The Open Ears Project - Episode Nine: On Challenging Expectations

CLEMENCY BURTON HILL: This is the Open Ears Project, welcome to day nine.

JON BATISTE: And this is the opening of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

[MUSIC - The Rite Of Spring by Igor Stravinsky]

That dissonance, is a wistful beautiful melody, and I'm setting you up to feel like that's what's coming. And that's not what's coming. I'm giving you this and then I'm going to challenge your definition in your understanding of what that is. It gives you an insight into Stravinsky's mind.

My name is Jon Batiste.  I am a musician that is a composer as well as a bandleader, I am the music director for the Atlantic magazine, and I'm the artistic director of the Jazz Museum in Harlem. So that's a lot of jobs, but guess what? I like them all.

I've listened to all types of music for years growing up in New Orleans and there's something about music that really grabs you, if it's something that you understand, but if you don't understand it, it kind of repels you.

So The Rite of Spring sounds like cacophony when you first hear it. To me as a child I thought it was people playing all of the notes at the same time and not listening to each other.

But for whatever reason, I was really attracted to it because the Disney cartoon Fantasia...as a child you like woah…. I don't know about this music but Mickey Mouse is happening 

I didn't always watch Fantasia while listening to the piece but listening back I really discovered that…. it’s an arc, it's like an ebb and flow that creates the entire narrative structure for the piece.

Stravinsky, naturally, would take forms and try to twist them and take melody and try to invert it or make it into these things that are challenging your perception like: I'mma flex on you real quick, I'm going to shift it on you and then I'm going to keep going and you just got to follow the thread of these two ideas. 

And that's  exactly the kind of stuff that I like to do.

You know, it's not really like an intellectual pursuit. It's more just about feeling the the wealth of greatness and the depth of humanity that these things that I love really harbor. Because then it opens your world to this other dimension of experience in life.

CBH: Jon Batiste and that inimitable take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, probably one of the most iconic of 20th century classical music, if not all music. If you want to dive in full then it’s coming right up, otherwise you can catch up with it any time over at openearsproject.org. Alright, I’ll be back tomorrow, see you then.