The performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 on March 13, 1913, in Vienna, was what you might call an unforgettable concert experience.

Before it came to an abrupt and unscheduled end, the presentation of convention-bending works by Schoenberg and other members of the Second Viennese School reportedly descended into full-contact chamber music, with fist fights and flying furniture.

It even earned its own sobriquet, “The Scandal Concert,” which you should totally Google right now.

“Police were called in, and even the police couldn’t keep things calm,” said Thomas Wilson, associate conductor of the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, who will lead a 15-member ensemble through a performance of Schoenberg’s “controversial” work in the season opener of the Philharmonic’s Signature Series at Ent Center for the Arts’ Shockley-zalabak Theater.

What attendees will hear, as part of a bill that also includes a larger ensemble performing Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, is an aural tour through changing times, in the lives of the composers who created the works, and those who showed up to watch and listen — from boxes and (increasingly) the cheap seats.

While Scandal Concert compositions explored new tonal territory and influences from classical musical traditions around Europe, and to historical ears probably sounded like “pretty modern stuff overall, (it was) nothing earth shattering,” Wilson said.

He said he believes it was the octaval shift in society’s power dynamics, and how the music reflected that shift, that struck a bad chord with the ruling class. The new music wasn’t only aspirational, it was gritty and sometimes jarring. Like real life.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a new middle class being built, with new young intellectuals going to concerts and art galleries ... (who) haven’t been brought up in sheltered environments, and they want art that really speaks to people and captures the human experience,” Wilson said.

The change in musical stylings underscored a growing realization among the aristocracy, who’d for centuries funded and dictated the direction of the arts. Concert halls, and the stories told within them, were no longer just for or about the elite.

“The dissonance of the music they almost saw as a political dissonance in a way,” Wilson said. “Now it’s amazing to think that this (Schoenberg) piece that some people would still call too modern is over 100 years old. It gives you an idea of just how forward thinking these composers really were.”