- NEWSLETTERS Vol.1 -         CONTENTS
  Click the title to read the text.

 • Present for the Future: A Journey Through the Music of the 20th Century
by Lucien La Motte

 • Interview with Robert McDonald (Part 1)

 • Scenes from Rehearsals

 • Biographies of the Composers
     Alexander Goehr
     György Kurtág
     Witold Lutosławski
     Judith Weir
     Isang Yun
 
 • Listening Suggestions

 


Readers are invited to submit questions, about contemporary music in general or Midori's all-contemporary program in particular. Time and space permitting, Midori will answer some of the questions on these Newsletter web pages.
Please address your questions to violin@gotomidori.com

At the Paris World Exhibition of 1889, members of an emerging global community gathered in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower eagerly anticipating the dawning of a new century. Thoughts of the onlookers took flight toward the heavens projected along its massive steel frame; the air was electric as a future of seemingly endless possibilities was upon them. The stage was set for an age of wonder in which man would discover the ability to play god to the world around him, capable of painting a world rich in beauty or destroying all life with a single stroke to the canvas. The world raced to meet this future with child-like curiosity and enthusiasm, leaving little time to reflect on the course of action.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was well aware of the global scale to which events of the coming age were inevitably headed. While attending the exhibition, he experienced the colorful and exotic sonorous world of the Javanese gamelan, the effects of which profoundly impacted his artistic direction. His use of sonorities as entities of color not bound to the tradition of western harmonic progression stems from his encounter with the music of the gamelan. The well of artistic creation from which he drew inspiration for works such as Prélude àl'après-midi d'un faun (1894) was one of world cultural origin, while La cathédrale engloutie (1910) in his use of parallel fourths and fifths alludes to organum of the ninth century. Debussy knew music to be a living language in which "we must throw wide the windows to the open sky,"1 allowing for the language to evolve in order for composers to express more appropriately their reaction to the world around them.

In America, Charles Ives (1874-1954) espoused the practice of anything is possible and should be tried, evident in his statement that "there can be nothing 'exclusive' about art, it comes directly out of the heart of experiencing life, thinking about and living life."2   In Piano Sonata No. 2, referred to as the Concord Sonata, Ives demonstrated a spirit of rugged individualism unafraid to experiment, taking the listener on a stylistic journey through the corridors of music history while simultaneously pointing to the way of the future. For this work Ives draws upon the transcendentalist ideal of a spiritual state that transcends the physical through individualism and self-reliance in the discovery of truth. The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction to the general state of culture and society at the time, and called for social reform, especially anti-slavery and women's rights. In 1836, transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay calling for a revolution in human consciousness stating, "So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes." In his work, Ives called upon the world to listen with new ears.

From its inception, the composition of art music has progressed by means of an increased use of dissonance. By the early twentieth century, the Second Viennese School headed by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) explored new compositional procedures with the idea of what he termed the "emancipation of the dissonance." The increased use of dissonance inevitably freed the subjects in the equal temperament system from their tradition roles in service to a king. The twelve tones of the equal temperament system were now truly equal, and were poised eye to eye on the sonic playing field of the twentieth century. Much like the emancipated tones of the equal temperament system, composers found new freedom to explore uncharted compositional directions and began devising their own systems of musical organization. In the new century, the increased rate of change in society was mirrored in the rapidly changing musical landscape and proliferation of compositional styles. Schoenberg's student Alban Berg wrote of the difficulties in listening to new music being the direct result of "the abundance of artistic means" and "the application of all compositional possibilities presented by music throughout the centuries - in a word; its immeasurable richness."3  With the expectation of anything being sonically possible in contemporary music, the listener is in essence unprepared for everything.

Revolution was in the air as Russian born Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) exploded onto the scene with works such as Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911) and Le sacre du printemps (1913). His fresh approach sent shockwaves through the music community, the effects of which reverberate in the ears of composers to this day. Stravinsky's early works exemplify the high rate of change and volatile nature of the twentieth century. He worked to consciously avoid repetition of his previous artistic output, tirelessly searching to explore and create new sonic landscapes. In Le sacre, Stravinsky broke new ground with musical material of an unpredictable, boundless, and even brutal energy. In Pulcinella (1920), Stravinsky became enamored with constructing music based on the devices of Mozart's time, but viewed those devices through the lens of the twentieth century. In his Neoclassical works, Stravinsky demonstrated the ability to create something new by filtering the traditions of the past. The composer desired an audience of active participants in the musical experience, "for in music …understanding is given only to those who make an active effort …passive receptivity is not enough …for one can listen without hearing just as one can look without seeing."4

Composers including Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) of Brazil and Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) of Argentina engaged listeners as they looked to the folk traditions of their heritage for musical material. Béla Bartók (1881-1945) drew from his Hungarian heritage as a source for compositional material. As an ethnomusicologist he undertook the enormous task of transcribing and collecting not only Hungarian folk music, but also that of Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Arabic and Turkish origin. Bartók possessed an intuitive sense of proportion in his creation of musical structures, similar to the balance and symmetry Mozart demonstrated in his work during the eighteenth century. Bartók's use of Sonata form for the first movement of his Concerto for Orchestra (1943) alludes to the age of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, while the opening fugue in Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta (1936) calls upon the procedures of Johann Sebastian Bach.

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) approached music with a mission to "reveal the truths of the Catholic faith." On his mystic pilgrimage he sought to create a new musical language that included what he termed modes of limited transposition, birdsong and rhythmic sequences of Greek and Indian origin. Mozart made use of birdsong in the Magic Flute and Beethoven in his Sixth Symphony, but they approached birds merely mimicking their songs. As an ornithologist Messiaen approached birdsong with exacting detail in giving flight to his birds, a lifelong obsession in pursuit of freeing the soul from its earthly vessel.

Perhaps in reaction to the rapid pace of society and destructive forces of war and imprisonment, Messiaen relentlessly pursued the compositional structuring of time in the hopes to transcend time itself. In Quatour pour la fin du temps, written and premiered while imprisoned by German forces from 1940-41, Messiaen explored the possibilities of rhythmic palindromes and isorhythmic patterns in which a cycle of pitches was set to a cycle of rhythmic durations, each differing in length. The listener becomes suspended in time as pitch and rhythm revolve in relationship to one anther in an unfamiliar dance that all the while seems strangely familiar. Messiaen's compositional techniques opened the door to total serialism. Among his students to venture through that door were Pierre Boulez (1925- ), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928- ), and Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001).

During the Jazz Age, the world in its hunger for new sounds turned to the compositions of George Gershwin (1889-1937) and Duke Ellington (1899-1974) as they forged an American identity. Stalin's Doctrine of Socialist Realism of 1929 isolated an entire generation of composers, effectively impeding the evolution of artists such as Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). In the years following World War II, composers such as John Cage (1912-1992) would challenge the very definition of music through the unpredictable element of chance. Stockhausen as part of the Darmstadt school challenged his listeners to experience music as a series of frozen points in time in what he termed "moment form," often using electronics to form new sonic landscapes.

In the 1960s, the minimalists including Philip Glass (1937- ), Steve Reich (1936-), and Terry Riley (1935- ) in opposition to the complex materials of the serialists, created simpler musical structures of a highly repetitive nature. Claude Debussy had stated, "music is the silence between the notes." If so, the work of Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) is pure music, often employing silence to deafening levels. The use of sound became a perversion of motionless air molecules.

No single style or school of composition in art music of the twentieth century existed as did in previous eras. Common ground was difficult to find, and listeners felt alienated as they struggled relating to the evolving musical language and expression of the world in which they lived. Stravinsky believed music to be "essentially powerless to express anything at all,"5  it is what we as participants in the musical experience bring to the sonic feast that gives the music its power. We must be actively present as participants in the experience for the music to have a future. As Henry Miller said, "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware …art is a means to the life more abundant and merely points the way."

Who will point the way in this century? Shall we follow?


Lucien La Motte is a graduate student in composition at San Francisco State University.

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Notes
1.  Sam Morgenstern ed., Composers On Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 326.
2.  Larry Sitsky ed., Music of the Twentieth-Century Avante-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 218.
3.  Sam Morgenstern ed., Composers On Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 458.
4.  Sam Morgenstern ed., Composers On Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 442.
5.  Sam Morgenstern ed., Composers On Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 442.


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Bibliography
 • Howard, John Tasker. This Modern Music: A Guide for the Bewildered Listener. New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1942.
 • Morgenstern, Sam, ed. Composers On Music: An Anthology of Composers' Writings from Palestrina to Copland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956.
 •  Sitsky, Larry, ed. Music of the Twentieth-Century Avante-Garde: A Biocritical Sourcebook. London: Greenwood Press, 2002.
 •  Oliver, Michael, ed. Settling the Score: A Journey through the Music of the Twentieth Century. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.
 •  Tawa, Nicholas. Art Music in the American Society: The Condition of Art Music in the Late Twentieth Century. London: Scarecrow Press, 1987.