Modern Music and After – Part 03
Regarding the integration of pitch and rhythm (or frequency and duration, respectively), I came to the same conclusion Stockhausen did within the past decade or so, in my own studies, independently of knowing about Stockhausen’s work. Stockhausen did not have the technological tools to fully pursue these ideas, and ended up going in a completely different direction, but the tools to explore this are sitting right in front of us, using digital sequencing and tuning logarithms.
Stockhausen “wanted to base his organization on the nature of sound. To create a true confluence with the phenomenon of pitch, he introduced a logarithmic scale of twelve tempos- a scale that could be ‘transposed’ by altering the rhythmic unit: for example, a change from crotchets to semibreves, and therefore a deceleration by a factor of four, would be the equivalent of a downward shift of two octaves. Within this system, the obverse of the one proposed earlier by Boulez, a rise of a perfect twelfth would have its analogue in a change of tempo in the ration 3:2 (the frequency ration of a perfect fifth, if one discounts the small discrepancies of temperament) coupled with a halving of the rhythmic unit. So any pitch line could be turned into a duration-tempo succession, a melody of rhythm, and one could also change the timbre of the rhythm, as it were, by adding ‘partials’ in the form of other duration-tempo successions going on at the same time, their number limited only by the practicalities of performance.” We discuss the overtone series with the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Stockhausen tried to accomplish this in his composition Gruppen with traditional orchestral instruments and players, since he didn’t have access to successful computer technology. This was in 1957.
“(Pierre) Boulez was mistrustful of one of Stockhausen’s new departures, finding in it ‘a new sort of automatism, one which, for all its apparent opening the gates to freedom, has only really let in an element of risk that seems to me absolutely inimical to the integrity of the work’…In a crucial article on aleatory composition, Boulez proposes that chance can be ‘absorbed’ in musical structures dependent on a degree of flexibility, perhaps in tempo: there were already examples of such structures in his own music.”
Composers Berio and Barraque, along with Boulez used ‘mobile’ serialism to expand the technique in ways that were not as rigid as the original model. “Mobile form was a neat solution to the problem of how to effect progress and closure in music that had outgrown the supports of tonality and metre. Serial procedures came up with multitudinous alternatives, not chains of succession; mobile form respected that, and also accorded with a new understanding of the work as a manifold, a site of actions and reactions rather than an object. It might seem curious, then, that it has to be spoken of in the past tense, for it did fade rapidly from most composers’ interests after the early 1960s.”
“One striking measure of the avant-garde’s success as a movement is the unprecedented impact composers still in their thirties and forties were having on thoroughly established figures- even the most thoroughly established. Perhaps Stravinsky was a special case- a composer with a constant inquisitiveness and intellectual rapacity. Messiaen, too, was maybe in an unusual position as the man who had had both Boulez and Stockhausen in his classroom, and whose prestige as a teacher brought him into daily contact with young composers.” The questions raised by Boulez and Stockhausen ended up teaching their teacher. Messiaen’s work and influence was profound and we encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study his ideas.
Meanwhile, in America, Edgard Varese was another composer that was an early pioneer in electronic music. “In several ways Varese was Messiaen’s dialectical opposite: American rather than European (though both were born in France), secular rather than sacred, urban rather than rural, spasmodic in creativity rather than continuous, solitary rather than being revered by hundreds of pupils and devoted performers. But the similarities outweigh. Both were impressed by ancient cultures. Both produced some of their best work for ensembles of wind and percussion. Both took from Stravinsky the principle of construction in disjunct blocks. Both were attracted by the ondes martenot, and both used ideas from electronic music (reversal through time, change of speed and register, sound synthesis) in works for instruments. Both- to pick up a tiny point of what seems to have been convergent evolution rather than borrowing- used an ensemble of violins to imitate the Japanese sho…Both, finally, enjoyed a creative renewal around 1950.”
While the older generation was in renewal, a new generation of composers was also arising. “Nono coined the term ‘Darmstadt School’ just at the point, in 1958, when solidarity was breaking down.” Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, and Gyorgy Ligeti became critical of the Darmstadt ideas. “In 1960 Ligeti made some of the same points within the pages of Die Reihe, citing examples from Boulez, Stockhausen, and others to show how serial principles had either proved self-defeating or been replaced by ‘higher order’ principles, such as those governing the temporal structure of Gruppen. Out of this analysis he derived the notion of ‘permeability’ in music: a musical structure is said to be ‘permeable’ if it allows a free choice of interval and ‘impermeable’ if not (he gives the example of Palestrina’s music- a symptomatic choice of a contrapuntalist- as being strictly defined by harmonic rules and hence ‘impermeable’ to an unusual degree.” Music history builds upon itself, so we encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study Palestrina’s influence on modern composition.
There were also followers of the Darmstadt ideas by younger composers. “In the mid-1950’s, the newest works of Boulez and Stockhausen, in particular, had been rapidly imitated by younger composers, as if those works provided the key to the future: Gruppen was followed by numerous scores for spaced orchestral groups, LeMarteau by a host of adamantine ensembles. By the middle of the next decade, the pursuit of fashion and the splintering of factions had together created a turmoil of simultaneous developments.”
“Nono began to present his music in factories- especially La fabbrica illuminata for soprano and tape (1964), which uses the words of factory workers and the noises of factory machines- and to write for new media. Most of his works from this point on use electronics, for reasons both musical and, on several levels, ideological….designed to place the music within the experience of workers, and estrange it from the experience of bourgeois concertgoers. Finally, through tape it was possible to bring into the music direct signals of political involvement: the sounds of street demonstrations in Contrappunto dialettico alla mente (1967-68).”
Luciano Berio “had learned that the ideal of the immediate postwar years, that of starting music again from scratch, could not so easily be accomplished, or at least that it could not be repeatedly accomplished. Stockhausen had spoken of the limitless availability of new systems, waiting to be discovered, but the experience of the 1960s was that history stayed around, even if it was only the history of each composer’s own works. Composition was not pure invention; it was adaptation. And the consciousness of that seems to have led composers to make adaptation the point. Berio, whose Sinfonia is the great classic of music as commentary, produced not only expanding versions of his own scores but also orchestral treatments of works by Brahms, Mahler, and Verdi.”
“Pierre Boulez’s arrival in 1971 to head both the New York Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra is the clearest indication of a match- momentary, as it turned out- between the aspirations of the avant-garde and the needs of leading musical organization. It was not an obvious marriage: in 1964 Leonard Bernstein’s attempt to lead the Philharmonic in Cage’s Atlas eclipticalis (1961-62) had failed for the player’s skepticism with regard to parts drawn from star maps. However, that orchestra had gone on to commission Berio (Sinfonia), Stockhausen (Third Regions of Hymnen), Babbitt (Relata II), and Carter (Concerto for Orchestra), and there was a widespread feeling that orchestras would have to engage more thoroughly with new music if they were not to become guardians of a ‘museum culture’ (which is, for the most part, what happed). At the same time, composers of the 1920s-1930s generation were now in their prime, and most were eager to connect with larger institutions and audiences.”
Milton Babbitt related his experience in the premiers of his work. “The New York Philharmonic had difficulty in finding enough rehearsal time for Relata II- a persistent problem everywhere- and the first performance of its predecessor, Relata I (1965), was even more disappointing: ‘Only about 80 percent of the notes were played at all, and only about 60 percent of these were played accurately rhythmically, and only about 40 percent of these were played with any regard for dynamic values’. Until things could be improved, he concluded, ‘composers of such works who have access to electronic media will, with fewer and fainter pangs of renunciation, enter their electronic studios with their compositions in their heads, and leave those studios with their performances on the tapes in their hands.” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas how electronic music production can successfully be used to convey new ideas.
“A great deal in music since 1945 seems to have been leaning towards cybernetics: the idea of music as sounding numbers, the importance of rules and algorithms in composition, the development of electronic sound synthesis, the concept of the work as a temporary equilibrium of possibilities that could be otherwise realized…Music created with computers is, therefore, part of a much wider concurrence of music and computing.”
Minimalism came to the fore, by way of turning the acoustic musician into a machine, playing patterns repeatedly. The style called Minimalism refers to kinds of music which “emerged in the United States in the 1960s and that wield simple melodic figures in cycles of repetition, the first prominent composers of such music being La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, all born in the mid-1930s. Diverse as these four were, they sometimes played in each other’s ensembles, and they had common sources in rock and Asian music, as mediated in particular by Young.” Henryk Gorecki (1933-2010) is a European composer who also composed in this style. This kind of composition is, again ahead of its time, a precursor to looping in contemporary pop music’s EDM, using such programs as Ableton Live. These composers did not have access to the electronics available today, so much of the ‘repetitious’ aspects of their music was written for live musicians. This form of modern classical composition was much more readily accessible to audiences than other avant-garde works, since the materials were derived in some degree from pop-culture. We teach looping techniques to the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas, which can be generated by software programs like Ableton Live.
Phillip Glass became perhaps the most prominent composer of Minimalism. “Glass worked with Ravi Shankar while pursuing more orthodox studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.” Steve Reich, also well-regarded, “had already set out his own independent areas of interest before Glass established himself: in particular, he fixed the scoring of his pieces, because matters of timbre and texture were always integral, and he concerned himself with continuous processes of change. ‘I want’, he said, ‘to be able to hear the process happening through the sounding music.’ This is rather a remarkable statement. For though music form Bach to Boulez might also seem to expose process, it does so, as experience shows, in ways that are ambiguous and that allow other possibilities of interpretation having nothing to do with process, whereas for Reich, at the start of his career, the process, fully disclosed, was the music.”
The 1970s and 1980s saw America emerge as a dominant world power with conservative leadership, and the music also followed that influence. “A certain conservatism also underlines much of the music of the late 1970s and 1980s…A new word appeared: ‘postmodernism’, which rapidly forked in its meanings almost to the end of usefulness.” Instead of breaking from the past, composers sought to take what existed, “or by mixing styles, as Berio had done in his Sinfonia (or, indeed, Stravinsky in his Agon). Around this same time, the deaths of Stravinsky (1971), Shostakovich (1975), and Britten (1976) brought an end to the era of the composer as public figure, even as the number of professional composers working worldwide started to increase beyond the bounds of summary…Nevertheless, the disintegration of the avant-garde, by now complete, left various cohorts that were…more or less distinct, if all subject to, or participant in, a spirit of recuperation.”
While the 20th century was filled with turbulent experimentation with varied approaches to musical composition, it is well worth studying, in order to find the way forward. We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study these developments, as they will shed light on future paths of creativity.