SF Symphony Radio Airs KEEPING SCORE: 13 DAYS...MUSIC CHANGED FOREVER

13 Days When Music Changed Forever, a new radio series that is part of the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas's Keeping Score music education project, is currently airing on New York's Classical 105.9 FM WQXR and streaming live at www.wqxr.org on Tuesday evenings at 10:00 p.m. Broadcasts began on WQXR on June 7 and will continue through August 30. The series of 13 one-hour episodes explores composers, compositions or musical movements that changed the way people heard and thought about music, including seminal events such as the premieres of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica, Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (full program descriptions follow). The Keeping Score project is an integral part of the San Francisco Symphony's almost century-long commitment to make classical music more accessible and meaningful to people of all ages and musical backgrounds.

The 13 Days When Music Changed Forever episodes include musical excerpts mixed with commentary from host, pop icon Suzanne Vega, as well as interviews with Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Michael Tilson Thomas, composers, musicologists, writers, and musicians. The radio series is produced by Tom Voegli who also produced the Peabody Award-winning The MTT Files and American Mavericks radio programs with the San Francisco Symphony.

This radio series is distributed by The WFMT Radio Network and supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lead funding for Keeping Score is provided by the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund. This project is also supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

All 13 episodes of the Keeping Score radio series are also available to be streamed from the Public Radio Exchange web site, www.prx.org.

Unlike any other orchestra initiative in scope or complexity, the national Keeping Score program provides innovative, thought-provoking classical music content via integrated multimedia, including public radio, public television, and interactive web content at keepingscore.org, and materials, training, and lesson plans for teachers using Keeping Score content and media.

New episodes of the Keeping Score television series wholly focused on the life and works of Gustav Mahler will air on New York's WNET/THIRTEEN on Saturday, June 25 at 2:00 p.m. and Saturday, July 2 at 2:00 p.m. Full episode streaming of the television series episodes will be available at video.pbs.org.

Keeping Score: 13 Days When Music Changed Forever

Episode 1 - February 24, 1607: the premiere of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo
WQXR air date: June 7
A program about the dawn of opera, and the development of secular music as through-composed, high art (something that had been the exclusive purview of church music). Up for discussion include precursors to L'Orfeo in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Jacopo Perri's Euridice, written a generation before Monteverdi.

Episode 2 - April 22, 1723: the town council of Leipzig appoints Bach as cantor
WQXR air date: June 14
An exploration of the Baroque and the never-ending legacy of Bach, through Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Steve Reich, and The Doors' Light My Fire.

Episode 3 - October 29, 1787: the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague
WQXR air date: June 21
With this work, Mozart attains his maturity and writes a masterpiece that dominates opera forever afterwards, echoing in Wagner and beyond.

Episode 4 - August 8, 1803: Parisian piano maker Sebastien Erard gives one of his sturdy new creations to Beethoven
WQXR air date: June 28
With this instrument, the composer was able to set aside his forte piano and write more expressive and emotional music, beginning with the Waldstein Sonata. New instruments and new technologies have inalterably changed music many times, but the pace of change quickened in the 20th century, with the record player, the computer, and the Internet.

Episode 5 - April 7, 1805: the first public performance of Beethoven's Eroica
WQXR air date: July 5
Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 changed the idea of what music could express. Instead of classical form and rarified beauty, this symphony lays out the full range of human feelings, from joy and love to hopelessness and pathos.

Episode 6 - August 13, 1876: the launch of the first Ring cycle at Bayreuth
WQXR air date: July 12
A program about the danger and appeal of Wagner's full-immersion mythology and why the composer was so important, even to those who hated him.

Episode 7 - May 6, 1889: the opening day of the Exposition Universelle in Paris
WQXR air date: July 19
The Exposition Universelle was where Debussy first heard gamelan music, and "world" music became a part of Western European classical language. Composers before and after Debussy frequently turned to vernacular sources for inspiration, with Brahms, Mahler, and Bartók incorporating folk melodies, Copland and Gershwin using the rhythms of Latin dance, and Steve Reich quoting West African drumming.

Episode 8 - January 5, 1909: the premiere of Elektra
WQXR air date: July 26
Elektra is Richard Strauss's most daring work, and perhaps the only piece from the days of early modernism that retains its ability to shock today.

Episode 9 - May 29, 1913: the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring
WQXR air date: August 2
Stravinsky's completely original instrumentation and rhythms, and his use of dissonance, have made this work one of the most important of the 20th century. The riot and ensuing scandal caused this Paris premiere to be one of the most shocking in all of performance history.

Episode 10 - December 26, 1926: the premiere of Tapiola
WQXR air date: August 9
This tone poem by Sibelius was his last major work before thirty years of silence, during which his admirers waited for an eighth symphony that never came. Sibelius in his time was seen as a nationalist along the lines of Grieg, but we now hear his music as radical and astonishingly prescient.

Episode 11 - January 10, 1931: the debut of Charles Ives's Three Places in New England
WQXR air date: August 16
This work was performed for the first time to mild applause at a concert funded by the composer himself. Mild applause, but Ives's music was revolutionary. Before him, American concert music was almost entirely based on European models. After him, through Copland, Cage, and beyond, American "classical" music found its own voice.

Episode 12 - January 28, 1936: the publication in Pravda of the article "Chaos Instead of Music"
WQXR air date: August 23
This article signaled Stalin's displeasure with Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and led to the composer's "redemption" in his Symphony No. 5. This program explores Shostakovich and the sometimes mutually beneficial, sometimes terrifying, relationship between music and the totalitarian state.

Episode 13 - November 4, 1964: the premiere of Terry Riley's In C
WQXR air date: August 30
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.

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