Feature

10 Moments That Changed Classical Music Forever

People talk about music changing the course of history, but what events have changed the course of music?

by Clive Paget on 24 March, 2016

Over Easter this year, ABC Classics are launching one of their biggest and most ambitious initiatives ever: 1,000 years of classical music. A total of 100 CDs are planned to represent the accumulated pleasures of a millennia of composition. That got us thinking. We all know a bit about the development of music and musical styles, and we are all aware that the course of any art form never did run smooth. But what were the key moments? And when did the tectonic plates shift so that what was considered the musical norm one day turned out to be something quite other the next?

Casting around the Limelight office, a number of names were frequently bandied about: Beethoven, for obvious reasons, came up a lot; Berlioz was mentioned quite a few times for his impact on orchestration and willingness to run with the ball passed to him by Beethoven; and Schumann who developed uniquely individual forms while advancing ideas on musical theory through polemical writings and his impact on criticism. Other names flitted by: Bach, Haydn (for the string quartet), Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky, Cage, Feldman, Boulez… And then there were influential works like Tristan and Isolde, the Eroica, The Rite of Spring, Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, Turangalîla – even Porgy and Bess and Peter Grimes.

History, of course, had something to say as well. Did the crippling Black Death leave its deadly mark on music? The French Revolution: did it put an end to more than just Marie Antoinette? World War I, World War II with its Holocaust and its stream of émigrés heading across the Atlantic, the Cold War – conflicts and persecutions tend to leave their mark on art.

Rather than go round and round in circles, and short of running a readers’ poll (though we would really love to know who or what you would have chosen), we decided to put the question: “What were classical music’s greatest game changers?” to a handful of experts from the fields of early, middle, late and contemporary music. And this is what they thought…