Mark
Morris’s Guide to Twentieth Century Composers
by
Mark Morris
A brief introduction to the history
of 20th-century music
links
to the composer and country entries
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The
music of the 20th century has seen more developments, more
divergent styles, more ferment and contrasts of idea, than
any prior century except perhaps that of the 16th. The disparity
between, say, a work of 1905 and a Kagel
piece of the 1960s is so vast that it has no parallel in earlier
times, not even between the music of Bach
and Beethoven, divided by a similar time-period.
With such a span to cover, it is invidious to attempt to outline
the history of 20th-century music in a brief introduction,
for any such attempt will be inadequate. Yet by the same token
the attempt is useful if the caution of over-simplification
is noted, to try and gain some order and perspective to what
can seem, especially to someone unfamiliar with the music
of the century, a very confusing picture.
Musically,
the latter half of the 19th century was dominated by the Romanticism
of German-speaking Europe, and by two composers, Wagner and Brahms,
both of whom had developed the German tradition stemming from
Beethoven in their own particular fashions. Other countries
had their own veins of Romanticism, notably the Russians,
and the Czech (Smetana and Dvořák), but the German tradition
dominated the music making of lesser musical countries such
as Britain, the U.S.A. or Sweden, whose composers attempted
to emulate German models. The other major force of the 19th
century, Italian opera, remained a law unto itself, largely
unaffecting the course of musical history outside Italy. French
composers thrived, many (especially their opera composers,
but also such figures as Saint-Saëns)
with conspicuous success in their time, but (with the exception
of Berlioz) without lasting influence outside their own sphere:
there is no French composer in his maturity in the second
half of the 19th century of the stature of the major German
composers.
The
continuity of the German tradition through the 19th century,
from the birth of Romanticism to the brink of its collapse,
is striking, and has its parallels in the relative but considerable
peace, stability, and continuous economic growth and development
of Europe from the Treaty of Vienna (1815) until the outbreak
of the First World War. It is not difficult to trace the progression
of musical idiom and idea through the 19th century, as each
new development, in the areas of both harmony and form, unfurls
in a logical and linear flow. Indeed the basic forms of music
and the different genres remained essentially unchanged through
the century, even if their content evolved: the main exception
was the continuous flow of the music-dramas of Wagner.
Then,
at the beginning of the 20th century, the continuity of these
19th-century traditions underwent such a huge upheaval, setting
the course for all the progressive elements of 20th-century
composition throughout the century, that it amounted to a
second Renaissance of classical music, even if the after-shock
of the Romantic aesthetic, in both form and content, continues
to echo to this day.
By
the turn of the century the traditional harmonic system had
been stretched to its limits in the search for more extensive
modes of expression. In that traditional system (the tonal
system) the melodic and harmonic progression follows a predetermined
pattern (exemplified in the music of Mozart).
It is a fundamental basis of the tonal system that, both on
a long-term scale (for example, movements) and in short-term
passages, a recognizable key is set up, modified or departed
from, and returned to; the expectation of that return is always
present, exemplified by the final cadences in any Classical
work. This principle of calculated tension and release has
its obvious satisfactions, which is why it has remained so
popular, and informs popular music to this day. Any notes
outside the seven notes of the key concerned are perceived
as dissonance, and such dissonance can create colour and effect.
Gradually
through the 19th century the dissonances became more complex,
and were increasingly used to reflect more complex ideas;
the piling up of tension upon tension, with limited or long-delayed
release, entirely suited the late Romantic aesthetic, moving
far from the collective `natural' order of the Enlightenment
to an appreciation of the power and force of nature and of
the individual psyche. This increased use of the extra five
notes available in a scale is known as `chromatic', after
the Greek word for colour. In a famous turning-point, the
opening chord of the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the
sense of key is almost completely dissolved; but by the end
of the 19th century, however complex the tensions, the traditional
key structure still remained the foundation of composition,
with any departures eventually returning to provide a sense
of resolution. Parallel with these developments, and also
in the search for deeper and more varied forms of expression,
works became longer and the forces larger, especially in the
areas of orchestral and operatic works.
At
the beginning of the 20th century the complexities of the
late-Romantic tensions became untenable and collapsed, and
the centre of that collapse was located in two cities, Paris
and Vienna. The French musical reaction to Romanticism was
much more subtle and less dramatic than the Viennese, and
has received less attention, but in terms of changing the
way musicians and composers think its effects on 20th-century
music have been just as far reaching. Its central figure was
Debussy: to encapsulate his contribution,
he reasserted the ability and the right of music to state
affects and effects without recourse to the patterns of tension
and release, without the Romantic emphasis of constantly developing
internal psychological states. He rewrote the possibilities
of motion (and thus of beginnings and endings) in classical
music, but in doing so maintained the basis of key (the triadic
structure), which is why his contribution is not so obviously
dramatic as those who destroyed it. Rather, he simply broke
almost every rule in the manual of how such triadic structures
were to be organized, reordering progression using juxtapositions
that were not supposed to work, but patently did; in this
he is rightly compared to the contemporary movement of Impressionism
in painting. In addition, he drew on the experience of musics
outside the prevailing German classical tradition - earlier
French musics, folk scales (pentatonic sales), the music of
Bali - a process of profound importance to later 20th-century
composers. In other words, he opened up to composers a new
palette of freedoms, immediately utilised, in a less revolutionary
way, by his younger contemporary Ravel.
The
intellectual and cultural role of Vienna as the focus for
new European thought in all fields at the turn of the century
is of such importance that it has been stated, without too
much exaggeration, that all the principal developments of
20th-century thought can be traced back there, from atomic
physics to architecture to psychology. What was happening
in Vienna was revolutionary: a rethinking of the nature and
place of the individual, drawn from the experience of Romanticism,
but in reaction to the failures and inadequacies of the Romantic
approach. Psychology and the concept of the subconscious were
being developed by Freud; Otto Wagner
led the movement for functionalism in architecture; the Vienna
Sezession revolutionized painting; and the Jugendstil
movement in literature turned into Expressionism. Building
on Nietzsche and Darwin,
humankind's relationship with God was being completely reappraised,
while the new science of sociology was emerging, and the older
one of mathematics rewriting the physical basis of the universe.
Major thinkers and artists from outside Austria, such as Einstein
(who taught at Prague, one of the three great cities of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire), Ibsen,
Oscar Wilde, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Max Weber,
or Bertrand Russell,
were as well known (in some cases better known) in Vienna
as in their home countries. The exodus of so many artists
and thinkers following the rise of the Nazis helped disseminate
the influence of this Viennese intellectual tradition, notably
in the United States. In the political sphere the turmoil
of the Vienna of the beginning of the century continues to
resonate, not the least in the Balkans. In those terms our
current European political history is still a continuation
of events set in motion in and around 1914, and this is equally
true of musical history.
Artistic
technical developments rarely occur outside a social and cultural
context. The tonal discipline of the Classical age of Mozart reflects the preoccupation with
Rational social order and grace; the darker and more complex
harmonies of Beethoven
the changes wrought by Napoleon and French thought; the tone-poems
of the later part of the century the increasing Romantic awareness
of the darker internal recesses of the soul, that were to
emerge in concrete fashion in the work of Freud.
The crisis that engulfed composition in the first two decades
of the 20th century can be seen in part to be a response to
the technical impasse: the tonal system could be stretched
no further without destroying the very basis of the system,
and forces were already so large as to be unextendable. But
it can also be seen as a reflection of the age, and an awareness
that the orders of European empires, the social and intellectual
structures of elite aristocracies, the patterns of thought
that had developed through 19th-century Europe, were no longer
viable. It is no coincidence that such a musical crisis occurred
in the period of the slaughter and massive social change of
World War I, or the Russian Revolution. But the locus of that
change at the turn of the century was undoubtedly in Vienna,
the centre of a decadent Empire in a state of collapse.
Musically,
the hinge of that crisis was Mahler, who died in 1911. In one
sense, he represents, in his huge, psychologically turbulent,
religiously and philosophically striving symphonies and song-cycles,
the culmination of the Romantic development. But in another,
with his use of musical sound-sources that had been considered
outside the area of serious music, with his extension of chromaticism
into the edge of atonality, and with his reversion to chamber
forces within the large-scale orchestration, he heralded what
was to come. But it was Schoenberg, together with his
pupils Berg and Webern,
who wrought the revolution. With Schoenberg leading at the
end of the first decade of the century, they first broke down
the whole concept of key (and thus of traditional tension
and release) in the so-called `atonal' works. Crucial to this
change was an appreciation that so-called dissonances were
not an adjunct to the consonance of tonality, a departure
from the norm, but perfectly worthy musical elements in their
own right: in other words, that the tonal system was in itself
a construct, sanctified by much usage and the passage of time,
and not necessarily given by nature. This is a concept still
argued, and still very difficult for many to understand, so
steeped are we in that tonal tradition. But the concept of
tonality as a natural order is a very Western ethno-centric
view: other systems exist perfectly viably elsewhere, such
as in some Eastern European folk-music, in the classical rāgs
of India, or in most Eastern musics, which is why, once this
concept had been established, 20th-century Western composers
have found it possible and profitable to learn from those
other musics.
The
problem for Schoenberg and his followers was that the traditional
structures of music had been inextricably linked to the harmonic
system, and the collapse of the latter led to problems with
the former. Their return to a primacy of small-scale, often
chamber, works was in part a reaction to Romantic inflation,
in part a response to the economic stresses of the period,
but also a necessity in that the basis of larger structures
was not yet available to them. In the 1920s Schoenberg responded
to this by inventing the 12-tone system, which organized the
ordering, or patterning of the 12 notes of the complete chromatic
scale, each carrying equal weight (i.e. without any note acting
as a traditional dissonant), and being arranged according
to mathematical and strict rules. This system was developed
by all three composers in their different fashions during
the next two decades, Schoenberg largely (until the end of
his life) following his system, Berg developing the more expressive
possibilities and the potential interweaving of 12-tone principles
and echoes of a tonal base, and Webern creating complex and
compressed miniatures. There are still composers (albeit not
many) following Schoenberg's system. Webern, however, opened
up new possibilities, for he realized the potential for the
other parameters of music (dynamics, duration, rhythm) to
be systematized in a fashion analogous to the ordering of
notes (thus, incidentally, increasing the mathematical content
of the construct).
The
potential of Webern's developments were exploited by a whole
new generation of younger composers after the Second World
War, notably Boulez
in France and Stockhausen
in Germany, and this strand of modern music has become known
as `total serialism', or more commonly simply `serialism'.
When these developments were married to ideas from other developments
in 20th-century music, they produced the avant-garde period
of the 1960s (Messiaen had already, to a large
extent, combined the legacy of Debussy and that of Webern
in his own very individual fashion). Thus the first of the
continuities of 20th-century music can be drawn, from Mahler through to the avant-garde composers
of the 1960s. The influence of Berg has perhaps been even greater, for
he showed later composers not prepared to be as experimental
as the main figures of the avant-garde that some of the controls
and organization of the 12-tone system could be fruitfully
merged with elements of more traditional harmonic organizations.
Although
Schoenberg's followers continued their
developments in the city, the importance of Vienna as an intellectual
centre waned after 1918, its empire defeated and dismembered.
Its place was taken by the capital of one of the major victors,
Paris, which attracted artists, writers, and composers from
all over the world in a remarkable ferment of new artistic
(rather than more widespread intellectual) ideas in the 1920s
and early 1930s, from Cubism to Surrealism, from Joyce to Hemingway.
Paris became the focus of alternatives to the Austrian developments
in the musical reaction to Romanticism, and of the recasting
of serious music to reflect new views of the world and humanity's
place in it. An immediate influence was that of jazz, whose
new rhythmic and instrumental sounds briefly flared in the
works of a number of composers (for example, Milhaud). But the major figure
was undoubtedly Stravinsky, whose continuous exploration
of new ideas was of enormous influence internationally for
four decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. His earlier
works (especially the ballet The Rite of Spring, 1911-1913)
caused sensation and scandal, though in retrospect they can
be seen as a continuation (or culmination) of the late-Romantic
Russian tradition. What was new, and of immense influence,
was Stravinsky's development of rhythm, from an element largely
circumscribed and ordered, into something much more potent
and malleable, putting it on an equal footing with the other
elements of a musical composition (in parallel with the development
and expansion of the percussion section of the orchestra,
and of the use of percussion in instrumental works). Stravinsky
also used effects that were being (or had recently been) adopted
by other composers, but which marked a development from the
19th century: polytonality, in which two or more keys are
heard simultaneously, and polyrhythms, in which two or more
rhythms are heard simultaneously. However, equally influential
was Stravinsky's adoption and development from the 1920s of
what has become known as neo-classicism. The basic intent
was decidedly anti-Romantic: to return music to an abstract
art, divorced from the expression of internal emotional states
that had so dominated later Romantic works; in this Stravinsky
was influenced by the example of Debussy. He, like others of his generation,
looked back to earlier musics for examples of such abstract
music-making, and then emulated the smaller forces and some
of the grace and style of the Classical and pre-Classical
masters. He also emulated their forms, melded with more modern
harmonic effects and instrumental colours, and staying within
the tonal harmonic tradition if not all the traditional procedures.
One of Stravinsky's major contributions within this style
was his use of two or more planes of musical event going on
at the same time, which fold over each other and replace each
other (in Stravinsky's case partly as a substitute for the
traditional classical harmonic progression), a concept widely
utilized in widely varying musical contexts ever since. Stravinsky
was not the first to develop a neo-classical idiom (Prokofiev, among others, had already
demonstrated his brilliance in such an arena), but he was
the most conspicuous and influential, and many other composers
turned to a similar idiom in the 1920s and 1930s (Honegger is a representative example),
though their usage encompassed a wide range. Neo-classical
works continue to be written. After the Second World War,
when Stravinsky was living in America, he eventually turned
in an ironic and unexpected development to 12-tone structures
and procedures. His influence then waned, and the place of
his actual music, rather than his influence on other composers,
is much less secure than was once thought, aside from the
early ballets. In part this is because neo-classicism is now
seen as something of a musical dead-end, more a reflection
of the particular cultural and artistic circumstances of the
time than of universal profundity, and in part because mid-century
musicologists and critics, brought up and educated in more
traditional idioms, could much more easily understand (and
promote) his music than that of more experimental composers
such as Schoenberg and his followers, and thus
overestimated his value, if not his influence.
The
1920s also saw the emergence of new musical ideas in areas
other than Vienna or Paris. It seemed to be the new age of
machinery and technology, and a vogue emerged for music that
reflected the mechanics of machinery. This motoric music,
with notable examples in the fervent young Soviet Union (where
it was part of the artistic movement of Constructivism) but
also by such composers as Honegger,
is now often laughed at, but it had considerable influence
on the rhythmic palette open to later composers, and motoric
rhythmic effects have permeated later 20th-century music.
In the same period, there emerged an interest in micro-tones,
divisions of the scale into intervals smaller than a semi-tone,
usually quarter-tones. This was seen as a potential way out
of the chromatic impasse, and its main proponents were led
by the Czech Hába, who, with others, had instruments
such as pianos specially constructed to include quarter-tones.
The drawback to such experiments was the familiarity among
audiences and musicians of scales based on the semi-tone.
They thus heard quartet-tones as mistuning (rather than dissonance),
especially on string instruments. If a tradition of micro-tone
music did not emerge, these experiments did lead the way for
a general acceptance of intervals of less than a semi-tone
in the avant-garde period of the 1950s and 1960s (especially
in electronic music) in a less systematized fashion, often
for colour or decorative effect; in parallel, the gradual
assimilation of folk-musics and Eastern musics, which often
divide the scale in a intervals different to those traditional
in Western classical music, had a similar effect.
In
Berlin, which itself became a decadent artistic centre in
the late 1920s until the Nazis emasculated cultural life,
styles arose influenced by Berlin cabaret jazz, and which
were associated with a more working-class, less elitist socialist
music-making without the vapid rigidity of later Communist
styles. The most notable exponent was Weill, especially in the operas
written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht; although others had developed
stage works on a similar scale (Stravinsky, for one), they showed that
a new art-form, small-scale music theatre (as opposed to opera),
was viable, and the genre has since continued to develop and
expand. Another composer who briefly adopted the idiom of
Berlin cabaret jazz was Hindemith,
but he also turned to his own style of neo-classicism, looking
back to Baroque models and often combining them with the new
motoric rhythms. In doing so, he developed a German neo-classicism
parallel to the Parisian-based neo-classicism of Stravinsky.
With his mastery of traditional harmony, his developments
of that tradition, and his teaching and writing powers, Hindemith
had widespread influence. In addition, he had a different
agenda to that of Stravinsky: producing music that was modern,
but which could be played or sung by amateurs, thus attempting
to give contemporary music a broader base than specialist
audiences. His agenda has been widely emulated. In the field
of children's music, two composers in particular have developed
systems of teaching music using modern means, Kodály
in Hungary and Orff
in Germany.
Meanwhile,
other composers were following their own paths, redirecting
the Romantic legacy rather than revolutionizing it. One phenomenon
initiated in the 19th century that has continued through the
20th has been the development of consciously national styles;
Russia (`The Six') and Czechoslovakia (Smetana and Dvořák)
are the obvious 19th-century examples. As the cultures of
various countries have arrived at a sense of musical self-identity,
as opposed to adopting the styles of musically dominating
countries, so distinct national styles have arisen to cement
that self-identity, and then usually dissolved into a more
self-confident internationalism.
The
characteristics of such nationalistic idioms are that generally
they have followed the mainstream advanced styles of the period,
rather than being expressly experimental, but added some particular
original element drawn from that country to create a new style
(which may in turn then influence composers in other countries).
Thus, just after the turn of the century British composers
(such as Vaughan Williams and Holst)
and Italian composers (Respighi
and Malipiero)
turned to earlier glorious periods of their musical histories,
in a renaissance of their own musics, drawing on old church
musics and indigenous folk-music. Similarly in the same period,
and reflecting the widespread interest in folk-music at the
start of the century, Bartók in Hungary, Szymanowski
in Poland and Enescu
in Rumania revitalized their countries' serious music making
by absorbing their own folk-musics, in each case with unusual
harmonic patterns. The Spanish-speaking countries also discovered
nationalistically idiomatic styles drawing on the rich, Moorish-influence
heritage of Spanish folk music, Falla
leading the way in Spain. In an even more potent development
(because it included the influence of non-western musics of
indigenous South and Central American cultures) Villa-Lobos
in Brazil and Chávez
in Mexico developed idioms originating in the Iberian heritage.
But
the major country to transform its classical music from clones
of the mainstream European trends to idioms unmistakably its
own was the United States, in the 1920s and 1930s. Led by
Copland, a number of composers
went to France to study with the extraordinary teacher Nadia
Boulanger,
thus adding a progressive French element to the prevailing
German cast of American composition. The new, purely American,
elements of the works of these composers were first of all
jazz, a revolutionary and especially American idiom, and second
a style we now associate with the expanses of the American
West, again exemplified by Copland, that had much of its origins
in the post-Spanish developments of Mexican music and Chávez,
however reluctant Americans have been to acknowledge the fact.
At the same time Ives, besides experimenting to
an extent almost as extreme as the Viennese, had shown the
potency of such indigenous American traditions as hymn musics,
though his works were little known until later in the century.
These three indigenous strands formed the basis, immediately
after the Second World War, for the emergence of the United
States as a major force in contemporary composition, with
its own developments to offer 20th-century music. Similarly,
if to a lesser extent, the composers of Japan have embraced
the idioms of Western music since the Second World War, and
allied them with elements of their own, very different, musical
traditions. The process of developing national styles continues:
recently Australia has seen such an emergence, with influences
drawn from its special landscape and its aboriginal heritage.
A
completely different form of nationalism has dominated about
half the Western world for much of the century. As already
noted, Russia had been a seedbed of experimental ideas in
all the arts immediately after the Revolution, but with the
complete control by Stalin of the U.S.S.R. from the beginning
of the 1930s, and the communist control, with varying degrees
of Stalinism, of Eastern Europe in the four decades following
the end of the Second World War, any participation of those
countries in the progressive development of classical music
was effectively stamped out. There was a similar situation
in those areas dominated by the Nazis before or during the
Second World War, when any taint of experimentation beyond
the point reached by the late 19th century was ruthlessly
expunged. The Communist creed was one of Socialist Realism,
art forms that would ostensibly speak to and for the people,
without bourgeois elitism. In effect this meant freezing harmony,
rhythms and forms in 19th-century idioms, with an emphasis
on easily memorable tunes and patriotic and communist themes.
This was, of course, the idiom that Stalin and his cultural
arbitrators had grown up with; it was also thought to be approachable
from the point of view of the general populace. The results
were predictable and fairly disastrous: a huge corpus of vacuous
music, in which only a very few composers managed to subvert
the process and continued to develop in their own constrained
fashions, often with compelling expressive effect. The most
significant of these is undoubtedly Shostakovich, who in part developed
the legacy of Mahler to express, in an extraordinarily
powerful fashion, those very angers, tensions, frustrations,
and despairs that the system engendered. The relaxation of
such controls was gradual and occurred at different times
in different countries, in Czechoslovakia (with its own strong
musical tradition) in the 1960s, in the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s.
One result was that the composers of these countries were
suddenly exposed to the Western developments of the previous
decades that had been denied to them; in almost all cases,
they went through a period of discovering Webern, in turn reinvigorating
the influence of such ideas in Western composition: the Hungarian
Kurtág,
who discovered Webern in the late 1950s and whose music came
into prominence in the West in the late 1970s, is an example.
These,
then, were the main trends in the development of 20th-century
music until the end of the Second World War, besides the continuation
of essentially 19th-century Romantic idioms, exemplified in
the music of Rachmaninov.
While they have all continued in some fashion or another (with
the exception of Socialist Realism, now thankfully been consigned
to history), a new movement developed in the 1950s and came
into full prominence in the 1960s: what has become known as
the `avant-garde', an expression now applied in musical circles
exclusively to this period of experimentation. This was essentially
an international movement, observing few stylistic boundaries
apart from the unscalable barrier of the Iron Curtain, though
its main centres were in Paris, Germany (especially Cologne)
and to a lesser extent in New York. As has already been suggested,
it originated in the development of strict organizational
and procedural controls, parallel to those of 12-tone techniques,
in the areas of music other than harmony - rhythm, dynamics,
duration, timbre - with Webern as the original inspiration.
In one sense this was just the logical development of the
potentials unleashed when Schoenberg and his followers took the
step beyond the brink of tonality, but it coincided with a
number of other developments. The most important was the invention
of the first electronic instruments, which had already seen
such pioneers as Varčse,
and then of the electronic manipulation of conventional instruments.
Initially, electronic music embraced two genres: pure electronically
generated sounds, and sounds (whether musical or otherwise)
recorded on tape and then manipulated electronically to create
a new tape (called musique-concrčte). Either way, this
was a complete and absolute divorce from the music of all
preceding ages, the earlier part of the 20th century included,
as the type of sounds produced had literally never been heard
or realized before, and the traditional procedures for organizing
music turned out to be inadequate or inappropriate to the
new medium; the problems of structure this posed have still
not been fully solved. At the same time, instrumentalists
and singers were learning to perform excessively complex scores,
and developing the range and colours of their instruments
far beyond what had ever been imagined possible before World
War Two, in the case of instruments often in ways their original
designers had never intended. This also opened up a whole
new range of effect, colour, and timbre; the combination of
electronics and these new `extended techniques' effectively
revolutionized the types of sounds available to composers,
which had remained relatively stable ever since the invention
of the piano. A natural extension of this was the awareness
that other things besides traditional instruments, such as
household items, could equally well make musical sounds if
one was not so hidebound by the notion of a musical `instrument'
as to preclude them. Thirdly, a number of composers, often
influenced by non-Western thought and led by Cage (the second great American
contribution to Western music after jazz), realized that they
were not necessarily constrained by the accepted structures
of music, but could draw on other, non-musical, structures
and patterns for the basis of their music. Most extreme among
these was the concept of chance (for example, from the fall
of a pack of cards that determines the order of a composition),
which reintroduced improvisatory elements into serious music-making:
this chance element (which can also be a question of choice
on the part of the performer rather than chance) has become
known as `aleatory', after the Latin word for dice. More important,
this very concept challenged the whole basis of all Western
classical music: that compositions were pre-determined by
the composer, and thus considered, fixed, and predictable
before performance. This indeterminacy was, in a very real
sense, the exact obverse of the strict control of all parameters
developed from Webern, and because of this, the two could
happily coexist (the strict control and determinacy of all
aspects of a section of a work that itself appeared or did
not appear according to chance principles, for example). Fourthly,
and a logical extension of these ideas, the traditional forms
and venues of music-making were questioned, so that works
were written for completely new forces, and non-auditorium
venues. Most important, they started to include major non-musical
elements, such as visual effects, film and drama (with the
instrumentalists performing), in what has become known as
`multi-media' works, a process flirted with in Paris in the
1920s, but not fully developed until the 1960s. One of the
results of all these developments was that scores abandoned
traditional notation, which could no longer encompass or express
the music.
The
conglomeration of these developments made the avant-garde
period of the late 1950s and the 1960s the most experimental,
the most fertile and the most exciting since the 1920s. From
the assured electronic soundscapes of Stockhausen,
through the complex constructs of Xenakis, to the ethereal vocal
scores of Ligeti, to name but three of the
experimentalists, there was a ferment of new idea, in which
often each work had to be taken on its own reference points,
as the connections with traditional procedures were so tenuous.
Yet this explosion of revolutionary idea reached a crisis
as great as that of the first decade of the century. First,
it had not achieved anything like widespread acceptance with
more traditionally minded musicians, let alone audiences;
the developments were so fast that it was almost impossible
for many people to adjust to the new musical demands made
on them. Second, the new sounds and ideas had not yet found
new, generally accepted and widely understood systems of containment
and organization (a situation parallel to the atonal period
of the Viennese experimentalists). The experimentation and
new directions largely collapsed, almost overnight, at the
beginning of the 1970s, before they had been given a chance
to develop those systems.
All
of this, of course, paralleled and reflected the contemporary
questioning of established patterns of thought and political
and social structure so prevalent in the 1960s, as well as
the change in human thinking engendered by the electronic
revolution (especially computers) and by the stunning widening
of horizons of the trip to the moon. The reaction to avant-garde
music exactly paralleled the conservative political and social
reaction to the sixties; many composers quite literally returned
to the music of prior times, in an movement known as neo-Romanticism,
saying very little new, and rarely saying it well. Some composers,
of course, had continued to develop their idiom within a more
mainstream style, often drawing on the kind of synthesis Berg
had initiated, but now informed by the appropriate techniques
explored by the experimenters: the Pole Lutosławski,
for example, or the American Elliott Carter, who developed a new and
influential technique of forward motion that uses overlapping
changes of pulse and metre (known as `metric modulation').
One
geographical area where this mainstream has been in continuous
development to interesting effect, allied to some avant-garde
experimentation, has been the Scandinavian countries. At the
beginning of the century they produced two major figures who
advanced the development of the symphony, the Dane Nielsen
and the Finn Sibelius.
They created a different way of looking at the world, with
nationalistic elements, often drawn from Northern mythology,
and a particular evocation of the Northern landscape and light.
The Scandinavian mainstream tradition of their successors
is beginning to get the attention it deserves.
In
a very different idiom, electronic music has been undergoing
development, with new computer techniques changing the interaction
between instruments and electronics, but as yet it is unclear
where this is leading, and this development remains on the
fringe of audience experience. The main new movement that
has emerged from the 1970s and 1980s is essentially a reactionary
one: Minimalism, where long, often very long, swathes of ostinati
unfurl and transmute, in a markedly tonal harmonic structure.
It has proved instantly attractive, produced one populist
composer (Philip Glass), but has seemed incapable
of enriching ideas, whether musical, social or philosophical,
with more than just a surface gloss, though Steve Reich may prove an exception.
Minimalism has been a fitting movement for what has emerged
as the most regressive and disappointing 20th-century period
in Western culture and intellect. Recently, Minimalism has
influenced a new development that holds promise, an ethereal,
spartan and often polyphonic musical style exemplified by
Pärt
and more recently by Tavener, both from societies undergoing
profound change (Estonia and Britain). However, in both cases
the impetus for their meditative contemplations is as much
religious as musical. The experience and development of the
avant-garde period is a sleeping giant, perhaps waiting for
the right genius of a composer to reawaken it.
Two
other important phenomenon of the history of 20th-century
music remain to be mentioned. The first is the internationalization
of styles: cultural boundaries are increasingly being broken
down, and idioms are cross-fertilizing each other in widely
differing regions. This process is much more marked, and much
more rapid, than in earlier ages. In part it is due to the
improvements in transport and the ease of movement around
the world, but much more it is caused by the ease of hearing
far-away developments almost immediately. Radio started this
process, but the emergence of the LP record, and especially
of magnetic tape recording, was far more significant, allowing
the very swift dissemination and availability of new works:
the first significantly international (i.e. non-national)
movement - the avant-garde - coincided with these developments
and greatly benefited from them.
The
second has been the decline of interest in contemporary music
among general audiences, rather than specialists, a decline
that seems to have been in proportion to the length of the
century. Many reasons have been put forward for this; undoubtedly
the difficulty of assimilating new sounds, musical patterns
and ideas is one of them, though previous eras almost exclusively
listened to new music (Schubert was surprised that anybody
still listened to Mozart). This does not mean that modern
and contemporary music has been ignored: quite the contrary,
the availability of modern music is unparalleled, and to the
surprise of many who had predicted otherwise, the emergence
of the CD as the main carrier of recordings has seen an unprecedented
surge of releases of modern music, with the exception of the
period of the avant-garde. In Europe especially the availability
of modern music on the radio is considerable. Rather, the
problem is that the progressive music of the century has not
entered the regular repertoire, or become familiar to a general
listening public. Those works that have entered the general
consciousness and regular programming have essentially been
those with strong after-echoes of the 19th-century tradition:
Shostakovich is an obvious example.
The
availability of modern music is not in question: rather it
is the dissemination of the newer idioms to a wider public.
Some may argue that it is the nature of modern music to be
too arcane for a general listener, but that has been the argument
ever since Monteverdi's time, and it is simply untrue:
children who have not been steeped in traditional music often
respond to modern music in a manner inexplicable to their
elders, who have to make the transition from traditional ideas
to new musical languages. Rather, alongside the echoes of
the Classical and Romantic idioms, the thought-patterns, the
substance, the foundations of modern music have undergone
a profound change. It is that recasting of thought and idea
which has not been disseminated to a wider public, for, I
would suggest, two main reasons.
The
first is one of education. Most music training is still based
on the concept of traditional harmony, often with the deeply
ingrained delusion that the traditional Western tonal system
is the `natural' basis of all music. A general appreciation
of modern music requires a change of paradigm in which traditional
tonality is seen - and taught - as but one facet (albeit one
that dominated historically for three centuries) of the Western
tradition that has since been superseded. Such fundamental
changes of thought do not come swiftly; we are perhaps in
an analogous situation to that of the Renaissance, where the
Scholastic modes of thought continued to be taught as the
fundamental basis of human existence long after they had been
made redundant by new developments. The obsession of those
musicologists who have specialised in new music with increasingly
arcane mathematical analysis (an unfortunate by-product of
the developments of Schoenberg and Webern) has also hindered
the creation of such a new aesthetic. The emotional power,
as well as the cerebral construction, of new music needs to
be demonstrated (hence this Guide); unfortunately it
is easier to explore the minutiae of construction than the
emotional power and cultural experience of modern music. A
corollary of this has been the role of the critic, the intermediary
between modern music and the potential audience. Many critics
- especially outside the major musical centres - have understandably
found it difficult to make the switch from a mode of thought
trained in traditional harmony to new musical languages, and
even more difficult to express the experience of a new work
in words. The influence of academe has, for some time, made
it more fashionable to describe music in factual rather than
descriptive terms; modern music needs the kind of advocacy
that such word-masters as George Bernard Shaw and the American
critic Paul Rosenfeld brought to earlier generations.
The
second reason is more contentious, and more insidious. Western
European cultures have traditionally valued the arts beyond
their immediate financial rewards as essential to the health
of those cultures; North American culture since the Second
World War has not. Increasingly, North American thinking has
been dominated by financial considerations, and controlled
by accountants. Consequently, in the search for large audiences,
the culture has aimed at a lower and lower common denominator.
In terms of classical music, this has meant an increasing
reliance on the standard `classics' that will bring in audiences.
New works are increasingly aimed at entertainment as much
as challenge; this is one of the reasons the United States
has comparatively produced so few composers of stature. A
culture that should be at the forefront of disseminating new
ideas - including new music - is almost totally incapable
of doing so with such cultural attitudes. For much of the
century Europe was largely immune from this attitude, and
has celebrated her new composers (one only has to think of
Stravinsky or Britten; potential German celebration
of Schoenberg and Webern was extinguished by the Nazis). Since
the 1960s - exactly that period when general audiences might
have been begun to assimilate the developments of music in
the 1930s and 1950s - American culture has started to dominate
internationally, bringing with it a cast of mind that downgrades
the culturally experimental in favour of the financially acute,
gratification rather than challenge. This has been a slow
process, but as American thinking based on the primacy of
economic values has begun to permeate Europe, so its cultural
attitudes have followed in the wake (as the French fully understand).
The process is not yet complete, but such frames of mind are
a major, if lateral, factor in the demise of introducing new
music to a wider audience, not only in actual performance,
but more especially in the attitudes that might make such
performances possible. The social woes and problems that such
cultural imperialism (for that it what is emerging) brings
with it are beyond the scope of this book, but suffice it
to say that a culture that does not constantly renew itself
with new forms of expression is a culture in crisis.
For
the serious art of any time should address its times, to propel
and inform it, and needs the climate in which it is able to
do just that. Every culture that wishes to understand the
changes in human thought needs to listen to that art if it
is to remain viable. There is a very real danger that classical
music will be relegated in its contemporary manifestations
to the ivory tower, and in the wider world to musics of the
past. These cannot speak to those needs, or propel ideas,
except in the most general way, and classical music is in
danger of becoming media to entertain, rather than to expand
our horizons.
This
should be reason enough to explore the music of our times,
but quite apart from such more lofty considerations, contemporary
music - indeed the `modern' music of our century - has the
power to uplift, frustrate, challenge, anger, extend, instruct,
enthral and even entertain us. To embrace those effects may
take a little courage, and a little perseverance, but it is
not too difficult, and to deny those experiences is to deny
something of ourselves, and the cogency of the art and times
that are our own.
Bibliography
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The
standard reference work in English on classical music in general
is the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(ed. S.Sadie, London, 1980, second edition, 2001). This gigantic
publication is beyond the budget of the ordinary music-lover,
but is to be found in most major libraries. Its coverage of
20th-century music is comprehensive and on the whole reliable,
though some of the composers included here are not to be found
in its pages. It is inevitably technical, and in a few cases
conveys absolutely no idea of what the music is actually like,
but it remains the paramount reference work, recently joined
by the New Grove Dictionary of Opera.
The
major reference work on living composers is Contemporary
Composers (eds. Brian Morton and Pamela Collins, 1992),
with extensive lists of works; however some notable composers
are missing, and the accompanying surveys of the composers'
music are often written by specialists or enthusiasts too
close to their subjects for an objective view.
The
Dictionary of Twentieth Century Music (ed. J.Vinton,
London, 1974) was a comprehensive one-volume reference work
that unfortunately did not remain long in print. It is to
be found in libraries, but is difficult otherwise to acquire.
The
best short paper-back (softcover) reference work on 20th-century
music is Paul Griffiths'
Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Music (London, 1986),
which is especially good at explaining terms and technicalities.
Griffiths has also written a number of other useful works
on modern music and on individual composers.
Of
the very many introductions to 20th-century music, the standard
university textbook is Eric Salzman's Twentieth-Century Music:
An Introduction (New Jersey, 1967, revised 1974), better
at outlining the means than evoking or conveying the aural
results. The Companion to 20th Century Music by Norman
Lebrecht (1992) provides highly idiosyncratic quick references
to 20th-century composers, and Green's Biographical Encyclopedia
of Composers by Daniel Mason Greene (1985), equally quirky
in its writing style, includes biographies of a large number
of 20th-century composers.
