You may not remember the 1480s, or the 1580s, or the 1680s, or the 1780s or the 1880s that well, so we thought we’d tell you about them. Hopefully we'll do such a bang-up job that you’ll end up feeling like you lived through them — that way our weekend of ’80s music will just be one nostalgic trip for you after another.
Tune in to WQXR all weekend for music from the ’80s and ’80s and ’80s and ’80s and ’80s and ’80s!
Here’s some of the best of the ’80s — all of them —in ascending order.
1480s
After massive armies would go to war over issues like “who owns this poorly insulated castle?” and “who is going to sit on this uncomfortable wooden chair in said castle?”, composers would sometimes write musical representations of the battles. Callec battaglias, they imagined sounds of drum beats and artillery fire, and replicated them on instruments. In the late 1480s, Flemish composer Heinrich Isaac wrote his own battaglia. The exact circumstances surrounding the piece aren’t certain, but it’s often thought A la Battaglia was written to commemorate the end of a 15-year war between the Italian Kingdoms of Florence and Genoa.
At around the same time Isaac’s more famous fellow Fleming, Josquin de Prez, was doing his part to revolutionize vocal music. In short, his biggest contributions came in the development of polyphony — two or more voices singing independent melodic lines.
1580s
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Canticum Canticorum consists of a series of motets taken from the biblical Song of Songs. But with titles like “Let Him Kiss Me,” “You Have Ravished My Heart” and “Thy Two Breasts are Like Young Roses,” we wouldn’t blame you for wondering if you were about to listen to a collection of Prince or Vanity 6 B-sides.
A few years after Palestrina’s sultry songs seized Europe, Claudio Monteverdi dropped his first book of madrigals. He would later come to dominate the song form, though his most influential efforts wouldn’t come until after 1600. That doesn’t make this 1587 collection any less great — it’s an outstanding rookie effort.
1680s
“Thriller.” “Eye of the Tiger.” “Canon in D.” All slam dunks, all born of the ’80s. German composer Johann Pachelbel wrote everyone’s favorite string-fest in 1680, but it didn’t blow up until 300 years later. A 1968 recording by Jean-François Paillard’s chamber orchestra made the whole world swoon, and in 1980 that same recording was used in the soundtrack for Ordinary People. If we’re just judging by reach, Pachelbel's Canon might just be the biggest ’80s hit of them all.
1780s
If you were a composer between 1780 and 1789, and you suffered the misfortune of not having a “Haydn” or “Mozart” behind your name, life must have been tough. The classical era reigned supreme, and those are still the two biggest names we associate with the period. 1984 might have given us Amadeus, but in 1784 Mozart gave the world some great chamber music and (possibly) a horn concerto. That same year, Haydn put out three symphonies, a string quartet and four piano trios. At least. And that’s not even thinking about the other years in that decade. You know, the ones that gave us Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D (1783) and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1787).
1880s
As part of the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1880s brand relaunch, Semper Fidelis (“Always Faithful”) was named the motto. In 1884, John Philip Sousa wrote a march of the same name, and it has since become the official march of that military branch.
On the other side of the Atlantic, European composers shared works that have since found their own ways into our hearts. Saint-Saens, ready to prove that he had a killer sense of humor, wrote the Carnival of the Animals suite; while Tchaikovsky melted our hearts with his romantic Sleeping Beauty.
1980s
The most recent ’80s, and the one we’re most willing to bet you can remember. In the span of ten years, John Williams dropped the iconic scores of two Star Wars movies, three Indiana Jones flicks, and E.T. For many of us, we couldn’t ask for a better soundtrack to childhood.
Philip Glass is another name that sticks out. Not only did he complete the score for one of the greatest documentary films of all time, he also turned us on to his first Violin Concerto, which makes everything — from the stew plopping on your stove to your morning dash to the subway — infinitely more intense, in the best way possible.