­er songs and try­ing to ape pop­u­lar trends and turned into the Monks, shav­ing their heads in a monas­tic style and dress­ing in monk’s cloth­ing.

Their bru­tal, repet­i­tive songs and anti-Viet­nam war lyrics were ahead of their time, but the lat­ter was one of the main rea­sons they found it hard to break into the Amer­i­can mar­ket after they released Black Monk Time on Poly­dor Ger­many. That and inter­nal con­flict with­in the band led to the band break­ing up in 1967. You can hear a lot of the Monks in the Vel­vet Under­ground, but it’s hard to say one was an influ­ence on the oth­er. It’s more like one great idea was in the air and only cer­tain peo­ple had their anten­nas up.

The influ­ence of the Monks popped up in the abra­sive and hyp­not­ic sounds of Krautrock sev­er­al years lat­er, and by the late 1980s post-punk band The Fall were cov­er­ing their songs “I Hate You,” “Oh, How to Do Now,” and “Shut Up.”

Jon Spencer, Mike D. of the Beast­ie Boys, Gen­e­sis P. Orridge of Psy­chic T.V., and Stephen Malk­mus of Pave­ment would all cred­it the Monks as an influ­ence.

In 1997, their sole album was rere­leased and two years lat­er the band reunit­ed for a New York con­cert to pro­mote a ret­ro­spec­tive com­pi­la­tion. In 2004, band mem­ber Roger John­ston passed from lung can­cer, and after Transat­lantic Feed­back, a 2006 doc­u­men­tary on the group, sev­er­al oth­er mem­bers had passed away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974)

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.