Icon: Igor Stravinsky

In 1909, the impresario Serge Diaghilev, who repackaged Russian culture as urbane spectacle intended for export to the West, happened to hear a work by a young composer named Igor Stravinsky, and promptly asked him to write a score for his dance company, the Ballets Russes. The result was The Firebird, an incandescent setting of a Russian folk tale. In a burst of revolutionary inventiveness, Stravinsky churned out two more ballets, Petrushka... and The Rite of Spring, that kicked music out of the 19th century and into the heart of the 20th. In Rite of Spring, which narrates a ritual sacrifice in an imaginary prehistoric Russia, he used loudness to overpower the ears, rhythmic intensity as a depiction of violence, and tough, jagged sounds to evoke primal emotions. All of which makes the dapper Igor Feodorovich from St. Petersburg a forefather of...punk.

Stravinsky left Russia as a young man, and if he ever had a thought of returning, the 1917 revolution expunged it. He became a borderless soul, gliding among languages, styles and homes and winding up in that haven of the deracinated émigré, Los Angeles. Still, the composer never forgot the Russian peasant music he heard as a child near the family's rural retreat, and he adapted its biting voices and herky-jerky rhythms... in his concert works. Les Noces, which chronicles a rustic wedding, requires a strange detachment of musicians: four pianists, two percussionists, four solo singers and a large chorus — but no orchestra. For obvious logistical reasons, it hardly ever gets played, yet it's one of Stravinsky's most powerful pieces, a tour de force of Russian folk modernism.

Even during the early rafter-shaking period of Rite of Spring, Stravinsky always cultivated the mystique of aloofness. After the traumas of World War I he, like so many prewar cultural flamethrowers, retreated to the cool comforts of neoclassicism. He took his topics and models from antiquity, insisted that music expressed no emotions and that his works should be performed with studious neutrality. The odd thing is that the stage work Oedipus Rex... is a story of extreme distress, parricide, incest and overweening guilt — hardly the stuff of Apollonian poise. (That would be the ballet Apollo. To chill the piece a bit, Jean Cocteau had his libretto translated into Latin and included a spoken narration. Even so, when performed with sufficient bite and the right dose of Slavic energy, Oedipus Rex becomes a work of riveting drama.

Stravinsky didn't just write important pieces or forge a personal style: He invented techniques of expression that changed the way instruments were taught and orchestras played for the next 100 years, at least. Pinprick staccatos, sledgehammer accents, clockwork ostinatos, sudden jumps of volume, melodic lines that quiver with rhythmic energy even at a languorous pace — these now standard aspects of contemporary orchestral playing developed to meet Stravinsky's demands. So even though... other conductors have led his music more capably than he, the fact that the he recorded his own orchestral works provides a kind of scriptural guide to the modern sensibility. When he was on the podium, and listeners heard a hectic whirl of timbres, they might not understand it, but they could be sure that's exactly what the composer had in mind.

When Stravinsky encountered ragtime, he saw in it the American equivalent of the Russian folk tune: music with a simple backbone and supple rhythm that could support a whole armature of variations. The result of his fascination, though, was more idiosyncratic than a concert adaptation: a series of pieces that treated the music of black Americans as if he had heard it only in Russian translation and then passed it through the... shredder of his own compositional process. In Piano-Rag Music, Stravinsky chops up the oom-pah stride patterns into irregular bursts, so that the tension between regular bass line and syncopated melody disappears. What's left is a jittery puppet dance. Nearly three decades later, Stravinsky wrote a concerto for the jazz clarinetist Woody Herman, and this time he achieved the hot fusion he was after: the sharp-crease attacks, brassy colors and sexy syncopations of big-band playing, combined with his own love for asymmetry, surprise and obstinate repetition.

One sign that Stravinsky was recovering nicely from the austere internationalism of the neoclassical period was his decision in 1926 to return to the Russian Orthodox Church after a long sabbatical. He grew up hearing the rich, deep chants of monks, and Symphony of Psalms, which he wrote in 1930, was a way of rendering homage to his country's choral traditions and to his own renascent devotion. He did not, however, embrace... an easy or consoling faith: "The psalms are poems of exaltation, but also of anger and judgment, and even of curses," he wrote, and the choral symphony bristles sublimely. It's a piece that synthesizes many of Stravinsky's various contradictory strains: old Russia, distant antiquity, baroque religious drama, brilliant orchestration, and unsentimental modernity.

World War II drove Stravinsky to the United States, where he lived for the last 30 years of his life as somewhat incongruous legend, a messenger from an earlier era. America both honored and ignored him. The distance he covered from Czarist St. Petersburg to Beverly Hills in the 1960s was reflected in the stylistic trajectory of his music, yet his American scores reveal an uneasy relationship with his adopted country. In... 1940, he tinkered so fearlessly with the Star-Spangled Banner — flavoring it with peppery harmonies and unsettling orchestrations — that at the premiere in Boston's Symphony Hall, cops rushed to the scene of the musical crime and arrested him for tampering with national property: a mug shot exists to prove it. His Symphony in Three Movements, a vivid, vigorous piece that alternates between violence and charm, suggests a composer trying, with mixed success, to reclaim the energy and freshness of his early years and at the same time endear himself to a musically conservative public.

During the fat years of the Ballets Russes, before World War I, Stravinsky got used to long rehearsal periods, opulent productions, and massive orchestras. The war put an end to big budgets and cumbersome tours, so the ever-flexible composer responded with a portable theater piece for one narrator, two actors, a dancer and a pocket orchestra of seven players. A Soldier's Tale looks and sounds like the music-theater equivalent of a cubist... painting: a fiddle, a game of cards, and a score made of irregularly fractured rhythms and jagged shards of melody. Yet despite its acerbic cool, the work is a tragedy, a thoroughly modern combination of the Faust and Orpheus stories, without the promise of redemption. This tiny epic proved vastly influential, partly because it showed composers how much moral and musical ground could be covered with the most minimal resources.