1 00:00:02,040 --> 00:00:05,240 MUSIC: "Holberg Suite" by Grieg 2 00:00:05,240 --> 00:00:08,840 Music, one of the most dazzling fruits of human civilisation, 3 00:00:08,840 --> 00:00:11,240 can make us weep, or make us dance. 4 00:00:11,240 --> 00:00:13,640 It's reflected the times in which it was written, 5 00:00:13,640 --> 00:00:17,160 it has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us. 6 00:00:18,680 --> 00:00:22,560 In this series I've been tracing the story of music from scratch. 7 00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:24,560 To follow it on its miraculous journey, 8 00:00:24,560 --> 00:00:28,640 misleading jargon and fancy labels are best put to one side. 9 00:00:32,920 --> 00:00:37,240 Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary and how exhilarating 10 00:00:37,240 --> 00:00:40,640 many of the innovations we take for granted today were 11 00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:42,400 to people at the time. 12 00:00:42,400 --> 00:00:46,840 There are a million ways of telling the story of music, this is mine. 13 00:01:02,520 --> 00:01:04,480 MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky 14 00:01:05,880 --> 00:01:10,200 In the 31 years between the death of Richard Wagner in 1883 15 00:01:10,200 --> 00:01:12,840 and the outbreak of the First World War 16 00:01:12,840 --> 00:01:15,880 music was shaken by a series of rebellions. 17 00:01:15,880 --> 00:01:17,840 "Pictures At An Exhibition" by Mussorgsky 18 00:01:17,840 --> 00:01:19,560 MUSIC: "The Firebird" by Stravinsky 19 00:01:19,560 --> 00:01:22,520 Russian music swept westwards exuberantly, 20 00:01:22,520 --> 00:01:25,960 as did the exotic sounds of distant continents. 21 00:01:25,960 --> 00:01:28,600 "Voiles" by Debussy 22 00:01:28,600 --> 00:01:31,600 And symphonies and operas of astonishing intensity 23 00:01:31,600 --> 00:01:34,040 amazed and startled audiences. 24 00:01:36,120 --> 00:01:38,160 Modernism in music was born. 25 00:01:40,680 --> 00:01:42,760 The world was becoming a smaller place, 26 00:01:42,760 --> 00:01:46,440 with millions of poor European immigrants seeking refuge 27 00:01:46,440 --> 00:01:47,760 in the New World, 28 00:01:47,760 --> 00:01:53,080 to join the white settlers, African Americans and Chinese workers already there. 29 00:01:53,080 --> 00:01:55,560 From this rich mix of musical cultures, 30 00:01:55,560 --> 00:01:59,240 soon to be heard on newfangled record players and radios, 31 00:01:59,240 --> 00:02:02,400 would spring the blues, ragtime and jazz. 32 00:02:02,400 --> 00:02:04,840 "Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin 33 00:02:04,840 --> 00:02:11,120 In just over three decades music underwent a series of gigantic convulsions. 34 00:02:11,120 --> 00:02:15,760 Change came in many different forms, some exciting, some bewildering. 35 00:02:15,760 --> 00:02:17,880 Revolution was in the air 36 00:02:17,880 --> 00:02:22,320 and all of music's laws and traditions were about to be shaken to their roots. 37 00:02:22,320 --> 00:02:25,680 What happened was a series of musical rebellions. 38 00:02:25,680 --> 00:02:28,200 MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky 39 00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:38,600 The first was aimed at displacing the musical giant of the late 19th century, Richard Wagner. 40 00:02:39,320 --> 00:02:42,720 His ideas, his style and his musical philosophy 41 00:02:42,720 --> 00:02:46,440 had been such a pervasive presence in classical music 42 00:02:46,440 --> 00:02:50,560 that what might have followed him was a plague of pseudo-Wagners. 43 00:02:51,320 --> 00:02:55,440 In fact what followed in his wake was an explosion of musical activity 44 00:02:55,440 --> 00:02:58,280 that sought to do things very differently indeed. 45 00:02:58,280 --> 00:03:00,240 It may not always have been deliberate 46 00:03:00,240 --> 00:03:03,280 but there was a kind of not-Wagner renaissance. 47 00:03:03,280 --> 00:03:08,280 All the things he hated most came to life. The French, for a start. 48 00:03:08,280 --> 00:03:12,240 MUSIC: "Carnival Of The Animals" by Saint-Saens 49 00:03:12,240 --> 00:03:15,960 In France a new wave of composers made it their business 50 00:03:15,960 --> 00:03:19,480 to write music of deliberate simplicity and clarity 51 00:03:19,480 --> 00:03:23,200 and to banish pretention and earnestness of all kinds. 52 00:03:24,880 --> 00:03:27,840 The French were about to enjoy a musical golden age 53 00:03:27,840 --> 00:03:31,040 thanks to their reaction against Wagner. 54 00:03:32,080 --> 00:03:35,200 Their best 50 years ever in music blossomed 55 00:03:35,200 --> 00:03:37,520 after he went off to his personal Valhalla, 56 00:03:37,520 --> 00:03:41,480 with Faure, Debussy and Ravel leading a glorious riposte 57 00:03:41,480 --> 00:03:43,800 to German musical dominance. 58 00:03:43,800 --> 00:03:47,160 MUSIC: "Gymnopedie Number 1" by Satie 59 00:03:48,480 --> 00:03:53,360 The movement was set in train by one of the most remarkable figures in music, Erik Satie. 60 00:04:07,920 --> 00:04:11,360 Erik Satie's first Gymnopedie of 1888, 61 00:04:11,360 --> 00:04:15,680 as well as sounding like a long, hot afternoon after a boozy lunch, 62 00:04:15,680 --> 00:04:18,040 can be seen as the first shot in a war 63 00:04:18,040 --> 00:04:22,080 to debunk pomposity and declutter French music. 64 00:04:22,080 --> 00:04:25,840 Satie, described by his tutors at the Paris conservatoire 65 00:04:25,840 --> 00:04:30,400 as "the laziest student ever", was an eccentric intellectual 66 00:04:30,400 --> 00:04:33,720 who hung out with other arty dreamers in Montmartre. 67 00:04:56,440 --> 00:04:59,280 Satie's music could hardly sound less like Wagner 68 00:04:59,280 --> 00:05:01,840 and what the Germans were up to. 69 00:05:01,840 --> 00:05:04,640 The irony is that there was a German influence 70 00:05:04,640 --> 00:05:07,960 on the work of Satie's Parisian contemporaries. 71 00:05:07,960 --> 00:05:12,680 Here's a clue. Composers like Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, 72 00:05:12,680 --> 00:05:17,520 Camille Saint-Saens and Gabriel Faure were all trained organists, 73 00:05:17,520 --> 00:05:20,080 and playing the organ means above all 74 00:05:20,080 --> 00:05:25,640 knowing one particular composer's work inside out - JS Bach. 75 00:05:25,640 --> 00:05:28,800 MUSIC: "Toccata" by Widor 76 00:05:29,840 --> 00:05:32,120 More than a hundred years after his death, 77 00:05:32,120 --> 00:05:34,360 these organist-composers in France 78 00:05:34,360 --> 00:05:38,560 were invigorated and inspired by Bach's clarity and economy. 79 00:05:40,720 --> 00:05:43,400 Even the master himself might have admired 80 00:05:43,400 --> 00:05:46,080 Charles-Marie Widor's famous Toccata. 81 00:05:46,080 --> 00:05:48,240 It was first performed by Widor himself 82 00:05:48,240 --> 00:05:51,920 at the Trocadero Palace in Paris in 1889 83 00:05:51,920 --> 00:05:53,960 and it's given a rousing send-off 84 00:05:53,960 --> 00:05:57,360 to many a newly hitched bride and groom ever since. 85 00:06:15,560 --> 00:06:19,480 The dignity and dexterity of Bach can also be heard 86 00:06:19,480 --> 00:06:21,400 in the music of Gabriel Faure, 87 00:06:21,400 --> 00:06:25,280 perhaps the most talented of these French organist-composers. 88 00:06:39,320 --> 00:06:44,080 Listening to Faure after Brahms, Liszt, Wagner or Tchaikovsky, 89 00:06:44,080 --> 00:06:47,080 it's as if someone has spring-cleaned and redecorated 90 00:06:47,080 --> 00:06:49,080 a teenage boy's bedroom. 91 00:06:49,080 --> 00:06:52,480 Gone are the posters of death, psychological torment, 92 00:06:52,480 --> 00:06:54,920 superheroes and tragedy. 93 00:06:54,920 --> 00:06:57,720 The augmented piles of clothes have been put away 94 00:06:57,720 --> 00:06:59,240 and the windows have been opened 95 00:06:59,240 --> 00:07:02,560 to dispel the diminished sneaker-smelling air. 96 00:07:02,560 --> 00:07:05,320 Faure's exquisite music simply says, "Chill," 97 00:07:05,320 --> 00:07:07,720 or, perhaps, refrigerez-vous. 98 00:07:19,400 --> 00:07:23,160 The exquisite pieces of Satie, Saint-Saens, Faure 99 00:07:23,160 --> 00:07:27,360 and the new wave of French composers were mostly small in scale. 100 00:07:28,800 --> 00:07:32,960 The next important step in the non-Wagner rebellion took place 101 00:07:32,960 --> 00:07:35,280 in the realm of symphonic music. 102 00:07:36,920 --> 00:07:38,920 And the composer who carried the torch 103 00:07:38,920 --> 00:07:42,680 for large-scale orchestral and vocal music after Wagner 104 00:07:42,680 --> 00:07:46,320 was about as different from him as a human being could be. 105 00:07:46,320 --> 00:07:48,040 Though he championed Wagner's operas 106 00:07:48,040 --> 00:07:50,440 as music director of the Vienna State Opera House, 107 00:07:50,440 --> 00:07:53,240 Wagner would have despised him because he was Jewish. 108 00:07:53,240 --> 00:07:55,080 He was Gustav Mahler. 109 00:08:02,080 --> 00:08:05,360 The hallmark of Mahler's music is that of openness. 110 00:08:05,360 --> 00:08:08,920 Unlike Wagner, Mahler invited into his music 111 00:08:08,920 --> 00:08:12,080 all the sounds and rhythms and the noisy diversity 112 00:08:12,080 --> 00:08:16,240 of the bustling East European communities at Vienna's doorstep, 113 00:08:16,240 --> 00:08:19,960 capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire. 114 00:08:24,800 --> 00:08:28,520 As an outsider in Vienna - a Jew, a Czech, 115 00:08:28,520 --> 00:08:31,000 a poor country boy in a profession full of toffs - 116 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:33,920 it's not surprising that Mahler should identify 117 00:08:33,920 --> 00:08:37,160 with the folklore and music of his small-town childhood. 118 00:08:38,840 --> 00:08:42,240 In his symphonies it's possible to identify, for example, 119 00:08:42,240 --> 00:08:45,560 the Klezmer style of strolling Jewish folk musicians. 120 00:08:48,880 --> 00:08:52,680 His music encompasses passing military bands. 121 00:09:02,800 --> 00:09:06,680 And he's not afraid to include boisterous children's choruses. 122 00:09:12,520 --> 00:09:16,280 Mahler's symphonies are music's gateway to the 20th century, 123 00:09:16,280 --> 00:09:19,280 a musical equivalent of New York's Ellis Island, 124 00:09:19,280 --> 00:09:22,360 where Europe's exhausted and oppressed peoples 125 00:09:22,360 --> 00:09:24,880 sought refuge and a new start. 126 00:09:24,880 --> 00:09:27,840 The musical cultures they left behind in Europe 127 00:09:27,840 --> 00:09:31,840 found a home in Mahler's generous symphonic embrace. 128 00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:37,760 One way we can see a modern perspective emerging in his music is 129 00:09:37,760 --> 00:09:41,200 its sense of reality, of truthfulness, warts and all. 130 00:09:41,200 --> 00:09:44,600 The frankness of his approach is a major break with the past 131 00:09:44,600 --> 00:09:48,680 and is much more characteristic of the 20th than the 19th centuries. 132 00:09:48,680 --> 00:09:51,240 How can music be honest? 133 00:09:51,240 --> 00:09:53,760 Well, before Mahler if you were composer 134 00:09:53,760 --> 00:09:57,920 and you wanted to write a piece about loneliness or despair or depression, 135 00:09:57,920 --> 00:10:03,360 you'd call it something generic like a nocturne, or a sonata pathetique. 136 00:10:03,360 --> 00:10:08,080 In an opera you could have singers act out emotional or political issues 137 00:10:08,080 --> 00:10:11,440 pretending to be someone from another era, in a fancy costume. 138 00:10:12,800 --> 00:10:15,080 But Mahler stopped all this role-playing. 139 00:10:15,080 --> 00:10:17,720 He wanted to evoke the real, contemporary world 140 00:10:17,720 --> 00:10:21,360 with all its actual suffering and joy, without pretence. 141 00:10:21,360 --> 00:10:23,120 He told it how it was. 142 00:10:23,120 --> 00:10:26,640 Mahler took our worst fears and set them to music. 143 00:10:26,640 --> 00:10:29,120 This may seem an unremarkable concept to us 144 00:10:29,120 --> 00:10:33,640 but in 1900 it was shockingly, distressingly new. 145 00:10:33,640 --> 00:10:38,360 The unflinching honesty of Mahler's approach is at times unbearable. 146 00:10:38,360 --> 00:10:40,440 From 1901, for example, 147 00:10:40,440 --> 00:10:44,040 he set to music five German poems called Kindertotenlieder - 148 00:10:44,040 --> 00:10:46,280 Songs On The Death Of Children. 149 00:10:46,280 --> 00:10:51,080 The sentiments of the songs are those of a parent's most unspeakable nightmares. 150 00:10:51,480 --> 00:10:53,840 MEZZO SINGING IN GERMAN 151 00:11:30,920 --> 00:11:32,920 In Mahler's unflinching settings, 152 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:37,160 these distant people of another century suddenly become like us. 153 00:11:37,160 --> 00:11:38,760 He's made them real. 154 00:11:38,760 --> 00:11:42,040 In a horrible irony, four years after he wrote the songs 155 00:11:42,040 --> 00:11:46,240 Mahler's own five-year-old daughter, Anna-Maria, died of scarlet fever, 156 00:11:46,240 --> 00:11:50,200 and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition. 157 00:11:50,200 --> 00:11:54,800 When he died in 1911 he was laid to rest in her grave. 158 00:12:01,720 --> 00:12:05,840 But despite the understandable sadness and alienation we hear in his music 159 00:12:05,840 --> 00:12:08,760 there is, incredibly, hope of something better, 160 00:12:08,760 --> 00:12:11,360 usually associated with childhood and youth, 161 00:12:11,360 --> 00:12:13,840 as in his Song Of The Earth. 162 00:12:14,920 --> 00:12:18,160 The final chord of The Song Of The Earth was described 163 00:12:18,160 --> 00:12:21,360 by the mid-20th century English composer Benjamin Britten 164 00:12:21,360 --> 00:12:24,600 as being "imprinted on the atmosphere." 165 00:12:24,600 --> 00:12:28,920 STRINGS, HARP AND OBOE CREATE A WASH OF SOUND 166 00:12:35,880 --> 00:12:40,920 MEZZO: # Ewig... # 167 00:12:45,920 --> 00:12:49,000 MUSIC FADES 168 00:12:56,800 --> 00:12:59,080 But there's something else going on in Mahler's music 169 00:12:59,080 --> 00:13:01,680 that wasn't perhaps obvious at the time. 170 00:13:01,680 --> 00:13:03,200 It's deceptive. 171 00:13:03,200 --> 00:13:05,000 Because of its all-inclusive style 172 00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:07,880 with its borrowings from ethnic folk music 173 00:13:07,880 --> 00:13:11,160 and because of the intensity of feeling he wanted to convey, 174 00:13:11,160 --> 00:13:13,840 Mahler's music began to destabilise 175 00:13:13,840 --> 00:13:17,960 the centuries-old Western musical system he'd inherited. 176 00:13:17,960 --> 00:13:21,360 His pupils in Vienna, led by Arnold Schoenberg, 177 00:13:21,360 --> 00:13:24,080 actively wanted to dismantle completely 178 00:13:24,080 --> 00:13:27,240 the familiar systems that had underpinned all music 179 00:13:27,240 --> 00:13:28,800 for hundreds of years 180 00:13:28,800 --> 00:13:31,920 and replace them with a brand new system. 181 00:13:42,160 --> 00:13:47,280 This academic rebellion was later labelled serialism, or atonality, 182 00:13:47,280 --> 00:13:52,320 and it produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars. 183 00:13:52,320 --> 00:13:56,560 And, in its purest, strictest form, not one piece of music 184 00:13:56,560 --> 00:14:01,560 that a normal person could understand or enjoy in 100 years. 185 00:14:04,600 --> 00:14:08,440 That's not to say that serialism hasn't always had a cultish following 186 00:14:08,440 --> 00:14:12,800 but for sure these composers weren't courting a mainstream audience. 187 00:14:20,440 --> 00:14:23,880 Had serialism had any chance of appealing to a paying public, 188 00:14:23,880 --> 00:14:27,360 one composer who would surely have opted into it 189 00:14:27,360 --> 00:14:29,360 was the musical magpie Richard Strauss, 190 00:14:29,360 --> 00:14:33,000 Germany's leading composer after Mahler's death. 191 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:37,760 But he had other, far more mischievous plans up his sleeve. 192 00:14:37,760 --> 00:14:40,560 He began his career conventionally enough 193 00:14:40,560 --> 00:14:43,480 in a musical style that owed much to Liszt 194 00:14:43,480 --> 00:14:44,520 and a little to Wagner. 195 00:14:45,200 --> 00:14:47,880 Thus Spake Zarathustra is pretty typical, 196 00:14:47,880 --> 00:14:52,480 with its now legendary opening, Sunrise, made even more famous 197 00:14:52,480 --> 00:14:56,120 by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 198 00:14:58,160 --> 00:14:59,920 Kubrick uses the power of the piece 199 00:14:59,920 --> 00:15:03,040 to underscore a momentous leap forward in the evolution of Man. 200 00:15:38,320 --> 00:15:40,920 The power of the idea the film wants to convey, 201 00:15:40,920 --> 00:15:45,160 man's discovery of weapons, needs equally portentous music. 202 00:15:45,160 --> 00:15:47,520 No one did it better than Strauss. 203 00:15:57,680 --> 00:16:00,080 And yet, the ever-versatile Strauss 204 00:16:00,080 --> 00:16:04,080 could also write songs of heart-breaking, Mahlerish delicacy, 205 00:16:04,080 --> 00:16:08,520 like the song Tomorrow, composed as a wedding present for his wife. 206 00:16:27,680 --> 00:16:31,120 On the surface of it the words of Morgen! seem 207 00:16:31,120 --> 00:16:33,280 to be optimistic about the future. 208 00:16:33,280 --> 00:16:35,760 "And tomorrow the sun will shine again." 209 00:16:35,760 --> 00:16:37,920 But it's also strangely melancholy. 210 00:16:37,920 --> 00:16:42,240 It seems to suggest, in fact, that there will be no tomorrow. 211 00:16:46,320 --> 00:16:49,480 It seemed at this point as if Strauss would continue to compose 212 00:16:49,480 --> 00:16:52,160 in this wistful but fairly traditional manner. 213 00:16:52,160 --> 00:16:57,120 But then he suddenly catapulted himself into musical notoriety 214 00:16:57,120 --> 00:17:00,280 with an opera of savage, erotic power 215 00:17:00,280 --> 00:17:03,600 that shocked bourgeois society and created a sensation. 216 00:17:03,600 --> 00:17:05,520 In one fell swoop, 217 00:17:05,520 --> 00:17:09,880 from being the genteel Kapellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoch, 218 00:17:09,880 --> 00:17:13,080 Strauss had transformed himself into the Che Guevara 219 00:17:13,080 --> 00:17:14,680 of the musical rebels. 220 00:17:16,320 --> 00:17:20,160 The opera in question was Salome, staged in 1905. 221 00:17:27,520 --> 00:17:30,720 It was immediately banned in several countries 222 00:17:30,720 --> 00:17:33,560 and it gave new meaning to the term discord... 223 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:43,360 ..even before Salome herself had stripped off 224 00:17:43,360 --> 00:17:45,480 for the Dance Of The Seven Veils 225 00:17:45,480 --> 00:17:48,240 and scandalised the first night audience. 226 00:17:54,360 --> 00:17:56,400 Salome's final, passionate solo, 227 00:17:56,400 --> 00:17:59,320 addressed to the severed head of John the Baptist, 228 00:17:59,320 --> 00:18:03,880 which she then kisses, was the Quentin Tarantino moment. 229 00:18:10,040 --> 00:18:13,440 You can either read Salome as a strong, independent young woman 230 00:18:13,440 --> 00:18:16,520 who gets what she wants by exploiting her sexuality, 231 00:18:16,520 --> 00:18:20,200 cleverly outwitting her stepfather the king in the process, 232 00:18:20,200 --> 00:18:22,240 or as a kind of demented junkie 233 00:18:22,240 --> 00:18:25,960 who lowers humanity's moral standards to rock bottom. 234 00:18:25,960 --> 00:18:27,280 Take your pick. 235 00:18:27,280 --> 00:18:29,360 Strauss apparently hedges his bets, 236 00:18:29,360 --> 00:18:32,560 giving the first mention of the necrophiliac kiss 237 00:18:32,560 --> 00:18:36,800 possibly the most dissonant chord ever used in music at that point. 238 00:18:36,800 --> 00:18:40,480 It's like the final howl of a busted civilisation. 239 00:18:40,480 --> 00:18:42,320 HIGH DISCORD 240 00:18:42,320 --> 00:18:44,160 CLUSTER OF NOTES 241 00:18:47,760 --> 00:18:49,720 But we're not finished with her yet. 242 00:18:49,720 --> 00:18:52,680 After asking whether the taste of blood on his lips is 243 00:18:52,680 --> 00:18:54,600 actually the taste of love, 244 00:18:54,600 --> 00:18:57,960 Salome revisits the kiss in supreme triumph. 245 00:18:57,960 --> 00:19:02,080 "I have now kissed your mouth, Jochanaan," she screams 246 00:19:02,080 --> 00:19:05,000 and Strauss unleashes a musical earthquake 247 00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:08,640 which might be construed as a sexual consummation. 248 00:19:08,640 --> 00:19:11,200 Again, make up your own mind. 249 00:19:11,200 --> 00:19:13,720 GRAND, ECSTATIC MUSIC 250 00:19:32,920 --> 00:19:37,280 King Herod, who had encouraged his stepdaughter to dance in the first place, 251 00:19:37,280 --> 00:19:40,000 now ordered his soldiers to kill her. 252 00:19:46,040 --> 00:19:50,760 For this climax Strauss reserved his most discordant and angry music yet. 253 00:19:50,760 --> 00:19:52,680 VIOLENT, DISCORDANT MUSIC 254 00:19:56,080 --> 00:19:57,520 REPEATED BRASS CHORDS 255 00:20:02,520 --> 00:20:04,200 At this point in musical history 256 00:20:04,200 --> 00:20:07,320 it looked as though the dominance of Austro-German music 257 00:20:07,320 --> 00:20:12,000 that began with Bach in 1700 might continue indefinitely. 258 00:20:12,840 --> 00:20:15,400 Instead, a new force had emerged 259 00:20:15,400 --> 00:20:17,800 and was by the early 20th century 260 00:20:17,800 --> 00:20:20,040 the most exhilarating sound in Europe. 261 00:20:20,040 --> 00:20:22,800 In the closing decades of the 19th century 262 00:20:22,800 --> 00:20:26,080 the sleeping giant of Russia had awoken. 263 00:20:26,080 --> 00:20:29,040 Music was never going to be the same again. 264 00:20:31,280 --> 00:20:34,440 And when it comes to rebellions, Russia is in a class of its own. 265 00:20:46,920 --> 00:20:49,880 For all of the 18th and most of the 19th centuries 266 00:20:49,880 --> 00:20:53,120 Russia doggedly copied the culture of Western Europe, 267 00:20:53,120 --> 00:20:56,680 which the Russian court deemed more sophisticated and interesting 268 00:20:56,680 --> 00:20:58,640 than anything home-grown. 269 00:21:00,120 --> 00:21:03,760 Even Russia's most famous composer of them all, Tchaikovsky, 270 00:21:03,760 --> 00:21:06,680 who became a worldwide star in the 1880s and '90s, 271 00:21:06,680 --> 00:21:11,000 was still composing in a style that owed more to Beethoven or Brahms 272 00:21:11,000 --> 00:21:14,320 than to anything he'd picked up on the banks of the Volga. 273 00:21:14,320 --> 00:21:17,040 But there was something Tchaikovsky excelled at 274 00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:18,600 that was distinctly Russian 275 00:21:18,600 --> 00:21:21,800 and that contained within it the seeds of a coming revolution - 276 00:21:21,800 --> 00:21:23,520 dance. 277 00:21:34,240 --> 00:21:38,000 If for Italians the supreme expression of their love of music 278 00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:41,440 was the emotionally charged operatic aria, 279 00:21:41,440 --> 00:21:43,680 for Russians it was dance, 280 00:21:43,680 --> 00:21:46,600 and Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most celebrated and memorable 281 00:21:46,600 --> 00:21:48,280 dance music of all time. 282 00:22:15,800 --> 00:22:17,960 The result of this flowering of dance is 283 00:22:17,960 --> 00:22:20,080 that the need for a driving rhythm 284 00:22:20,080 --> 00:22:23,800 began to change the character of the music itself, 285 00:22:23,800 --> 00:22:27,600 making it more robust, muscular and exciting. 286 00:22:27,600 --> 00:22:30,640 Russian music was about to explode into life 287 00:22:30,640 --> 00:22:33,040 in a manner that was unprecedented, 288 00:22:33,040 --> 00:22:36,000 and subsequently unmatched in history. 289 00:22:41,040 --> 00:22:45,080 In Russia the invigorating, regulated beat of dance is everywhere, 290 00:22:45,080 --> 00:22:47,880 at the ballet, in operas, on the concert stage, 291 00:22:47,880 --> 00:22:51,880 lilting, driving, whirling, tiptoeing, leaping, gliding, 292 00:22:51,880 --> 00:22:53,680 jumping, gyrating and twirling - 293 00:22:53,680 --> 00:22:55,760 Russian music can't get enough of it. 294 00:22:55,760 --> 00:22:57,640 Presumably, it's the cold - 295 00:22:57,640 --> 00:23:00,480 you have to keep moving or your circulation will pack in. 296 00:23:10,240 --> 00:23:14,040 The rhythms of dance first powered this Russian awakening. 297 00:23:14,040 --> 00:23:17,800 The second vital element which changed the melody and harmony 298 00:23:17,800 --> 00:23:22,240 came from a renewed interest in Russia's own religious heritage. 299 00:23:22,240 --> 00:23:24,800 PRIEST CHANTING 300 00:23:26,240 --> 00:23:29,520 A new breed of composers, starting in the 1880s, 301 00:23:29,520 --> 00:23:33,720 turned their attention, not to the musical traditions of Western Europe, 302 00:23:33,720 --> 00:23:35,320 but to those of their own, 303 00:23:35,320 --> 00:23:39,080 especially the centuries-old Russian Orthodox chants, 304 00:23:39,080 --> 00:23:43,800 with their deep basses and thick eight or 16-voice block chords. 305 00:23:50,920 --> 00:23:53,440 In the decades to follow, this ancient sound, 306 00:23:53,440 --> 00:23:56,960 known as Znamenny Chant, was to flow like a river 307 00:23:56,960 --> 00:24:00,120 into the choral texture of all Russian composers. 308 00:24:00,120 --> 00:24:03,240 No longer did they look west for inspiration. 309 00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:10,280 The fuse-lighter of the Russian firework display about to unfold, 310 00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:13,440 the truly original, creative path-finder, 311 00:24:13,440 --> 00:24:18,960 wasn't cosmopolitan, well-travelled friend of the Romanovs Tchaikovsky, 312 00:24:18,960 --> 00:24:21,960 but a former military cadet who worked in the civil service 313 00:24:21,960 --> 00:24:25,320 and had a fatal vodka habit - Modest Mussorgsky. 314 00:24:25,320 --> 00:24:28,040 MUSIC: "Promenade Pictures At An Exhibition" 315 00:24:32,960 --> 00:24:37,560 Mussorgsky is quite simply the most original composer of the late 19th century, 316 00:24:37,560 --> 00:24:40,240 a one-off whose ideas were new, 317 00:24:40,240 --> 00:24:43,080 not derived from other composers of his time. 318 00:24:44,640 --> 00:24:46,160 There's a reason for this. 319 00:24:46,160 --> 00:24:49,200 Mussorgsky wasn't musically trained at a conservatoire 320 00:24:49,200 --> 00:24:51,200 and he wasn't a professional composer. 321 00:24:51,200 --> 00:24:52,800 He was self-taught 322 00:24:52,800 --> 00:24:56,320 and therefore blissfully unaware of the rules he was breaking. 323 00:24:56,320 --> 00:25:00,920 It was like he'd wandered onto Tsarist Russia's Got Talent, 324 00:25:00,920 --> 00:25:04,320 slightly drunk, and started improvising at the piano, 325 00:25:04,320 --> 00:25:06,160 to everyone's amazement. 326 00:25:06,160 --> 00:25:09,000 "Promenade - Pictures At An Exhibition" 327 00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:24,040 But despite the naivety of his style, 328 00:25:24,040 --> 00:25:26,880 which earned him more than a little ridicule at the time, 329 00:25:26,880 --> 00:25:30,920 Mussorgsky showed that Russian music could carve its own identity. 330 00:25:40,360 --> 00:25:43,240 To see how radically the music of Russia had changed 331 00:25:43,240 --> 00:25:45,200 in fewer than 40 years, 332 00:25:45,200 --> 00:25:48,920 listen to this coronation scene from A Life For The Tsar, 333 00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:54,120 an opera written by the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka in 1836. 334 00:25:54,120 --> 00:25:57,120 BIG, FOURSQUARE CHORDS 335 00:26:03,560 --> 00:26:07,800 Glinka had his musical training in Italy, Austria and Germany, 336 00:26:07,800 --> 00:26:09,400 and it shows. 337 00:26:09,400 --> 00:26:11,800 BRAHMSLIKE WRITING 338 00:26:16,400 --> 00:26:19,760 Now listen to another Kremlin coronation scene 339 00:26:19,760 --> 00:26:23,360 from the thoroughly Russian opera by Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov. 340 00:26:23,360 --> 00:26:25,880 VIVID, ENERGETIC MUSIC 341 00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:45,720 This time, complete with colours, voices and glittering effects, 342 00:26:45,720 --> 00:26:48,720 tolling bells and echoing orchestra chimes, 343 00:26:48,720 --> 00:26:50,960 it's been thoroughly Russianised. 344 00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:59,400 Mussorgsky died in 1881, his music virtually unknown outside of Russia. 345 00:26:59,400 --> 00:27:01,600 But that was about to change. 346 00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:04,240 "Carnival Of The Animals" by Saint-Saens. 347 00:27:09,280 --> 00:27:13,080 So many of the seeds of the rebellions of late 19th century music 348 00:27:13,080 --> 00:27:16,760 can be traced to one extraordinarily fertile event. 349 00:27:16,760 --> 00:27:22,080 It took place in Paris in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution. 350 00:27:22,080 --> 00:27:24,080 It was the World's Fair. 351 00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:34,240 Here in the Trocadero, which overlooked the newly-built Eiffel Tower, 352 00:27:34,240 --> 00:27:37,480 Widor first played his famous organ Toccata 353 00:27:37,480 --> 00:27:41,000 and here also non-Russian composers heard 354 00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:44,280 the music of Mussorgsky for the first time. 355 00:27:44,280 --> 00:27:48,480 One such composer, then aged 27, was Claude Debussy. 356 00:27:48,480 --> 00:27:53,400 His visit to the World's Fair was a life- and music-changing experience. 357 00:27:55,280 --> 00:27:57,120 What Debussy learnt from Mussorgsky 358 00:27:57,120 --> 00:28:00,560 was that there was a way of building up the architecture of a piece of music 359 00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:03,440 that was an alternative to the developmental method 360 00:28:03,440 --> 00:28:06,520 that was bread and butter to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. 361 00:28:06,520 --> 00:28:10,880 The development approach was to take small cells of melody or rhythm, 362 00:28:10,880 --> 00:28:14,080 or both, and make up a whole discourse from them 363 00:28:14,080 --> 00:28:16,360 over a 15 or 20 minute period. 364 00:28:16,360 --> 00:28:21,080 So Beethoven is able to construct a whole symphony movement from this tiny idea. 365 00:28:21,360 --> 00:28:23,360 MOTIF FROM BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH 366 00:28:23,360 --> 00:28:26,920 Count how many times he uses it in just the first 40 bars of the symphony. 367 00:28:28,520 --> 00:28:29,880 HE MOUTHS 368 00:28:42,680 --> 00:28:44,040 That's 13. 369 00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:03,080 That's already 33, and counting. 370 00:29:06,040 --> 00:29:08,160 Debussy, inspired by Mussorgsky, 371 00:29:08,160 --> 00:29:12,160 ditched 100 years of studious development technique 372 00:29:12,160 --> 00:29:13,800 and started over - 373 00:29:13,800 --> 00:29:15,960 Mussorgsky, because he knew no better, 374 00:29:15,960 --> 00:29:19,480 and Debussy, because it suited his taste for experiment. 375 00:29:20,680 --> 00:29:22,960 GAMELAN PLAYS 376 00:29:26,200 --> 00:29:30,080 What revolutionised Debussy's music more than anything, though, was 377 00:29:30,080 --> 00:29:34,680 a wind of change blowing to the Paris World's Fair from very far afield. 378 00:29:38,080 --> 00:29:42,240 The World's Fair showcased exhibits and cultural tableaux 379 00:29:42,240 --> 00:29:44,160 from all over the planet. 380 00:29:45,520 --> 00:29:47,480 Thanks to increased communications, 381 00:29:47,480 --> 00:29:50,680 the global village was starting to become a reality. 382 00:29:52,680 --> 00:29:56,960 What especially mesmerised Debussy was a Javanese village, 383 00:29:56,960 --> 00:29:58,880 complete with a gamelan orchestra, 384 00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:03,480 with its gongs, bells, bowls and xylophone-like chimes. 385 00:30:04,640 --> 00:30:07,800 The particular sonorities and scales of the Gamelan orchestra 386 00:30:07,800 --> 00:30:10,800 intrigued Debussy so much he was inspired to attempt 387 00:30:10,800 --> 00:30:14,680 an evocation of its Eastern sounds on a Western piano. 388 00:30:14,680 --> 00:30:18,840 Although he couldn't replicate the unfamiliar tuning of the bells, 389 00:30:18,840 --> 00:30:21,080 gongs, and other metal bars of the gamelan, 390 00:30:21,080 --> 00:30:24,520 or the exact division of the Asian musical scale, 391 00:30:24,520 --> 00:30:27,240 he could approximate it in two ways. 392 00:30:27,240 --> 00:30:30,480 One was to make use of the so-called pentatonic scale, 393 00:30:30,480 --> 00:30:34,040 the five notes that are common to all the world's musical systems 394 00:30:34,040 --> 00:30:36,840 and which are especially prevalent in Eastern music. 395 00:30:36,840 --> 00:30:41,520 On a piano the pentatonic notes can be found by playing just the black notes. 396 00:30:46,800 --> 00:30:50,080 There's a whole section of his prelude Voiles, sails, 397 00:30:50,080 --> 00:30:51,960 which is all pentatonic. 398 00:31:22,800 --> 00:31:26,920 The other trick Debussy deployed was to allow his chords to hang over each other, 399 00:31:26,920 --> 00:31:30,360 overlapping and ricocheting from one to the next. 400 00:31:30,360 --> 00:31:32,520 This technique, on a piano at any rate, 401 00:31:32,520 --> 00:31:34,360 has the effect of eking out 402 00:31:34,360 --> 00:31:37,480 the sympathetic resonances, or harmonics, 403 00:31:37,480 --> 00:31:40,440 latent in the reverberating strings. 404 00:31:43,440 --> 00:31:48,120 Natural harmonics are hidden extra notes, usually quite high in pitch, 405 00:31:48,120 --> 00:31:50,640 that are found within any given sound, 406 00:31:50,640 --> 00:31:52,520 like the additional colours of the spectrum 407 00:31:52,520 --> 00:31:54,360 contained within white light. 408 00:31:54,360 --> 00:31:58,640 Every time you allow the felt dampers on a piano to clamp down on the strings 409 00:31:58,640 --> 00:32:02,200 you shut off the natural harmonics from resonating. 410 00:32:03,840 --> 00:32:04,880 CHORD STOPS 411 00:32:07,760 --> 00:32:09,960 But Debussy wanted to do the opposite, 412 00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:13,600 to allow the strings to ring like they would on a harp. 413 00:32:13,600 --> 00:32:17,400 His hanging chords with the dampers kept away from the strings 414 00:32:17,400 --> 00:32:19,600 were a kind of return to nature. 415 00:32:20,200 --> 00:32:22,880 "Claire de Lune" by Debussy 416 00:32:33,800 --> 00:32:35,680 Putting these ideas into action, 417 00:32:35,680 --> 00:32:38,560 Debussy created a new soundscape for the piano. 418 00:32:38,560 --> 00:32:42,160 The reformation of scales and harmonies that he introduced 419 00:32:42,160 --> 00:32:45,240 offered a whole new palette of aural possibilities. 420 00:32:45,240 --> 00:32:48,960 The piano had never sounded so exotic and so rich. 421 00:33:18,840 --> 00:33:23,560 By recalibrating the traditional Western scale on Eastern lines, 422 00:33:23,560 --> 00:33:26,320 Debussy's music was a radical departure 423 00:33:26,320 --> 00:33:28,640 from the classical style he'd grown up with, 424 00:33:28,640 --> 00:33:33,080 and his harmonic experiments based on Asian sound combinations 425 00:33:33,080 --> 00:33:38,200 were still influencing musicians, especially in jazz, half a century later. 426 00:33:57,080 --> 00:33:59,560 As well as kicking off a highly fruitful interest 427 00:33:59,560 --> 00:34:01,800 in what we'd call world music, 428 00:34:01,800 --> 00:34:06,720 the World's Fair in Paris had also put the new music of Russia on the map. 429 00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:12,200 Another of St Petersburg's musical dynamos, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, 430 00:34:12,200 --> 00:34:16,560 took over the torch and mined the golden seam of Slavic folklore 431 00:34:16,560 --> 00:34:20,800 in a series of operatic pageants put on around the turn of the century. 432 00:34:20,800 --> 00:34:25,120 Rimsky didn't just use folk stories in his plots. 433 00:34:25,120 --> 00:34:30,440 Crucially he also started to borrow the melodic building blocks of Russian folk music. 434 00:34:52,080 --> 00:34:55,240 These sparkling entertainments laid down a challenge 435 00:34:55,240 --> 00:35:00,600 to Rimsky-Korsakov's most talented pupil, then a complete unknown. 436 00:35:00,600 --> 00:35:03,720 That challenge was to blaze a path for Russian music 437 00:35:03,720 --> 00:35:07,240 and put Russia onto the cultural map once and for all, 438 00:35:07,240 --> 00:35:10,120 and boy, was the challenge accepted. 439 00:35:10,120 --> 00:35:13,960 Rimsky-Korsakov's pupil was Igor Stravinsky. 440 00:35:17,400 --> 00:35:20,440 Stravinsky's combustible arrival on the world music scene 441 00:35:20,440 --> 00:35:21,920 was stage-managed 442 00:35:21,920 --> 00:35:27,760 by an entrepreneurial art, dance and music impresario, Sergei Diaghilev. 443 00:35:27,760 --> 00:35:31,920 In 1909 he created a dance company in Paris, the Ballets Russes, 444 00:35:31,920 --> 00:35:36,440 in order to produce annual festivals of modernist Russian ballets. 445 00:35:36,440 --> 00:35:39,080 He approached Stravinsky to compose the music for one 446 00:35:39,080 --> 00:35:42,560 based on an ancient Russian fairytale, The Firebird. 447 00:35:46,800 --> 00:35:49,080 When he was commissioned Stravinsky was unknown 448 00:35:49,080 --> 00:35:51,680 and third choice for the job. 449 00:35:51,680 --> 00:35:54,760 Three years later he was both the most notorious 450 00:35:54,760 --> 00:35:57,840 and the most eagerly championed composer in all Europe. 451 00:35:58,600 --> 00:36:00,440 The Firebird's scenario, 452 00:36:00,440 --> 00:36:04,400 an amalgam of several versions of folk tales about a magical bird, 453 00:36:04,400 --> 00:36:08,400 combines supernatural characters and beasts with the natural, 454 00:36:08,400 --> 00:36:11,000 the fantastical world with the human world. 455 00:36:13,080 --> 00:36:17,160 Stravinsky gives these two worlds different styles of music. 456 00:36:17,160 --> 00:36:20,840 Human characters, like the 12 princesses in the story, are given 457 00:36:20,840 --> 00:36:24,920 folk song derived melodies based on the common Western musical scale. 458 00:36:25,400 --> 00:36:26,800 C MAJOR SCALE 459 00:37:16,440 --> 00:37:20,320 The fantastical creatures and characters on the other hand are allotted 460 00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:23,160 a much more exotic and complex musical palette, 461 00:37:23,160 --> 00:37:26,600 often based on the so-called octotonic scale. 462 00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:29,080 SEQUENCE OF TONES AND SEMITONES 463 00:37:31,480 --> 00:37:35,160 This non-Western sounding octotonic scale had been the feature 464 00:37:35,160 --> 00:37:38,480 of the music of Stravinsky's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, 465 00:37:38,480 --> 00:37:41,640 especially when depicting the magical, malevolent 466 00:37:41,640 --> 00:37:43,520 or the mysterious. 467 00:37:59,600 --> 00:38:03,080 When Stravinsky borrows from Russian ethnic folk music like this 468 00:38:03,080 --> 00:38:05,080 he doesn't lift it straight 469 00:38:05,080 --> 00:38:07,760 but distorts it through a mischievous prism. 470 00:38:07,760 --> 00:38:10,320 In field recordings of peasant folk music, 471 00:38:10,320 --> 00:38:14,000 the educated, bourgeois Stravinsky had discovered 472 00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:16,160 a raw, ritualistic world 473 00:38:16,160 --> 00:38:19,640 from way beyond the frontiers of industrial civilisation. 474 00:38:19,640 --> 00:38:23,040 His instinct to repackage it for a Parisian audience 475 00:38:23,040 --> 00:38:25,200 was brilliantly provocative. 476 00:38:33,920 --> 00:38:37,800 Stravinsky's rebellion against established musical conventions 477 00:38:37,800 --> 00:38:42,800 wasn't just about exotic scales and weird jingly-jangly sounds 478 00:38:42,800 --> 00:38:45,120 he injected into the orchestra. 479 00:38:45,120 --> 00:38:48,320 Stravinsky, like Mussorgsky and Debussy before him, 480 00:38:48,320 --> 00:38:51,280 wanted to find a way of assembling a musical structure 481 00:38:51,280 --> 00:38:55,440 without using constantly developing nuggets of tune. 482 00:38:57,280 --> 00:39:00,520 Stravinsky in particular wanted to tell his ballet stories 483 00:39:00,520 --> 00:39:01,960 a different way. 484 00:39:01,960 --> 00:39:05,000 He created a montage, an aural jigsaw, 485 00:39:05,000 --> 00:39:08,520 one tune followed by a different tune, followed by a different tune 486 00:39:08,520 --> 00:39:10,720 in tumbling succession. 487 00:39:10,720 --> 00:39:15,800 For this reason, ballet, with its short, restless kaleidoscopic episodes, 488 00:39:15,800 --> 00:39:19,000 was the form for which Stravinsky was born to compose. 489 00:39:38,440 --> 00:39:41,920 We find the idea of musical collage, the mix, 490 00:39:41,920 --> 00:39:45,920 the remix, the iPod shuffle and the mash-up, completely normal, 491 00:39:45,920 --> 00:39:47,520 but we shouldn't forget 492 00:39:47,520 --> 00:39:50,360 how bewilderingly unfamiliar an idea this was 493 00:39:50,360 --> 00:39:54,200 to the musical establishment of the early 1900s. 494 00:39:54,440 --> 00:40:01,120 When the Ballets Russes took Stravinsky's second ballet, Petrushka, to Vienna in 1913 495 00:40:01,120 --> 00:40:04,200 the scandalised musicians refused to play it, 496 00:40:04,200 --> 00:40:07,240 describing it as "dirty music". 497 00:40:07,240 --> 00:40:10,080 All of the radicals, Mahler, Debussy and Stravinsky, 498 00:40:10,080 --> 00:40:11,960 were dismantling the old system 499 00:40:11,960 --> 00:40:17,280 whereby musical ideas carefully unfolded, one thing after another. 500 00:40:17,280 --> 00:40:19,640 They wanted everything at once. 501 00:40:20,800 --> 00:40:23,800 Stravinsky, like all Russian composers, was turned on 502 00:40:23,800 --> 00:40:26,000 by the rhythmic urgency of dance 503 00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:29,200 but he did something very unusual with that rhythm. 504 00:40:29,200 --> 00:40:32,680 Whilst Mahler had layered melody on melody, 505 00:40:32,680 --> 00:40:35,200 tangled together like a twisted knot, 506 00:40:35,200 --> 00:40:40,160 and Debussy had manipulated blocks of adjacent sound overlapping one another, 507 00:40:40,160 --> 00:40:42,600 Stravinsky went one step further, 508 00:40:42,600 --> 00:40:46,280 superimposing simultaneous rhythms on top of each other. 509 00:40:49,440 --> 00:40:51,720 Polyrhythm, as it has since been dubbed, 510 00:40:51,720 --> 00:40:54,400 had long existed in African tribal drumming, 511 00:40:54,400 --> 00:40:58,640 improvised on the spot by highly intuitive, skilful players. 512 00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:05,320 But polyrhythm, conceived from scratch by a composer, 513 00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:07,080 written down on the page, 514 00:41:07,200 --> 00:41:10,720 imposed on the Western symphony orchestra player by player, 515 00:41:10,720 --> 00:41:15,160 this was utterly, breathtakingly novel a concept. 516 00:41:15,160 --> 00:41:18,960 It was as if Stravinsky wanted the past and the present to coexist 517 00:41:18,960 --> 00:41:20,600 in one dimension, 518 00:41:20,600 --> 00:41:22,640 the prehistoric ritual of his dancers 519 00:41:22,640 --> 00:41:25,520 and the modern cacophony of the industrial world 520 00:41:25,520 --> 00:41:28,160 and the only way he could conceive it 521 00:41:28,160 --> 00:41:31,600 was to make parallel, competing rhythmic patterns fight 522 00:41:31,600 --> 00:41:33,600 for the same space. 523 00:41:33,600 --> 00:41:36,000 It's complicated but it's magnificent. 524 00:41:56,560 --> 00:41:57,920 But here's the thing. 525 00:41:57,920 --> 00:42:01,040 The Rite of Spring, which premiered a hundred years ago, 526 00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:03,680 was the high-water mark of musical modernism. 527 00:42:03,680 --> 00:42:07,680 It therefore presented progressive music with a dilemma. 528 00:42:07,680 --> 00:42:09,560 Where the hell to go from here? 529 00:42:09,560 --> 00:42:13,720 Neither Stravinsky nor Debussy in 1913 would've guessed 530 00:42:13,720 --> 00:42:16,400 where the answer to that question would come from, 531 00:42:16,400 --> 00:42:20,120 never mind just how massive the forces of change were going to be. 532 00:42:20,120 --> 00:42:24,200 After all, revolutions don't always start with a bang. 533 00:42:25,280 --> 00:42:28,480 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, 534 00:42:28,480 --> 00:42:32,040 'and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.' 535 00:42:32,040 --> 00:42:36,680 Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of recorded sound in 1877 536 00:42:36,680 --> 00:42:41,440 but in fact the first ever recording was made nearly 20 years earlier, 537 00:42:41,440 --> 00:42:43,080 in France. 538 00:42:44,960 --> 00:42:48,240 This is the earliest-known surviving recording of a person singing, 539 00:42:48,240 --> 00:42:52,160 making the man who made it, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, 540 00:42:52,160 --> 00:42:55,800 the true inventor of recording, not Edison. 541 00:42:55,800 --> 00:42:57,840 BUZZING NOISE 542 00:42:57,840 --> 00:43:01,320 The recording was made on a machine now virtually forgotten, 543 00:43:01,320 --> 00:43:03,040 the phonautograph. 544 00:43:03,040 --> 00:43:04,880 Here's the amazing bit. 545 00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:09,640 The inventor's aim was to be able to study sound in graph-like form. 546 00:43:09,640 --> 00:43:12,560 What he couldn't do was play the sound back. 547 00:43:12,560 --> 00:43:15,480 Then, in 2008, 548 00:43:15,480 --> 00:43:19,400 American engineers using sophisticated digital technology 549 00:43:19,400 --> 00:43:23,480 were able to convert the markings on the paper back into sound. 550 00:43:23,480 --> 00:43:28,600 The French folk singer of 1860 miraculously sang again. 551 00:43:28,600 --> 00:43:31,400 BUZZING NOISE Sort of. 552 00:43:34,240 --> 00:43:36,160 The phonautograph had begun a process 553 00:43:36,160 --> 00:43:39,320 that was totally to transform music. 554 00:43:39,320 --> 00:43:41,640 Very soon after Edison invented a machine 555 00:43:41,640 --> 00:43:43,680 that could play recordings back, 556 00:43:43,680 --> 00:43:47,240 a new breed of musician researcher popped up 557 00:43:47,240 --> 00:43:48,800 in virtually every country, 558 00:43:48,800 --> 00:43:51,160 travelling around remote, rural areas, 559 00:43:51,160 --> 00:43:53,640 recording and preserving the folk songs 560 00:43:53,640 --> 00:43:58,000 they persuaded doubtless bemused locals to perform for them. 561 00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:02,600 These field recordists captured the oral and musical culture 562 00:44:02,600 --> 00:44:05,200 of communities now long disappeared. 563 00:44:05,200 --> 00:44:07,920 SINGING AND DRUMMING 564 00:44:07,920 --> 00:44:10,720 But the real future for recorded sound was in 565 00:44:10,720 --> 00:44:13,680 the reproduction of music that was already popular. 566 00:44:13,680 --> 00:44:18,800 TENOR: # Vesti la giubba 567 00:44:18,800 --> 00:44:21,760 # E la faccia infarina... # 568 00:44:21,760 --> 00:44:26,960 The first million-selling record was Caruso's Vesti La Giubba in 1907, 569 00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:30,160 just before radio broadcasts began. 570 00:44:30,160 --> 00:44:32,960 As well as live music, radio also played records, 571 00:44:32,960 --> 00:44:34,760 thus boosting their sales. 572 00:44:34,760 --> 00:44:41,160 # ..t'invola Colombina... # 573 00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:43,560 The advent of recording made 574 00:44:43,560 --> 00:44:47,360 the huge wealth of music already written by 1900 575 00:44:47,360 --> 00:44:50,240 increasingly available to millions of people across the world, 576 00:44:50,240 --> 00:44:53,120 vastly expanding their musical horizons 577 00:44:53,120 --> 00:44:56,520 and turning something hitherto expensive and elitist 578 00:44:56,520 --> 00:44:58,480 into an ordinary commodity. 579 00:44:58,480 --> 00:45:01,160 This was a very good thing. 580 00:45:01,160 --> 00:45:04,360 Recording also began to put in front of a mass audience 581 00:45:04,360 --> 00:45:08,280 forms of folk and ethnic music that were up to then unknown 582 00:45:08,280 --> 00:45:10,560 outside their local communities. 583 00:45:10,560 --> 00:45:14,560 The music that was boosted most of all by recording, as it turned out, 584 00:45:14,560 --> 00:45:17,000 was that produced by African Americans, 585 00:45:17,000 --> 00:45:19,320 beginning with spiritual songs. 586 00:45:19,320 --> 00:45:25,040 # When Israel was in Egypt's land 587 00:45:25,040 --> 00:45:28,720 # Let my people go 588 00:45:28,720 --> 00:45:33,840 # Oppressed so hard they could not stand 589 00:45:33,840 --> 00:45:37,400 # Let my people go 590 00:45:37,400 --> 00:45:40,080 # Go down, Moses # Go down, Moses 591 00:45:42,520 --> 00:45:46,720 # Way down in Egypt's land 592 00:45:46,720 --> 00:45:50,440 # Tell old pharaoh 593 00:45:54,600 --> 00:45:59,320 # You got to let my people go # Let them go 594 00:45:59,320 --> 00:46:02,480 # You got to let my people go 595 00:46:02,480 --> 00:46:03,640 # Let them go 596 00:46:03,640 --> 00:46:06,800 # You got to let my people go 597 00:46:06,800 --> 00:46:08,120 # Let them go 598 00:46:08,120 --> 00:46:11,240 # You got to let my people go 599 00:46:11,320 --> 00:46:15,920 # Let them go, let them go 600 00:46:15,920 --> 00:46:19,280 # Let them go. # 601 00:46:19,400 --> 00:46:20,920 Huh! 602 00:46:20,920 --> 00:46:23,200 African American slaves and their descendants 603 00:46:23,200 --> 00:46:26,480 living in conditions of oppressive poverty developed 604 00:46:26,480 --> 00:46:28,720 a form of religious song, the spiritual, 605 00:46:28,720 --> 00:46:30,800 which seems to have been an amalgam 606 00:46:30,800 --> 00:46:34,200 of half-remembered African call and response chants 607 00:46:34,200 --> 00:46:36,080 and missionary hymns. 608 00:46:36,800 --> 00:46:43,320 # Swing low, sweet chariot 609 00:46:43,320 --> 00:46:49,000 # Comin' for to carry me home 610 00:46:49,000 --> 00:46:52,240 # Swing low, sweet chariot... # 611 00:46:52,240 --> 00:46:54,840 These spirituals of the Deep South were rich 612 00:46:54,840 --> 00:46:58,480 with Old Testament references to the slavery of the Israelites, 613 00:46:58,480 --> 00:47:02,680 visions of redemption and heavenly justice. 614 00:47:02,680 --> 00:47:07,040 # I looked over Jordan What did I see? 615 00:47:07,040 --> 00:47:10,560 # Comin' for to carry me home? 616 00:47:10,560 --> 00:47:15,240 # A band of angels Coming after me... # 617 00:47:15,240 --> 00:47:19,480 The existence of the spiritual was for a long time mostly unknown 618 00:47:19,480 --> 00:47:21,920 to the white population of the United States, 619 00:47:21,920 --> 00:47:26,160 let alone the rest of the world but a long fuse had been lit. 620 00:47:26,160 --> 00:47:32,520 # People, they are faithful And like to say a good prayer, too 621 00:47:32,520 --> 00:47:38,360 # If you ask them about their religion 622 00:47:38,360 --> 00:47:40,640 # They'll say they're just as good as you... # 623 00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:45,200 The Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were themselves the children of slaves, 624 00:47:45,200 --> 00:47:47,360 began to make fundraising tours 625 00:47:47,360 --> 00:47:50,640 singing what were called at the time negro spirituals. 626 00:47:50,640 --> 00:47:53,640 But strangely, one of the first musicians 627 00:47:53,640 --> 00:47:56,960 to put this music in front of a middle-class American audience 628 00:47:56,960 --> 00:47:58,120 was an Englishman. 629 00:48:08,680 --> 00:48:12,160 The Edwardian Samuel Coleridge-Taylor caused a sensation 630 00:48:12,160 --> 00:48:17,080 on three trips to the USA, conducting his own compositions. 631 00:48:17,080 --> 00:48:20,360 In one of them we can hear early and tantalising evidence 632 00:48:20,360 --> 00:48:23,040 of the melodic style of what came to be known as the blues, 633 00:48:23,040 --> 00:48:25,120 which, albeit in different disguises, 634 00:48:25,120 --> 00:48:28,360 went on to dominate the music of the 20th century and beyond. 635 00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:29,720 The clues we're looking for 636 00:48:29,720 --> 00:48:33,880 are so-called flattened degrees of the musical ladder, or scale, 637 00:48:33,880 --> 00:48:35,720 at the third and seventh position, 638 00:48:35,720 --> 00:48:38,760 especially when the phrase is heading in a downward direction. 639 00:48:38,760 --> 00:48:42,480 And here they both are, one after another, in this melody. 640 00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:45,960 Third. 641 00:48:46,480 --> 00:48:48,440 Seventh. 642 00:48:48,440 --> 00:48:50,800 The blues, as it developed slowly and piecemeal 643 00:48:50,800 --> 00:48:53,160 amongst former slave communities in the USA 644 00:48:53,160 --> 00:48:55,240 in the final decades of the 19th century, 645 00:48:55,240 --> 00:48:58,560 clung resolutely to the flattened thirds and sevenths, 646 00:48:58,560 --> 00:49:00,480 and does so to the present day. 647 00:49:00,480 --> 00:49:03,000 Indeed, they became known as blue notes. 648 00:49:17,320 --> 00:49:19,120 MAN: Play that thing, boy. 649 00:49:26,320 --> 00:49:29,000 Blue notes, revivalist spirituals, 650 00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:32,400 the call and response or holler songs of the Deep South, 651 00:49:32,400 --> 00:49:34,440 all derived from their African origins, 652 00:49:34,440 --> 00:49:36,920 went into the mixing pot of the early blues. 653 00:49:36,920 --> 00:49:40,000 But also mixed in were chords borrowed 654 00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:42,560 from hymns and parlour and vaudeville songs, 655 00:49:42,560 --> 00:49:47,080 and the folk songs of other members of the American underclass. 656 00:49:47,080 --> 00:49:50,080 MAN SINGS BLUES 657 00:49:58,440 --> 00:50:00,120 There's been considerable research 658 00:50:00,120 --> 00:50:03,360 into song forms of the poorest Americans of all ethnic groups 659 00:50:03,360 --> 00:50:05,200 in the 19th century. 660 00:50:05,200 --> 00:50:08,080 It reveals the influence of Anglo-Celtic folk music 661 00:50:08,080 --> 00:50:10,160 on the growth of the blues. 662 00:50:10,160 --> 00:50:14,000 This folk music was learnt from the African Americans' co-workers 663 00:50:14,000 --> 00:50:15,960 in the cotton fields and on the railroads, 664 00:50:15,960 --> 00:50:18,680 many of whom were from the British Isles. 665 00:50:21,160 --> 00:50:22,960 Amongst these song types are hundreds 666 00:50:22,960 --> 00:50:26,440 which lament the burden and misery of the labourer's life. 667 00:50:29,520 --> 00:50:31,920 Typical is the iconic American work song, 668 00:50:31,920 --> 00:50:34,800 The Ballad of John Henry, The Steel Driving Man, 669 00:50:34,800 --> 00:50:37,520 which eventually became a blues standard. 670 00:50:37,520 --> 00:50:39,200 It celebrates the futile battle 671 00:50:39,200 --> 00:50:41,640 between an African American railroad worker 672 00:50:41,640 --> 00:50:43,880 and a new machine designed to replace him. 673 00:50:43,880 --> 00:50:46,680 Music historians have traced the shape 674 00:50:46,680 --> 00:50:50,080 back to the much earlier British ballad, The Birmingham Boys. 675 00:50:50,080 --> 00:50:52,840 Listen out for the overall storytelling shape 676 00:50:52,840 --> 00:50:54,880 and the repeated line at the end. 677 00:50:55,360 --> 00:50:58,840 # In Birmingham town there lived a man 678 00:50:58,840 --> 00:51:02,280 # And he had such a lovely wife 679 00:51:02,280 --> 00:51:05,760 # And so dearly she loved company 680 00:51:05,760 --> 00:51:10,040 # As dearly as she loved life, boys, life, 681 00:51:10,040 --> 00:51:13,760 # As dearly as she loved life. # 682 00:51:13,760 --> 00:51:17,320 Now here's one of the many later versions of John Henry. 683 00:51:17,800 --> 00:51:24,920 # John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his mother's knee 684 00:51:24,920 --> 00:51:28,680 # He picked up a hammer in his little right hand 685 00:51:28,680 --> 00:51:32,560 # Says, "A hammer's gonna be the death of me, O Lord 686 00:51:32,560 --> 00:51:35,640 # "A hammer's gonna be the death of me." # 687 00:51:36,960 --> 00:51:40,120 One of the changes that's happened to the tune crossing the Atlantic 688 00:51:40,120 --> 00:51:42,640 is that it's become entirely pentatonic. 689 00:51:42,640 --> 00:51:46,240 Remember those five basic notes prevalent in Eastern music 690 00:51:46,240 --> 00:51:47,920 that Debussy imitated? 691 00:51:52,440 --> 00:51:54,760 And who were the other railroad workers 692 00:51:54,760 --> 00:51:59,360 toiling alongside the British, Irish and African American labourers? 693 00:52:05,640 --> 00:52:09,000 Now, even to suggest any European influence 694 00:52:09,000 --> 00:52:10,920 on the blues is controversial, 695 00:52:10,920 --> 00:52:12,680 and it's entirely understandable 696 00:52:12,680 --> 00:52:16,320 that there should be sensitivity about any non-African elements 697 00:52:16,320 --> 00:52:18,120 in the origin of the blues. 698 00:52:18,120 --> 00:52:21,520 Since the music of the slaves, from which it sprang, was 699 00:52:21,520 --> 00:52:22,840 so often a lament, 700 00:52:22,840 --> 00:52:26,120 or a coded protest against the harsh treatment they received, 701 00:52:26,120 --> 00:52:29,520 some African Americans quite naturally resent the idea 702 00:52:29,520 --> 00:52:32,160 that the blues could in any way have been influenced 703 00:52:32,160 --> 00:52:35,280 by the very people who enslaved their ancestors. 704 00:52:35,280 --> 00:52:40,640 But the fact is that music does not observe racial or national boundaries. 705 00:52:40,640 --> 00:52:44,360 It's a free-flowing river, open and available to all cultures, 706 00:52:44,360 --> 00:52:47,080 owned by none. 707 00:52:47,080 --> 00:52:50,080 Whatever elements went into its kit of parts, 708 00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:52,200 the early blues musicians made something 709 00:52:52,200 --> 00:52:54,360 unique and lasting of their own. 710 00:52:55,480 --> 00:52:58,960 This same intermingling of styles and traditions can be seen 711 00:52:58,960 --> 00:53:02,280 in the arrival at around the same time of ragtime, 712 00:53:02,280 --> 00:53:04,040 which became a kind of craze. 713 00:53:12,560 --> 00:53:15,160 Rag or ragtime music originated 714 00:53:15,160 --> 00:53:17,800 in St Louis and Chicago bars and brothels, 715 00:53:17,800 --> 00:53:21,680 from house pianists copying the popular marching band style 716 00:53:21,680 --> 00:53:23,520 of the 1880s and '90s, 717 00:53:23,520 --> 00:53:27,840 a fashion that reached its peak with the band leader John Philip Sousa. 718 00:53:27,840 --> 00:53:32,400 In order to emulate the whole band - bass, accompanying chords and tune - 719 00:53:32,400 --> 00:53:35,120 the pianist had to leap about the keys frantically, 720 00:53:35,120 --> 00:53:37,880 resulting in a quite virtuoso left-hand motion 721 00:53:37,880 --> 00:53:40,320 from bass to chord and back. 722 00:53:47,680 --> 00:53:51,920 On top of this accompanying oom-pa the rag pianists wove a catchy tune 723 00:53:51,920 --> 00:53:55,520 that pulled the rhythm around - a technique called syncopation. 724 00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:13,960 Syncopation is LIKE talk-ING with THE emph-A-sis ON the wrong words 725 00:54:13,960 --> 00:54:16,640 TO cre-ATE a jer-KY sound. 726 00:54:16,640 --> 00:54:21,320 Listen to this bit of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag without syncopation. 727 00:54:22,120 --> 00:54:24,360 HE PLAYS A SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF RAG 728 00:54:36,520 --> 00:54:39,080 And now with Joplin's syncopations, 729 00:54:39,080 --> 00:54:42,360 which feel like they're tripping ahead of where you'd expect them to fall. 730 00:54:42,360 --> 00:54:44,760 MUSIC: "Maple Leaf Rag" by Joplin 731 00:54:51,240 --> 00:54:55,360 Ragtime picked up syncopation, a playful jumping ahead of a tune, 732 00:54:55,360 --> 00:54:59,120 from the banjo or piano accompaniments for cake walks, 733 00:54:59,120 --> 00:55:02,840 a jokey form of dancing that plantation workers had invented 734 00:55:02,840 --> 00:55:04,520 for their own amusement, 735 00:55:04,520 --> 00:55:09,680 in lampooning imitation of white folks' la-di-da ballroom dancing. 736 00:55:09,680 --> 00:55:12,040 The white folks in question used to enjoy 737 00:55:12,040 --> 00:55:15,040 watching their staff's cake walk parties, 738 00:55:15,040 --> 00:55:20,440 not realising that what they thought was a comic and ludicrous African American dance step 739 00:55:20,440 --> 00:55:23,160 was actually a caricature of them. 740 00:55:26,280 --> 00:55:30,240 Along with the cake walk another offspring of ragtime was 741 00:55:30,240 --> 00:55:33,280 a hyper-syncopated form of piano and band-playing 742 00:55:33,280 --> 00:55:37,480 that flickered into life in the Storyville district of New Orleans. 743 00:55:37,480 --> 00:55:41,000 Charismatic performers like Jelly Roll Morton took it on tour 744 00:55:41,000 --> 00:55:44,200 around the southern states in travelling vaudeville shows. 745 00:55:44,200 --> 00:55:47,400 Though Jelly Roll called a lot of his numbers blues, 746 00:55:47,400 --> 00:55:52,160 we now know this is the beginning of a distinct genre of its own, jazz. 747 00:56:01,480 --> 00:56:04,960 From now on this music took on a life of its own. 748 00:56:08,840 --> 00:56:11,960 As up-to-the-minute blues and its many offspring began 749 00:56:11,960 --> 00:56:14,440 to revolutionise popular music, 750 00:56:14,440 --> 00:56:17,360 classically-trained composers found themselves outflanked 751 00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:19,880 and increasingly unloved. 752 00:56:20,800 --> 00:56:24,560 Given the choice the general public voted with their feet in their millions 753 00:56:24,560 --> 00:56:27,360 and took the populist path. 754 00:56:27,360 --> 00:56:29,480 The coming century would see popular music, 755 00:56:29,480 --> 00:56:32,560 especially American popular music, sweeping the planet. 756 00:56:32,560 --> 00:56:36,200 And yet, faced with the twin rebellions 757 00:56:36,200 --> 00:56:39,200 of dissonant modernism and the mass market, 758 00:56:39,200 --> 00:56:42,200 the classical tradition found an ace up its sleeve 759 00:56:42,200 --> 00:56:45,040 and played it with impeccable timing. 760 00:56:45,040 --> 00:56:49,480 In a world of turmoil and change its response was nostalgia. 761 00:56:49,480 --> 00:56:52,840 Edward Elgar's most famous piece, Enigma Variations, 762 00:56:52,840 --> 00:56:54,800 embodies this response. 763 00:56:54,800 --> 00:56:56,440 As the world began to slide 764 00:56:56,440 --> 00:56:59,320 towards a final showdown of the European empires, 765 00:56:59,320 --> 00:57:03,560 this music reminded people what they were about to lose. 766 00:57:22,160 --> 00:57:24,440 From Elgar and Vaughan Williams in Britain, 767 00:57:24,440 --> 00:57:27,280 Grieg in Norway, Sibelius in Finland, 768 00:57:27,280 --> 00:57:28,920 Respighi in Italy, 769 00:57:28,920 --> 00:57:32,160 Rachmaninov in Russia and Richard Strauss in Germany, 770 00:57:32,160 --> 00:57:36,200 a musical style of tender, old-fashioned melancholy 771 00:57:36,200 --> 00:57:41,080 seemed to want to hold back the relentless passage of time and progress. 772 00:57:43,640 --> 00:57:46,440 That this music is so popular in our own time 773 00:57:46,440 --> 00:57:48,680 testifies to its enduring appeal, 774 00:57:48,680 --> 00:57:53,400 and perhaps our own continuing need for its soothing balm. 775 00:57:53,400 --> 00:57:56,200 It may also indicate that in a crowded market 776 00:57:56,200 --> 00:58:00,360 classical music's unique selling point is, like it or not, 777 00:58:00,360 --> 00:58:04,000 its ability to wrap up the past like a beautiful gift. 778 00:58:15,360 --> 00:58:17,760 MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by Gershwin 779 00:58:21,720 --> 00:58:25,760 In the next programme we trace how all the developments of this 30-year period 780 00:58:25,760 --> 00:58:29,200 found affirmation in a golden age of popular music. 781 00:58:30,840 --> 00:58:32,680 Classical music went undercover, 782 00:58:32,680 --> 00:58:36,840 morphing gloriously into a variety of new musical forms, 783 00:58:36,840 --> 00:58:40,560 made possible by the onwards march of technology. 784 00:58:43,680 --> 00:58:45,880 Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd