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Stravinsky made his fame with three big orchestral works: the Firebird Suite, and the ballets Petrushka and the Rite of Spring.

The last is so intense that at its premier there was a riot between people who hated it and people who loved it! It changed the face of music. If you've ever heard pounding, dissonant orchestral music in a movie - like a chase scene - it was either inspired by the Rite of Spring, or by some film score inspired by the Rite of Spring.

Whenever a musician does something people love, they say "more like that, please!" But Stravinsky gave his fans a big fat middle finger, by going off in a different direction. Eventually this led to his so-called "neo-classical period", much less dissonant and superficially rather old-fashioned - unless you, umm, actually pay attention. Very sneaky stuff.

But before that, he wrote Three Pieces for String Quartet, which offhandedly destroys the whole idea of a string quartet:

"Stravinsky's work, for the first time in the history of the genre, is determinedly not a 'string quartet' but a series of pieces to be played by four strings. There is no acknowledgement of a tradition or a form, and the lack of any such acknowledgement seems iconoclastic because of our own experience of the genre's traditions."

I remember watching this performed when I was in college, and absolutely loving it. Here Samuel Andreyev plays the first piece, which is only one minute long, and then explains its intricate structure.

The explanation makes me love it even more - but mainly I like its mood. You may love it, you may hate it, but you don't need to know music theory to have it affect you.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUnYQ50tRo