Modern Music and After – Part 04
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.”
Messiaen continued to write avant-guard works while supporting himself as a church musician in Paris. He, however, had the desire to bring an awareness of God into his secular concerts. “With his wider and more complex harmonic vocabulary (often related to resonance phenomena)- and with a melodic style, in benign coexistence with it, still related to the modes of limited transpositions- Messiaen sets his music in a world apart. Its apartness, defined perhaps principally by the modes and how Messiaen uses them to transmute, or to receive, his sources (as with the birds of Reveil des oiseaux), may be what makes possible the extraordinary achievement of coherent heterogeneity…One of the challenges of the sacred concert, or the sacred opera, is that it confuses what are normally very different kinds of public gatherings, which people join through different routes and with different expectations: the audience and the congregation. Messiaen’s intention was not to manifest his faith- though his music could not have been made without it- but to make possible a religious experience for his listeners. Personal expression is ruled out by the multifariousness of means: the music has no consistent voice. But exactly that multifariousness, contributing to a disorientation attained in another way by the music’s apartness, is necessary to bring about what Messiaen on many occasions called ‘dazzlement’, the condition under which the auditor could experience flashing visions of the beyond, to quote the title of the composer’s last completed word, scored for what was by this stage a characteristically expanded orchestra: Eclairs sur l’Au-dela (1988-92)” The title translates, “Lightning Over the Beyond” and was written to describe the Book of Revelation, with movements titled ‘The Bridal City’, ‘The Elect Marked with the Seal’, ‘The Seven Angels with the Seven Trumpets’, ‘And God Shall Wipe Every Tear from Their Eyes’ and ‘Christ, light of Paradise’. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to study Messiaen’s example of spirituality.
In the 1980s, only thirty years later, things had radically shifted from Darmstadt. “The dream of Darmstadt in the 1950s, or at least the stated purpose, was to develop a new musical language that would nurture any number of idiolects, as the languages of Renaissance polyphony or common-practice tonality had done. Out of it, of course, came a babble of more or less independent, and in some cases rudely conflicting tongues, being elaborated by former revolutionaries become mature masters, now in their fifties and sixties (or seventies and eighties in Carter’s case.)…With age Carter did not slow down but speeded up…For Carter, coming of age at a time when the early modernist advances of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ives were recent history, the great need seems to have been one of clarification and triumphal commemoration: one could compare his historical position with Bach’s, as a master of order (despite the fact that what he was ordering was dynamic movement) after a period of wholesale musical revolution. Change may be his principal subject, but the elation in his music is the elation of arrival.”
For Berio, relating to the past revolutionaries took a slightly different turn. “Berio was the great rememberer…What Berio remembered, however, was not the substance of the past but rather the whole subtending language, culture, and history. And his remembering goes on not before the music is composed but as it proceeds.” In the composer’s own words, “‘Music is all relative’. It asks ‘the ever-open question of how man relates to the world’, and as it does so, its answers become themselves part of the world, so that every new work enters a widened field of relations, and widens it still more. Such was Berio’s all-embracing inclusivity by this period.”
Also in this era, exploration of Spectralism or Spectral Music was being developed, “music whose composition is informed by the overtone spectra of sounds, especially instrumental sounds.” Gerard Grisey became the predominant composer of this style, which focused more on the ‘texture’ of sounds than on motivic development of melodic fragments. “From an understanding of sound, therefore, came an understanding of rhythm. For Grisey it was important to keep in view the rudimentary periodic states of both: the harmonic series and pulsation. Periodes owes its title to the regular rhythm to which it returns from time to time, as at the end, a rhythm that is not metronomic but organic.” This work harkens back to Stockhausen’s exploration of the synchronicity of pitch and rhythm, mentioned above. We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas about the music experimentation of texture and spectralism.
Other composers in the late 1970s and 1980s include John Adams and William Bolcom. Adams took Minimalism and made it sound somewhat like of ‘repetitive movie score’. “His opera ‘Nixon in China (1985-87) trawl these rich waters…to treat minimalism’s deficit of meaning- so much made of so little- as an irony.
By 1989, “Countless composers, excited by the examples of Ligeti or Carter or Boulez in their youth, moved on to write like Shostakovich; popular musicians as esteemed as Paul McCartney (b. 1943) started producing ‘classical’ scores to which the music of their ‘classical’ contemporaries (Ferneyhough, for example) had little relevance. Music also entered the marketplace directly as the compact disc provided a cheap and ready means of distribution. Instead of creating scores that could be performed again and again, composers found themselves in a world where the recording, especially in the case of orchestral works, was the endpoint. The consumer, increasingly, was not the performer but the listener, and another aspect of market economies entered the faculty of listening: individualism.”
Central to the continuing conservatism or consolidation of the 1980s and 1990s- that postmodern era already in the past- was a growth towards consonance, harmonic progression, and tonal stability, a development found not only in the music of composers who, like Bolcom, Rochberg, Penderecki, and Adams, were explicitly retrieving aspects of nineteenth-century tonality but also in that of contemporaries who held to the ideals expressed by the avant-garde since 1945. Lachenmann’s move from a music of extreme techniques to one with room for familiar chords and gestures- albeit in new contexts- provides an example, and parallel tendencies may be observed continuing in the work of Berio and Holliger, of Birtwisle and Grisey.”
“For young composers in the 1990s, Ligeti may have seemed the most encouraging signpost, pointing towards ways of achieving melodic definition and harmonic direction without restoring old-style tonality, or while doing so in an ungrounded manner, with a sense of the putative or playful. This was the period, for example, of the extraordinary youthful works of Thomas Ades (b. 1971)” Ligeti and Ades are composers well worth studying, and we encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to appreciate their work.
The 1990s saw, along with a return to Romanticism’s ideals of subjectivity, the decade saw a return to Opera, particularly in works by Holliger, Schnittke, Birtwistle, and Lachenmann.
By 2001, “The developing heterogeneity of music could now see the symptom of an impending cultural swerve on the scale of the Renaissance, so many arrows pointing towards so many potential futures. Many of those futures would depend on the rapid rise of the Internet, which in the first years of the century became, especially for younger composers, the main channel of communication. For more traditional means- symphony orchestras, music publishers- a continuing relevance to new music looked less certain. Twenty-first-century music might be smaller, and more nimble in its diffusion. It might also, as postmodernism became a historical phenomenon, be tighter and more serious.”
“Music’s move into a new century- the first new century that modernism had encountered- brought no immediate disruption. Indeed, a listener might have great difficulty in identifying, on internal evidence alone, an unknown piece as belonging to the first decade of the twenty-first century rather than the last decade of the twentieth, or even the last decade but one, possibly two. For such a degree of stasis, universally observable, one might have to go back to the first half of the eighteenth century, a period perhaps similar (and unlike intervening ages) in its social stability. No less remarkably, this stasis survived a fundamental shift in the means of disseminating music, from disc to download. Vastly more music became available, in many cases free of charge, with barely a quiver in its nature.”
“We live in unusual times. The subject matter of this book remains virtually unknown to a very large proportion even of people for whom the experience of Western classical music is a regular necessity, let alone the vast majority of others. Composers- still heirs to a nineteenth-century ideal of music’s universality, despite the chastening of recent decades- find themselves writing only for specialized ensembles, specialized festivals, specialized audiences. It is a reality Lachenmann reflects in the torn, pressured extremity of his music, excoriates in his outburst of protest, and fights in his flares of beauty. Music from the Renaissance to the Romantic era was driven by a tug of forces involving the composer’s desires and inclinations (what might be called in one age ‘taste’, in another ‘self expression’), the nature of the musical language and the expectations of the audience. In the labyrinth of contemporary music, however, no Ariadne’s thread of common practice is to be found, while the audience has similarly lost whatever unanimity it might have had. With certainty gone about means and destination, ‘taste’ easily becomes a mirage and ‘self expression’ shadow boxing. For the aspiring composer, the inquiring listener or the despairing critic, the abundance of avenues is at once overwhelming and unsettling. Yet it may also be illusory, for each of today’s many musical languages implies all the others, and is implied in them.” To be a successful artist in today’s world, one must be eclectic in taste and style. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to listen widely to form their palette and direction.
“Steven Stucky (b. 1949), expressed an alternative attitude to history, both in his music and in his essays, writing, for instance, that: ‘One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new word, and so to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind. I am the kind who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who have cleared the path ahead…I sometimes talk about my Household Gods, those founders of the great twentieth-century musical traditions I still depend on: Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, Sibelius, Ravel, Berg, and many others. Their DNA is still in my musical genes, as it is in the genes of so any of the composer colleagues and friends of my own day to whom I feel closest musically.’”
“The stability of new music- the fact that there has been no major innovation since the developments in computer sound synthesis, noise composition, new complexity, spectral music, and minimalism in the 1970s- may also have something to do with the greying of the avant-garde. In a heartening display of longevity, almost all the composers who were young in the 1950s and 1960s remained active into the first decade of the twenty-first century and in many cases beyond, working on well past the age of seventy (Berio, Stockhausen, Lucier, Gubaidulina, Cage, Goehr, Penderecki, Birtwistle, Davies, Part, Lachenmann, Reich, Glass, Riehm, Silvestrov, Harvey, Holliger, Andriesse), eighty (Babbit, Boulez, Kurtag, Henze, Schnebel) and even, in the astonishing case of Carter, one hundred.” We hope to inspire long careers of forefront creativity in the students of our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Since this book was published, several musical giants have now passed away: Elliot Carter (2012), Pierre Boulez (2016), and Steven Stucky (2016). The way forward is up for grabs, as the end of another era has come.
This book, for me, represents one of the most important discoveries of my musical life. It has both confirmed intuitive directions and revealed my ‘position’ in the history of Western music.
As I wrote above, I was astounded by how much of what we consider culturally relevant originated in the avant-guard thinkers of Classical music in the first half of the 20th Century. We try to convey to the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas the historical importance of past composers and their relevance to our current social and artistic norms.
There are significant threads in this history that are at the very least meaningful to me, and quite possibly could be the answer to questions of how to responsibly move forward.
Much of what this book represents feels more like scientific discovery than explorations in ‘styles’ that come and go. Obviously, much dealt with styles, such as Serialism, Minimalism, Spectralism, and New Romanticism; however, there are tools that have been forged out of these experiments that are needful and useful in the path forward.
As I have written before, in my personal view, the system developed around 400 years ago we call Equal Temperament began to break apart, having been explored to its farthest reaches by the 1950s (and some would argue by a few decades before that). In order to move forward, composers needed digital tools that were not yet created; so, they did the best they could in a ‘floating point’ of history, as they waited for the technology to become available to achieve what they were imagining. In this ‘floating point’ younger composers tried to find their way by looking backwards, or simply floundering with ideas that seemed to have little historic direction.
However, the technological tools are now available. Amazingly, some of those who believe themselves to still be in the Classical tradition seem confused. They are still trying to figure out how to stay relevant to the ‘concert hall’ and the instruments of this genre.
In all honesty, avant-guard Classical music is moving forward, not in the concert hall, but in digital sequencing, digital tuning algorithms, and digital media. The challenge, however, is to keep music fundamentally human as we move forward, historically in new creative endeavors.