At 11 a.m. on today's date in 1918, the Allied powers signed a ceasefire agreement with Germany in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne in France, bringing to an end the enormous physical and emotional devastation of the First World War. And if one were looking for a precise point at which the world of the 19th century really and truly ended, this might be as good a one as any.

The post-1918 world was a traumatized new age, disillusioned with a tarnished past, and in the arts, figures like Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso emerged offering new ways of looking and listening.

At the exact hour the Armistice was being signed in France, Stravinsky was in Switzerland, putting the finishing touches to a chamber orchestra piece he titled "Ragtime." This music was inspired by American jazz, and, just as the minuet seemed appropriate for the 18th century and the waltz for the 19th, Stravinsky seemed to be saying a jazz dance might be just the thing for the 20th.

Looking back at that moment, Stravinsky wrote, "Jazz meant, in any case, a wholly new sound in my music… and marks my final break with the Russian orchestral school in which I had been fostered."

It's lean, brash, and sharp-edged "modern" music. And when Stravinsky's "Ragtime" was published in 1919, it featured a lean, brash, and sharp-edged "modern" cover drawing for the score by Stravinsky's good friend and occasional collaborator, Pablo Picasso.