This is a program about the dawn of opera, but also about secular music becoming through-composed high art (something that had been the exclusive purview of church music).  We’ll look at precursors to L’Orfeo in Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Jacopo Perri’s Euridice, written a generation before Monteverdi.

With this work, Mozart attains his maturity and writes a masterpiece that dominates opera forever afterwards, echoing in Wagner and beyond.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 changed our idea of what music could express.  Instead of classical form and rarified beauty, this symphony lays out the full range of human feelings, from joy and love to hopelessness and pathos.

The Exposition Universelle was where Debussy first heard gamelan music, and “world” music became a part of Western European classical language.  Composers before and after Debussy frequently turned to vernacular sources for inspiration, whether Brahms, Mahler, and Bartók incorporating folk melodies, Copland and Gershwin using the rhythms of Latin dance, or Steve Reich quoting West African drumming.

Stravinsky’s completely original instrumentation and rhythms, and his use of dissonance, have made this work one of the most important of the 20^th century, not to mention the riot and ensuing scandal that caused this Paris premiere to be one of the most shocking in all of performance history.

This work is performed for the first time to mild applause at a concert funded by the composer himself.  Mild applause, but Ives’s music was revolutionary.  Before him, American concert music was almost entirely based on European models.  After him, through Copland, Cage, and beyond, American “classical” music found its own voice.

This piece, which debuted at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and the minimalist outpouring that it sparked, were a reaction to the rigid strictures of serialism and the stranglehold of the academic composers of the time.