music since the first world war

7/24/2019 music since the first world war

1/17

Chapter I O

Whittall, Arnold. (1 977).

Music since the First World War.

London

:

J

M. Dent Sons Ltd.

Ch. 10. The radical aesthetic , pp. 195-21 1.

The Radical Aesthetic

Convenient categorization of the mass of composers, from Satie to

Stockhausen, who are neither consistent upholders of the traditional

tonal forms nor totally committed to the twelve-note technique, is

virtually impossible. Basic distinctions can still be made between

stylistic features and techniques, but in most cases it is the confronta-

tion between different, if not opposing, tendencies which has produced

memorable music: increasingly, to

be

a radical is to be an eclectic. The

distinction which has been suggested1 between avant-garde and

experimental music is an attempt to clarify the confusion, even at the

risk of over-simplification: avant-garde composers are those who

continue to build on the traditional foundations of European music,

however remote their actual techniques may be from those of the

best-known classical and romantic representatives of that tradition,

whereas experimental composers have rejected that tradition, how-

ever hard they may occasionally seem to find it to avoid the parody and

distortion of what they have determined to put behind them. In these

terms, all those composers so far discussed who are not obviously

conservative are closer to the avant-garde camp than to the experimen-

tal, and many of those who remain to be discussed may be considered as

experimental in intent but avant-garde in practice. I t is at least already

fairly easy to distinguish between those whose experimentalism is

wholehearted and those who are prepared to compromise with (poten-

tially conservative ) avant-gardisms.

The most obviously experimental music has arisen in response to

those radical movements in the other arts known as Dadaism and

Surrealism. In a Andrt Breton s Surrealist Manifesto defined

Surrealism as thought dictated in thc absence of all control exerted by

reason, and outside any aesthetic or moral preoccupation . The prima-

cy of instinct over intellect might have been expected to promote purely

intuitive, improvisatory artistic expression, and as far as music is


2/17

conceiilsd,

su h elements

have

indeed been

brought

into prominence,

especia &y since 959.Ye t

it

is far from

being

the

case that

the

avznt-gardist is

211

self-rcgzrding intellectual

manipuialion

whil the

experimenter is pure unsullied

instinct. The

crucial distinction is in

bas.ic g>:i ,ti~&,

r3ther than in the

methods

whereby

those

atiit~jdcs

given

musical expression.

The essence

of

the experimental attitude can be sensed in John

Cage's 'description of EL%Satie I 866 925)

We

despised art.

He

w s going nowhere.' Cageinevitably stresses those tendencies

of

a more

extreme End

whi h he

finds ir? the French composer, to be interested in

whom,

he claims,

'one

must give up illusions about ideas of order,

expressions of sentiment, and all

the

rest of our inherited aesthetic

claptrap'.' But Satie's experimental attitudes are expressed through

techniques which cannot be so conveniently or narrowly defined.

With Wagnerian single-mindedness, Satie produced an

oeuure

of

consistently anti-romantic characteristics. From the

Sarabande

and

Gymnopidies I887-8) to the ballet Reliche 1924) his compositions have

a disconcerting simplicity. Goo1 restraint or sardonic humour are

expressed with an instinctive disregard for the conventions of continu-

ity

or

integrated contrasts which serious music had evolved over the

centuries. Satie is not merely a composer of light music, however, and

his earlier works are

by

no means so austere as to be completely

inexpressive. The distortion of basically traditional processes of chord-

progression, phrase-structure and form removes pieces like the

Gymno-

pi ies

from any direct dependence on traditional associations; even if

such associations are to a degree unavoidable, they remain peripheral

and highly ambiguous. Yet even to use the term 'distorted' implies a

conscious intention on the composer's part which can hardly be

proved. The music is reticent in the extreme: it establishes consistency

of style by simple repetition, but it is music in which the will, if not the

personality

of

the composer scarcely obtrudes at all. This, in Cage's

terms, is the archetypal example of music which doesn't 'do' anything

to a listener. For Satie, the 'absence of emotion' is a means of expressing

the spirit

of

'humility and renunciation' which the modern composer,

in his view, should cultivate. It was therefore natural that

in

the later

years of Satie's life his compositions should have aspired, not to the

hyper-romantic condition of

a

philosophy or religion, but to that of

furniture: something which we use and take for granted. This 'musique

d'ameublment'

should not

be

listened with

the

intense

concentration

196


3/17

due to

a

B r a h s symghoripr or

Wagner

music

drama,

but

mere l y

heard

s

part he

baclcground

of

ordinary

Ijie,

contributing to

it 'in

the same

w y

as

private

c~riversation oes, painting

in a gallery

r

the chair

on

which

you

may

or

may nst

be

seated3.3

Such

xi

attitude indicates that Satie would probably have endorsed

Cage's view that nomusic could ever be as interesting s life itself9.4

Even so, far from

regarding

all S8tj.e'~ate pieces as 'hrniture music', it

is possible to argue thatbecause of their 'radical economy' they make

the most stafngent demands on listenez-s.5

In

bath the ballets Pam&

9 7 and

Reldche

the title means 'no pehrmance' he juxtaposi-

tion different types of usually very simple material is disconcerting,

yet

can still be felt to add up to something more than

an

arbitrary

succession of separate events, the order

of

which could be

shuffled

at

will.

And the

symphonic drama + crate ( I C J I ~ ) ,

or

all the rhythmic

uniformity so deplored

by

Stravinsky, lives

up

to its title in that the

narrative process is both consistent and cohesem by conventional

musical standards. That Satie has been a great influence on later

experimentalists is evident, and their view of him is not so much

inaccurate as one-sided. He may

have

despised romantic art lor its

philosophical pretensions and exaggerated gestures so did Debussy

but he never despised technique as a means of ensuring that a work for

which

one

individual

took

ultimate responsibility could make its points

directly

and

precisely.

Edgard Var6se ( I883- 965) was studying at the Schola Cantorum in

Paris

when

Satie embarked on a three-year course there at the age

of

thirty-mine

in 905.

Theonly surviving piece by Vargse from this

period

is the

brief Verlaine setting, 'Un grand

sommeil

noir' ( I 906): though a

Rhapsodic Romane for orchestra and an opera Oed us unddie S'hynx were

lost in a fire,

and

Varkse himself destroyed the orchestral work HZour-

gogne

as late as 1960. The loss of these youthful works

is

unfortunate,

but it was only after his move to America in Ig15 that Var?se began to

achieve maturity as

a

composer.He lived for another half-century, well

into that era s electronic music which he had foreseen

and

foreshadowed. He was therefore physically, practically closer to experi-

mental music which, between the

wars,

was pursued more consistently

in America

than

in

Europe. Yet it

is

questionable

whether

VarZse's own

most radical works are as genuinely experimental as thoseof Satie, and

it is

significant that Cage s enthusiasm for Varkse is distinctly less

wholehearted.


4/17

7Mtlsic Since

the

First

World

ar

Cage diagnoses a 'need for continuity' which fails to 'correspond to

the present need for discontinuity'. Yet he is prepared to concede that

'more clearly and actively than anyone else of his generation, he

established the present nature of music', which 'arises from an accep-

tance of all audible phenomena as material proper to music'. Cage's

main criticism of Varkse is that he is 'an artist of the past. Rather than

dealing with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varkse'. So, in

Diserts ( I

954),

a work in which orchestral music and taped sections of

'organi'zed sound' alternate, 'he attempts to make tape sound like the

orchestra and vice versa, showing again a lack of interest in the natural

differences of sounds, preferring to give them all his unifying

signature'

G

These are shrewd points, for it is possible to regard Varkse as a

composer who, even if he wanted to, was unable to throw off the

'burden' of traditional musical processes, and who therefore remained,

however reluctantly, committed to the continuity of which Cage writes.

Var6se himself could admit that 'the very basis of creative work is

experimentation', while refusing to accept that the finished work itself

could be described as experimental. 'I'offer a finished product : it is

for the audience to make the experiment of confronting a new

work'.? SO, while the finished product came to contain a far greater

range of 'audible phenomena as material proper to music', the very

concept of a work of art as a finished product, fixed and immutable save

for the shades of interpretation, reduces its experimental status in the

eyes of those for whom such traditional principles of structure are

anathema.

Between I 9 8 and I 936 Varkse completed a series of compositions

which are remarkably original and remarkably successful. The person-

al nature of these works Varsse once commented, 'I don't like looking

over y shoulder' naturally does not exclude all influences. Debussy

and Stravinsky are of particular importance, but Varl-se's debt to them

is as much structural as stylistic. Melodic lines which evolve through

internal repetition are an 'impressionist' feature which transfers direct-

ly to Varkse's more scientific, crystallographic interests. Yet such

evolutionary processes, the presence of which makes it dangerous to

assume that Varkse's structures are in some sense inorganic, had to find

their place in a satisfactory form. Just at the time when the great

European masters, nationalist, neo-classical and twelve-note alike,

were rediscovering or reinforcing sonata form, Varitse began in earnest

to question the whole nature of musical continuity. Speaking in later


5/17

l f h e

Radical

Aesthetic

years of Debussy's Ja tx he corn~nentedhat in it 'we find a higher state

of tension than n any work before

it',

and the exploitation and control

of

high tension dominate his own most characteristic works. The

terminology with which

he

described

his

techniques in

936

is also

explicitly linked to such considerations: 'taking the place of the old

fixed linear counterpoint, you will find in my works the movement of

masses, varying in radiance, and of different densities and volumes.

When these masses come into collision, the phenomena of penetration

or repulsion will result. Certain transmutations taking place on one

plane,

by

projecting themselveson other planes which move at different

speeds and are placed at different angles, should create the impression

of prismatic aural (auditory) deformations.'

With such preoccupations, it

is

hardly surprising that Varkse later

spoke of neo-classicism as 'deplorable'.g Yet he praised the discipline

provided by the twelve-note method, and never showed the slightest

sign of wishing to adopt the indeterminate techniques

of

those comp-

osers to whom he was invariably regarded in the last years of his life

as most spiritually akin. Whatever Varkse's final position with regard

to experiment, it was arrived at gradually. There was no sudden,

blinding revolt, no rejection of every pre-existing compositional techni-

que, but a radical re-examination

of

them, leading to new conclusions.

Varbe's first American compositions were

Amiripues

(1920-

I )

and

ffrandes

( I ~ z I ) ,

ut the four-minute work for wind and percussion

called Nype ri>m, completed in I923 s his first fully realized statement

of radical intent. The title presumably means 'intensifying a prismatic

function', and therefore implies a basic unity strongly refracted by

surface contrasts. While it is not difficult to perceive that the interval of

the major seventh possesses a primary thematic function which unifies

pitch procedures throughout, the sheer diversity

of

tempo and thematic

shape within the short single movement is ultimately disruptive rather

than integrative. The final

Allegro molto may indeed surnmafize the

intervallie emphasis of the work with various piled-up transpositions of

the major seventh, but it still seems structurally arbitrary: something

stuck on. Here; the term 'inorganic' is certainly justified, and the music

is, if anything, closer to the disconcerting uxtapositions of a Satie ballet

than to the dynamically inter-connected units of Jeux or the Sym-

phonies of Wind Instruments. Thematically, too, the contrasts be-

tween single-note reiterations, a sinuous flute melody (after Fig.

2

and

an initially chorale-like brass phrase (Fig. 4) emphasize the dangers of

producing too episodic a scheme in the attempt to elaborate very simple


6/17

Music

ince

the First World War

basic elements without completely submerging them. In Octandre for

seven wind instruments and double bass ( I923) Varkse composes

three separate movements and then establishes thematic cross-

references between them, with some slightly incongruous results in the

third, with its quasi-modal opening and miniature fugato. Nevertheless,

his concern to achieve a new form which does not involve the absence of

all unifying factors is still more evident.

With dntk'grales

(1924-5)

Varkse returned to the ensemble of wind

and percussion and the single-movement scheme. It is longer than

either Hype rism or Octandre, but Varkse's control of forrn and thematic

process is much more assured, and the surface thematic diversity is

here more firmly projected from the fundamental unifying factors.

he opening section of Intigrales Andantino is an exposition

involving much repetition of a thematic idea which is little more than a

reiterated monotone. The music here verges on the static, in spite of

constantly changing time signatures, but in view of the frequent

changes of tempo in the middle of the work, this is an appropriate

foundation. After a somewhat slower second section, marked Moderato,

in which the monotone of the Andantino with its two-note anacrusis

remains the central thematic feature, the &tempo hanges, first to

Allegro, then to Presto, and the material becomes more conventionally

melodic. With the establishment of a slow tempo (crotchet 58), which

dominates the rest of the work until the coda, melodic material is

related to monotone material in

a

manner which is truly 'integral', and

allows for explicit reminiscences of earlier moments (Ex.57).

Ex 57

po o roll

The coda, which starts as a Presto, also looks back, confirming that

Variise has been able to achieve a satisfactory balance between

'evolutionary' and 'recapitulatory' factors in a work which is thematic

without obvious adherence to traditional structural proportions. There

may be a short-breathed phrase structure in places he tendency to

reach climaxes rapidly, then restart, is even more evident in the longer,


7/17

T he Radical Aesthetic

orchestral Arcana I926

7 )

but intigrales is a rare example of a work

composed in the mid-

I

920s which is both truly radical and convincing-

ly coherent. Even if a critical interpretation is preferred which gives

greater prominence to more radical elements, interpreting the title as a

reference to the retreat from the exclusive, well-tempered scale into the

integral world of instruments capable of a true pitch continuum, filling

the spaces between the semitones, it can scarcely be claimed that

Intigrazes represents a total break with the European past.

The battery of percussion which Hype rim , Intigrales and Arcana

employ is the most obvious evidence of Varese s experimentalism, the

interest in new sounds as such, since without new instruments the

composer was forced to exploit new combinations and unusual selec-

tions of existing instruments. In Ionisation (1931) Varbe wrote for

percussion alone, and the whole piece up to the coda uses unpitched

instruments (the siren, strictly speaking, is an exception, though its

Ex.58

OH

W I O H O H

CON STRU

TO R E S

H

FOR

M4

ES PI

RI DEL CIE LO

ES PI R i

TU E LA TIER RA

pitch is in

a

constant state of change). Ionisation is another scientific

term, denoting the electrophoresis , or migration, of electrically-

charged particles. In the composition, the particles are rhythmic cells,

or sound masses , and even in the absence of pitch a thematic process

can be observed. Ionisation has even been analysed (by its dedicatee and

first conductor, Nicolas Slonimsky) as a sonata-form movement, and

the basic pulse (crotchet 69) remains stable until the somewhat slower

coda, when pitched percussion (piano, bells and glockenspiel) enter for

the first time.


8/17

~Wusicince the First World a r

Varkse's next composition,

Ecuatorial

(1g34), saw his first use of

electrially-generated sound, with a pair

of

Ondes Martenot. As with

ionisation,

the phrase s rucrure as such is far from revolutionary, and the

vocal line contains significant amounts of varied repetition

Ex.

58).

After Ecuutorinl,

however, twenty years were to elapse before another

substantial work

Diserts

was completed, and that would use pitch

without 'themes', and organized sound on tape alongside live orches-

tral sound: only

Densite

I 936) and the

h u d g

pour

Espace I 947)

were composed during the intervening period.

Speaking of Vartse's last finished work, the

Pohe ilectronipue

I 95%)'

Stockhausen noted that 'anyone living today Varkse was at the time

living in New York s confronted daily with the hurtling together of all

race;: all religions, all philosophies, all ways of life

.

of all nations. In

works by the musician Varitse this bubbling of the cauldron is aestheti-

cally portrayed New York, that prime blueprint for a world society,

is without question an indispensable experience for the contemporary

artist. Ideas one might have about possible integration, about a

coherent unification, or about possible syntheses of the influences

issuing from all parts of the globe, all these must be tested against living

experience if they are to lay claim on any truth.'lo These remarks are

also relevant to

De serts,

which occupied Varkse from

195

to

I

994, and

which is in the most basic sense

a

portrait of an urban desert.

De serts

may indeed be a deeply pessimistic work, a commination of

the

whole of

modern civilization: it is also the logical outcome of the more radical

tendencies in VarPse's earlier works. Like them, it has vital organic

features: a 'continual process of expansion, penetration, interaction

and transmutation accounts for the immense sense of growing organ-

ism in the entire score, and illustrates Varkse's concept of sound as

living matter

.ll

What is remarkable and remarkably avant-garde

about

Diseltr

is that this 'organic process' has now ceased to be in any

traditional sense a thematic process. At last Vargse's own term, 'sound

mass', seems precisely right to define the 'idea, the basis of an internal

st ru~ture':~ he successions of sound masses which surround the taped

episodes of organized sound in

Diserts

present

a

process in which single

pitches are successively brought into focus. Even in this athematic

context, a residual degree of hierarchy survives, and nowhere more

simply and clearly than at the end, when a 'rich but subdued' horn E

flat, prolonged through the last two bars by piano, vibraphone and

flute, forms a clear point of focus, even of resolution

Ex.

59).

The danger of exaggerating the structural function of a series of pedal


9/17

Th e Radical Aesthetic

notes in a thematically featureless pitch texture is obvious. Yet in its

tendency to

Mlangfarbenmelodie, De serts

invokes association with such

pioneering essays as Schoenberg s Orchestral Piece, Op.

16,

No.

3

composed in

I

909.

The

athematicism of

Diserts

recalls those statically

conjoined blocks of sound matter employed in the early stages of

Ex.

59

l u t e s

Piano1

T rumpe t s

Horn

Perc. 1


10/17

Musi c Since the First Worl d W a r

Intigrales, and the alternation between live and taped sound, with their

radically different associations, may heighten one s sense of discon-

tinuity. Yet Cage was surely right in claiming that Varbe was attempt-

ing to make the tape sound orchestral and vice versa: the object was to

bring the new world of concrete and electronic sound into the orbit of

the old, and mediate between them, not to use the new to demonstrate

the redundancy of the old.

The experience of composing Diserts must have increased Varkse s

desire to invent a purely electronic work, and the 958 Brussels World

Fair provided the opportunity, with its Philips Pavilion designed by Le

Corbusier for the simultaneous presentation of projected visual images

and organized sound through 4 5 loudspeakers. The diversity and

realiim of many of the sounds employed categorizes the

Po2me llectro-

nique

as

musique contrite

(a term coined in

I

948 by the French musician

Pierre Schaeffer for recorded sound material which, even if electroni-

cally modified, originates in nature or man-made environments),

rather than true, studio-generated electronic music, but it remains the

fulfilment of a vision which, while radical in impulse, was never content

with totally abstract sound manipulation.

y

the time the

Po2me

llectronique

was first heard, Stockhausen and others had progressed

beyond

musique concr2te

(useful though its principles were to remain) into

the purer, less anecdotal world of electronic synthesis: Stockhausen s

Studie was composed during the summer of 1953. Yet far from

dismissing Varsse s work as oldfashioned or amateurish, Stockhausen

paid it a warm tribute: Varkse is alone in his generation in having

composed a work of electronic music and furthermore in having

heralded in this P o h e a modern formulation of compositional relation-

ships whose true significance can only today be recognized: namely the

sequential presentation and superimposition even though sometimes

abrupt and unmediated of events of a heterogeneous nature. 13

In

I

958 Varkse was seventy-five, and any discussion of such work as

survives from the last years of his life is inevitably tinged with specula-

tion about what he might have achieved had the electronic techniques

available to him in the 1950s been on hand when he first envisaged

them more than thirty years before. As it is, the last works seem like a

retreat, or even a pessimistic confession of disillusionment, since

neither Nocturnal for soprano, chorus and orchestra (1g61), only a

fragment of which could be edited for publication, nor the later, still

unavailable

Nuits

for soprano and chamber ensemble I 965) use any

electronic elements, and the prevailing atmosphere of

Nocturnal

is


11/17

TheRadical Aesthetic

sombre and doom-laden. For all the fragmentary nature of these works,

enough remains to indicate that Varkse s career as a whole cannot be

considered as a simple forward progress starting with ruthless rejection

of conventions and reaching its consummation in the eager, exclusive

exploration of new electronic sound worlds. Perhaps his greatest single

work is Ecuatorial, that enigmatic prelude to the long silence, a passion-

ate, primitive prayer for survival, which in its simplicity and serious-

ness is utterly remote from the kind of radical experimentation which

was shortly to gain ground in America. Perhaps the most daunting

thing for Varbe in his last years was not the complexity which rapid

developments in technology had brought into the world of electronic

music, but the sense shared by Boulez, Ligeti and others that

composers were insufficiently equipped to develop the new technical

possibilities to the full: that one lifetime, even in the twentieth century,

would not be enough.

In October 1918, three years after Var2se had arrived in America,

Charles Ives ( I 874-

I

954) suffered the heart attack which was a crucial

factor in his abandonment of further creative work. Instead,

he

began

the complicated task of sorting and editing his many manuscripts, and

arranged for the private publication of certain pieces. Performances

were still slow in coming, however, and during the interwar years it was

publication which won Ives such recognition as he received.

Elliott Carter was an early acquaintance and admirer of Ives hey

first met in I 924, when Carter was only sixteen and Henry Cowell

(1897-1965) published several of Ives s works in his New Music

Edition. As early as I 912 Cowell the composer had begun to question

received beliefs as to how traditional instruments like the piano could

be exploited, and to employ highly discordant tonal clusters for which

he devised a new kind of notation. In 1919Cowell completed a short

book called

ew

Musical Resources which, although pre-dating many of

his most influential experimental pieces like the Mosaic String Quar-

tet ( I934), an early example of so-called open forrn, is a remarkable

anticipation of the spirit of root-and-branch questioning of accepted

ideas about music which only became widespread after I 950.

ew

Musical Resources was not published until 1930, but it was in the

late 1920s that Harry Partch (1901

74

wrote the first draft of what

was to become a still more radical attempt to create a genuinely new

music: Genesis o aMusic

This enormous, rambling tome provides both

a critique of the entire history of musical theory and composition from

Partch s own very personal viewpoint, and a primer in the new


12/17

Music Since

the

First World War

techniques of Corporeal Music , which reject Equal Temperament

and are rooted in just intonation with a scale of forty-three steps to the

octave. What makes Partch such a consistently radical figure is not his

rejection of an old tradition but his determination

not

to create a new

tradition. His own compositions are not intended to provide a basis for

a substitute tyranny, the grooving of music and musical theory into

another set of conventions. What

I

do hope for is to stimulate creative

work by example, to encourage investigation of basic factors, and to

leave all others to individual if not idiosyncratic choice. To influence,

yes: to limit,

no. 14

In discussing musical instruments which attempt better intona-

tions , Partch ruefully noted that they tend to survive only in museums.

Now that all perceptible inflections of pitch can be achieved electroni-

cally, the odds must be that his own instruments ven those with such

evocative titles as the Marimba Eroica and The Spoils of War will

also finish up alongside Bosanquet s Enharmonic Harrnonium and

General Thompson s Enharmonic Organ (both to be seen in London s

Science Museum): that is, unless their visual, dramatic potential,

undoubtedly so superior to that of any electronic equipment, wins them

survival. Partch s own compositions have also shown little potential for

attracting frequent performance. So however predisposed one may be

to approve of a composer who uses titles like A soul tormented by

contemporary music finds a humanizing alchemy

The

Bewitched,

Scene q), the effort involved in learning the special techniques can only

reward those who sympathize deeply with the aesthetic philosophy and

view of history underlying those techniques.

Partch was never tested by success, but John Cage (born 191 ) has

shown remarkable resilience in the face of exposure to the full glare of

acclaim as a cult figure. In the musical scene since I 945, Cage stands at

the opposite pole from Milton Babbitt, the only ground on which they

meet being the use of electronic techniques. It is therefore ironic that,

while Babbitt has done more than any other American composer to

build on twelve-note foundations, it was Cage who actually studied

with Schoenberg, between

935

and 1937. Earlier, Cage took lessons

from Henry Cowell, who did much to stimulate an interest in non-

Western ideas; and this interest, later to embrace aspects of Buddhist

philosophy, did much more to mould Cage s development as a com-

poser than the harmony-oriented, post-Renaissance assumptions of

Schoenberg

206


13/17

The Radical esthetic

Cage soon gained attention as an explorer of new sound sources,

carrying on from what Varsse had achieved in Ionisation at a time when

Varbe himself was virtually silent. One of his earliest characteristic

works is the

First Construction

n

Metal

for percussion ensemble

( I

939),

and in the same year he also produced Imaginary Landscape No. for two

variable-speed gramophone turntables, frequency recordings, muted

piano and cymbal. This is not only a genuine precursor of electronic

music, but also employs what is probably Cage s most familiar modifi-

cation of a traditional sound-source, the prepared piano. In view of

the Dadaist expectations aroused when audiences see a pianist pluck-

ing the strings, using drum sticks, inserting screws, pieces of paper and

other objects to deaden resonance, or simply tapping on the instru-

ment s closed lid, it is important to remember that Cage s most

substantial composition for prepared piano, the seventy-minute

Sonatas and Interludes I 946-8) involves quite rigorous rhythmic

structuring. I t is in fact only since 1950 that the experimental concept

with which Cage is principally associated has been fully established

and explored. Indeterminacy , as this is most commonly called, has

been defined in many different ways, but in essence it involves a shift of

emphasis away from the idea of a musical composition as a sequence of

permanently fixed and fully realized elements to an approach which

seeks a significant degree of freedom and flexibility in the structure and

notation of a composition. It was only with the liberation of music from

the principle that every performance of a particular piece will be

substantially the same, however revolutionary the language employed,

that experimentalism achieved a new breakthrough. That break-

through, though variously anticipated during the first half of the

century, did not finally achieve a wide following until the postwar

period, at a time when many composers were disillusioned with total

serialism.

Indeterminacy encouraged greater spontaneity through performer

participation in actually determining both the course of events in a

work and the content of those events, and it was soon possible to

observe parallels with those surrealistic dramatic happenings often

known collectively as the Theatre of the Absurd. The more imprecise,

graphic methods of notation likewise resemble abstract or surrealist art

more than traditional musical notation. These more extreme manifes-

tations of musical indeterminacy have inevitably tended to receive the

greatest publicity, and to create the assumption that the entire move-

ment is more destructive than constructive. Yet the most common and


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Music Since the First World War

fruitful kind of indeterminate or aleatory element has been that which

permits a performer to select the number of segments in a work and the

order in which they appear. This allows the interpreter a more positive

role than he has in much other modern music, where the technical

difficulties are such that the most he can hope for is an approximate

reproduction of the 'correct' pitches and durations; but the role of the

composer is not usurped. For Cage himself, however, a more radical

approach was necessary: if music was to aspire to the condition of

furniture (in Satie's terms), if the now decadent distinctions between

Art and Life were to be eliminated and, the concept of composition as

something more valuable than any other human activity to be discre-

dited, then the authority of the composer as decision-maker must be

undermined, and the traditional idea of a concert as an event in which

clearly distinct hierarchies composer, interpreter, listener are

preserved, should be destroyed: in this Reformation, the first 'monas-

teries' to be wiped out were therefore concert halls. Cage first attemp-

ted to cast off the responsibility for creative decisions by such random

procedures as employing the Ching, as in his Music ojChangesfor piano

I 95 I ) . Later he came more and more to favour Dadaist activities like

the Theatre Piece (1960) and Musiccirnts (1g68), in which his role is

confined to that of an initiator of events which are likely to possess

certain characteristics but in which the gulf between what is 'notated'

in the 'score' and what takes place at a performance is, intentionally,

immense: it is in that gulf that freedom from traditional shackles, and

therefore the experimental essence, lie.

Cage himself has always been perfectly willing to discuss his motives,

and even to make 'compositions' out of his lectures as in 45'for a

speaker ( I 954), the seventh minute of which is laid out as follows,

Ex 6

7

00 Composers are spoken of as having

ears for music which generally

means that nothing presented

to their ears can be heard by them.

Their ears are walled in

with sounds

I

o

of their own imagination

Of fiv spects

bseme

20

two


15/17

T h e Radical Aesthetic

The highest purpose is' to have no purpose

at all. This puts one in accord with nature

in her manner of operation.

If

someone comes

along and asks why? there are answers.

30 However there is a story I have found very help-

ful. What's so interesting about

technique anyway?

W hat there are twelve tones in a

row?

What row? This seeing of cause and effect

is not emphasized but instead one makes an

identification with what is here and now. He

40 then spoke of two qualities. Unimpededness and Inter-

penetration.

The relationship of things happening

at the same time is spontaneous

and irrepressible.

50 It is you yourself

in the form you have

that instant taken.

To stop and figure it out

takes

time.

His writings are full of recurring themes:

'I

attempt to let sounds be

themselves in a space of time I do not object to being engaged in a

purposeless activity; ~and 'more and more in this global electronic

world that we are living in,

I

think this experience of non-knowledge is

more useful and more important to us than the Renaissance notion of

knowing BCDEFwhat you are

doing. ^

Perhaps the archetypal experimental composition (leaving aside the

argument that the most experimental thing of all would be to compose

nothing) is Cage's

4 '33 1 9 5 2 ~

he score of which 'bears the numbers

I, 11, 111,

each marked

TACET

and each given a duration in

minutes and seconds which together add up to four minutes, thirty-

three seconds. A secondary part of the notation tells the performer that

the piece may be done on any instrument, for any length of time. Since

tacet is the notation which informs a player that he should play

nothing during a movement, the performer of 35s asked to make no

sounds in the three timed sections.'17

It

is obvious enough that the

whole 'point' of this piece lies in its contradiction, graphic and drama-

tic, of what normally happens at a concert when a pianist enters and sits

down at the piano. In these terms, it may irritate or amuse: after all,


16/17

Music Since the First World War

those decisions which the composer

has

made are still very important.

Such precise timings are obviously a parody of a composer's normal

concern with durational relationships within a piece, but they at least

ensure that the 'joke' is bearably short. More fundamental aesthetic

issues are nevertheless raised when the whole question

of what is heard

during those

4' 33

is considered: audience shuffles, laughter, traffic

outside the hall, air-conditioning systems and the like. 'Any sounds

which might be heard are of no consequence in themselves; the real

interest of the piece is

in

the concepts which underlie it (that silence

does not really exist, reversal of the roles of performer and listener

etc) . In much Experimental Music, style, in my sense of a coherent

musical language and discourse, has been painstakingly destroyed. All

that remains are ideas and concepts, which on closer examination

begin to appear positively reactionary in their implication^. ^^

It is nevertheless appropriate that Cage's most consistent trait

should be unpredictability: so he may still occasionally produce a

composition which, surrealist connotations notwithstanding, is not

merely a matter of letting unforeseen sounds occur by accident. Cheap

Imitation ( I969) 'congsts solely of the melodic line of Erik Satie's Socrate,

using the

I

Ching to determine the mode and transposition of each bar

or half-bar. There is no counterpoint because the entire work (which,

like Socrate, is in three movements and lasts about twenty minutes) is

monodic; it is wonderful to come upon a piece which makes a

unique effect with such subtlety that one is scarcely aware of it

happening.

I

am sure of the lesson which this piece can teach us

that perhaps it is the simplification rather than the elaboration of

musical language which is now the most fruitful way forward.'lgCage's

affectionate and characteristically personal tribute to his most admired

precursor may therefore also represent his recognition that what other

experimental composers have been doing increasingly since

I

960 has

genuine musical value, in spite of its remoteness from the more extreme

manifestations of Dadaist 'play' and Buddhist 'will-less-ness' alike.

In general, there has been a retreat from chance and from the 'happen-

ing': 'perhaps a reaction against indeterminacy was inevitable: the

music of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phil Glass

shows a many-sided retrenchment from the music that has grown

from indeterminacy, and draws on sources hitherto neglected by

experimental music. This music not only cuts down the are& of

sound-activity to an absolute (and absolutist) minimum, but submits


17/17

he

Radical Aesthetic

the scrupulous1y selective, mainly tonal, material, to mostly repetitive,

highly disciplined procedures which are focused with an extremely fine

definition (though the listener's focusing is not done for him) '20 Further

evidence of such retrenchment is provided by another American

experimentalist, Christian Wolff (born

I

934), who senses that 'practi-

cally everything's been done now. There are just a few bizarre things

that haven't been thought of. There's a desire now to come back and

get reconnected to what most people have been trained for. I think it's

perhaps more a desire to relate to music which can reach a larger public

and which has clear-cut technical

Often the motivation for

the new simplicity is political, as in Wolff's own Accompaniments and

Changing the System, so it is not surprising that experimental techniques

which had their origins either in the consciously frivolous, apolitical

aesthetic atmosphere of the years immediately after g 8, or else in the

eager absorption of Eastern religious philosophies, should no longer

seem so relevant: today it is Mao rather than Buddha who is the most

important Eastern inspiration.

The 'minimalist' or 'systemic' music of Riley (born ~g y j ) , eich

(born 1936)~Glass (born 1937) and their many followers in both

Europe and America is certainly a more positive kind of experimental-

ism, often involving the sensitive interaction of an ensemble in a 'group'

work, than the isolated snook-cocking of a work like 4'

33 :

it is also a

good deal less 'anti-evolutionary' than the work which is often de-

scribed as its direct progenitor, Satie's Vexations, in which the same

short phrase is repeated without variation 840 times. Systemic music

involves a creative response to certain areas of tradition, especially

pre-Renaissance Western music and what is interpreted

at least

by

LaMonte Young as the more 'static' aspects of Webern; the 'gradual

changes in time' (Reich's phrase) which occur therefore assume tre-

mendous structural significance (cf. also Reich's description of his Four

Orgaans as 'one chord growing in time' ). Yet it is music principally for

participation: passive listening to such protracted simplicity Glass's

Music

in welve

Parts lasts over four hours may actually create the

desire for something more 'random', for more variety, more 'informa-

tion'; and yet, if this music begins to develop new kinds of complexity

and to satisfy the desires of audiences for intellectual involvement as

well as emotional stimulation, it may well cease to be experimental and

become avant-garde. It may also give tonality a new lease of life.

music since the first world war

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