FREE4ALL, Part 2: Testing, Testing

March 15, 1945. Paris, France: 

A performance of Igor Stravinsky’s work Four Norwegian Moods is held at the Theatre de Champs Elysees, where his infamous debut of the Rite of Spring had taken place nearly 30 years earlier. The event is the third of a seven-concert series celebrating the work of this now-legendary composer. 

Stravinsky will get a similar reaction when he performs at the Champs Elysees in 1952.

The old guy can’t catch a break.

Yep, the times they are a-changing!

The Serial Killer

The ringleader of both protests was the French composer Pierre Boulez, the new enfant terrible of the European avant garde.

Still, the music that Boulez pushed did show how much the winds had changed in compositional circles, with old revolutionaries like Stravinsky struggling to keep up.

In many ways, Boulez’s music built upon innovations made by Stravinsky’s principle rival: Arnold Schoenberg from Vienna.

Schoenberg had wanted to open up traditional notions of melody and harmony in music, which traditionally greatly favored certain notes and patterns because people found them pleasant to hear.

Schoenberg further formalized the approach by creating a new rule: no repeating any note until all other notes in the scale have been included.

Schoenberg’s approach yielded countless scores of melodies that most casual listeners will think of as music from someone who was rather drunk while composing.

Yet notes were only the beginning. In Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – which he wrote and debuted as a prisoner of war – the tempo, duration, and dynamics of the piece were all treated as Schoenberg had treated pitch: as variables to be weighed and distributed for maximal variety of sound.

Sometimes the results were as violent as his overblown rhetoric, but in truth Boulez’s music more often than not sounds…random. If there was any real violence to his music, the attack was on his own sense of self in his work.

And that’s the unifying theme of this era: modern artists committing themselves to elaborate theories and laborious formal processes that served to strip their creations from that pesky mundane concern for personal expression.

In the late industrial and modern eras, art was often made to capture feelings and subjective emotional states. But in the middle of the 20th century, even self-expression seemed like a restriction. The new wave of innovators wanted to free their works of conscious intention, to liberate art from the shackles of the artist.

Chance of Lifetime

John Cage had studied with Schoenberg for a time, but even then he was searching for a radically different way of composing.

Instead of rigid rules to help him plan out a piece, John Cage wanted to leave his music up to chance. In 1951, he composed the first randomly-generated solo piano work.

Cage created a chart system that corresponded to the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination.

Whatever he landed upon, he would transcribe into musical notation for the score. The result was Music of Changes, a unique collection of piano sounds for which Cage was but a mere vessel. It was a pioneering effort of what he called “chance operations.”

Soon enough, Cage felt even that his use of fixed scores was a stifling habit.

This new approach to chance music was named “indeterminacy.” It was music free from his personal likes and dislikes, and thus he liked it very much.

Despite their very different methods of composition, the works of Boulez and Cage can sometimes sound eerily similar.

The Romanian composer Gyorgi Ligeti complained that both Cage and Boulez wrote works plagued by “compulsion neurosis,” which stripped them of expressive qualities. (Ligeti’s own work at this time was thoroughly modern, and yet bubbling with emotion.)

Oddly enough, it was Boulez who eventually deigned to get more expressive in his music.

Back to the Lab

Yes, “experiment” with composition. John Cage didn’t bother with the military term “avant garde.” Instead, he called his work “experimental music.”

Cage put scrupulous effort into his chance compositions, yet other composers of the time outdid even him in terms of methodical rigor. They seemingly sought to bring musical creation as close as possible to the realm of scientific investigation.

Composer Herbert Eimert collaborated with physicists Werner Meyer-Eppler and Robert Beyer to found a studio for electronic music in postwar Cologne Germany.

Like the Dadaists of the early 20th century, “musique concrete” was a fresh and irreverent appropriation of found sounds. Unlike the Dadaists, the masters of musique concrete really put the “lab” in laborious for their intensely rigorous efforts in magnetic tape splicing and reconstruction.

Karlheinz Stockhausen took both of these approaches, as well as Boulez’s total serialism, and fashioned some of the most commanding modernist works of the era.

Naturally, he perfected the image of the composer as an experimental investigator. While the famed psychologist B.F. Skinner was devising contraptions to understand animal and human behavior, Stockhausen and the rest tired away in their labs to unleash all possible musical ideas to be heard.

If you’re not inclined to think of any of these experiments as actually worth listening to, perhaps a better analogy to consider is architecture. Most people would not say that the Eiffel Tower is beautiful, or that visiting it is life-changing in any way.

So too with these major works of modernism. The experience of sitting with them is memorable, even if the tunes themselves are not.

This above analogy undoubtedly works best for Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who actually worked as an architect and engineer as well as a musician.

At very least, he had listening audiences in mind, which is not always a guarantee with modernists.

Freedom or Else!

Arnold Schoenberg passed away in 1951, and afterward Stravinsky began to pay more attention to the music of his old rival.

Soon enough, he would publish his own compositions inspired by Serialist principles. Join or die, as they say. In this case, the pressure to join came from the radical individualists. 

At their best, these postwar experimental works showcase a wide-eyed wonder for new and unconventional ways of hearing and appreciating sound. They also invite interpretation and discussion with respect to what they mean and what feelings they elicit.

But at their worst, the musical modernists showed real disinterest in their audience, sometimes real contempt. Their number one concern was their own freedom to do as they wished. To hell with listeners, and even colleagues, who disagreed with them. 

Kudos to all the modern composers who sought to open up the world of possible sounds, while still endeavoring to create something that holds power and beauty.

Something that they would deem to be music.

However those terms may be defined…

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