PART 6: Video Intro

Now that you've been taking a music course for a while, let me ask you a simple question:

What is your definition of 'music'?

Actually, I shouldn't have called it a "simple" question.  It only seems simple. Webster's New World Dictionary gives this definition:

mu sic (myoo' zik) n. 1. the art and science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds or tones in varying melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre, especially so as to form structurally complete and emotionally expressive compositions.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this definition:

1. the art of organizing tones to produce a coherent sequence of sounds intended to elicit an aesthetic response in a listener.

Perhaps it seems strange to bring up this question so late in the semester.  But what you might find stranger is that the 20th century is the first time in the history of music when people began to openly debate the definition of music. After hundreds of years of musical history and repertory, composers began to reconsider what constitutes a musical sound, and began to rethink almost all the essential elements of music.

Revisiting this question, the composer Edgar Varese (1883-1965) gave his own definition of music: he said that music was Organized Sound.  Plain and simple. Music is Organized Sound. There was no reference to vocal or instrumental sounds, no mention of aesthetic responses, no listing of elements such as harmony, melody, and rhythm. Why did Varese phrase his definition this way? What did he really mean to say?

Although I personally don't agree with Varese's definition of music, it does very clearly articulate the viewpoint of many composers from his generation. Furthermore, it has been a very influential statement, cited in articles and countless discussions. For that reason, we should take some time to look at it.

Let's start with the first word, organized. I believe that Varese was still reacting to the suffocating influence of  late Romantic expression. He, like many other composers of his generation, was trying to make music more in tune with the spirit of the 20th century-- as Debussy put it, to write music "for the century of airplanes," that is, something more up-to-date, modern, scientific.  To give you an example, Varese titled his piece for solo flute Density 21.5 after the density of platinum. Throughout his music as well as his writings one finds similar attempts to invoke science, with its tremendous sense of organization.

As far as the word sound is concerned, here too we have an attempt to update the essentials of music. Varese has gone down in history books for a work called Ionisation, written for 45 percussion instruments played by 13  percussionists-- the first western composer to write such a work.  Ionisation was Varese's way of rethinking the very sounds that music was traditionally based on.  Writing a purely percussive piece was also a way of rebelling against the tyranny of melody--  and all the Romantic baggage associated with melody.

Varese's definition pointedly leaves out any mention of expressive intent on the part of the composer, nor does it deal with the response of the listener to the musical experience. This too is deliberate, because, as you will see, many composers in the 20th century dismissed issues of expression and communication in music. Many of them even came to scorn the notion of audience response. As we go through a potpourri of composers and styles in the 20th century, try to keep in mind Varese's definition. You may find it useful in trying to understand both the style and motivation of many contemporary composers.

"ULTRA-RATIONALISTS"

In a sense, when Schoenberg and Berg wrote with the 12-tone system, they still could not entirely betray their Romantic leanings.  There was one disciple of Schoenberg's named Anton Webern (1883-1945), however, who used the system to write music that did seem more emotionally detached. Webern's music has been described as "terse," "dry," "pointillistic," and "austere," with stretches of silence punctuating his sounds. It was this rather arid style of Webern's that, for many younger composers during the first half of the 20th century, captured a sense of modernity.  These composers took their lead from Webern (they have sometimes been called "post-Webernites") and began to experiment with ways to extend the 12-tone system beyond pitch.  You may remember that in Schoenberg's system a composer chose a 12-tone row (or, perhaps a 6 or 10-tone row), and worked with those pitches in a fairly prescribed order. This order helped to circulate all pitches as evenly as possible-- and the even circulation of pitches kept the composer (and consequently the listener) from staking out one or two pitches as the "key" or the main tonal areas of the work. What some composers now attempted to do was to stretch Schoenberg's system to organize rhythm, dynamics, and other elements as well.  This was known by a variety of names, including, "Ultra-Rationality," "extended serialization," or "total serialization." With these techniques a composer laid out a "series" or "row" of rhythms, as well as a series or row of dynamics, for example.  These rows were then circulated in the same manner as the pitch row.

Among the European "post-Webernites" was French composer Pierre Boulez (b. 1925), who also enjoyed a tenure as Music Director of The New York Philharmonic. Boulez wrote a work using total serialization called Structures for two Pianos. Boulez later recanted this method of composition, likening Structures to train schedules for trains that never depart. But his music has remained staunchly intellectual in its basis-- a listener might not even suspect that his later work was not founded upon total serialization.

In America, the first pieces to be worked out with "ultra-rationalist" techniques were written by Milton Babbitt (b.1916) in 1948. In these pieces the linear succession of the pitches is laid out in a row, as well as the harmonies, dynamics, rhythms, tempi, register, timbre, and articulation. His Composition for 4 Instruments is an example of such indefatigable organization of musical materials. Milton Babbitt has had a very large influence in academia as a teacher and theoretician-- an influence which was certainly not limited to the circle of his students but which spread across the United States. His music has not been embraced by the listening public, however, for reasons that will probably be fairly obvious when you listen to the excerpt above. In fact, there have been bilious arguments over the aesthetic merits of Babbitt's music (as well as other composers of this musical persuasion).  Babbitt steadfastly and unapologetically maintains that his music is not for everyone, nor can it be understood or appreciated without some training or musical education-- and he has his adherents. There are those who oppose his style, however, who call it astringent and overly-intellectual, and who feel that listeners should not have to be educated or otherwise "prepped" to be able to appreciate a musical work. Would you like to voice an opinion on the music you just heard? Why not email me?
 

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Before he became a professional composer Milton Babbitt was a mathematician.  He, like so many other composers--Varese and Boulez among them--found great possibilities in melding science with music. And hardly anything could satisfy the search for modernity better than the new avenue of electronic music.

Starting around the turn of the century various inventors and musical tinkerers began to experiment with creating electronic musical instruments. The earliest of these inventions, the Telharmonium developed by Thaddeus Cahill, took up several boxcars and was an enormously complicated mess of wiring. Later electronic instruments that gained brief favor with audiences and composers were the Ondes Martenot and an instrument which became legendary: the Theremin.

The Theremin is the strangest musical instrument ever invented: the only one to be performed without the player actually ever touching it! In the photo at right, the inventor, a Russian scientist named Leon Theremin played the instrument (this particular model was manufactured by RCA in 1929), by holding his hands in front of two antennas. The vertical antenna controlled pitch whereas the round horizontal one controlled volume.

Theremin's concerts attracted such hysterical crowds that police had to be called in! He used the instrument primarily to play sentimental numbers like Saint-Saen's The Swan, but a repertoire of pieces written especially for the instrument soon developed.  Theremin lived in New York for 11 years and then returned to Russia where he suffered terribly under the repressive regime of Stalin. He had no idea that, in the midst of his agony, his instrument had taken on another life altogether in America as the backdrop to countless 1950s sci-fi films, and even -- it's more famous use-- as the spooky background effect in The Beach Boy's hit, Good Vibrations.

In 1948, the composer Pierre Schaeffer (b. 1910), using the French National Radio studios began producing short tape studies based on transformations of "naturally occurring" sounds, such as a train, the wind, or a musical instrument. Using magnetic tape technology Schaeffer edited out portions of the sound, varied the playback speed, played the sounds backwards, and recorded them on top of themselves ("overdubbing.") Schaeffer called these creations musique concrete, a name that has come to signify music created from actual sounds ('concrete sounds') as opposed to purely electronic music, which is created from purely electronic means. Schaeffer founded a group, along with Boulez, Stockhausen, Messaien, Varese, and Xenakis, to explore the possibilities of musique concrete.

In Germany a similar venture was formed at the West German Rundfunk (radio) in Cologne-- but the emphasis was slightly different. German composers did not use natural or concrete sounds, preferring to produce sounds from the ground up, so to speak--entirely from oscillators. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen also worked in this studio and produced a piece that blended aspects of the French musique concrete with the German electronic music. An example of this wildly experimental music is Gesang der Jünglinge (1956).

Edgar Varese, who was zealously devoted to electronic music, composed his Poeme Electronique for the Philips Radio Corporation's Pavillion at the 1958 World's Fair. This building was a futuristic-looking affair designed by Le Corbusier and equipped inside with colored lights and images projected on the walls. This visual setting was accompanied by Varese's Poeme played from 425 speakers throughout the hall.

The biggest breakthrough in electronic music came with the design of the synthesizer, which integrated into one console all the previously disparate electronic elements such as frequency and amplitude (or said another way, volume and pitch) as well as dynamics and timbre. The first successful synthesizer was the RCA Mark II developed by the Sarnoff Research Center in New Jersey. Completed in 1955 it was given to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (housed at Columbia University in New York), under the direction of Milton Babbitt.  For years Babbitt was the only person who knew how to use such a complicated piece of equipment.

As you might expect, the Mark II soon became arcane and was supplanted by a smaller, better and easier machine: the Moog synthesizer, developed by Robert Moog and the Buchla, designed by Donald Buchla. Their synthesizer became the mainstay of the synthesizer industry and was taken up by classical and pop musicians alike. An example of an early work for Buchla was Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon, which was commissioned by the record company, Nonesuch.

Today the world of "electronic music" is largely run by computers-- digital interface has replaced the oscillator and transistor. There are artists who play on electronic violins, as well as a host of other imaginative instruments rarely seen by the public.
 

"ANTI-RATIONALISTS"

Just as "ultra-rationalist" composers found Edgar Varese' definition a stimulus to a new type of creation and a new attitude toward the fundamentals of music, so did those composers that might fit into an opposite aesthetic-- call it "anti-rationalist." Here were composers who were also looking to update music and create something new, daring, and modern. But they opposed the formalism of ultra-rationalist composition.

The most famous of all "anti-rationalist" composers is John Cage (1912-1993), who might also be termed the "bad boy" of music! Cage came at the problem of musical creation with both a sense of humor and a dead-serious desire to be provocative. Taking Varese at his word ("Music is Organized Sound"), Cage wrote compositions such as Imaginary Landscape No.4 for 12 radios!  In this piece, performers have 12 radios on a stage playing simultaneously. The combination of stations, volumes and durations of play determine the presentation and overall effect.

Another Cage work is called HPSCHD, an abbreviation for the word "harpsichord." In this piece (which I performed, live, at Symphony Space in New York City, under the coaching of the composer), six harpsichordists sit on stage and play their parts (consisting of snippets of Mozart, Chopin, and other composers) whenever they so desire. This melange of sound is visually augmented by an old silent film playing in the background. Another work, Concert for Piano and Orchestra, lets the musicians get to choose the pages of music they will play, and also the order of those pages-- the conductor has no score, but instead indicates elapsed time to the performers with arm movements.  In preparing scores for such works, Cage often relied on "chance" -- the throw of dice, or the toss of coins. The ancient Chinese book, I Ching: The Book of Change also provided inspiration for Cage's off-the-cuff creations. The use of such "methods" for musical composition was not necessarily new (an 18th century composition manual detailed how to compose with the throw of dice), but no one had taken them terribly seriously before. With Cage, such chance operations (also called indeterminacy and aleatory) became an alluring form of creation. Cage also pioneered the musical "happening," a spontaneous creation of music performed before a live audience (his Water Music requires the pianist, among other things, to pour a pitcher of water and to blow whistles under water).

If there were a prize for the most famous Cage piece of all that would undoubtedly go to the work named 4'33".  In this work, an instrumentalist sits on stage in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds! The idea was to get the audience to listen to the sounds in the concert hall-- the hum of air-conditioners, people coughing, car-keys jangling, seats creaking-- as if it was all music.  4'33" was meant to demonstrate Cage's conviction that music is everywhere around us in life, and is not an activity that should be limited to the concert hall. As he explained it: "Art is about becoming open to our environment."

I was tempted to put up a blank RealAudio file for 4'33", but then thought better of it-- so here is another work of Cage's, which shows the spirit of his ideas just as vividly: Suite for Toy Piano.

During the 1950s, Cage worked closely alongside a group of like-minded composers: Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Earle Brown (b. 1926), and Christian Wolff (b. 1934).  These composers took their cue from the visual arts, in particular the abstract expressionist painters flourishing in new York City at the time. Feldman noted that he wished to combine tones "as freely and spontaneously as the way the abstract expressionists combined colors." Rothko Chapel (1971-72) expresses his own brand of converting abstract expressionism into music; it takes its inspiration from the architectural design and interior paintings (by Mark Rothko) of a private chapel in Texas. Note how the musical 'events' are spread out over a large canvas of silence the way isolated patches and swathes of color would be spread over a painting.

Earle Brown started out as an engineering major at Northeastern University.  When he switched over to music he studied the "Schillinger System of Musical Composition," a rare music composition method propounded by one man-- Joseph Schillinger-- who was a rather charismatic muse to a number of prominent composers who flocked to his studio to learn from him (among them, George Gershwin). Schillinger's system is not presently in use, nor is it taught as anything more than a curiosity, but it was quite intriguing to composers earlier in the century, who--again-- found that its mathematical and statistical bases seemed more modern. Earle Brown was trained in this system and actually taught it for two years in Denver, Colorado. Brown has since distinguished himself for involving performers in the creation of his music to an almost unprecedented degree (perhaps only rivalled by Cage). In his writings, Brown has discussed the intense sense of "spontaneity" and "mobility" he feels comes from blending the roles of performer and composer. "I prefer that the 'final form' which each performance necessarily produces be a collaborative adventure ,and that the work and its conditions of human involvement remain a 'living' potential of engagement."  Here is an example of Brown's work: Available Forms I.

In seeking new palettes of musical sound, some composers began to examine texture, producing whole pieces based on an exploration of this one musical element. A good example of this is a work by Krzysztof Penderecki called Threnody: To the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). This work defined "textural composition," a type of work based on bands of sound, clusters of notes, and overall textures. In Threnody each individual instrument has its own part, which makes for very dense textures.  Penderecki also abandoned traditional notation for this work, preferring to devise his own "spatial" notation in which measures are supplanted by fixed time segments marked off precisely in seconds. The performers also have to read new signs which instruct them to play their instruments in different ways-- for instance, playing on the tailpiece or bridge of a violin, or striking the instrument with the fingertips to get a knocking sound. This piece is supposed to be descriptive of the bombing of Hiroshima in World War II and the subsequent terror.

So, coming back to the question we began with--

What's your definition of music? Has any of this discussion changed your mind about the issue? Or confirmed your views?

If you'd like to share your thoughts on the subject please do email me.  I look forward to hearing your responses.

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