Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 – Part 02
Modern Music in late 20th century and early 21st century became so fractured in its diversity that in order to succeed, composers began to seek ways of integrating techniques and philosophies from divergent school of thought. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be open to combining elements that were not previously thought of as going together, in order to create new paths forward.
“What is new is the way techniques are combined…The units may not be new, but the idea- almost an ethical principle- that things should be open to integration like this is characteristic of our times. We have already seen examples of how, in the last twenty years or so, basic musical elements such as harmony, meter, noise, and silence were becoming susceptible to this principle and how they could be used outside the contexts to which they might appear most suited.”
In a dialogue between modern classical composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and three techno musicians (including Plastikman, Richie Hawtin) there were critiques from both sides of the musical spectrum. Although both used electronic music, “there seemed to be little intellectual connection between the two scenes, contemporary composition and electronic dance music. Stockhausen’s initial remark was: ‘I wish those musicians would not allow themselves any repetitions, and would go faster in developing their ideas or language. It is like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can’t get words out of his mouth.’ In their own responses… ‘Stockhausen should experiment more with standard melodies, try and subvert them…He should stop being so afraid of the normal: by being so afraid of the normal he’s being normal himself by being the complete opposite. He should try to blend the two together: that would be new and interesting.”
The technology of computer sampling became extremely important to creativity. Steve Reich had been working laboriously with developing technology, but the modern computer made sampling sounds (i.e. recording them and manipulating them) even easier. We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas about sampling sounds and other kinds of synthesis techniques.
“A greater challenge to the traditional form came from outside the sphere of classical music, as electronica and dance artists began to sample works of contemporary music, thus treating contemporary composition according to the same terms as funk, soul, rock, and other more commonly sampled genres.”
“Composers have always had to negotiate their place between popular and ‘high’ culture in order to make a living. However, such matters became more visible and moved closer to the center of concern toward the end of the century as a result of the forces of mediation and the marketplace, and the general breaking down of boundaries and redefinition of the significance of the listener.” Being able to navigate what is popularly accessible with what is aesthetically experimental is not always easy. We try to help students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be aware of these dynamics.
Technology became an important factor in the 1990s and “The MP3 therefore effectively enabled access to any music recorded from anywhere in the world to anyone with a broadband connection and the right software,” bringing about an age where the “materiality of cultural objects, or the boundaries between them that define them as themselves- a piece of music, a novel, a photograph- need no longer be a property of these objects themselves. Instead it is the software and hardware that make the pure data ‘physical.’”
“Dematerialization does not just have implications for portability, storage, transferal, and scale. It also enables endless possibilities for inter-medial translation and transformation…the way in which a sound, recorded in digital format, can be extracted from its original context and reused in an entirely new musical setting. This is the process more commonly known as sampling. Sampling is related to the much older notion of quotation, but with two important differences. Unlike a musical quotation- such as occurs in a Bach choral prelude, for example, in which an existing melody is copied by the composer as musical notation, to be interpreted by a performer- a sample is a duplication of the original in the same form, a slice of a recording rendered as a new recording.”
“As it has in popular music, the power of home computers- and more recently mobile phones and tablets- to act as digital audio workstations has encouraged an explosion of un-mappable diversity in electroacoustic composition.” We train students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to understand the basics of a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
“Digital technology, through sampling and video…enables multiple ways…in which live musicians, electronic soundtracks, and, latterly, video combine to create dialogues between the real and the virtual.”
Experimentation with other ways to approach making music came in GeneMusiK (2003), by Nigel Helyer. “First, an existing melody is recoded as a DNA strand. This DNA is then created in the lab and allowed to grow within a bacterial culture, which breeds and transforms the original DNA sequence as it does so. After a time, this new DNA is analyzed and re-sequenced before being coded back as music.”
Another direction, “At the same time, music has increasingly begun to make use of specificity and spectacle…moving as much of their programming as possible outside the traditional concert hall and into galleries, public spaces, unused industrial buildings, and so on.”
Merging genres also became the goal of the Silk Road Project, “built on the principles of cultural exchange, learning and understanding,” founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. “The Silk Road Ensemble’s mash-up of global musical styles is an example of the sort of cross-genre permissiveness…and its more instrumental angle attract investment that more conventional, ‘abstract’ compositional approaches cannot.” We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to experiment with global music styles.
Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented on a grand scale in his composition, Helikopter-Streichquartett (1992-3). “When four Alouette III helicopters of the Royal Dutch Air Force’s Grasshoppers display team took off from Deelen Air Base, north of Arnhem, on June 26, 1995, each with a member of the Arditti String Quartet inside, a new line was crossed in musical extravagance.”
Greater complexity was another direction of some composers. “Over the last two or three decades, the music of Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) has taken on an almost talismanic quality. Not one of the world’s most regularly performed living composers (although the obscurity of his music can be overstated), he is nonetheless one of its most frequently referenced…as the originator of a style and aesthetic hat has excited many younger composers.”
“In its scale and influence, IRCAM represents the quintessential example of the channeling of financial, computational, and intellectual resources into creating new music. Although it was initially a site of considerable innovation, in the 1980s it drifted into a cycle of self-justificatory research design, common to many academic institutions, in its continuing pursuit of funding…This began to change in the 1990s. Boulez retired as director and in 1991 was succeeded by Lauren Bayle…IRCAM opened an extensive multimedia library in 1996 and launched a large and user-friendly website, today one of the Web’s most authoritative sites on contemporary music.” The school began to offer “a range of opportunities, including children’s workshops, software training, a summer school, and graduate composition courses that have become a rite of passage for ambitious composers…The result is that IRCAM’s place within the contemporary music world has become even more important than it was during Boulez’s tenure, even though it is not as loudly heralded.”
“Its software developments have been even more significant. Two of the most successful are the visual programming languages Max and OpenMusic. Max was written at IRCAM around 1986, by the composer and programmer Miller Puckette (b. 1959), and was first used to realize Philippe Manoury’s (b. 1952) Pluton (1988), in which a computer creates a live electronic accompaniment synchronized with a solo piano. Max was licensed by IRCAM first to Opcode Systems (in 1990) and then to Cycling ’74 (in 1999), who are its current developers, and it has since been renamed Max/MSP. An on-screen interface for creating and processing electronic sound in real time.” We offer students in our music school in Odessa, Texas courses in learning Max/MSP.
“OpenMusic is a means of processing pitch and/or rhythmic data, which is then output as conventional notation. It is therefore a tool not for live sound synthesis but for pre-compositional planning and calculation. OpenMusic has been widely used by composers interested in harmonic spectra, such as Michael Jarrell (b. 1958), Tristan Murail (b. 1947), and Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), as a means of generating and transforming chord sequences based on individual sound spectra; it has also been used extensively, by Ferneyhough, for example, as a means of calculating rhythms.”
“The economics of managing a studio mean that technologies are often developed in line with research and/or market application, as has become the case with IRCAM’s software and MIT’s musical toys. One of the most successful such outcomes is the game Guitar Hero.”
With digital technology, there has come to be more music available than anyone can ever hear. “The sound artist JLIAT (James Whitehead, b. 1951) considers the relationship of scale to superabundance in the digital era: ‘Today I can hold in the palm of my hand sufficient storage capacity for more than seven years of music. Ten of these devices would store an un-listenable quantity- yet one that is by all means an objective reality- and the data that exists in data farms far exceeds any single human experience.’”
Then there has been a desire away from the avant garde towards a connection with the past. “It may be found in the continuations of the symphonic tradition represented by composers such as John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, and Krzysztof Penderecki.”
Then there are those who seem to have successfully found a meeting place between the extremes. “While many composers have been unable to escape their pasts, or have at least felt an uneasy responsibility toward them, others have enjoyed freedom from their backgrounds. There is a significant generational shift between composers who came of age during the postwar decades and those who reached adulthood toward the end of the century, and this is palpable in the different approaches the two groups take to the use of historical materials.”
“There are few composers who convey this shift more clearly than Thomas Adès. Born in London in 1971…In Adès music, we can hear clearly a post-postmodern or even altermodern approach to history. His is an entirely postdialectical music, in which ‘the tension between tradition and modernism is simply not an issue.’”
“Adès employs a logic of excess in his music that engages the past, not to align with it but to burst it apart. In Adè’s music, quotations or allusions to the familiar are not sources of certainty but opportunities, starting points. A neoromantic or antimodernist might seek stillness or unity in idioms of the past; Adès uses them to turn outward, to exceed their associations…The Piano Quintet (2000) is perhaps his most radical step into the past.”
“Social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the Internet, late capitalist economics, and the green movement. As these intersected with the musical legacies of the 1960s and ‘70s- experimentalism, spectralism, complexity, musique concerète instrumentale, and minimalism- they gave rise to a number of formal types and thematic preoccupations: the journey, the ruin, and the transcription; modes of nostalgia and displacement; forms of excess and reduction; preoccupations with the body and the audience; and (qualified) returns to tonality and meter.”
Perhaps the most important discussion in the book, for me, centered around how the school in Paris (IRCAM), led by Pierre Boulez began developing software in the 1990’s which later became known as Max/MSP. This software company (just this year) was purchased and included in Ableton Live 10. What this means to me, as a composer from the school of modern classical composition, is that the gap between Classical and Pop has been historically closed. Forefront Classical composition and forefront Pop culture have found a meeting place. This is astonishing, and it raises incredibly important questions and possibilities for the future.