The Chord That Ended Classical Music

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]One thing I've always found fascinating is the way that we divide our culture into different historical eras. Painting distinguishes between the Baroque and impressionist eras. Literature distinguishes between the modernist and post-modernist eras. Film has its silent era preceding the era of classical Hollywood and so on. But of all the arts, perhaps none is more categorized into periods, traditions, and genres than music. And of all the many taxonomical distinctions that are made in the history of music, the one that I find the most interesting is the boundary between what we today call classical music as distinct from modern music. And as it turns out, musicologists often point to not only a single piece of music as delineating that boundary, but even to a single chord within that piece. That chord is called the augers of spring chord, and it sounds like this.

[00:00:52]And in this video, we'll talk about why this chord is special, how it caused a riot in 1913, and why over a century later, it has the dubious distinction of signaling the end of classical music.

[00:01:08]The chord is from the score of a ballet written by Igor Stravinsky. That ballet is called the right of spring, and the chord in question plays just after the introduction. The curtain is raised, revealing a primeval landscape and a group of young girls in a strange ritualistic pose. Then the chord plays 59 times. And just as shocking as the chord's harmony is the chord's staggered rhythm.

[00:01:42]Now, if this stabbing rhythm sounds familiar, you might be remembering the dinosaur sequence from Fantasia, which imagined the augur's cord as explosions of burbling lava.

[00:01:57]That film released in 1940, only 27 years after the piece premiered. By the way, Stravinsky was actually alive to see it and even approved the use of his music. Here he is photographed with Walt Disney. It's really an appropriate visual for a musical cue that was very intentionally designed to conjure a feeling of the primitive. The figures in the ballet are a Slavic tribe preparing a ritualistic sacrifice. It's not exactly Swan Lake, something we might consider to be more on the classical side of the fence. Now, when most people hear that word classical, they probably think of the same couple of names. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. It's all violins and powdered wigs and grand opera halls.

[00:02:39]Now, of course, the history of Western music can be broken down into more granular classifications with the Renaissance and Baroque periods preceding the classical and the romantic period sitting between classical and modern. But more important than the timeline of this art form is the medium of the art form. So Michelangelo's medium was marble. Monaet's medium was oil paint. What medium were artists like Shopan, Tchaikovski, and Vivaldi working in when they composed their grand symphonies, operas, and conertos? Yes, music is the general answer, but there's also a more precise answer, and that is tonal music. The late great musicologist Leonard Bernstein has a great metaphor for explaining what tonality means in music. He says we should imagine tonal music as a baseball diamond. You start at home plate. You leave home and arrive at some other chord.

[00:03:35]You continue on your tonal journey.

[00:03:39]And just before the final stretch, there's a moment of harmonic tension which resolves as you slide back into home plate. a musical home run.

[00:03:50]Now, this is of course an incredibly simplified metaphor, but the essential idea is neatly illustrated. The great classical musicians were just exploring tonality by circling the bases in ever more novel and sophisticated ways. So, here's a familiar piece that takes you on a very simple tonal journey.

[00:04:16]And if you just make that a million times more complex, you get Beethoven's ninth than all the others.

[00:04:35]Now, when people hear the word modern music, they don't necessarily get the same couple of names popping to mind. If we take the term to refer to the period of time since classical music until now, then well, pretty much everything is modern music. But if we're talking about just the early 20th century and the aesthetic rebellion against tonal music, then you might think of a name like John Cage. He's known for things like the prepared piano, basically a modded piano designed to sound really weird.

[00:05:08]He's also the guy who composed the famous piece 433 which is just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence with the idea being that whatever ambient sounds you might hear in the auditorium in that moment that is the music.

[00:05:26]So he was all about redefining the concept of music itself.

[00:05:32]This is of course the absolute opposite of classical music because it makes no attempt whatsoever to explore tonality and it definitely doesn't care about rounding the bases to home plate with some satisfying resolution to the tonic.

[00:05:47]Now, I only point out this type of avongguard music to illustrate how much music really changed in the early 20th century. And one naturally wonders why the old ways seem to suddenly unravel into this sort of aesthetic chaos. How did we get to literal urinal being exhibited in art galleries? Well, many have observed that the world itself seemed to be unraveling during this time period. And if we grant that music is in some ways a reflection of what's happening in the broader culture, then it's pretty tempting to point to things like industrialization, revolutions, and world wars as the explanation for why so many art forms seem to abandon old assumptions. Here is often quoted William Butler Yates, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." The center being the organizing principles of society, belief in a shared truth, and things like that. And there's no shortage of examples of famous works of art from the early 20th century that fit neatly into the narrative that some old aesthetic order was fracturing. And I guess where I'm going with this video is to show you what this broader aesthetic revolution meant for music. I mentioned Leonard Bernstein before and he was one of the great music educators of the 20th century. He gave a series of televised lectures in the 1970s where he laid out his theory that modern music wasn't a mere evolution in musical philosophy.

[00:07:08]was a full-on crisis and he understands it primarily as a crisis of tonality. He points to a famous opera from 1865 by Richard Vagner called Tristan and his old as one of the first examples of the cracks forming in the edifice of traditional tonal harmony. So listen to the introduction.

[00:07:49]These chords do not resolve in the way your ear might expect. And just to show you what I mean, here's what it would sound like if it did resolve.

[00:08:06]Vagner instead suspends that resolution indefinitely, climbing the ladder of emotional suspense as each longing chord in search of a resolution never finds it, much as Tristan longs for isol. If you're wondering what the complete abandonment of tonality sounds like, then Bernstein has an answer for you, too. Arnold Schunberg's music is an attempt to create a completely new tonal system called 12 tone serialism. The basic idea is that you take all 12 notes from the chromatic scale and arrange them in a particular order. You cannot repeat a note until all 12 have been used. So, here's what a single tone row might sound like.

[00:08:54]Now, the point isn't to make it random, but make sure that no single note ever feels more important than the others or has a feeling of resolution. It's like 12 bases, but with no home plate. And while Bernstein considered Shonberg's a tonal experiment to be an admirable intellectual project, he also understood that this was likely not a plausible future for popular musical expression.

[00:09:17]And actually, if you analyze Shonberg's work really deeply, you could make the argument that it's still just in the same traditional tonal system. What's really interesting for our purposes is that Leonard Bernstein considered this to be a kind of terminus for the art form that we think of as classical music. It's not that artists suddenly became incapable of writing great symphonies of the caliber of Mozart and Beethoven. It's just that those new symphonies would never achieve the artistic relevance of those earlier works. Sort of like if a painter today had the idea of painting the impression of a scene rather than faithfully representing it. You'd say, "Wow, nice impressionist painting. You can paint just like Monae. Who cares?" The point is that music as a broad artistic movement had nowhere to go. Once you get to the point of scrambling 12 tones into a row just to create a novel sound, well, you've kind of jumped the shark in a way. So, what does all this mean for Stravinsky, who is kind of in between Vagner and Shonberg? Well, to understand, let's look more closely at the Augers chord itself. On its surface, the chord just sounds dissonant, meaning that the notes seem to clash with each other.

[00:10:29]But if you deconstruct the chord, you'll see that it's actually two chords. On the bottom is an E major and on top is an E flat dominant 7.

[00:10:41]Now, each one on its own sounds perfectly consonant, but played together, they create this really interesting harmonic tension.

[00:10:54]Now, is that just arbitrary banging, letting the fingers fall where they may?

[00:10:59]On the contrary, that repeated chord is carefully devised and structured through bonality.

[00:11:07]It's not a tonal. There's not a complete lack of a tonal center. It's bonal with two simultaneous tonal centers, which, as Leonard Bernstein would point out, is still within the standard system of tonality. It pushes the limit of what might be acceptable to the ears of a Parisian in 1913, but it doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater by presuming to completely reinvent music from the ground up. In fact, the argument could be made that Stravinsky saved classical music with this chord by proving that there were still new and uncharted regions of tonality left to explore. Sure, these new musical excursions might look and sound completely different and might not even initially be regarded as serious music, but fundamentally they would still be continuing the same basic aesthetic project, just maybe without the powdered wigs. And this is why the right of spring is such a famous piece because when it premiered in Paris in 1913, it is purported to have caused a riot in which the old ways clashed with the new.

[00:12:09]So, the more expensive box seats were full of rich people who were offended by this strange new musical blasphemy, while down in the cheap seats, a younger class of Bohemians cheered on in approval. This conflict got so loud and chaotic that the dancers were unable to hear the music and couldn't really perform. By some accounts, there were even fist fights and the police had to be called to break the whole thing up.

[00:12:32]Sounds awesome. Of course, we'll never know how much of this story is just embellishment, but in any case, the incident is often cited as the moment the modern world broke from the old world all over this one little chord.

[00:12:44]Now, to be clear, it's not that Stravinsky was the first artist ever to explore this kind of sound, just as Monae wasn't the first painter to paint atmosphere. But judging by Strinsk's own stated interest in this particular chord, >> I like very much this was rather new chord. You know, >> it's likely that he knew he was making an artistic or even philosophical statement by making it so prominent in the piece. As for whether it ended classical music, that's probably more of a semantic debate. Orchestral music still thrives as an art form, especially as film score. And in fact, many of the most famous modern composers are directly influenced by Stravinsky. Check out this scene from Star Wars.

[00:13:45]And here's the crazy part. What you just heard is not John Williams score. That's actually just a clip from the right of spring. Stravinsky is very often cited by artists known to be innovators like Miles Davis, Joanie Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and even outside of music, he was close friends with Picasso, who is himself often cited as a bellweather of modernism. Now, I'm not here to make the argument that this little anecdote about the right of spring is the correct way to think about our musical history. In fact, if anything, I'd actually caution against trying to fit complex histories into neat little stories. But on the other hand, sometimes a story like this one can provide insight because after all, we all have jobs and nobody really has time to learn all the nuance of classical music. Maybe Leonard Bernstein's genius was not only in his comprehension of music, but in his ability to tell a story about it in a way that just helps people understand it. His theory about the great tonal experiment can help to explain some of today's most interesting musical innovations, many of which do actually work outside the 12 tone system. So, if you can just temper your understanding by recognizing that stories often simplify a much more complicated truth, your reward will be a more enriched experience of the world around you and a new kind of appreciation for something as apparently simple as a strange sounding chord. So, thank you for watching. Check out my Patreon if you'd like to support this channel and I'll see you on the next one.