13 Days When Music Changed Forever

WFMT, the Classical Music radio station and the San Francisco Symphony have developed a classical music series called the "Keeping Score Series - 13 Days When Music Changed Forever". Remember, these are classical music people, so the breakup of Creedence Clearwater Revival is not on the list. What is on the list are a number of musical pieces that I haven't heard (or heard of).   

It begins on February 24, 1607 with the premiere of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. The radio broadcast for this one runs 59 minutes and, according to the description,  

This is a program about the dawn of opera, but also about secular music becoming ...  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.   

And it finishes on November 4, 1964 with the remiere of Terry Riley’s In C.   

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.  

           

I may not know art, but I know an alarm going off in the morning when I hear it. I think it probably gets really cool later on. I don't know - I shut the alarm off after 3 minutes and got up. Maybe Mary can explain this to me sometime.   

Anyway, it does show my incredible lack of knowledge in the area of classical music. We sang a lot of Bach in high school choir and in church and when I was in the State Singers choral group at Michigan State University we did a Beethoven festival in 1970 with the MSU Orchestra and Albion University's choir to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. I still have the two vinyl records from the concert, though I haven't pulled them out in twenty years. The classical list on my IPod nowadays consists of Aaron Copland (I love Fanfare for the Common Man), Vivaldi, and Pachelbel's Canon in D. So, time to get to work. Let's see if we can teach an old dog to enjoy classical music. But we're going to avoid Terry Riley for a while. No need to go overboard here.