Close Encounters with Music offers two tickets to their gala concert, Music That Shook the World featuring Michael Chertock, piano; Yehonatan Berick, violin; and Yehuda Hanani, cello. Performance is at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington on June 11 at 6pm. 

THE 20TH CENTURY saw a series of cultural earthquakes that shook the music establishment and scandalized audiences. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Debussy’s breaking through the German hegemony with Impressionism; granting Jazz concert hall respectability; coupling music with film (from “Bad Boy of Music” George Antheil and Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet Mécanique); and the advent of Latin American vernacular—all radically transformed our notion of classical music. This program brings to the fore some of the direct predecessors of John Cage, Philip Glass and John Adams. Amplifying the music, passages from Igor Stravinsky’s and Antheil’s memoirs will be threaded through the program. In Paris of the 1920s, Antheil’s concerts regularly incited huge riots. Ballet Mécanique is scored for multiple pianos, percussion, electric buzzers and airplane propellers and we offer a segment of the film. (Bring your riot gear!)