Culture Shock 1913
The hour long special
Wednesday, December 05, 2012
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Culture Shock 1913
The one-hour special program Culture Shock 1913 visits that landmark year in global culture. It was a year in which Modernism asserted itself as never before.
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What a year was 1913! In an exhibition in a New York Armory, Cubism and abstraction were revealed to the American public for the first time. In Vienna, audience members at a concert of atonal music by Schoenberg and others broke out into a near-riot. And in Paris, Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s new ballet The Rite of Spring burst on stage with famously inflammatory results.
Culture Shock 1913 tells the stories behind these and other ground-breaking events that year, and goes back to consider the years leading up to this mad, Modernist moment. WNYC’s Sara Fishko speaks with thinkers, authors, musicians, art curators and historians about this unsettling, shocking era of sweeping change –and the not-so-subtle ways in which it mirrors our own uncertain age.
Host/Executive Producer: Sara Fishko
Associate Producer: Laura Mayer
Editor: Karen Frillmann
Mix Engineer: Wayne Shulmister, additional mixing by Edward Haber.
- Listen to our 1913 Podcast Series
- Watch our 1913 Videos
- Program Information
- For more on the culture of 1913, visit "MoMA Celebrates 1913," a series of videos and blog posts featured throughout this year.
- Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925: Q2 Music & The Museum of Modern Art
Comments [16]
@Paul Ezust from Cambridge, MA
That piano piece was a section of the Nicolai Medtner “Sonata Reminiscenza” opus 38, performed by Emil Gilels.
Excellent program! Thanks so much for making it available on the web.
Can you please identify the 30 second piano piece that starts at 41:36 as the narrator begins to talk about the Russian futurists?
I know that I have heard it before but I can't figure out what it is.
Thanks again!
-PE
To all who requested a playlist, here is a selected playlist from "Culture Shock 1913"
Igor Stravinsky. “The Rite of Spring” (Dance of the Earth). Kirov Orchestra, conductor Valery Gergiev. 2001.
“Music Futurista: The Art of Noises.” Performed by Marinetti, Russolo, etc. rec. 1909-1935
Schoenberg 5 Orchesterstucke op. 16. I. Vorgefuhle. Berlin Philharmonic cond. by James Levine.
“Great Singers: Caruso.” “COTTRAU: Fenesta che Lucive.” rec. 1912.
J.S. Zamecnik. “Death Scene.” Track 17. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. 1999
J.S. Zamecnik. “Mandy’s Ragtime Waltz.” Track 19. The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. 1999
“Erik Satie: Cubist Works 1913-1924.) “Les Pantins Dansent.” Performed by Bojan Gorisek and Aleksandar Madzar. 1994.
“Erik Satie: Popular Piano Works.” “Les Courses.” Aldo Ciccolini, piano. 1991.
“Debussy, Preludes, I & II.” “Book 1 Voiles.” Walter Gieseking, piano. 1953.
Arnold Schoenberg. “Pierrot Lunaire.”BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Pierre Boulez. 1978.
“Erik Satie: Popular Piano Works.” “Le Flirt.” Aldo Ciccolini, piano. 1991.
Debussy “The Snow is Dancing” from Children’s Corner
Honneger “Pastorale D’Ete”
“Love, Betrayal and Redemption” Track 11
Schoenberg, 5 Orchesterstucke, see above
Alban Berg. “Lulu-Suite.” London Symphony Orchestra, conductor Claudio Abbado.
Anton Webern. “4 Pieces Op. 5” Ensemble Avantgarde.
Debussy. “La Cathédrale Engloutie.” Jeremy Denk. (live illustration)
Debussy. “Martyre de Saint Sebastian.”
“Love, Betrayal and Redemption: Music of the Silent Cinema” (trk 19). The Monto Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.
Igor Stravinsky. “Rite of Spring.” Several parts. Kirov Orchestra, conductor Valery Gergiev. 2001.
Could 1913 have been considered pivotal without the sinking of The Titanic the year before [there is a limit to man's supposed techological supremacy] and the beginning of The Great War [that same tech achievement has created a meatgrinder] the year after?
@ Molly from Brooklyn
Update: 1/31/13
Jeremy Denk played: Debussy, “Reflets dans l’eau” (reflections in the water) from “Images,” Book I.
I enjoyed this program so much - I listened 2-3 times to make sure I really could appreciate each
cultural aspect.
My mother passed away in 2010 and I especially miss her at this time of year.
For decades we journeyed to England every Christmas, to enjoy being with family and partly to assuage my guilt for leaving and making my life in America.
One thing my Mum and I used to talk about often were the many changes that she had seen in her lifetime b.1918 - 2010. Between the 2 of us we spanned almost the whole 20th century - as a baby boomer I think I had the best of it in the second half of the century as I was born after WWII and both World Wars defined the lives of my families.
Growing up with the huge cultural upheavals at the end of the war, the relative prosperity of the 1950's and 1960's, the birth of rock and roll, the Swinging Sixties, the 'youthquake'
the now quaint sounding sexual revolution - a culture shock itself- what a time to be young !
This program, which I am recommending to boatloads of people was a superior entertainment - one that
teaches or reminds and makes us think anew....
Thank you Sarah Fishko and WNYC
I really enjoyed the program!
Can you please let me know the name of the piece that Jeremy Denk plays at 33:58?
Thank you!
Wonderful program, and what a great idea for a documentary as well. What a great time capsule!
Everytime I hear your promo for the culture shock program with its driving rhythms from Rite of Spring on WNYC, it brings me back to the same rhythm and primal urgency of the shark theme in Jaws-- certainly an hommage to Stravinsky! I think the instrumentation is also similar. HMMMMMMM
Thank you for this program. Came at a perfect time for me when I think our current world is going through such rapid changes and groups are rebelling and the notion of uncertainty is in our faces all the time. It's comforting to know that 100 years ago there were just as many changes and protests were loud. And yes, I hope we have a time of reflection in the near future and really watch and listen to our artists.
@spurn from NYC
Thanks for listening!
It is the Debussy Martyre de Saint Sebastien.
Written in 1911, the work — a five-act musical mystery play on the subject of Saint Sebastian - was produced in collaboration with Gabriele d'Annunzio. Debussy's contribution was a large-scale score of incidental music for orchestra and chorus, with solo vocal parts.
Both Debussy and D'Annunzio (by the way) were present at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Paris on May 29.1913.
Really enjoyed this program.
Can anyone identify the music that occurs from 33:04 - 33:39? I'd love to hear the entire piece.
Beautifully done - balanced, focused, historically anchored but not pedantic, very well edited, hits the high points, which is all you can do in an hour and also reveal the excitement of all these works (many of which, a century later, are still regarded as incomprehensible and scandalous). Please keep doing this kind of thing but run it several times.
This was a FABULOUS show!!! Kudos to Sara Fishko for putting together something so interesting, cohesive, compelling, and surprising. LOTS of disparate information all woven together to form a stupendous whole. Clearly lovingly done. Brava, brava!!!!
Thanks very much for your comment! FYI, later in the program we feature Schoenberg, Freud, Jung, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Nijinsky and cite Einstein, Khlebnikov, Proust and many others as having been central to thinking in this year. We agree, it was a global phenomenon!
This program is a Very Good Thing. One cavil is that it's nearly All-American and does not have to be. In my chapter on 1913 in The First Moderns, I adduced Niels Bohr's quantum atom, the first draft of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, Russell & Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, Khlebnikov at al's multimedia play Victory Over the Sun, Anna Akhmatova's near-epic Poem Without a Hero (which begins with a memory New Year's 1913 in St. Petersburg) and the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Want more?
-WRE
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