Throughout the history of Western Art Music, following the progression of its development, there are several ‘defining moments’ in terms of the systems that have been made available to composers. I am not referring to the instruments, per se, but rather the methodologies.
Pre-Bach, the key of D Major and the key of Ab Major could not successfully exist together in the same composition. When equal temperament came on the scene, it was as if Bach began playing around with a new toy, seeing how far he could take it, experimenting.
So, roughly speaking, pre-Bach, we had tonality, but limited chromaticism. Starting with Bach, we had a new direction in the unification of tonalities. That is to say, a composer could travel to multiple harmonic centers within one composition rather easily, and still sound fairly congruent, harmonically.
The subsequent Classical period explored this further. The Romantic Period began pushing the boundaries of the benefits of equal temperament even more, fluidly transitioning from key to key, and even losing a clear tonal center.
The early music of Schoenberg started here, but he pushed into what he called pan-tonality, which became known as atonal (or 12-tone) music. This system relied heavily on intervallic relationships rather than any tonal center at all, albeit composers in this era could still manage to use the techniques of serialism and maintain a sense of tonality (i.e. Berg).
In the 20th Century, composers in the Western tradition began seeking for intervals smaller than the half-step on the piano with micro-tonality as well as varied tunings outside of the traditional Western scale.
Also, in the mid-20th Century, electronic music began to be explored (i.e. Stockhausen, Babbitt). With the advent of computer technology, specific tunings have now become readily available and accurately achieved through the use of software programs such as Scala, in which user-defined tunings can be created rather easily.
So, to summarize, music in the pre-Bach era was harmonically key-centric. Post-Bach music, with the advent of equal-temperament, became increasingly less tonal and finally non-harmonic. Since this point, experimentation outside of the traditional Western scale has been underway. We train our students in our music school Odessa Texas, to appreciate and participate in music-making with these various historical styles.
In terms of the ‘tools’ available to composers, the historical progression starts with harmony, moves to chromatic harmony into linear chromaticism, serialism, and finally micro-tonality. Along with this transition, rhythm started out very simplistically in the early periods of the Baroque and Classical eras, where there was clear harmonic expression. Little by little it became more complex and obscured (speaking in very general terms).
At the beginning of the 20th Century, as the equal-temperament system was at its furthest distance from any harmonic foundations, a new approach to music-creation was in its embryonic stages.
In the early 20th Century, experiments with musique concrete, ambient sounds, spectralism, and organically derived sounds from the overtone series were being conducted by Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Gerard Grisey, and Harry Partch, respectively. The influential book New Musical Resources, by Henry Cowell, exposed areas of rhythmic expansion within the traditional Western ethos never before explored.
Composers were just beginning to experiment with electronic music, as the tools were in their infancy.
Following are excerpts from Modern Music and After (Paul Griffiths):
In May 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 beginnings of techniques future DJs and EDM artists would use. These early 20th Century composers envisioned, and one could say initiated, the technology available today, several decades away from their own creative exploits. In our music school Odessa Texas, we not only offer training in traditional classical instruments, but also with computer technologies.
Schaeffer even describes computer-sampling that would come about. He 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.
John Cage, in 1937, described today’s modern computer technology, and
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. Technology, such as Ableton Live, running on any laptop, producing time and pitch altering loops was only 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).
Cage applauded other composers who saw a correlation between tempo and pitch, crediting
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…the whole forming thereby an organic entity’.
Duration, amplitude, frequency, and timbre were the four characteristics of sound that 20th Century composers were manipulating using serialism. Seeking integration of pitch and rhythm, Messiaen experimented with serialism’s 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.
Elliot Carter was also experimenting with time and duration.
Carter’s polyphony, in the First Quartet as in his later music, is one proof against subjectivity: because the music is happening in several speeds simultaneously, it has no speed of its own, and therefore allows no presumption that it speeds or sings (or, given the abundant pulsed rhythms, dances) the thinking of one person at one time…liberation form psychological time…has an effect on the notion of what constitutes a musical movement.
Stockhausen, also seeking integration of pitch and rhythm, focused his attention on experimentation with such things as
the conversion of a complex event into a single sound, or the treatment of duration as a variable with the same capacity for complex relationships as pitch.
Stockhausen was working on Studien, to prove
a practical demonstration of how pitch and duration- the two parameters whose parallel ordering had been such a problem to total serialism- are aspects of a single phenomenon, that of vibration. A vibration of, say, 32 Hz will be perceived as a pitched note, whereas one of 4 Hz will be heard as a regular rhythm, and somewhere in between the one will merge into the other. So for different reasons- to do with acoustics rather than mathematics- Stockhausen came to the same conclusion that Babbitt had reached a little earlier, that some deep coherence had to be sought between the principles applied to pitch and to rhythm in forming a work. The scale of chromatic durations was inadequate, in Stockhausen’s view, because it contradicted acoustical reality, being an additive series and not a logarithmic one, such as lay behind the chromatic scale of pitches; moreover, it led to absurdities and inconsistencies, such as the tendency towards regular pulsation when many lines are superimposed, or the undue weight of long durations.
(He) 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 ratio 3:2 (the frequency ratio 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.
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.
Stockhausen also worked towards what ultimately would become known as the keyboard synthesizer, using FM (frequency modulation) synthesis, common to performers today.
Also in this era, exploration of Spectralism or Spectral Music was being developed. Gerard Grisey became the predominant composer here, focusing on the ‘texture’ of sounds. He saw the inherent integration of pitch and rhythm in the overtone series.
Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources sparked yet another branch of experimentation and exploration by Conlon Nancarrow, Georgy Ligeti, and others. Cowell extends the concepts of ratios to dynamics, meter and time combinations, tempo, scales of rhythm, and time.
Conlon Nancarrow, inspired by Cowell’s writings, found a way to produce on a player-piano what was impossible to achieve otherwise, and foreshadowed our modern Digital Audio Workstation MIDI sequencer.
Ligeti, who greatly appreciated Nancarrow’s work, sought to find a way to include the kinds of tempo ratios used by Nancarrow in live performance, also with a desire for convergence between frequency and pitch. He began using a combination of independent meters and multi-tonal harmonies.
Even though Pierre Boulez resisted the experimentation Stockhausen championed, he ironically became the head of IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustcs/Music) in Paris, from which a team of computer savvy musicians later developed flexible software designed for performance: Max/MSP.
As synthesizers became usable, connectable through MIDI, and manipulatable with computers, the desire to merge computer technology with synthesis came together in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). The next goal was to bring this technology to the live stage. The DJ’s LP turntables were soon replaced by computers with human interfaces, and particularly with Ableton Live sotware. IRCAM’s Max/MSP was a perfect fit for Ableton, and Ableton’s version 10 absorbed it with Max for Live. Ableton is currently the most widely used platform for EDM (Electronic Dance Music).
Whether the creators of Ableton knew it or not, their platform became a convergence point for decades-old avant garde Western Classical theoretical exploration and Pop music’s DJ and ultimately the EDM artist. We teach classes in how to use Ableton Live in our music school Odessa Texas.
Yet another example of Modern Classical composition being the vanguard of today’s pop-culture, Phillip Glass, with his minimalism, was remarkably creating ‘looping’ with orchestral instruments decades before EDM became vogue, or DAW’s were technologically available. Glass marked the convergence of classical music, pop music, ethnic rhythms, foreshadowing EDM decades prior to its arrival.
Throughout the 20th Century, composers can be seen searching for ways to find unity in the seemingly disparate subjects of rhythm and pitch, harmony and serialism, diatonic, chromatic, and microtonal scales.
Early thoughts of the integration of these musical components could be seen in Hindemith’s desire for harmonic integration and tonality in a world of high chromaticism. From a solidly European Western tradition of equal-temperament, he would never leave that world. Neither could he, since the technology to do so was not yet available. His desire for complete chromatic/harmonic unity was simply unachievable in the construct of equal-temperament.
Conlon Nancarrow could have brought his rhythmic canons into harmonic unity with the overtone series, if the technology had been available. His compositional approach of using ratios to derive his rhythmic counterpoint would have been a perfect fit for harmonic series tunings that were congruent to those tempi. His player-piano, of course, was equal-tempered. His music has successfully been transferred into MIDI files, so it may yet be possible to insert harmonic series tuning scales congruent with the tempos he was using. We study works of this nature in our music school Odessa Texas.
The rich experimentation in the 20th Century avant-garde has led us now to a place where frequency encompasses both the understanding of pitch, as well as tempo and poly-rhythm. The road ahead has a wide array of possibilities, all built on the foundations of those who have come before us. We are excited to bring an awareness of these possibilities to our students in the music school Odessa Texas.
Music’s morphology, from Pre Equal Temperament, to the Equal Tempered scale, to Microtuning and Spectralism, has caused the art of composition to be brought closer than ever to the natural order of the Overtone Series and organic human expression. It may be possible, in deeper understandings of the subject of frequency, that music may find its way to novel approaches for healing the human soul and body, matching frequency through sympathetic vibration.
Nevertheless, the power of music has never had a moment in history in which its veracity has been greater. Students in our music school in Odessa Texas will learn to function successfully in these opportunities.