Wrecking Ball The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music

What happened to classical music?

For centuries,

composers created music that sang with beautiful melody and harmony.

Then suddenly, just over 100 years ago,

a battle began for the very soul of music.

The early 20th century was an explosion of possibilities.

The spirit of the day was to experiment,

to seek out new sounds,

moving really almost for the first time

in musical history into the sphere of pure noise.

In concert halls across the world, radical new composers decided

they'd had enough of the staple diet of Beethoven and Mozart

There was a certain point in music where it was very mental.

Screechy music. Pots and pans music.

My cat could write that music.

Listening to it makes my head want to explode.

As the century progressed,

many composers experimented with the boundaries of sound.

Their music became more and more confrontational, extreme,

and challenging.

The rule book was torn up.

I mean, let's make a noise that nobody likes.

If the audience applauded your work, you'd failed as a composer.

I long for the days of 19th century opera where somebody would

just stand up and start yelling. Say, "Stop this madness!"

But the 20th century was also one of the most extreme periods in history,

civil unrest, dictators, brutal wars, and the atom bomb.

The rebels of modern music said they were simply reflecting

the turmoil and madness of the world they lived in.

It was almost as if the history of music had been

in black and white before.

Music, like culture, like civilisation in the West,

cannot stand still.

You have to destroy to grow.

This is the story of a revolution in sound,

of how avant-garde composers broke from the melodic mainstream,

and catapulted classical music from beauty into beyond.

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

One legendary evening in May, 1906, the great and the good of the

classical music world descended on the elegant Austrian city of Graz.

They had travelled from far and wide to see an opera that had been

banned by the Court Opera in Vienna.

Its composer was an unlikely rebel, Richard Strauss,

the 42 year-old, German whose lush, romantic music had made him a star.

But this was no ordinary opera.

It was Salome, a musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde's scandalous play

about Princess Judea's necrophiliac lust for John the Baptist,

and it ushered in a century of musical scandals.

Strauss was conducting.

Mahler was there,

Schoenberg came with no fewer than six of his pupils.

Puccini took the trip up from Italy to see

what his operatic rival had come up with.

And then there is this rumour that the teenage Adolf Hitler was present.

Hitler himself, in fact, told Strauss's son that he was there.

So it was very scandalous.

I mean, you know, Wilde had undergone his

trial and imprisonment

and his name was simply not spoken in many circles.

It was somewhat daring,

I think, of Strauss to make an opera on an Oscar Wilde text.

Even today, Salome is daring and shocking,

a depraved trip into the underbelly of human emotion.

But in 1906 it was beyond the pale.

Its original leading lady, Marie Wittich,

refused to perform its erotic dance, or kiss John the Baptist's

severed head, because she was too respectable.

Strauss was giving us sado-masochism and the unconscious,

showing that life is full of volcanic feelings and temperaments

and so forth, and so you have really a blood fest in Salome.

You have the head of St John the Baptist,

and then you have Salome herself crushed to death at the end.

People didn't like it.

They found it painful, inharmonious indecent.

But Strauss saved the biggest shock till the end.

A short burst of unholy sound that has been called

"the most sickening chord in all opera."

With just eight notes of dissonance, Strauss captured the volcanic

temperament of the new century and fired up a musical revolution.

It's still a thrilling and successful piece,

and still a little unsettling.

It is amazing to hear these sounds coming out of nowhere,

out of Strauss's imagination that simply no-one had thought of before.

But the wind of change in classical music had been stirring

since the end of the 19th century, in Paris, a city already

enthralled to the sights, sounds and possibilities of a new modern world.

Paris then, in the 1880s/1890s, in terms of literature

and in terms of bubble of painting, but also of music, all the arts,

was just bursting at its seams with imagination and genius.

There was a universal exposition in Paris in 1889 to mark

the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

And that's when the Eiffel Tower went up.

And the very form and size of the Eiffel Tower

is a kind of modernist symbol.

And had this amazing 260 acre site in the centre of Paris

with 36 turnstiles admitting a thousand people a minute.

That's how vast it was.

Among the millions inspired by the exotic sights

and sounds of the Paris Expo was the 27-year-old Claude Debussy,

a composer with a mission to drive music into the 20th century.

Debussy is a unique figure.

He probably is the start of what we call modern music.

He was very ambitious.

He said something along the lines of,

"I must invent a music that's worthy of the motor car

"and the era of the aeroplane and the Eiffel Tower."

Debussy went to the Paris exhibition in 1889

and he heard all sorts of music from all over the world.

And he was just absolutely gobsmacked.

None of this had been heard by Westerners before.

And one of the key things he heard was the Javanese Gamelan.

The Gamelan's an ensemble, an orchestra of gongs of all

different sizes, metallophones and xylophones.

And the sound itself is extremely sonorous.

It's a completely different world.

This had a cataclysmic effect on the sound that Debussy's music made.

In 1894, Debussy fused the sounds of the Eastern

and Western worlds into a modern masterpiece, a unique sonic tapestry

that threw open the doors to a century of musical innovation.

Prelude To The Afternoon Of The Faun is considered, perhaps, to be

the great radical piece of the late 19th century.

It did not cause too great a scandal in its time,

even if there was a camp who thought that Debussy had gone over the edge.

But you are moving

into a new world with the Afternoon Of A Faun.

You could say that that opening flute melody

is the start of modern music.

You have this sole, lone instrument.

A melody that's suspended in space,

and there's an immediate sense of disorientation.

And then the way in which the music proceeds

in this free-flowing organic sort of stream of consciousness almost,

is the opposite of the very directional classical music,

Brahms, Beethoven.

And when it was heard by that audience

in the middle of the 1890s in Paris,

it would not have been unstrange, it would have been very strange indeed.

MUSIC: Prelude A L'Apres-Midi D'un Faune

Debussy argued that composers had a duty to

"evoke the progress of modern days."

If classical music was to survive,

it had to adapt to the dynamism and uproar of the modern world.

The early years of the 20th century were probably the greatest

period of innovation in history.

There's a whole raft of new discoveries.

You have everything from the invention of flight, the

invention of the cinema, relativity, Freud's theories of the unconscious.

You've got all of these things coming within a generation.

There's this feeling about that this really is a new age.

And Ezra Pound said it clearly,

"Make it new, make it new, make it new."

All over Europe, artists dismantled the old forms of their art,

inventing radical new styles that perplexed and shocked.

This was the birth of the century's most dramatic cultural revolution,

the movement that became known as modernism.

Modernism turned the world round and saw it from different angles.

But that's what... That is what each epoch has tended to do to music,

each century.

Music changes, it develops, it alters.

I mean, there are aspects of modernism which were extreme

very extreme, but tremendously exciting as well.

And there was a very great

and violent rejection of elements of the past.

Nowhere were the shockwaves more violently felt than in the city

that was virtually a byword for classical music, Vienna.

For 100 years, the capital of the Austral Hungarian Empire had

worshipped the giants of romanticism - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven.

Sophisticated bourgeois audiences flocked to concerts of this

exquisite, melodic music.

What chance then, for a rebellious modern composer?

I try to put myself in a position of a composer during that time.

You know, they may have felt much more bludgeoned

by tradition than we understand.

They may have wanted to go in just the opposite direction,

which is what we as composers very often do.

It's our only way to be original,

is to do the opposite of what is a big deal.

Step forward, Arnold Schoenberg,

a formidable Austrian painter, inventor,

and, most significantly, composer whose bloody-minded musical vision

hit the refined world of Viennese concert halls like a wrecking ball.

Music would never be the same again.

I am asking myself, "Would the music of the 20th century

"be changed if Schoenberg had not been born?"

And I say, "Yes, the life of music would have been totally

"changed if Schoenberg would not have existed."

And poor Schoenberg.

You know, he carries the great weight of

causing this terrible rot that happened in classical music.

And I think, Schoenberg especially, is such a tragic figure,

at least to me, because he started with such promise.

You look at his early pieces, they're so beautiful,

high romantic music, and then he found this other way.

Schoenberg was a loose cannon in the Viennese musical world.

Largely self-taught, but brimming with confidence.

He wanted nothing more than to overthrow the very rules

of music itself, to be tune-less, rather than tuneful.

The beautiful melodies of traditional Viennese music

were rooted in consonance,

complementary notes and chords that were harmonious to the ear.

But Schoenberg embraced the opposite, dissonance.

He used harsh, clashing patterns of notes,

that were tonally at war with each other.

His aim was to set music free.

He spoke grandly of his "emancipation of the dissonance."

When Schoenberg first emancipated the dissonance,

first, you know, moved away from the big tonal centres,

the home keys of classical and romantic music.

Every sense of anything that was resembling home

seems to have been taken away.

MUSIC: Three Piano Pieces

Schoenberg was working to explode the parameters of harmony,

and his harmony is a complex beast.

It's a difficult thing to understand and engage with.

I find most of his music amazingly aurally ugly.

I've never ever been able to find a way into really loving it.

I find it just sensually very, very punishing to my ear.

The sound-world is just sort of angsty and very, sort of, brittle.

You would think by now that Schoenberg would be

standard repertoire and nobody would have a problem with it.

But I think it's really interesting that quite a few of those pieces

around that time are still difficult for 21st century audiences.

Difficult today, scandalous then.

With his Second String Quartet, Schoenberg unveiled atonal music,

a seemingly shapeless concoction of jarring sounds

which tormented the audience into loud booing,

and provoked a critic to scream, "Stop it!"

For the composer, it was visionary, for the listeners, it was cacophony.

There's a famous moment where the soprano sings a Stefan George poem,

"Ich fuhle luft von anderem Planeten."

"I feel the air of under of another planet."

And it's at that moment that Schoenberg's music, it is said,

develops or goes into a kind of atonal sphere.

But have a think about what the words are there.

You know, it's a stroke of composition and imagination,

absolutely not a kind of attempt to sort of shock people.

It's actually about, you know, what's the best way of

expressing what's happening in that poem?

Air of other planets, non-gravitational music.

Well, the most obvious thing to do, frankly, would be to write

music that is unmoored, that isn't anchored to tonal centre

and doesn't give you that same sense of homecoming and going away

from things that basically a lot of music before had been based on.

When Schoenberg is finding these things, he's finding them

because he has to, cos he has to express something

at the absolute extremes of human emotion.

It's music that's rendered as absolutely as pure feeling.

He was a bit of an emotional wreck at the time.

There was turmoil in his personal life.

He discovered, in the summer of 1908, that his wife was having an affair

with an unstable expressionist painter named Richard Gerstl,

who ended up committing suicide by hanging himself in his studio.

And Schoenberg, he was Jewish in Vienna, and I think

this was a factor as well, in terms of his feeling of being watched

from all sides and measured up.

And as he went on, his situation as a Jew in that world

became more and more important to him.

Schoenberg was fuelled by rage and disgust.

He saw Viennese society as sick, anti-Semitic, desperately

clinging to the coat-tails of its decadent, imperialist past.

In an age of psychoanalysis and expressionist art,

his music was forward-thinking.

It was the audience that was backward.

He stood tall in the face of rejection.

"If I must commit artistic suicide," he announced, "I must live by it."

Schoenberg was aggressive. He was such a prickly individual.

There was a very powerful and, in some cases,

dark emotion at work in this music, which was the music Vienna

at that time where so many artists and writers were playing

with these, these very dark and extreme emotions.

If you think of these harsh and angular images of Kokoschka

or Egon Schiele, it was the style of that time in Vienna

to really confront the audience, to show them things

that they didn't want to see,

to expose the dark underside of human life, to go to the dark side.

Oh, there was definitely something in the air.

I mean, whether we... With the benefit of hindsight,

we can see the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire

and the degeneration of that environment.

The thing that Schoenberg did, of course,

was to take those moments of crisis to another level.

And it's through that kind of crisis that he actually steps into

this abyss, as it's called, you know, the abyss of no tonal centre,

which is what the audiences at the time found disturbing and difficult.

But Schoenberg's music of crisis didn't just upset their ears.

By seemingly rejecting two centuries' worth

of music tradition, audiences felt his work was

a slap in the face to their culture of beauty and refinement.

There are musical reasons for these cataclysmic audience reactions,

but there are also social reasons.

The growing bourgeoisie in the cities across Europe,

they expected music to behave like they wanted.

They cared desperately about this music.

And to hear these weird sounds where the rules of harmony break down,

seemed like an attack, not only on their artistic world,

but on themselves, on their universe, in fact, on their society.

My father was not discrediting, and he said that over and over again,

he was not discrediting the past, he was saying,

"I am living in a certain period

"and I'm going to evolve from what was proper in another period."

In a lot of other disciplines people do want to be modern,

and they do want to have change,

and it seems like in music people would rather stay with the old.

It was only a few years earlier that Debussy and Strauss had paved

the way for Schoenberg's radical reinvention of music's language.

If the public couldn't get to grips with it,

surely at least his fellow composers could?

I think Schoenberg thought that of all people, Richard Strauss,

the composer of Salome and Elektra,

would understand what he was trying to do.

But Strauss did not at all comprehend what Schoenberg was trying to do

and thought that he had gone off at the deep end,

as so many other people were saying at the time.

And there was really then a serious falling out between them when

Schoenberg discovered that Strauss had written a letter saying that

Schoenberg would be better off shovelling snow

than writing on music paper.

And so that was the end of that really.

Down, but not out.

Atonality continued its forward march,

for Schoenberg had partners in crime.

Two of his former pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern,

had become converts to the "emancipation of the dissonance."

When quizzed about their music's absence of tonality,

Webern snapped, "We broke its neck."

Oh, Webern is a strange animal.

He was a strange, lonely, quiet, melancholy man,

very, very sensitive. Nervous as well.

And he evolved through the encouragement and above all,

through the technical expertise that Schoenberg gave him.

One of the most amazingly individual

and poetic styles of music that we've ever had in Western music.

Webern's breakthrough works were the polar opposite

of grand 19th century symphonies.

They were brief and fragmented.

He arranged musical notes as if they were

brushstrokes on an abstract painting.

Schoenberg himself described them as

"a novel contained within a single sigh."

Webern's music just moves.

It behaves in a completely different way,

so it's more like looking at a crystal under a microscope or

thinking about the way that plants form and develop.

And it's able, I think, to do strange things with space and time.

You feel that time moves in a special way

and you feel yourself hovering, almost weightless.

His music is so deprived of most of the sensual pleasures of music.

It doesn't have great energy, it doesn't have a massive sound.

He had a sort of fanatical belief in the structures that he was

creating as if they had some sort of deep, universal,

mystical truth about them.

I like Webern, but I also find it emotionally stingy.

Webern fit a certain kind of sensibility of the time,

which is that he was very tightly wired.

His organisation of all the elements of the music was something

that gave particular kinds of anal retentives,

just, you know, a frisson of pleasure.

No element in the music was spontaneously generated or intuitive.

It's the scientific imposition onto an artistic activity.

MUSIC: Five Orchestral Pieces

With their unfathomable music receiving few performances, atonal

composers were forced to conduct and to teach to make a living.

But they were undaunted.

They saw themselves making a quantum leap in music,

the equivalent of Einstein's discoveries in physics.

And just as few people could figure out e=mc squared,

so atonality was unashamedly complex.

"If it is art," Schoenberg said, "it is not for all.

"And if it is for all, it is not art."

Modernism was, and maybe still is, elitist.

Composers felt that only people that were educated or had some sort

of genius or talent could really appreciate what was being said.

The rise of scientific thinking

and critical thinking changed everything.

And classical music became so intellectual

that it couldn't be enjoyed, or that it wasn't allowed to be enjoyed,

by a common audience member.

His argument was - I'm working at this level

and it's up to you to have the education

and the experience to come and understand it.

I'm at the mountaintop, you come to me.

But not all modernist composers were quite so lofty and alienating.

While Viennese audiences scratched their heads at atonality,

Parisians were wowed by the inventions

of a gregarious Russian emigre who became arguably

the most popular modernist of all, Igor Stravinsky.

For me, it's just an open and shut case. If you say,

"Who's the greatest composer of the 20th century?" It's Igor Stravinsky.

You know, is there any further discussion?

I don't have any further discussion.

Although I love Schoenberg and Berg and Webern,

I mean, Stravinsky is my God.

I first saw Stravinsky conduct when I was 11 years old.

And I later played under his direction and he had such a sparkle

and such a curiosity, a delight,

it was so clear how much he enjoyed composing.

The interest of my life, my everyday life, is to make.

Stravinsky, a former law student who arrived in Paris in 1910,

was not without his own share of controversy.

In 1913, at Paris's Theatre de Champs Elysees,

his score for a controversial new ballet sparked the most

legendary riot in all 20th century music.

An orchestral force of nature,

The Rite Of Spring was a musical jolt that packed a mighty punch.

I was about 13 years old

when I heard The Rite Of Spring for the first time.

It was like opening the door to a world that I'd never

conceived of before. I mean, it was just so powerful.

Talk about visceral with a capital V.

It was just completely overwhelming.

Every time you hear The Rite Of Spring today

you're always taken by surprise.

You have this rhythm coming at you.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

One, TWO, three, FOUR, five, six, seven, eight.

One, TWO, three, four, FIVE, six, seven, eight.

ONE, two, three, four, five, SIX, seven, eight.

And it's like a boxer coming at you from all angles.

You never know where the next blow is going to land.

And that particular section, this is where the big riot

broke out in the Theatre de Champs Elysees in 1913.

Just full of very noisy public. A very austere public.

And so I went out and I heard all this noise. I said, "Go to hell!

"Excuse me, Monsieur, Madame and goodbye."

The Rite of Spring collapsed the rules of rhythm

making it jarring and unpredictable,

just like Schoenberg had done with melody.

Yet Schoenberg felt Stravinsky was merely

dipping his toe in the troubled water of modernism,

still holding on to old modes of harmony and tonality.

He nick-named his great rival the little modernsky.

Stravinsky had a very different attitude to melody

and harmony from Schoenberg.

He was much more about taking what we know and fragmenting it

in an almost cubist type way.

You get one very familiar harmony and another very familiar harmony

and they're juxtaposed together

so that they sound really crunchy and dissonant.

It's a bit like Picasso sort of cutting up an image of a violin,

it's something very familiar, but it's fractured and fragmented.

Stravinsky placed himself at the heart of

the 20th century revolution in European culture.

He'd gone to Paris to escape the imperial music of his native Russia,

dominated by the rousing nationalism of his teacher,

Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov.

Yet ironically, his radical compositions were unthinkable

without the old tunes of his homeland.

You have these dissonances in Stravinsky

in The Rite of Spring and even before,

in Firebird and Petrushka,

but they come from a completely different source.

They come, to a great extent, from folk music.

Stravinsky is delving into folk music,

Eastern Europe, Russia,

the sounds of the rural population,

trying to listen more closely than others had done before.

And to try to think about, well, how can I really capture what

it's like to see people sort of dancing in the street of a village?

What would that sound like and how can I make it different

from the conventional music of the present?

In Russia, reception of Stravinsky's music was difficult.

There was great suspicion about the kind of nationalism

that Stravinsky created.

For example, Rimsky-Korsakov's son, Andre Rimsky-Korsakov,

stopped speaking to Stravinsky after Petrushka

because he felt that this folk material was distorted.

It was presented in an ironic way.

It was like he was making fun of all these tunes.

And that was not the good way of his father Rimsky Korsakov,

who glorified these tunes.

And Stravinsky didn't do that, yeah, he sort of cut them up,

sliced them up, and you know,

served it as a completely different sort of modernist dish.

Early Stravinsky is an extremely nationalistic composer.

And this was another aspect of modernism,

this idea of people strongly departing from the

Austro-German Empire's musical language, and writing with the

help of indigenous music and folk tunes above all, a type of music

which reflects their society, their civilisation, on the world stage.

In the capitals of early 20th century Europe,

modernism had transformed classical music.

It would soon rear its head thousands of miles away,

in the New World, America.

At the turn of the century, America was a nation in transition,

only 40 years since the Civil War,

but on the brink of becoming the most powerful country in the world.

Its music, too, was poised between the comfort of the old

and the shock of the new.

The American culture was a very conservative atmosphere.

There were these wonderful orchestras and opera houses,

but the repertory was heavily European.

There wasn't a sense yet of a new absolutely American sound

or even an individual sound.

I mean, there were very few composers that you could identify

as really having a very strong personality.

Enter a maverick New Englander, lauded as the pilgrim father

of modern American music, Charles Ives.

# Hip hip hooray

# You'll hear them say... #

Charles Ives trained in music at Yale

right at the turn of the century, and then he dropped out.

He disappeared, from the music world, at least.

He went into life insurance

and became a very successful life insurance executive.

Made a great deal of money for himself and for his company.

He was a master of the hard sell,

he would show door-to-door salespeople how to relentlessly

get the product across so that people couldn't resist, in a way.

And in music he was the complete the opposite.

He continued composing, but in almost total privacy, isolation.

It was a long time before a lot of pieces by Ives were even played.

For me, Ives is America's most important modernist composer.

And it's no accident that so many of these composers,

Stravinsky, Ives, are so heavily based on vernacular music.

It's village music, it's folk music, but it's abstracted

and taken to remarkably visionary places.

It's almost a photo album, a sonic photo album,

because you're literally hearing the sounds of America

at the time that he was alive.

He's taken the sounds of marching bands,

of quartets that he'd heard, church hymnals,

the sounds of his life and integrated them into the music.

Sometimes layered over the top of each other.

It's evocative of America, first because it is America.

Ives took the humble, homespun tunes of his childhood,

chopped them up like Stravinsky, then collapsed them

into a discordant jigsaw of sound as jarring and radical as Schoenberg.

But his music didn't challenge or disturb his audience,

because he didn't have one.

He was a lone modernist voice in an old world country.

America was a very raw young country, and Charles Ives

simply arrived at a too early time in our country's development.

And I think he also felt strangely bifurcated.

You know, he felt he had to be a businessman

and a good American, a good Protestant ethic kind of guy.

And then he had this other side, which was his creative side,

and you know, in New York City and Connecticut in 1890,

you were a dandy if you liked classical music.

It wasn't manly, you know, it wasn't something the guys did.

So I think that caused a great kind of internal dissonance for Ives.

Dissonance and consonance,

in music Ives favoured neither one nor the other.

He loved the Sturm und Drang of atonality,

but he also loved traditional melodies.

When he finally made his music available to fellow musicians

in 1920, it was with a piano sonata that encompassed both.

The Concord Sonata is probably his, his most familiar masterpiece

and also one of his most radical works.

In the opening movement in Emerson,

you have the impression of just some kind of titanic force coming at you.

And it gives this impression of

massiveness, of sort of imperturbable nature,

and all of the violence of nature as well.

Then there's this remarkable third movement,

which is very different in tone.

The Alcotts, a domestic scene of people playing music and singing

and you hear little bits of Beethoven sort of coming in and out.

The so-called fate motif of Beethoven's Fifth keeps recurring.

It's a piece about music, about listening in a lot of ways.

That Alcotts movement, it's extremely touching.

The thing about Ives now is, it doesn't matter

when he wrote these things, it only matters what his music says,

and what his music says is mostly sad and beautiful things.

The music is about a world of America that he sees slipping away.

It's not even his world, it's his father's world.

It's the way people felt in those little towns after the Civil War,

the idealism they had, the neighbourliness,

the closeness, the way the little tunes were drifting

from the blacksmith's shop into the parlour and the church organ.

All that... that closeness was gone

and Ives' music has this meditative farewell,

leave-taking to all of that and sometimes a kind of rage -

why has this happened?

What had happened?

America had become the most advanced nation in the modern world.

In just over 100 years, its population had gone from

six million to 106 million.

Ives' radical sound was ahead of its time,

but now the European avant-garde was making an impact in the USA,

where the music of chaos fit its cityscapes of speed and noise.

You look at the cross section of any year what composers were doing

in the 20th century, you will find every sort of human reaction

to the events that are happening in the world.

So you will find composers who stick their head in the sand to

lament the loss of a lost culture, and you will find composers who say,

"We need to find, not just a completely new way of writing music,

"but a completely different world order.

"We need to reflect the sound, the noise, the fury

"of the world around us, whether it's the sound of popular cultures

"that people are hearing or whether it's the sounds of machinery."

I suppose the composer who grabbed the machine age most

enthusiastically was Edgar Varese.

He was originally French and then towards

the end of the First World War he went to live in New York.

He arrived in New York as the first skyscrapers were going up,

and immediately he absolutely grabbed the sights

and sounds of the machine age and all of that went into his music.

Varese said he wanted to find

"a bomb that would make the musical world explode."

In 1922, with the gargantuan orchestral piece Ameriques,

he dragged the sounds of the city into the sedate

world of the concert hall.

Ameriques has got

so much in common with Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring.

It has those thrashing, off-kilter rhythms of The Rite Of Spring.

But whereas The Rite of Spring is a sort of pagan ritual,

Ameriques is a hymn to the modern age, a hymn to the machine age.

So you hear the sound of a dredger on the Hudson River.

You hear the sound of the overhead railway that

went past his apartment.

You hear sirens.

He was trying to imagine a music of the future.

He saw this great city of noise,

of din,

of chaos.

It remains one of the great evocations of the city

and really one of...one of the wildest pieces ever created.

Wild, but also a sensation.

When Ameriques made its explosive New York debut at Carnegie Hall

in 1926, it was a surprise hit with audience and critics alike.

Somehow, Varese had managed to capture the zeitgeist

of his adopted country, deafening, determined and dynamic.

There is something about the spirit of America and New York, especially

in the first part of the 20th century that was really anything goes.

There was the spirit of optimism in that moment,

and right in that time, jazz began to emerge.

And that changed everything.

In the Roaring '20s,

America's cities were buzzing with new sounds on every corner.

A huge immigrant population had seized the promise of

the good life in the New World.

They brought with them a melting pot of musical styles,

and jazz took over as the hot new sound.

For the first time in history,

popular music rivalled art music for invention and modernity.

What did happen that was very unique in the 20th century

was that at a certain point,

art actually entered the province of the popular.

So you had people like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,

George Gershwin, who actually reached hundreds, if not thousands,

if not millions of people

with something that they considered popular,

but they did have the substance of fine art.

The son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, George Gershwin was,

by the age of just 20,

one of the most successful songwriters on Broadway.

But he was also a classically trained composer who strove

to write symphonic pieces that would be taken seriously

in America's concert halls.

As with so many modernists,

his orchestral music drew on traditional folk styles,

the sounds of his own Jewish heritage and, equally,

the church spirituals and jazz sound of the black population.

But his ear for a great melody was always front and centre.

Gershwin was this, this wonderfully ambiguous figure,

between classical music and popular music.

The Rhapsody In Blue was premiered at a concert called

An Experiment In Modern Music and it was another great spectacle

of the period, much talked about, much written about.

Somewhat controversial because people thought,

"Well, these worlds shouldn't mix, necessarily."

You know, you should have classical, it's one world, and jazz

in the other and you shouldn't try to combine them together,

you end up falling between two stools, and yet he pulled it off.

He realised that there was something that was going on with

the black people, that everybody that was humanly available

and should...and could touch everybody.

He went to the churches, he sang with people,

he also went to Harlem.

And see, Rhapsody In Blue actually is his musical paean to Harlem,

to stride piano Negro melodies and rhythms,

to all of those things that he heard.

So he was basically saying

look, this is what all of us need to be building on.

Music communicates human experience. That's the power of it.

Rhapsody In Blue was a resounding success,

totally eclipsing in popularity the experimental modernism

of his European colleagues.

But it symbolised the great schism that hung over much

early 20th century music.

If Gershwin's tunes spoke to millions,

did that make him a less serious composer?

It wasn't that long ago that popular music was a good thing,

and in fact composers tried to be popular, or at the very least

they tried to write music that people would like to listen to.

But something happened in the 20th century where critically, especially,

artists began to be frowned upon for the popularity of their work.

And isn't that odd? It should be the exact opposite.

I'm amazed now, even these days that Rhapsody In Blue,

or An American In Paris, for instance, it'd be odd, almost,

to see it performed on a "serious concert."

And, in fact, the audiences they desperately want to hear it,

they love it, I love it.

Why not have it on there?

Why not let audiences enjoy that as well as the tough stuff?

Gershwin himself was torn between the popular and the tough stuff.

He travelled to Europe in 1928, to seek out the titans

of European modernism, for he felt that to become a serious composer,

he should adopt their hard-core, revolutionary styles.

Gershwin went to Stravinsky and to my father

and wanted to study with them.

And each of them refused to teach him.

And the story goes that, that he asks Stravinsky to teach him

and Stravinsky said, "How much do you earn?"

And Gershwin told him how many millions he was making

and so Stravinsky said, "Well, then I should study with you!"

So that's Stravinsky.

And then he came to my father and said,

"I would like to study with you." And my father said,

"No, I will not accept you because right now you are a great Gershwin,

"and if you studied with me, you would be a mediocre Schoenberg."

And yet, by the early 1930s, the great Broadway tunesmith

and the father of atonality had hit it off.

Their rivalry confined only to the tennis court.

Because by then Schoenberg was, somewhat ironically, living in the

very heart of popular entertainment, Los Angeles, California.

He'd fled from a Europe where the radical experiments

of modernist Jewish composers were facing a much

more terrifying enemy than unwelcoming, bourgeois audiences.

In Vienna, crowds of Austrian Nazis were taking to the streets.

They were campaigning to forge a union between Austria and Germany.

Schoenberg had been teaching in Berlin.

He saw at first hand the looming, inexorable rise of the Third Reich.

My father was aware of the political situation in Germany.

He knew Hitler was coming to power

and he expected things to go really badly.

He had already written, "How can this end?

"It can only end in the destruction and the killing of Jews."

And things like this.

Well, he was, he was really very much aware and way ahead of his time

in understanding what a terrible situation this would come to.

Schoenberg foresaw that his music would die under the Nazis basically,

and saw the catastrophe that was looming.

Other great composers didn't have the same moral compass,

and were slightly more confused by what must have been

an appalling epoch to live through. And it's very easy to judge today.

But there are writings in the early '40s of Webern

which praised Hitler in an embarrassing and terrible way.

One has to either forgive or forget a naive

and confused composer during a very difficult time.

Modern composers did have a thorny relationship with the general public

and they thought that totalitarian leaders,

in Italy as well, would give funds and support this art form

in a way that the more democratic civilisation wouldn't.

And so at first, at least, they had high hopes for Fascism, sadly.

CROWD CHANTING

"I see such a good future," Webern wrote of Hitler's rise.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

The world was about to be plunged into war,

and music's modernist progress would be derailed by totalitarianism.

In the next programme, as the Second World War raged,

the world of classical music

suffered from repression and censorship.

But when peace was restored, composers responded by taking music

to the extremes of violence and noise.

STRINGS SCREECH

To find out more about 20th century composers,

and for details of a year-long festival of events

celebrating a century of revolution in music, art and culture, go to...

Follow the links to the Open University.

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