# The Immovable Objects



## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Hi there,

On the day of celebration for _The Rite of Spring_, I wonder which other works are so important to the canon that more or less all the music which followed was descended from it - or in some way had to react to it?

For example, I'll start with an obvious one: Beethoven's 9th. This was a moment in music history that meant that everything that came after had to face the fact of its existence. It couldn't possibly be ignored. Remove the Ninth from history and everything that follows is by definition lesser.

I know, it's a bold remark: _everything that follows is by definition lesser._ But I believe it to be true. And I believe _The Rite of Spring_ has been probably equally influential, going by the way it's commented upon here.

Which other musical works do you know, that you could say confidently that their removal from existence would weaken subsequent musical movements. These works are not only genius, they're not only foundational - they _break the ground_ to let the foundations be poured in...


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

You probably could include both Tristain Und Isolde and the Ring Cycle. They were tremendously influential, not only by those who reacted positively to it, but those like Debussy who eventually reacted negatively thus putting into motion the French and Italian distaste toward the German tradition allowing them to grow independent voices in the 20th century.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

I'd put Beethoven's 3rd ahead of the Ninth. Robbins Landon has a famous quote along the lines of it (the Eroica) represents the greatest single leap in the expressive power of music in the history of music -- and not many people quarrel with that judgment.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

That's the thing I'm thinking: music that leapt out of its skin into a whole nother era. I think Schubert has some stuff like that - but it wasn't appreciated in its time. Beethoven did that thing where music bounds from key to unrelated key as if to the manor born, absolutely wild leaps, that formed the consciousness of composers that followed. They couldn't _not _face up to what he done. It was so explicit it rewrote the program.

But the single works that were indispensable to this process? Well, maybe some Chopin piano work, didn't this irrevocably change the shape of keyboard playing so much that we can say there is _before_-Chopin, and _after_-Chopin? And were his Etudes the recognisable line in the pianistic sand?


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)




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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

It's true, though, and we could put Bob Dylan's _Like a Rolling Stone_ in there too...


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Immovable object...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I was reading a bit of what conductor Esa Pekka Salonen said about The Rite of Spring in an article & he said there's three works like that, game changers that had little or no precedents (or not any strong ones), and even though quite influential, they had no follow ups or literal 'sequels,' either by the composer or others. For example, I think he said that the opening bassoon solo of The Rite is taken from Russian Orthodox choral music, but hearing that, would you think that's an influence. Most people won't I think. So that's what I'm saying, these things don't come out of nowhere, but the place they come out of is not where you'd expect (in terms of inspiration or influence). Of course, guys like Rachmaninov where taking things from the choral realm and incorporating it into their instrumental music before Igor, so too others like Mussorgsky. But again, Igor wasn't just rehashing Rach, or Mussorgsky, or Russian tradition. He was doing something wholly unique with it that nobody else could have done.

Anyway, apart from The Rite, Salonen named Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Beethoven's Symphony #3, "Eroica" as such works that stand alone as these kind of gamechangers that are integral to the repertoire. & now The Rite is 100 years old a monument maybe, certainly integral in many areas of the Modern canon - both in terms of performance (repertoire), musicology/history and pedagogy/academic area (study) of music. 

I really got little time now to add more, but I think that Salonen's three picks are relevant to this thread & GGluek has already mentioned Eroica, so I think we're on the right track here. Not that Beethoven's 9th wasn't revolutionary, just that being a late work, I see it more as an end point than a breakthrough (for him, anyway, for others like Mahler who where to write similarly signficant vocal/choral symphonies later - yeah, it was a big deal, it sowed some seeds for sure)...


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Kieran said:


> I wonder which other works are so important to the canon that more or less all the music which followed was descended from it - or in some way had to react to it?


Isn't this getting into overhyping?


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

How about Schoenberg's Suite for Piano op. 25, his first work based entirely on his twelve-tone system.

Also Haydn's string quartets op. 33, composed, as Haydn put it, "in an entirely new and special way". They made Mozart refine his own efforts in that genre and helped establish the string quartet as one of the most highly regarded forms of all classical music.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

If everything derives from something I'd guess it would be something from the medieval period, but I still don't believe there is a clear linear and predictable progression as music history books would have it. The major change for me is probably in the classical period with sonata form, that had a huge long term effect. But I'm not sure it was inevitable, the baroque had to be superceded by something but the fashion just happened to be for this new style. And I'm not sure a single work or even composer has to be the cause of change, it could be a group of people and then that influence needs to spread out and be propogated to other parts by others. And now you could say there are various strands of classical from minimalism to weighty colourful pieces and it's hard to say they derive from just one shared moment.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

starry said:


> Isn't this getting into overhyping?


I don't think so, since the example I used - Beethoven's 9th - is a work of such immense historical significance, it just had to be by other composers...


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Andreas said:


> How about Schoenberg's Suite for Piano op. 25, his first work based entirely on his twelve-tone system.
> 
> Also Haydn's string quartets op. 33, composed, as Haydn put it, "in an entirely new and special way". They made Mozart refine his own efforts in that genre and helped establish the string quartet as one of the most highly regarded forms of all classical music.


Exactly. Or there might be a stage in moving the overture into the concert hall and calling it 'symphony' that affected the way composers work. Haydn was the generating force behind that, although I don't think it was as immediate or earth-shattering as The Rite or Beethoven's 9th...


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Kieran said:


> I don't think so, since the example I used - Beethoven's 9th - is a work of such immense historical significance, it just had to be by other composers...


But does everything really have to face the fact of it's existence or be lesser without it? What about opera for example? I wouldn't say that was obviously affected more by Beethoven's 9th than by significant operas.

It certainly influenced some thinking about the symphony (such as Mahler), though the symphony was already an acclaimed genre. Even if the 9th had not existed I think there could have been some very great symphonies inspired by other works. Beethoven's 5th may have been as big an influence in its way anyhow. Some composers may even have been influenced more by the more economical Mozart style.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

starry said:


> But does everything really have to face the fact of it's existence or be lesser without it? What about opera for example? I wouldn't say that was obviously affected more by Beethoven's 9th than by significant operas.
> 
> It certainly influenced some thinking about the symphony (such as Mahler), though the symphony was already an acclaimed genre. Even if the 9th had not existed I think there could have been some very great symphonies inspired by other works. Beethoven's 5th may have been as big an influence in its way anyhow. Some composers may even have been influenced more by the more economical Mozart style.


That's true, starry, and by his influence on Beethoven, Mozart may have been an implicit influence on a lot which followed Beethoven, as well as being a direct influence on Chopin and others like him, who were of less heart-sleeve instruction in their music.

But didn't the Ninth even influence Wagner?

I also agree that it didn't tick boxes everywhere: Italian opera still bloomed and ripened without Beethoven's say-so, it seems. But I think the effect of certain works of Beethoven - including the 3rd above - changed forever the way music was written. This is what I'm interested in, the _seismic works _of the last millennium, of which there can surely only be a small number, really. If these works were removed, then the whole edifice would seem shaky. A trail of crumbs from the Ninth to Mahler seems fairly straight-forward, to my ears. If the Ninth didn't exist? This is the level of influence I'm thinking about...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Regarding Haydn, he innovated in embryonic form what Beethoven was to do later. Same can be said of Mozart (difference is that Ludwig van said he learnt nothing from Haydn and yet revered Mozart like a god). But whatever Beethoven thought - and fact is, despite their differences, him and Haydn respected eachother to some degree at least - in the classical era you had lots of innovation going on, perhaps peaking with Beethoven and Schubert (cos they clearly point the way forward to many other things, not only in the Romantic era but also in the 20th century). But in hearing Mozart's and Haydn's choral works, there are similar contrapuntal textures there to things like part of Beethoven's 9th. There's experimentation in their symphonies and concertos with tonality, with incorporating instruments new at the time (eg. the clarinet), with sonority (I think how Haydn uses the timpani quite resembles Beethoven's use of it in his own symphonies). 

There's a lot of other things & I don't claim expertise on all this, its all gleaned from my listening and reading, I'm no musicologist (even though if you read about this, inevitably you will get info on the massive innovations of papa and Wolfie). & even though Beethoven was a freelance musician throughout all his life, late in their careers Mozart and Haydn where that too. They where also among the first to establish the first public concerts.

So I think at least one or two works of Haydn and Mozart deserve to be mentioned re the topic of this thread. But they where so prolific, and with so many works that are benchmarks in their own genre/period, question is which works do we single out? Its up to the individual I think.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Hey Sid, good morning!

I think with Mozart, his PC's changed that form forever, but did any single work have the same effect as the _Rite of Spring_? Mozart's explorations of the forms of music were so complete and seemingly perfect that they'd almost be unnoticed, they were so seamless. But the 20th PC is one which had a huge effect, by introducing such dramatic noise into the form.

And Don Giovanni introduced terror in a way that probably had a huge effect. I imagine the young Beethoven in the orchestra pit in Bonn performing the overture of Don Giovanni and being blown wide open by it...


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## Guest (May 30, 2013)

Kieran said:


> Hey Sid, good morning!
> 
> I think with Mozart, his PC's changed that form forever, but did any single work have the same effect as the _Rite of Spring_? Mozart's explorations of the forms of music were so complete and seemingly perfect that they'd almost be unnoticed, they were so seamless. But the 20th PC is one which had a huge effect, by introducing such dramatic noise into the form.
> 
> And Don Giovanni introduced terror in a way that probably had a huge effect. I imagine the young Beethoven in the orchestra pit in Bonn performing the overture of Don Giovanni and being blown wide open by it...


Mozart's concertos, as a body of work, certainly influenced everything to come. So can it be argued that his first original concerto, K175, was the single work representative of the landmark that changed the concerto as a form? He took the form to greater and greater heights, but his PC#5 was the fork in the road for the concerto. It stands as one of my favorite of Wolfie's, and one of his first masterpieces.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

I think Ligeti's Atmosphères also fits the description.


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Influence can reflect fashion more than worth. Mozart wasn't as fashionable as Beethoven in the 19th century but that doesn't mean he wasn't influencial as he influenced Beethoven anyway, same with Haydn. And if it's just one work a composer is particularly renowned/infamous for that would surely lessen their influence anyway. 

I still think if you want to look at Beethoven you can't discount the 5th, though Beethoven had other works that defined the tragedy to triumph trajectory that really was the iconic piece on that. And choral symphonies are outnumbered by instrumental ones. Also symphonies as personal rather than universal statements are probably more evident. Though even if you would argue against that a piece that arguably sounds like a universal statement and which predates Beethoven's 9th or 3rd by many years is Mozart's 41st. I remember someone recently making an interesting comment about how abstract Mozart's music could be considered to be. And at times, if not always, I would agree.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Good post, starry. I think Mozart's was a covert influence in the 19th century, as opposed to Ludwig's more direct splash...


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Andreas said:


> I think Ligeti's Atmosphères also fits the description.


Cheers, Andreas! I'm not familiar with that, but you say it's a work which changes the way composers will think from now on? It'll fashion a whole new style? I must look it up in youtube, sounds like the kind of thing I'm thinking of...


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Kieran said:


> But didn't the Ninth even influence Wagner?


He claimed it did, yes, and there's no doubt that on some level it did. But reality, as usual, was more complicated than that. Wagner took some creative liberties with his past when he waxed ecstatic about the Ninth. In 1839, he saw a performance of Berlioz's _Roméo et Juliette_ in Paris, and the combination of symphony and chorus convinced him that the old-fashioned instrumental, four-movement symphony was a dead genre. But when he retold this story in his 1870 essay on Beethoven, he changed Berlioz's _Roméo et Juliette_ to what historians have determined was a fictitious performance of Beethoven's Ninth. Between 1839 and 1870, apparently, it became necessary to use Beethoven rather than Berlioz as the wellspring of his own ideas about music. So you're right that Beethoven's Ninth influenced Wagner, but retroactively.



Kieran said:


> Italian opera still bloomed and ripened without Beethoven's say-so, it seems. But I think the effect of certain works of Beethoven - including the 3rd above - changed forever the way music was written.


I'm not sure how these two sentences are consistent with each other, unless we're taking it as a given that Italian opera doesn't count as an indication of "the way music was written." (And the only way we can justify that is if we use the Beethovenian model as the template for all of music, in which case the observation that Beethoven's Ninth is an immovable object is not really a conclusion but a premise.)

So, in order to shake things up a bit, I'll nominate Pergolesi's _Serva padrona_.


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## Guest (May 30, 2013)

There are a few others that aren't as appreciated, but in their time influenced things quite a bit.

Claudio Monteverdi - as I understand it, while the process was already underway, his opera L'Orfeo was the critical work that moved us to what we now conceive of opera. Prior to that, it was little more than musical interludes in a stage play. Monteverdi, bridging the gap of the Renaissance and the Baroque, gave us the opera.

Along those lines, Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice was also ground-breaking and influenced opera forever afterwards. At the time, the opera had come to be dominated by form over substance, with the singers upstaging all else, sometimes digressing into such flourishes as to make the original melody completely unrecognizable, and the plots completely inane. Gluck restored order and discipline, making the performers subordinate to the performance.

Finally, I think there is strong consensus, or at least a good plurality, that would argue that Bach's Well-tempered Clavier has been extremely influential on the musical world.


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## Kleinzeit (May 15, 2013)

This is a big kids thread, and as not a musician but a painter I've evolved to have opposable brains and really powerful thumbs.

But I can't _not_ say something here because been taking notes for future listening project.

So howzabout Satie's Vexations, c. 1893. Had stealth influence in the century following. "Satie did not publish the work in his lifetime, and is not known ever to have performed or mentioned it. The piece was first printed in 1949 in facsimile form by John Cage"

Influential in music as conceptual art paradigm. Not yet set & settled in history. Perhaps like cicadas cooking in the ground for 17 years, then emerging in the billions.


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## Kleinzeit (May 15, 2013)

short article (italics mine):

Vexations: description by "Blue" Gene Tyranny

This extraordinary piano piece Vexations by Erik Satie is one of those rare breakthroughs of consciousness that fulfills the promise of art to reveal something never imagined before. Marked "Trés lent" (Very slowly), and printed on one page, "Vexations" (No. 2 of the "Pages Mystiques" edited by Robert Caby from Satie's notebooks) consists of floating, three-voiced augmented and diminished harmonies spread over two sections of 13 beats each (actually twelve beats plus a beat for sustained resonance). The second section is a repeat, an interior echo of the first with the upper voice brought down an octave. There is some confusion, given Satie's "signe" (at this sign) instructions, on whether to play the bass by itself at certain points or to simply emphasize it; for the most part, performers usually just play the two sections through with emphasis on the bass. The remarkable aspect of the composition is that the piece is to be played 840 times. This usually requires anywhere from eighteen to twenty-four hours, and is most often performed as a marathong with the participation of multiple pianists.

So just what is the psychological effect of playing this piece 840 times? Pianist Peter Evans reported (in Alan Gillmor's book "Erik Satie") that during his 1970 one-man performance, he began experiencing "frightful hallucinations" and had to cut short the performance at repetition 595 after fifteen hours. At the centennial birthday performance on May 15, 1993, at the Roulette performance space in Manhattan, twenty-one pianists took part, each playing for an hour, enabling the performers to impose their interior thoughts/interpretations upon the evocative material, from reverent to romantic to joking. There were score-keepers/timers who kept track of the number of repetitions, and this further freed the performers to concentrate on the music. A legendary performance of the complete piece was organized by composer John Cage, who "re-discovered" the piece and published several articles on it. This took place in September, 1963, in New York City, and covered a duration of eighteen hours and forty minutes. At this performance, as well as others, some listeners camped out (sometimes in sleeping bags) for the entire concert and report of experiencing altered states of awareness.

_This is the first instance of the psychological state of the performer(s) being the primary, foreground content of a musical piece, rather than having the psychic state of the performer being subsumed within the dramatic (or otherwise) content of the piece (as "emotion" leading to changes of articulation and phrasing, or as text, etc.). As such, it is the modest precursor to conceptual and pattern (minimalist) music in the 20th-century and beyond._


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Eschbeg said:


> I'm not sure how these two sentences are consistent with each other, unless we're taking it as a given that Italian opera doesn't count as an indication of "the way music was written." (And the only way we can justify that is if we use the Beethovenian model as the template for all of music, in which case the observation that Beethoven's Ninth is an immovable object is not really a conclusion but a premise.)
> 
> So, in order to shake things up a bit, I'll nominate Pergolesi's _Serva padrona_.


Good post, Eschberg!

I suppose the two statements would irreconcilable if I had said that Beethoven's Ninth "changed forever the way *all *music was written." This was why I exempted Italian opera. Maybe the Italians felt they should ignore Germanic displays of power? Or maybe they just preferred their own way of writing opera? I know that Verdi once referred to Mozart's Italian operas in a less than flattering way.



Kleinzeit said:


> Influential in music as conceptual art paradigm. Not yet set & settled in history. Perhaps like cicadas cooking in the ground for 17 years, then emerging in the billions.


I'm thinking more of the cooking that explodes in the kitchen like a bomb! :lol:


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Music history books, (Grout's anyway) claim that *Rossini* was highly influential in launching the romantic period with his program music and eschewing form. I don't necessarily hear it for myself. To me his music still sounds fairly rooted in the classic period with a little larger orchestra, but I'll nominate _Guillaume Tell_ as a benchmark moment, especially the overture which set the style for overtures to follow.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Weston said:


> .. I'll nominate _Guillaume Tell_ as a benchmark moment, especially the overture which set the style for overtures to follow.


Not to mention a great cowboy theme!


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## Kleinzeit (May 15, 2013)

Taggart said:


> Not to mention a great cowboy theme!


You know the joke from the 50s that a highbrow is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Kleinzeit said:


> You know the joke from the 50s that a highbrow is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.


Drat. Failed!  too short


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Earlier I talked of Esa-Pekka Salonen's take on what he thought where three groundbreaking works with little precedent in the history of music - Beethoven's Eroica, Berlioz's Fantastique and Stravinsky's Rite. Here is part of what Maestro Salonen said in the interview (in green italics). I think his thoughts are stimulating and interesting and they relate to the topic of this thread.

_It has this amazing and mysterious freshness to it. I wish I knew why if I did, I'd be consulting composers worldwide on the subject of longevity! But I don't. What I do feel, though, is that only a few pieces in the canon have the same sort of vitality, and all these care breathtaking works that seemingly came out of nowhere, with no existing models. So Eroica would be one, Symphonie Fantastique another, and also Sacre. It has to do with the lack of history, precedence and models. Although we know that Berlioz was fascinated by Beethoven's symphonies No 2 and No 7 when he wrote the Symphonie Fantastique, (if anything) there are only very distant echoes of these pieces in that work. With Stravinsky, we know where he was coming from, but the leap from Petrushka to this is like Bob Beamon in the 1968 Olympics jumping 8.9m (a sort of freak long jump) - in one go exceeding the previous world record by 55cm. The Sacre similarly came out of nowhere, and changed everything.

…Sacre is loved by many, with generation after generation getting their kicks from it. A lot of the so-called groundbreaking modernist stuff written in the 1910s and '20's is almost forgotten, and when we talk about it we're mostly respectful and reverential, but it's not the kind of music that you miss when you don't hear it. Whereas I know lots of people who have to get their Sacre fix otherwise they go bonkers - if ever there was a mark of a masterpiece, that's it!
_
(Source: Limelight magazine, May 2013).


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Sid James said:


> and all these care breathtaking works that seemingly came out of nowhere, with no existing models. So Eroica would be one, Symphonie Fantastique another, and also Sacre. It has to do with the lack of history, precedence and models.
> (Source: Limelight magazine, May 2013).


Everything comes out of somewhere though, even if it's from non-classical sources in some cases. And there could be some pieces which are relatively original but badly crafted and so don't make that big an impression.


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## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

Kieran said:


> That's the thing I'm thinking: music that leapt out of its skin into a whole nother era. I think Schubert has some stuff like that - but it wasn't appreciated in its time. Beethoven did that thing where music bounds from key to unrelated key as if to the manor born, absolutely wild leaps, that formed the consciousness of composers that followed. They couldn't _not _face up to what he done. It was so explicit it rewrote the program.
> 
> But the single works that were indispensable to this process? Well, maybe some Chopin piano work, didn't this irrevocably change the shape of keyboard playing so much that we can say there is _before_-Chopin, and _after_-Chopin? And were his Etudes the recognisable line in the pianistic sand?


There was only a year between Chopin and Liszt and I would have thought that Liszt was the one who altered pianistic thinking way across the board.


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

moody said:


> There was only a year between Chopin and Liszt and I would have thought that Liszt was the one who altered pianistic thinking way across the board.


You could be right, moody, but I'm going on an interesting article I read some time ago by pianist Stephen Hough...


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## Kieran (Aug 24, 2010)

Sid James said:


> Earlier I talked of Esa-Pekka Salonen's take on what he thought where three groundbreaking works with little precedent in the history of music - Beethoven's Eroica, Berlioz's Fantastique and Stravinsky's Rite. Here is part of what Maestro Salonen said in the interview (in green italics). I think his thoughts are stimulating and interesting and they relate to the topic of this thread.
> 
> _It has this amazing and mysterious freshness to it. I wish I knew why if I did, I'd be consulting composers worldwide on the subject of longevity! But I don't. What I do feel, though, is that only a few pieces in the canon have the same sort of vitality, and all these care breathtaking works that seemingly came out of nowhere, with no existing models. So Eroica would be one, Symphonie Fantastique another, and also Sacre. It has to do with the lack of history, precedence and models. Although we know that Berlioz was fascinated by Beethoven's symphonies No 2 and No 7 when he wrote the Symphonie Fantastique, (if anything) there are only very distant echoes of these pieces in that work. With Stravinsky, we know where he was coming from, but the leap from Petrushka to this is like Bob Beamon in the 1968 Olympics jumping 8.9m (a sort of freak long jump) - in one go exceeding the previous world record by 55cm. The Sacre similarly came out of nowhere, and changed everything.
> 
> ...


That's the stuff, Sid - thanks! :tiphat:


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Weston said:


> Music history books, (Grout's anyway) claim that *Rossini* was highly influential in launching the romantic period with his program music and eschewing form. I don't necessarily hear it for myself. To me his music still sounds fairly rooted in the classic period with a little larger orchestra, but I'll nominate _Guillaume Tell_ as a benchmark moment, especially the overture which set the style for overtures to follow.


It was considered one of the first Grand Operas, and one of the few that's still performed, after Meyerbeer, Auber, Halevy, and co. have fallen by the wayside.


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## Op.123 (Mar 25, 2013)

Well this is hard as for every genre there are many "unmovable objects" that all influenced each other.
For example:
Piano concerto: Mozart's - Beethoven's - Schumann's - Brahms and Grieg - Rachmaninoff


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

starry said:


> Everything comes out of somewhere though, even if it's from non-classical sources in some cases.


Yes, and I know for a fact that Stravinsky (and also Prokofiev) revolved around the literary and artistic circles of Paris when they where there in the 1910's and after. So you had this exchange of ideas between composers, painters, writers and so on. In terms of painting, this was the decade Cubism emerged, Picasso being at the forefront of those innovations. & I remember anecdote that during that time, he went to a museum in Paris and looked at their African exhibits (particularly African masks). That influenced him heavinly in developing Cubism.

In terms of Stravinsky, there are these links to African music in The Rite of Spring. To what extent I don't remember, but I do know that jazz was always huge in Paris (hence Debussy incorporating ragtimes into his music, and Ravel doing the same thing with blues). Stravinsky also wrote a ragtime, a kind of quirky very short piece, but that was around the time of WWI when Americans streamed into the city as they (finally) got involved in the war, towards the end of it. I might have to go back and re-read sources on The Rite, I wouldn't be surprised if Stravinsky somehow knew of African music as well. I know that Debussy heard gamelan at the Paris Exposition, perhaps AFricans came to perform there as those from French Indo-China did.

Basically what I'm saying is that the world was becoming a smaller place, even 100 years ago. Transportation and communication where developing at a fast rate. In case of Debussy, Asia came to his doorstep in Paris. With Picasso, same thing with him seeing those African masks in the Paris museum. But in the case of Saint-Saens, he actually travelled to not only North AFrica but South East Asia, and incorporated that into his music. But look at now, with world music for decades so profoundly influencing aspects of classical music. Its a trend that started way back.

But the overall concept of The Rite is going back to pagan times, to these rituals. Things like voodoo in parts of West AFrica still have animal sacrficie. Its going back to the roots of humanity itself, of tribalism and connections with the earth. Even though Stravinsky was thinking of pagan Russia, one could argue that these things dig deep into many listeners, whatever culture a person comes from we all go back in some way to all that.


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

_Dubya. Tee. See._


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