Modern Music and After – Part 01
This is an extensive history of Avant-guard music, detailing the lives of composers, their associations, influences, and techniques starting from 1945 to the present. The main cultural centers where composers studied and influenced one another’s thoughts were Paris (where IRCAM- Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, or the English translation- Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) was founded through Pierre Boulez’ influence; Darmstadt, Germany (in which the Serialism technique was explored, expanded and critiqued); and New York City. The major composers who influenced and challenged long-held traditional concepts were Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Olivier Messiaen. The questions these individuals raised about how music is perceived and created became a turning point in the history of music in and around the 1950’s. Their radical thoughts since then have created a number of reactionary groups, which have since been trying to assimilate their thoughts and methodologies. Since the mid-twentieth century, composers have not seen or been involved in creating the same kind of upheaval or radicalism, but rather have tried to find new meaning and creativity on the other side of a centuries-long history of harmony that had been shattered by their teachers. We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study these forefront composers and their ideas.
Pierre Boulez was a student of Olivier Messiaen in Paris. “Messiaen recalled that during this period Boulez ‘was in revolt against everything’; Boulez himself remembers that ‘it was our privilege to make the discoveries and also to find ourselves faced with nothing’. The artist who is ‘against everything’ can, by virtue of that, look around him and find ‘nothing’.”
Boulez criticized his teacher, saying in an article published in 1948, that “Messiaen ‘does not compose- he juxtaposes.’ and admonishes Bartok for having a rhythmic style ‘much simpler and more traditional’ than that of The Rite of Spring, Jolivet because ‘his empirical technique has prevented him from going very far’, Messiaen for failing to integrate rhythm and harmony, Schoenberg and Berg because they ‘remain attached to the classical bar and the old idea of rhythm’, and Varese ‘for spiriting away the whole problem of technique…a facile solution which solves nothing’. Even Webern- whom the young Boulez took as a touchstone of unflinching modernism, and whom he was at pains to isolate from other members of that crucial grandfatherly generation as the only exemplar- even Webern is glancingly, parenthetically chided for ‘his attachment to rhythmic tradition.” As Boulez did, we encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas not to be afraid of challenging the status quo.
Speaking of his Second Piano Sonata, Boulez recalls, “I tried to destroy the first-movement sonata form, to disintegrate slow movement form by the use of the trope, and repetitive scherzo form by the use of variation form, and finally, in the fourth movement, to demolish fugal and canonic form. Perhaps I am using too many negative terms, but the Second Sonata does have this explosive, disintegrating and dispersive character, and in spite of its own very restricting form the destruction of all these classical moulds was quite deliberate.”
Composers were just beginning to experiment with electronic music, as the tools were in their infancy. In “May of 1948 Pierre Schaeffer created the first example of what became known as ‘musique concrete’: Etude aux Chemins de fer, a three-minute piece made by manipulating recording of railway trains. Experiments with discs had been conducted before the war, notably (and independently) by Milhaud, Hindemith, and Varese, but it remained to Schaeffer to discover and use the basic techniques of sound transformation: reversing a sound by playing its recording backward, altering it in pitch, speed, and timbre by changing the velocity of play-back, isolating elements from it, and superimposing one sound on another. Just as important as these possibilities was the change to the art of composition. Every example of musique concrete was an improvisation created by the composer working directly with the sounds available.” Amazingly, this marked the early beginnings of what we now know in pop-music as EDM. These early composers would have loved to have the technology available today, less than a century away from their creative exploits. As a matter of fact, Schaeffer had hoped “to employ an array of gramophone turn-tables as ‘the most general musical instrument possible’, providing facilities for altering any sound derived from the real world.” This literally describes what we have come to know as a DJ, at work in clubs in the 1990s. Schaeffer envisioned it decades earlier! We teach the use of electronic music and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) to the students of our music school in Odessa, Texas.
John Cage, in 1937, “had expressed his optimistic view of the potential electronic evolution of music, and in 1942- after he had made his first electronic experiments, beginning with the 1939 turntables with frequency recordings- he had been more specific: ‘Many musicians,’ he had written, ‘the writer included, have dreamed of compact technological boxes, inside which all audible sounds, including noise, would be ready to come forth at the command of the composer’. This is an extremely provocative statement envisioning what would be state-of-the-art technology decades later. Technology, such as Ableton Live, running on any laptop, producing time and pitch altering loops was possible in the early 2000’s, sixty years later.
Cage’s concept of rhythm, which again ties into looping technology, was “for music to be structured on the basis of duration (possessed by all kinds of sound, and silence) rather than harmony (possessed only by pitched tones in combination).” He applauds “Satie and Webern for correctly using duration as the measure: ‘There can be no right making of music that does not structure itself from the very roots of sound and silence- lengths of time…to bring into co-being elements paradoxical by nature, to bring into one situation elements that can be and ought to be agreed upon- this is, Law elements- together with elements that cannot and ought not to be agreed upon- that is, Freedom elements- these two ornamented by other elements, which may lend support to one or the other of the two fundamental and opposed elements, the whole forming thereby an organic entity’. We teach the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the value of understanding the synthesis of various layers of rhythmic durations.
Boulez and Cage appreciated each other’s work, and were similar in a few regards. “Both composers made extensive use of number charts, but where Boulez’s goal with these was total serial organization, Cage’s was non-intention. For Boulez, objective rule was a guarding against traditional values, a guarantor of independence: he as composer was master of the rule. For Cage, always more radical, mastery of the rule was an idle conceit: he was delighted by the possibility of removing his own creative wishes…’my music had been based on the traditional idea that you had to say something. The charts gave me my first indication of the possibility of saying nothing’. Some of Cage’s works applying the ‘coin-tossing’ method were Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1951-2) and Williams Mix (1952).
Messiaen’s reaction to Boulez’ criticism, in his own words, “compelled me to undertake studies I might not have dreamt of, had it not been for them.” And much of Cage’s work expanded the concept of Serialism not only to include pitch organization, but also of amplitude and timbre. Duration, amplitude, frequency, and timbre were the four characteristics of sound that composers could manipulate with the Serial technique. Messiaen experimented with this high degree of organization in Mode de valeurs, in which “each of the thirty-six pitches is permanently associated with one of the thirty-six durations, and each also keeps the same values in the other two parameters, of which ‘amplitude’ is represented by seven dynamic levels and ‘timbre’ by seven different attack markings…For Messiaen, the Mode de valeurs was at an extreme point of pre-compositional systematization.” We teach the concepts of serialism to the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Boulez, on the other hand, “obtained his duration series by applying numbers to the pitch series, and then translating all the other serial forms into number sequences by using the same pitch-number equivalences: thus the retrograde inversion B-F-C-Bb-A-…translates as 12-11-9-10-3-…Boulez also arranged the number sequences- twelve for the prime forms, twelve for the inverted forms (retrogrades can be simply read off backwards)- in two twelve-by-twelve squares, and obtained series of dynamic markings by reading the squares diagonally and interpreting the numbers on a scale from 1 = pppp to 12 = ffff. Structures Ia is quite simply a presentation of the forty-eight forms of the pitch series, each with a different form of the duration series (so that pitches do not always have the same durations, as happens in the Mode de valeurs and generally within each major section of Kreuzspiel), and each with a particular dynamic level and attack marking.
Many of these highly organized structures by these 20th Century composers can be appreciated and analyzed for new uses in current compositions. We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be open to the possibilities of new experimentation for their own creativity.