Number 10: Stravinsky

Stravinsky wrote an enormous amount of music in all sorts of genres, but he makes it into my top ten almost solely on the basis of his ballets. To be honest, I don't much care for the rest of his music. But that really doesn't matter when you're the composer who wrote The Firebird, Petrouchka, Rite of Spring, and Apollon Musagette, just to name a few.

There is a great Stravinsky quote from his book Poetics of Music, where he describes the compositional process this way:
"A composer improvises aimlessly the way an animal grubs about. Both of them go grubbing about because they yield to a compulsion to seek things out. What urge of the composer is satisfied by this investigation? The rules with which, like a penitent, he is burdened? No: he is in quest of his pleasure."
This almost perfectly captures my sense of my own improvisatory composing. It also might explain why Stravinsky's music retained a great vitality even after undergoing a number of radical stylistic changes--he was always grubbing around for something fresh.

I still am amazed by how the composer who wrote this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FWq17CT6Cs

Also wrote this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbWDG3LU4bc

And this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16zasqydUE&feature=related

And then turned around and wrote this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUNQjjbozF8&feature=related

All of his ballets shimmer with beautiful, dynamic, pulsing music. Stravinsky at his rawest creates some of the most crunching harmonies and wrenching rhythms of all. But when he wants to, as in the famous end of the Firebird, he can effortlessly spin the most lyrical and noble of melodies out of that chaos. But even then, all is not as it may seem--the meter of that great punctuated coda is in an unusual 7/4, as you can see conducted in this video of the maestro himself (wait for the timpani whack at 6:07--I played that timpani part in high school and man what a blast):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGA6bpscj8

Stravinsky: Number 10.