It isn’t often that one gets the chance to talk with world-class musicians about the history and meaning of modern music. In a look at their upcoming series, “The Sound of Wild Imagining,” Monadnock Music Artistic Directors Jonathan Bagg and Laura Gilbert shared the inspiration behind the performances, which are funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

They’ve performed all over the world, attained the heights of musical excellence and now Bagg and Gilbert have developed a summer season for Monadnock Music with free and ticketed concerts that’s worthy of recognition in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Yankee Magazine. “The Sound of Wild Imagining” is a three-part ticketed series beginning Aug. 7 at the Peterborough Town House.

In “The Sound of Wild Imagining,” Bagg and Gilbert promise to take listeners back to the beginning of experimental modernist music, back to the European roots of American legend Frank Zappa, a progressive rocker who took his own path, defied categorization and is considered by many to be a musical genius.

In the three concerts that make up the series, Bagg and Gilbert trace two very different musical traditions — the French school and the Viennese-German school — each with its own reaction to the 20th century and both trying to capture the heart and meaning of their country’s worldview.

“These two very strong European threads filtered across the Atlantic [Ocean] to become important threads in the American musical scene,” Bagg said in an interview Monday.
“The Sound of Wild Imagining” is the story of that musical journey and evolution through the 20th century.

For 45 years, Monadnock Music’s mission has been to raise consciousness about the myriad ways of making music and, in that respect, this series is no different, Gilbert said.
“We’re stepping out a little bit from the composers who are generally showcased,” she said about “The Sound of Wild Imagining.”

Aug. 7 performance, “No Strings
Attached”
Before there was Zappa, there was Edgard Varèse, a French-born composer who came to the U.S. in 1915. Varèse was one of the first classical composers to write pieces for percussion instruments alone, Bagg noted.

At age 10 or 11, when Zappa first heard a record of Varèse’s work, he became obsessed, Gilbert said. At age 18, Zappa began corresponding with Varèse, who was known for his experimentation with rhythm and harmonic dissonance.

“There was this lingering influence from his childhood that actually influenced his rock music,” Gilbert said of Zappa.

Varèse traced his influences to Claude Debussy, born in 1862, and the French school of music, and Zappa drew from both of them, Gilbert said. Zappa’s “The Black Page” — included in the Aug. 7 performance, “No Strings Attached” — is a crossover work, neither totally rock nor classical.

“You can’t qualify it truly in a single category,” she said.

Debussy had provided a foundation for experimentation with instruments that others would follow. His “Chansons de Bilitis” features two harps and a celesta, which is a type of keyboard.

An impressionist musician, Debussy also employed a narrator, rather than a singer, who recites old poems.

“That was the beginning of the whole modernist movement in France,” she said. “It’s dancing on the precipice of modernism and transformation at the turn of the 20th century.”

The pieces included in “No Strings Attached” are all avoiding the traditional chamber music and orchestral sound, Bagg explained.

“Debussy and Varèse were trying to escape from that world. They were trying to create new sounds,” Bagg said, adding that the search for something new at a time when change was in the air.

Aug. 8 performance, “Paris of the
Senses”
“Paris of the Senses,” the Aug. 8 performance, looks back at the burgeoning of French modernism in the works of Ernest Chausson, Andre Caplet and Manuel de Falla. Their music captures a moment when the expressive romantic style was on the cusp of change in the 19th century.

“Something was shifting,” Gilbert said.

Chausson was the bridge between the old and the new, and between the French school and the Viennese-German school, she said. Although very much steeped in the French tradition, there are Germanic tendencies in his music structurally and in the phrasing.

Moving forward, new uses of voice and instrumental timbre would create, as Gilbert put it, “a different sonic world than their predecessors” with new uses of voices and instrumental timbre.

Aug. 14 performance, “Moonstruck: Myth, Poetry, and Percussion”
In “Moonstruck: Myth, Poetry, and Percussion,” internationally acclaimed soprano Tony Arnold takes center stage, singing cornerstone pieces of contemporary music, including “Philomel,” by Milton Babbitt. Written in the 1960s, “Philomel” features electronically manipulated voice sounds, Bagg noted.

Babbitt’s work was in the tradition spawned by German composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose piece, “Pierrot Lunaire,” written in 1912 is the opening performance in “Moonstruck.”

“It’s drawn from melodrama,” Bagg said of “Pierrot Lunaire.” “It’s not actually indicated which pitch she’s supposed to be on. ... It’s very impressionistic.”

Schoenberg’s was a “high expressive vocabulary,” Bagg said. “Schoenberg was the root of what came later in Babbitt.”

Taking a cue from what Babbitt had done with voice, Luciano Berio in his “Circles” employs a huge array of percussion instruments, Bagg said.

Schoenberg, Babbitt and Berio were all considered avant guarde in their time. Beginning with Schoenberg, there was a move away from music based in a particular key, which led to other ways of developing music, such as Berio’s percussion pieces and Babbitt’s electronic experiments with sound.

“It was a very, very intoxicating explosion away from traditional constraints,” Bagg said. “What ties them together is they kind of shatter preconceptions of what music can be.”

And somehow, their work never lost the ability to move listeners. “Despite all the experimentation, they were still compelling,” Bagg said.