This week, on Ether Game, we celebrated nine composers who went against the grain with a show called Romantic Rebels. 

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) The Rite of Spring (piano, 4 hands version) Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” with its infamous depiction of a primitive human sacrifice, is best known today as a concert work. But the original work was a ballet whose rebellious choreography by Vaslav Najinsky was as least, if not more, controversial than the music that accompanied it. In fact, it has been speculated that the riot that erupted when the Ballet Russes premiered the work in 1913 was entirely prompted by the choreography, as the audience became so unruly that hearing the music would have been nearly impossible! Stravinsky always composed at the piano, and the four-hand version of “The Rite” was not an arrangement, but rather a separate, alternate version that was published long before the full score, and which Stravinsky himself frequently performed, at one point with CLAUDE DEBUSSY providing the other two hands!

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Piano Concerto No. 3 in c, Op. 37 Sturm und drang, or Storm and stress was a movement in German arts that reached its height in the 1770s. It was most present as a literary movement, with Goethe being the forerunner, whose early Sturm und Drang literature paved the way for gothic fiction. It also influenced the visual arts, where the tempestuous style kicked off a fashion for pictures of storms and shipwrecks. Its aims were to frighten and stun while emphasizing extreme and savage anti-rational emotions. It had many musical parallels, whose adherents used dramatic effects such as sudden dynamic changes, frenzied tremolos, contrasting melodies, and syncopation. It undeniably had an influence on Beethoven, especially in the agitated and bold emotion of his compositions completed after moving to Vienna, where the short-lived style had a long-lasting influence on German aesthetics. 

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) Valse in C, FP 17 A group of six former classmates at the Paris Conservatory—Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, and Georges Auric—began assembling concerts together in Paris in 1917 under the name Les Nouveaux Jeunes, “The New Young Ones,” but it wasn’t until 1920 when critic Henri Collet gave them their famous moniker Les Six, “The Six,” composed and promoted new music which rebelled against French Romantic sensibilities. With avant-garde mentors like Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, the music of Les Six was neo-classical, exploring new chromatic dissonances in a clear and direct style that was inspired by the modern urban cultural landscape. Though they became famous as a group, only two collaborative compositions involving the entirety of The Six were ever published, a ballet and the Album des Six. This collection of piano music contains at least one short composition from each composer, with the Valse as Poulenc’s only contribution.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) Les Indes Galantes: Danse des Sauvages & Duo and chorus 'Forêts paisibles' After Lully, Rameau was the next influential figure in French opera. Lully laid groundwork that Rameau would build on, as well as radically depart from. Almost ten years into his career as a conductor of one of the finest private orchestras in Paris, Rameau split the musical tastes of the French aristocracy over his opera-ballet Les Indes galantes. While many were impressed by Rameau's new and elaborate use of harmony, others remained loyal to his recently deceased predecessor. Two camps emerged, the “Lullyists” who criticized Rameau's harmonies as discordant as distracting to the stage drama, and the “Rameauneurs,” who applauded his innovations as a pinnacle of French musical style. Rameau eventually won the ensuing pamphlet war with another opera-ballet, Les fêtes d’Hébé. The work was an instant success, and featured textures and dance music more rich and elaborate than any of his previous works.

Christoph W. Gluck (1714-1787) Orfeo and Euridice: Che faro senza Euridice? Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice is considered the first “modern” opera. It may not have sounded particularly modern to you, but compared to what came before, it was totally against the grain. Gluck struck out in a new direction that was more flexible than the French tragedie lyrique and less bound to showcasing divas than Italian opera, with many novel elements that changed the tradition forever. He did away with lengthy scenes that focused more on vocal virtuosity than drama, and increased interplay among soloists and chorus. He used simpler melodies, and increased the number of dance movements. The success of Orfeo et Euridice, and the reforms it helped bring about was also due to another romantic rebel who played Gluck’s first Orpheus: the Italian castrato singer Gaetano Guadagni. Guadagni was renowned in Europe for his emotive and unorthodox performances. He had a reputation for refusing to repeat arias as encores nor bowing to acknowledge applause, in the service of maintaining dramatic unity. As part of Gluck’s efforts to make opera feel more natural and realistic, he was a perfect candidate. 

Josquin Desprez (c.1440-1521) Miserere mei, Deus Josquin du Prez is counted among the greatest of Renaissance composers and seemingly one of its most independently minded. Unfortunately, so little is known of his life that historians have relied on random letters and pay records to figure out where he worked and lived. One extant letter, by the Ferrarese court agent Gian d’Artiganova, was written to convince his superiors not to hire the rebelious Josquin for a position. He writes: “It is true that Josquin composes better, but he composes when he wants to and not when one wants him to, and he is asking 200 ducats in salary while Heinrich Isaac  will come for 120 – but Your Lordship will decide.” Josquin was given the job, while Isaac moved on to Florence, where he was patronized by the Medici family. Unfortunately, the unsuccessful agent, Gian d’Artiganova, was eventually executed for treason

György Ligeti (1923-2006) Concerto for Piano and Orchestra The music of Hungarian composer György Ligeti is probably best known to the public, not from the rebellious avant-garde circles which he occupied, but through the films of Stanley Kubrick, who used Ligeti’s music in 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. In the early 1960s, Ligeti was interested in exploring a new type of orchestral sound. Rather than the traditional parameters of melody and harmony, this new sound was conceived as perpetually shifting fields of color and texture. Ligeti explored tone clusters ranging from the most delicate to the almost unbearably intense, as well as instrumental effects such as blowing air through brass mouthpieces. In his 1988 piano concerto, we also hear a technique Ligeti called “micropolyphony,” in which precise individual lines of moving notes create an overall wash of sound. His piano concerto is a late work in his compositional career, and a piece that he believed proved his ability to move against the avant-garde principles that initially defined his style.

Harry Partch (1901-1974) Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers' Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California American composer Harry Partch was obsessed with different tuning systems. He hated equal temperament, the tuning system used by most western musicians from Bach to the Beatles and beyond, and preferred using just intonation—a system that features mathematically-sound and purely-consonant intervals. Just intonation requires different scales than our typical twelve-note chromatic scale. So Partch had to create new instruments to accommodate his new scales. In 1935 after studying early intonation in England, he returned to the US and lived a transient lifestyle, moving across the American West. This inspired an “Americana” phase in his music, where he composed around themes inspired by the lives of hobos, hitchhikers, and working in Depression-era federal work camps. The text for this selection, which was originally written for voice and a specially rebuilt guitar, is taken from scribbles found written on a highway railing just outside the Mojave Desert. Partch saw the little fragments of names, addresses and snatches of obscenity as raw human emotion, and therefore analogous to music. 

Hugh Cornwell (b.1949) Golden Brown We couldn’t put on a show about rebels without choosing a punk band for our pop selection. The punk subculture began in the UK with an aggressive, do-it-yourself style of rock music which purposefully lacked polish and emphasized raw emotion and cynical humor. Punk rock music usually had simple chord structures, minimal melodic riffs and lyrics expressing nihilistic themes. The Sex Pistols might be considered the first “official” punk band, but The Stranglers also made significant contributions to the genre. “Golden Brown” is their second single from 1982, and owes a little more to Baroque music than might be expected from a punk band.