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  • MUSIC: "Holberg Suite" by Grieg

  • Music, one of the most dazzling fruits of human civilisation,

  • can make us weep, or make us dance.

  • It's reflected the times in which it was written,

  • it has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us.

  • In this series I've been tracing the story of music from scratch.

  • To follow it on its miraculous journey,

  • misleading jargon and fancy labels are best put to one side.

  • Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary and how exhilarating

  • many of the innovations we take for granted today were

  • to people at the time.

  • There are a million ways of telling the story of music, this is mine.

  • MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky

  • In the 31 years between the death of Richard Wagner in 1883

  • and the outbreak of the First World War

  • music was shaken by a series of rebellions.

  • "Pictures At An Exhibition" by Mussorgsky

  • MUSIC: "The Firebird" by Stravinsky

  • Russian music swept westwards exuberantly,

  • as did the exotic sounds of distant continents.

  • "Voiles" by Debussy

  • And symphonies and operas of astonishing intensity

  • amazed and startled audiences.

  • Modernism in music was born.

  • The world was becoming a smaller place,

  • with millions of poor European immigrants seeking refuge

  • in the New World,

  • to join the white settlers, African Americans and Chinese workers already there.

  • From this rich mix of musical cultures,

  • soon to be heard on newfangled record players and radios,

  • would spring the blues, ragtime and jazz.

  • "Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin

  • In just over three decades music underwent a series of gigantic convulsions.

  • Change came in many different forms, some exciting, some bewildering.

  • Revolution was in the air

  • and all of music's laws and traditions were about to be shaken to their roots.

  • What happened was a series of musical rebellions.

  • MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky

  • The first was aimed at displacing the musical giant of the late 19th century, Richard Wagner.

  • His ideas, his style and his musical philosophy

  • had been such a pervasive presence in classical music

  • that what might have followed him was a plague of pseudo-Wagners.

  • In fact what followed in his wake was an explosion of musical activity

  • that sought to do things very differently indeed.

  • It may not always have been deliberate

  • but there was a kind of not-Wagner renaissance.

  • All the things he hated most came to life. The French, for a start.

  • MUSIC: "Carnival Of The Animals" by Saint-Saens

  • In France a new wave of composers made it their business

  • to write music of deliberate simplicity and clarity

  • and to banish pretention and earnestness of all kinds.

  • The French were about to enjoy a musical golden age

  • thanks to their reaction against Wagner.

  • Their best 50 years ever in music blossomed

  • after he went off to his personal Valhalla,

  • with Faure, Debussy and Ravel leading a glorious riposte

  • to German musical dominance.

  • MUSIC: "Gymnopedie Number 1" by Satie

  • The movement was set in train by one of the most remarkable figures in music, Erik Satie.

  • Erik Satie's first Gymnopedie of 1888,

  • as well as sounding like a long, hot afternoon after a boozy lunch,

  • can be seen as the first shot in a war

  • to debunk pomposity and declutter French music.

  • Satie, described by his tutors at the Paris conservatoire

  • as "the laziest student ever", was an eccentric intellectual

  • who hung out with other arty dreamers in Montmartre.

  • Satie's music could hardly sound less like Wagner

  • and what the Germans were up to.

  • The irony is that there was a German influence

  • on the work of Satie's Parisian contemporaries.

  • Here's a clue. Composers like Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor,

  • Camille Saint-Saens and Gabriel Faure were all trained organists,

  • and playing the organ means above all

  • knowing one particular composer's work inside out - JS Bach.

  • MUSIC: "Toccata" by Widor

  • More than a hundred years after his death,

  • these organist-composers in France

  • were invigorated and inspired by Bach's clarity and economy.

  • Even the master himself might have admired

  • Charles-Marie Widor's famous Toccata.

  • It was first performed by Widor himself

  • at the Trocadero Palace in Paris in 1889

  • and it's given a rousing send-off

  • to many a newly hitched bride and groom ever since.

  • The dignity and dexterity of Bach can also be heard

  • in the music of Gabriel Faure,

  • perhaps the most talented of these French organist-composers.

  • Listening to Faure after Brahms, Liszt, Wagner or Tchaikovsky,

  • it's as if someone has spring-cleaned and redecorated

  • a teenage boy's bedroom.

  • Gone are the posters of death, psychological torment,

  • superheroes and tragedy.

  • The augmented piles of clothes have been put away

  • and the windows have been opened

  • to dispel the diminished sneaker-smelling air.

  • Faure's exquisite music simply says, "Chill,"

  • or, perhaps, refrigerez-vous.

  • The exquisite pieces of Satie, Saint-Saens, Faure

  • and the new wave of French composers were mostly small in scale.

  • The next important step in the non-Wagner rebellion took place

  • in the realm of symphonic music.

  • And the composer who carried the torch

  • for large-scale orchestral and vocal music after Wagner

  • was about as different from him as a human being could be.

  • Though he championed Wagner's operas

  • as music director of the Vienna State Opera House,

  • Wagner would have despised him because he was Jewish.

  • He was Gustav Mahler.

  • The hallmark of Mahler's music is that of openness.

  • Unlike Wagner, Mahler invited into his music

  • all the sounds and rhythms and the noisy diversity

  • of the bustling East European communities at Vienna's doorstep,

  • capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire.

  • As an outsider in Vienna - a Jew, a Czech,

  • a poor country boy in a profession full of toffs -

  • it's not surprising that Mahler should identify

  • with the folklore and music of his small-town childhood.

  • In his symphonies it's possible to identify, for example,

  • the Klezmer style of strolling Jewish folk musicians.

  • His music encompasses passing military bands.

  • And he's not afraid to include boisterous children's choruses.

  • Mahler's symphonies are music's gateway to the 20th century,

  • a musical equivalent of New York's Ellis Island,

  • where Europe's exhausted and oppressed peoples

  • sought refuge and a new start.

  • The musical cultures they left behind in Europe

  • found a home in Mahler's generous symphonic embrace.

  • One way we can see a modern perspective emerging in his music is

  • its sense of reality, of truthfulness, warts and all.

  • The frankness of his approach is a major break with the past

  • and is much more characteristic of the 20th than the 19th centuries.

  • How can music be honest?

  • Well, before Mahler if you were composer

  • and you wanted to write a piece about loneliness or despair or depression,

  • you'd call it something generic like a nocturne, or a sonata pathetique.

  • In an opera you could have singers act out emotional or political issues

  • pretending to be someone from another era, in a fancy costume.

  • But Mahler stopped all this role-playing.

  • He wanted to evoke the real, contemporary world

  • with all its actual suffering and joy, without pretence.

  • He told it how it was.

  • Mahler took our worst fears and set them to music.

  • This may seem an unremarkable concept to us

  • but in 1900 it was shockingly, distressingly new.

  • The unflinching honesty of Mahler's approach is at times unbearable.

  • From 1901, for example,

  • he set to music five German poems called Kindertotenlieder -

  • Songs On The Death Of Children.

  • The sentiments of the songs are those of a parent's most unspeakable nightmares.

  • MEZZO SINGING IN GERMAN

  • In Mahler's unflinching settings,

  • these distant people of another century suddenly become like us.

  • He's made them real.

  • In a horrible irony, four years after he wrote the songs

  • Mahler's own five-year-old daughter, Anna-Maria, died of scarlet fever,

  • and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition.

  • When he died in 1911 he was laid to rest in her grave.

  • But despite the understandable sadness and alienation we hear in his music

  • there is, incredibly, hope of something better,

  • usually associated with childhood and youth,

  • as in his Song Of The Earth.

  • The final chord of The Song Of The Earth was described

  • by the mid-20th century English composer Benjamin Britten

  • as being "imprinted on the atmosphere."

  • STRINGS, HARP AND OBOE CREATE A WASH OF SOUND

  • MEZZO: # Ewig... #

  • MUSIC FADES

  • But there's something else going on in Mahler's music

  • that wasn't perhaps obvious at the time.

  • It's deceptive.

  • Because of its all-inclusive style

  • with its borrowings from ethnic folk music

  • and because of the intensity of feeling he wanted to convey,

  • Mahler's music began to destabilise

  • the centuries-old Western musical system he'd inherited.

  • His pupils in Vienna, led by Arnold Schoenberg,

  • actively wanted to dismantle completely

  • the familiar systems that had underpinned all music

  • for hundreds of years

  • and replace them with a brand new system.

  • This academic rebellion was later labelled serialism, or atonality,

  • and it produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars.

  • And, in its purest, strictest form, not one piece of music

  • that a normal person could understand or enjoy in 100 years.

  • That's not to say that serialism hasn't always had a cultish following

  • but for sure these composers weren't courting a mainstream audience.

  • Had serialism had any chance of appealing to a paying public,

  • one composer who would surely have opted into it

  • was the musical magpie Richard Strauss,

  • Germany's leading composer after Mahler's death.

  • But he had other, far more mischievous plans up his sleeve.

  • He began his career conventionally enough

  • in a musical style that owed much to Liszt

  • and a little to Wagner.

  • Thus Spake Zarathustra is pretty typical,

  • with its now legendary opening, Sunrise, made even more famous

  • by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  • Kubrick uses the power of the piece

  • to underscore a momentous leap forward in the evolution of Man.

  • The power of the idea the film wants to convey,

  • man's discovery of weapons, needs equally portentous music.

  • No one did it better than Strauss.

  • And yet, the ever-versatile Strauss

  • could also write songs of heart-breaking, Mahlerish delicacy,

  • like the song Tomorrow, composed as a wedding present for his wife.

  • On the surface of it the words of Morgen! seem

  • to be optimistic about the future.

  • "And tomorrow the sun will shine again."

  • But it's also strangely melancholy.

  • It seems to suggest, in fact, that there will be no tomorrow.

  • It seemed at this point as if Strauss would continue to compose

  • in this wistful but fairly traditional manner.

  • But then he suddenly catapulted himself into musical notoriety

  • with an opera of savage, erotic power

  • that shocked bourgeois society and created a sensation.

  • In one fell swoop,

  • from being the genteel Kapellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoch,

  • Strauss had transformed himself into the Che Guevara

  • of the musical rebels.

  • The opera in question was Salome, staged in 1905.

  • It was immediately banned in several countries

  • and it gave new meaning to the term discord...

  • ..even before Salome herself had stripped off

  • for the Dance Of The Seven Veils

  • and scandalised the first night audience.

  • Salome's final, passionate solo,

  • addressed to the severed head of John the Baptist,

  • which she then kisses, was the Quentin Tarantino moment.

  • You can either read Salome as a strong, independent young woman

  • who gets what she wants by exploiting her sexuality,

  • cleverly outwitting her stepfather the king in the process,

  • or as a kind of demented junkie

  • who lowers humanity's moral standards to rock bottom.

  • Take your pick.

  • Strauss apparently hedges his bets,

  • giving the first mention of the necrophiliac kiss

  • possibly the most dissonant chord ever used in music at that point.

  • It's like the final howl of a busted civilisation.

  • HIGH DISCORD

  • CLUSTER OF NOTES

  • But we're not finished with her yet.

  • After asking whether the taste of blood on his lips is

  • actually the taste of love,

  • Salome revisits the kiss in supreme triumph.

  • "I have now kissed your mouth, Jochanaan," she screams

  • and Strauss unleashes a musical earthquake

  • which might be construed as a sexual consummation.

  • Again, make up your own mind.

  • GRAND, ECSTATIC MUSIC

  • King Herod, who had encouraged his stepdaughter to dance in the first place,

  • now ordered his soldiers to kill her.

  • For this climax Strauss reserved his most discordant and angry music yet.

  • VIOLENT, DISCORDANT MUSIC

  • REPEATED BRASS CHORDS

  • At this point in musical history

  • it looked as though the dominance of Austro-German music

  • that began with Bach in 1700 might continue indefinitely.

  • Instead, a new force had emerged

  • and was by the early 20th century

  • the most exhilarating sound in Europe.

  • In the closing decades of the 19th century

  • the sleeping giant of Russia had awoken.

  • Music was never going to be the same again.

  • And when it comes to rebellions, Russia is in a class of its own.

  • For all of the 18th and most of the 19th centuries

  • Russia doggedly copied the culture of Western Europe,

  • which the Russian court deemed more sophisticated and interesting

  • than anything home-grown.

  • Even Russia's most famous composer of them all, Tchaikovsky,

  • who became a worldwide star in the 1880s and '90s,

  • was still composing in a style that owed more to Beethoven or Brahms

  • than to anything he'd picked up on the banks of the Volga.

  • But there was something Tchaikovsky excelled at

  • that was distinctly Russian

  • and that contained within it the seeds of a coming revolution -

  • dance.

  • If for Italians the supreme expression of their love of music

  • was the emotionally charged operatic aria,

  • for Russians it was dance,

  • and Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most celebrated and memorable

  • dance music of all time.

  • The result of this flowering of dance is

  • that the need for a driving rhythm

  • began to change the character of the music itself,

  • making it more robust, muscular and exciting.

  • Russian music was about to explode into life

  • in a manner that was unprecedented,

  • and subsequently unmatched in history.

  • In Russia the invigorating, regulated beat of dance is everywhere,

  • at the ballet, in operas, on the concert stage,

  • lilting, driving, whirling, tiptoeing, leaping, gliding,

  • jumping, gyrating and twirling -

  • Russian music can't get enough of it.

  • Presumably, it's the cold -

  • you have to keep moving or your circulation will pack in.

  • The rhythms of dance first powered this Russian awakening.

  • The second vital element which changed the melody and harmony

  • came from a renewed interest in Russia's own religious heritage.

  • PRIEST CHANTING

  • A new breed of composers, starting in the 1880s,

  • turned their attention, not to the musical traditions of Western Europe,

  • but to those of their own,

  • especially the centuries-old Russian Orthodox chants,

  • with their deep basses and thick eight or 16-voice block chords.

  • In the decades to follow, this ancient sound,

  • known as Znamenny Chant, was to flow like a river

  • into the choral texture of all Russian composers.

  • No longer did they look west for inspiration.

  • The fuse-lighter of the Russian firework display about to unfold,

  • the truly original, creative path-finder,

  • wasn't cosmopolitan, well-travelled friend of the Romanovs Tchaikovsky,

  • but a former military cadet who worked in the civil service

  • and had a fatal vodka habit - Modest Mussorgsky.

  • MUSIC: "Promenade Pictures At An Exhibition"

  • Mussorgsky is quite simply the most original composer of the late 19th century,

  • a one-off whose ideas were new,

  • not derived from other composers of his time.

  • There's a reason for this.

  • Mussorgsky wasn't musically trained at a conservatoire

  • and he wasn't a professional composer.

  • He was self-taught

  • and therefore blissfully unaware of the rules he was breaking.

  • It was like he'd wandered onto Tsarist Russia's Got Talent,

  • slightly drunk, and started improvising at the piano,

  • to everyone's amazement.

  • "Promenade - Pictures At An Exhibition"

  • But despite the naivety of his style,

  • which earned him more than a little ridicule at the time,

  • Mussorgsky showed that Russian music could carve its own identity.

  • To see how radically the music of Russia had changed

  • in fewer than 40 years,

  • listen to this coronation scene from A Life For The Tsar,

  • an opera written by the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka in 1836.

  • BIG, FOURSQUARE CHORDS

  • Glinka had his musical training in Italy, Austria and Germany,

  • and it shows.

  • BRAHMSLIKE WRITING

  • Now listen to another Kremlin coronation scene

  • from the thoroughly Russian opera by Mussorgsky, Boris Godunov.

  • VIVID, ENERGETIC MUSIC

  • This time, complete with colours, voices and glittering effects,

  • tolling bells and echoing orchestra chimes,

  • it's been thoroughly Russianised.

  • Mussorgsky died in 1881, his music virtually unknown outside of Russia.

  • But that was about to change.

  • "Carnival Of The Animals" by Saint-Saens.

  • So many of the seeds of the rebellions of late 19th century music

  • can be traced to one extraordinarily fertile event.

  • It took place in Paris in 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution.

  • It was the World's Fair.

  • Here in the Trocadero, which overlooked the newly-built Eiffel Tower,

  • Widor first played his famous organ Toccata

  • and here also non-Russian composers heard

  • the music of Mussorgsky for the first time.

  • One such composer, then aged 27, was Claude Debussy.

  • His visit to the World's Fair was a life- and music-changing experience.

  • What Debussy learnt from Mussorgsky

  • was that there was a way of building up the architecture of a piece of music

  • that was an alternative to the developmental method

  • that was bread and butter to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

  • The development approach was to take small cells of melody or rhythm,

  • or both, and make up a whole discourse from them

  • over a 15 or 20 minute period.

  • So Beethoven is able to construct a whole symphony movement from this tiny idea.

  • MOTIF FROM BEETHOVEN'S FIFTH

  • Count how many times he uses it in just the first 40 bars of the symphony.

  • HE MOUTHS

  • That's 13.

  • That's already 33, and counting.

  • Debussy, inspired by Mussorgsky,

  • ditched 100 years of studious development technique

  • and started over -

  • Mussorgsky, because he knew no better,

  • and Debussy, because it suited his taste for experiment.

  • GAMELAN PLAYS

  • What revolutionised Debussy's music more than anything, though, was

  • a wind of change blowing to the Paris World's Fair from very far afield.

  • The World's Fair showcased exhibits and cultural tableaux

  • from all over the planet.

  • Thanks to increased communications,

  • the global village was starting to become a reality.

  • What especially mesmerised Debussy was a Javanese village,

  • complete with a gamelan orchestra,

  • with its gongs, bells, bowls and xylophone-like chimes.

  • The particular sonorities and scales of the Gamelan orchestra

  • intrigued Debussy so much he was inspired to attempt

  • an evocation of its Eastern sounds on a Western piano.

  • Although he couldn't replicate the unfamiliar tuning of the bells,

  • gongs, and other metal bars of the gamelan,

  • or the exact division of the Asian musical scale,

  • he could approximate it in two ways.

  • One was to make use of the so-called pentatonic scale,

  • the five notes that are common to all the world's musical systems

  • and which are especially prevalent in Eastern music.

  • On a piano the pentatonic notes can be found by playing just the black notes.

  • There's a whole section of his prelude Voiles, sails,

  • which is all pentatonic.

  • The other trick Debussy deployed was to allow his chords to hang over each other,

  • overlapping and ricocheting from one to the next.

  • This technique, on a piano at any rate,

  • has the effect of eking out

  • the sympathetic resonances, or harmonics,

  • latent in the reverberating strings.

  • Natural harmonics are hidden extra notes, usually quite high in pitch,

  • that are found within any given sound,

  • like the additional colours of the spectrum

  • contained within white light.

  • Every time you allow the felt dampers on a piano to clamp down on the strings

  • you shut off the natural harmonics from resonating.

  • CHORD STOPS

  • But Debussy wanted to do the opposite,

  • to allow the strings to ring like they would on a harp.

  • His hanging chords with the dampers kept away from the strings

  • were a kind of return to nature.

  • "Claire de Lune" by Debussy

  • Putting these ideas into action,

  • Debussy created a new soundscape for the piano.

  • The reformation of scales and harmonies that he introduced

  • offered a whole new palette of aural possibilities.

  • The piano had never sounded so exotic and so rich.

  • By recalibrating the traditional Western scale on Eastern lines,

  • Debussy's music was a radical departure

  • from the classical style he'd grown up with,

  • and his harmonic experiments based on Asian sound combinations

  • were still influencing musicians, especially in jazz, half a century later.

  • As well as kicking off a highly fruitful interest

  • in what we'd call world music,

  • the World's Fair in Paris had also put the new music of Russia on the map.

  • Another of St Petersburg's musical dynamos, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov,

  • took over the torch and mined the golden seam of Slavic folklore

  • in a series of operatic pageants put on around the turn of the century.

  • Rimsky didn't just use folk stories in his plots.

  • Crucially he also started to borrow the melodic building blocks of Russian folk music.

  • These sparkling entertainments laid down a challenge

  • to Rimsky-Korsakov's most talented pupil, then a complete unknown.

  • That challenge was to blaze a path for Russian music

  • and put Russia onto the cultural map once and for all,

  • and boy, was the challenge accepted.

  • Rimsky-Korsakov's pupil was Igor Stravinsky.

  • Stravinsky's combustible arrival on the world music scene

  • was stage-managed

  • by an entrepreneurial art, dance and music impresario, Sergei Diaghilev.

  • In 1909 he created a dance company in Paris, the Ballets Russes,

  • in order to produce annual festivals of modernist Russian ballets.

  • He approached Stravinsky to compose the music for one

  • based on an ancient Russian fairytale, The Firebird.

  • When he was commissioned Stravinsky was unknown

  • and third choice for the job.

  • Three years later he was both the most notorious

  • and the most eagerly championed composer in all Europe.

  • The Firebird's scenario,

  • an amalgam of several versions of folk tales about a magical bird,

  • combines supernatural characters and beasts with the natural,

  • the fantastical world with the human world.

  • Stravinsky gives these two worlds different styles of music.

  • Human characters, like the 12 princesses in the story, are given

  • folk song derived melodies based on the common Western musical scale.

  • C MAJOR SCALE

  • The fantastical creatures and characters on the other hand are allotted

  • a much more exotic and complex musical palette,

  • often based on the so-called octotonic scale.

  • SEQUENCE OF TONES AND SEMITONES

  • This non-Western sounding octotonic scale had been the feature

  • of the music of Stravinsky's teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov,

  • especially when depicting the magical, malevolent

  • or the mysterious.

  • When Stravinsky borrows from Russian ethnic folk music like this

  • he doesn't lift it straight

  • but distorts it through a mischievous prism.

  • In field recordings of peasant folk music,

  • the educated, bourgeois Stravinsky had discovered

  • a raw, ritualistic world

  • from way beyond the frontiers of industrial civilisation.

  • His instinct to repackage it for a Parisian audience

  • was brilliantly provocative.

  • Stravinsky's rebellion against established musical conventions

  • wasn't just about exotic scales and weird jingly-jangly sounds

  • he injected into the orchestra.

  • Stravinsky, like Mussorgsky and Debussy before him,

  • wanted to find a way of assembling a musical structure

  • without using constantly developing nuggets of tune.

  • Stravinsky in particular wanted to tell his ballet stories

  • a different way.

  • He created a montage, an aural jigsaw,

  • one tune followed by a different tune, followed by a different tune

  • in tumbling succession.

  • For this reason, ballet, with its short, restless kaleidoscopic episodes,

  • was the form for which Stravinsky was born to compose.

  • We find the idea of musical collage, the mix,

  • the remix, the iPod shuffle and the mash-up, completely normal,

  • but we shouldn't forget

  • how bewilderingly unfamiliar an idea this was

  • to the musical establishment of the early 1900s.

  • When the Ballets Russes took Stravinsky's second ballet, Petrushka, to Vienna in 1913

  • the scandalised musicians refused to play it,

  • describing it as "dirty music".

  • All of the radicals, Mahler, Debussy and Stravinsky,

  • were dismantling the old system

  • whereby musical ideas carefully unfolded, one thing after another.

  • They wanted everything at once.

  • Stravinsky, like all Russian composers, was turned on

  • by the rhythmic urgency of dance

  • but he did something very unusual with that rhythm.

  • Whilst Mahler had layered melody on melody,

  • tangled together like a twisted knot,

  • and Debussy had manipulated blocks of adjacent sound overlapping one another,

  • Stravinsky went one step further,

  • superimposing simultaneous rhythms on top of each other.

  • Polyrhythm, as it has since been dubbed,

  • had long existed in African tribal drumming,

  • improvised on the spot by highly intuitive, skilful players.

  • But polyrhythm, conceived from scratch by a composer,

  • written down on the page,

  • imposed on the Western symphony orchestra player by player,

  • this was utterly, breathtakingly novel a concept.

  • It was as if Stravinsky wanted the past and the present to coexist

  • in one dimension,

  • the prehistoric ritual of his dancers

  • and the modern cacophony of the industrial world

  • and the only way he could conceive it

  • was to make parallel, competing rhythmic patterns fight

  • for the same space.

  • It's complicated but it's magnificent.

  • But here's the thing.

  • The Rite of Spring, which premiered a hundred years ago,

  • was the high-water mark of musical modernism.

  • It therefore presented progressive music with a dilemma.

  • Where the hell to go from here?

  • Neither Stravinsky nor Debussy in 1913 would've guessed

  • where the answer to that question would come from,

  • never mind just how massive the forces of change were going to be.

  • After all, revolutions don't always start with a bang.

  • 'Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow,

  • 'and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.'

  • Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of recorded sound in 1877

  • but in fact the first ever recording was made nearly 20 years earlier,

  • in France.

  • This is the earliest-known surviving recording of a person singing,

  • making the man who made it, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville,

  • the true inventor of recording, not Edison.

  • BUZZING NOISE

  • The recording was made on a machine now virtually forgotten,

  • the phonautograph.

  • Here's the amazing bit.

  • The inventor's aim was to be able to study sound in graph-like form.

  • What he couldn't do was play the sound back.

  • Then, in 2008,

  • American engineers using sophisticated digital technology

  • were able to convert the markings on the paper back into sound.

  • The French folk singer of 1860 miraculously sang again.

  • BUZZING NOISE Sort of.

  • The phonautograph had begun a process

  • that was totally to transform music.

  • Very soon after Edison invented a machine

  • that could play recordings back,

  • a new breed of musician researcher popped up

  • in virtually every country,

  • travelling around remote, rural areas,

  • recording and preserving the folk songs

  • they persuaded doubtless bemused locals to perform for them.

  • These field recordists captured the oral and musical culture

  • of communities now long disappeared.

  • SINGING AND DRUMMING

  • But the real future for recorded sound was in

  • the reproduction of music that was already popular.

  • TENOR: # Vesti la giubba

  • # E la faccia infarina... #

  • The first million-selling record was Caruso's Vesti La Giubba in 1907,

  • just before radio broadcasts began.

  • As well as live music, radio also played records,

  • thus boosting their sales.

  • # ..t'invola Colombina... #

  • The advent of recording made

  • the huge wealth of music already written by 1900

  • increasingly available to millions of people across the world,

  • vastly expanding their musical horizons

  • and turning something hitherto expensive and elitist

  • into an ordinary commodity.

  • This was a very good thing.

  • Recording also began to put in front of a mass audience

  • forms of folk and ethnic music that were up to then unknown

  • outside their local communities.

  • The music that was boosted most of all by recording, as it turned out,

  • was that produced by African Americans,

  • beginning with spiritual songs.

  • # When Israel was in Egypt's land

  • # Let my people go

  • # Oppressed so hard they could not stand

  • # Let my people go

  • # Go down, Moses # Go down, Moses

  • # Way down in Egypt's land

  • # Tell old pharaoh

  • # You got to let my people go # Let them go

  • # You got to let my people go

  • # Let them go

  • # You got to let my people go

  • # Let them go

  • # You got to let my people go

  • # Let them go, let them go

  • # Let them go. #

  • Huh!

  • African American slaves and their descendants

  • living in conditions of oppressive poverty developed

  • a form of religious song, the spiritual,

  • which seems to have been an amalgam

  • of half-remembered African call and response chants

  • and missionary hymns.

  • # Swing low, sweet chariot

  • # Comin' for to carry me home

  • # Swing low, sweet chariot... #

  • These spirituals of the Deep South were rich

  • with Old Testament references to the slavery of the Israelites,

  • visions of redemption and heavenly justice.

  • # I looked over Jordan What did I see?

  • # Comin' for to carry me home?

  • # A band of angels Coming after me... #

  • The existence of the spiritual was for a long time mostly unknown

  • to the white population of the United States,

  • let alone the rest of the world but a long fuse had been lit.

  • # People, they are faithful And like to say a good prayer, too

  • # If you ask them about their religion

  • # They'll say they're just as good as you... #

  • The Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were themselves the children of slaves,

  • began to make fundraising tours

  • singing what were called at the time negro spirituals.

  • But strangely, one of the first musicians

  • to put this music in front of a middle-class American audience

  • was an Englishman.

  • The Edwardian Samuel Coleridge-Taylor caused a sensation

  • on three trips to the USA, conducting his own compositions.

  • In one of them we can hear early and tantalising evidence

  • of the melodic style of what came to be known as the blues,

  • which, albeit in different disguises,

  • went on to dominate the music of the 20th century and beyond.

  • The clues we're looking for

  • are so-called flattened degrees of the musical ladder, or scale,

  • at the third and seventh position,

  • especially when the phrase is heading in a downward direction.

  • And here they both are, one after another, in this melody.

  • Third.

  • Seventh.

  • The blues, as it developed slowly and piecemeal

  • amongst former slave communities in the USA

  • in the final decades of the 19th century,

  • clung resolutely to the flattened thirds and sevenths,

  • and does so to the present day.

  • Indeed, they became known as blue notes.

  • MAN: Play that thing, boy.

  • Blue notes, revivalist spirituals,

  • the call and response or holler songs of the Deep South,

  • all derived from their African origins,

  • went into the mixing pot of the early blues.

  • But also mixed in were chords borrowed

  • from hymns and parlour and vaudeville songs,

  • and the folk songs of other members of the American underclass.

  • MAN SINGS BLUES

  • There's been considerable research

  • into song forms of the poorest Americans of all ethnic groups

  • in the 19th century.

  • It reveals the influence of Anglo-Celtic folk music

  • on the growth of the blues.

  • This folk music was learnt from the African Americans' co-workers

  • in the cotton fields and on the railroads,

  • many of whom were from the British Isles.

  • Amongst these song types are hundreds

  • which lament the burden and misery of the labourer's life.

  • Typical is the iconic American work song,

  • The Ballad of John Henry, The Steel Driving Man,

  • which eventually became a blues standard.

  • It celebrates the futile battle

  • between an African American railroad worker

  • and a new machine designed to replace him.

  • Music historians have traced the shape

  • back to the much earlier British ballad, The Birmingham Boys.

  • Listen out for the overall storytelling shape

  • and the repeated line at the end.

  • # In Birmingham town there lived a man

  • # And he had such a lovely wife

  • # And so dearly she loved company

  • # As dearly as she loved life, boys, life,

  • # As dearly as she loved life. #

  • Now here's one of the many later versions of John Henry.

  • # John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his mother's knee

  • # He picked up a hammer in his little right hand

  • # Says, "A hammer's gonna be the death of me, O Lord

  • # "A hammer's gonna be the death of me." #

  • One of the changes that's happened to the tune crossing the Atlantic

  • is that it's become entirely pentatonic.

  • Remember those five basic notes prevalent in Eastern music

  • that Debussy imitated?

  • And who were the other railroad workers

  • toiling alongside the British, Irish and African American labourers?

  • Now, even to suggest any European influence

  • on the blues is controversial,

  • and it's entirely understandable

  • that there should be sensitivity about any non-African elements

  • in the origin of the blues.

  • Since the music of the slaves, from which it sprang, was

  • so often a lament,

  • or a coded protest against the harsh treatment they received,

  • some African Americans quite naturally resent the idea

  • that the blues could in any way have been influenced

  • by the very people who enslaved their ancestors.

  • But the fact is that music does not observe racial or national boundaries.

  • It's a free-flowing river, open and available to all cultures,

  • owned by none.

  • Whatever elements went into its kit of parts,

  • the early blues musicians made something

  • unique and lasting of their own.

  • This same intermingling of styles and traditions can be seen

  • in the arrival at around the same time of ragtime,

  • which became a kind of craze.

  • Rag or ragtime music originated

  • in St Louis and Chicago bars and brothels,

  • from house pianists copying the popular marching band style

  • of the 1880s and '90s,

  • a fashion that reached its peak with the band leader John Philip Sousa.

  • In order to emulate the whole band - bass, accompanying chords and tune -

  • the pianist had to leap about the keys frantically,

  • resulting in a quite virtuoso left-hand motion

  • from bass to chord and back.

  • On top of this accompanying oom-pa the rag pianists wove a catchy tune

  • that pulled the rhythm around - a technique called syncopation.

  • Syncopation is LIKE talk-ING with THE emph-A-sis ON the wrong words

  • TO cre-ATE a jer-KY sound.

  • Listen to this bit of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag without syncopation.

  • HE PLAYS A SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF RAG

  • And now with Joplin's syncopations,

  • which feel like they're tripping ahead of where you'd expect them to fall.

  • MUSIC: "Maple Leaf Rag" by Joplin

  • Ragtime picked up syncopation, a playful jumping ahead of a tune,

  • from the banjo or piano accompaniments for cake walks,

  • a jokey form of dancing that plantation workers had invented

  • for their own amusement,

  • in lampooning imitation of white folks' la-di-da ballroom dancing.

  • The white folks in question used to enjoy

  • watching their staff's cake walk parties,

  • not realising that what they thought was a comic and ludicrous African American dance step

  • was actually a caricature of them.

  • Along with the cake walk another offspring of ragtime was

  • a hyper-syncopated form of piano and band-playing

  • that flickered into life in the Storyville district of New Orleans.

  • Charismatic performers like Jelly Roll Morton took it on tour

  • around the southern states in travelling vaudeville shows.

  • Though Jelly Roll called a lot of his numbers blues,

  • we now know this is the beginning of a distinct genre of its own, jazz.

  • From now on this music took on a life of its own.

  • As up-to-the-minute blues and its many offspring began

  • to revolutionise popular music,

  • classically-trained composers found themselves outflanked

  • and increasingly unloved.

  • Given the choice the general public voted with their feet in their millions

  • and took the populist path.

  • The coming century would see popular music,

  • especially American popular music, sweeping the planet.

  • And yet, faced with the twin rebellions

  • of dissonant modernism and the mass market,

  • the classical tradition found an ace up its sleeve

  • and played it with impeccable timing.

  • In a world of turmoil and change its response was nostalgia.

  • Edward Elgar's most famous piece, Enigma Variations,

  • embodies this response.

  • As the world began to slide

  • towards a final showdown of the European empires,

  • this music reminded people what they were about to lose.

  • From Elgar and Vaughan Williams in Britain,

  • Grieg in Norway, Sibelius in Finland,

  • Respighi in Italy,

  • Rachmaninov in Russia and Richard Strauss in Germany,

  • a musical style of tender, old-fashioned melancholy

  • seemed to want to hold back the relentless passage of time and progress.

  • That this music is so popular in our own time

  • testifies to its enduring appeal,

  • and perhaps our own continuing need for its soothing balm.

  • It may also indicate that in a crowded market

  • classical music's unique selling point is, like it or not,

  • its ability to wrap up the past like a beautiful gift.

  • MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by Gershwin

  • In the next programme we trace how all the developments of this 30-year period

  • found affirmation in a golden age of popular music.

  • Classical music went undercover,

  • morphing gloriously into a variety of new musical forms,

  • made possible by the onwards march of technology.

  • Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

MUSIC: "Holberg Suite" by Grieg

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