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The Rest Is Noise Series: Brave New World: The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties
Alex Ross


This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, �The Rest is Noise’. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme.The Cold War breaks out and music explodes into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances,and party splits. The language of modern music is reinvented. This short ebook looks at some of the extraordinary compositions of this period.Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London’s Southbank, The Rest is Noise is an intricate commentary not just on the sounds that defined the century, but on art’s troublesome dance with politics, social and cultural change.Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic, and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Rest is Noise, which was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson and Pulitzer prizes for non-fiction.







This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20


century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episode

Post-War World: Making a Break with the Past


Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Rest is Noise was his first book and garnered huge critical acclaim and a number of awards, including the Guardian First Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of Listen to This.




BRAVE NEW WORLD

The Cold War and the Avant-Grade of the Fifties

From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross








Contents

Brave New World (#u550eb69b-7d93-5130-8b2b-06d0d31e3dd1)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Suggested Listening and Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)





11

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The Cold War and the Avant-Garde of the Fifties


“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet Charles Péguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentieth-century music, describing how grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder for a power struggle among ideologues and pedants. “Unfortunately for most people who pursue art, ideas become their opium,” Feldman said. “There is no security to be one’s self.”

The century began with the mystique of revolution, with the mind-bending harmonies and earthshaking rhythms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The process of politicization was already under way in the twenties, as composers competed to stay ahead of changing trends and accused one another of complicity in regressive tendencies. In the thirties and forties, the entire Romantic tradition was effectively annexed by the totalitarian state. But nothing could compare to what happened when the Second World War ended and the Cold War began. Music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions, theories, polemics, alliances, and party splits. The language of modern music was reinvented on an almost yearly basis: twelve-tone composition gave way to “total serialism,” which gave way to chance music, which gave way to a music of free-floating timbres, which gave way to neo-Dada happenings and collages, and so on. All the informational clutter of late-capitalist society, from purest noise to purest silence, from combinatorial set theory to bebop jazz, came rushing in, as if no barrier remained between art and reality. Strange bedfellows were the order of the day. Following in the footsteps of OMGUS, the CIA occasionally funded festivals that included hyper-complex avant-garde works. Cold War politicians such as John F. Kennedy promised a golden age of freethinking art, and twelve-tone composers at American universities were the indirect beneficiaries.

The Second World War was the war that never really ended. The Allied superpowers stayed on a military footing, and the introduction of atomic warfare and the discovery of the death camps in the summer of 1945 brought about a worldwide darkening of mood. The rhetoric of the early Cold War period crept into the musical discussion as into everything else. Composers exploited possibilities, annexed territory, neutralized the opposition, advanced, retreated, changed sides. When Stravinsky shocked his colleagues by giving up neoclassicism in favor of twelve-tone composition, Leonard Bernstein said that “it was like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him.”

The dominant aesthetic, in European and American music alike, was one of dissonance, density, difficulty, complexity. The American composer Elliott Carter explained why he gave up Copland-style populism and Stravinsky-style neoclassicism: “Before the end of the Second World War, it became clear to me, partly as a result of rereading Freud and others and thinking about psychoanalysis, that we were living in a world where this physical and intellectual violence would always be a problem and that the whole conception of human nature underlying the neoclassic esthetic amounted to a sweeping under the rug of things that, it seemed to me, we had to deal with in a less oblique and resigned way.”

The most formidable proponent of sweeping nothing under the rug was Theodor Adorno—Berg’s old student, Sibelius’s nemesis, Thomas Mann’s musical adviser in the writing of Doctor Faustus. After the war Adorno acquired an intimidating reputation as a post-Marxist philosopher and deep-thinking musical analyst. He was an effective practitioner of the politics of style, using every device at his disposal to demean music that he considered retrogressive. One objective of his 1949 book Philosophy of New Music was to destroy the neoclassicism of Stravinsky: the very act of preserving tonality in the modern era, Adorno proposed, betrayed symptoms of the Fascist personality. He condemned Hindemith on similar grounds, arguing that the “New Objectivity” and “music for use” were tantamount to Nazi kitsch. In his book Minima Moralia Adorno mocked American composers of the populist persuasion, claiming that Copland’s Lincoln Portrait could be found on the gramophone of every Stalinist intellectual.

The only possible path for Adorno was the one that Schoenberg had marked out at the beginning of the century. In fact, music would now carry its holy torch into abysses where even Schoenberg had not dared to go. All familiar sounds, all relics of convention, had to be expunged. The crucial passage in Philosophy of New Music was this:

[New music] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. All its happiness comes in the perception of misery, all its beauty comes in the rejection of beauty’s illusion. Neither the individual nor the collective wants any part of it. It dies away unheard, without echo. When music is heard, it is shot through with time, like a shining crystal; unheard music drops through empty time like a useless bullet. New music spontaneously takes aim at that final condition which mechanical music lives out hour by hour—the condition of absolute oblivion. It is the true message in a bottle.

Such language, reminiscent of the sermons of Thomas Mann’s aesthetes (“Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths”), made perfect sense to the young composers who had recently witnessed oblivion at close range. Schoenberg, having been denounced by Hitler and Stalin alike, carried no taint from totalitarianism either on the left or on the right, or so it seemed. Ernst Krenek went so far as to suggest that he had converted to twelve-tone writing in order to distance himself from totalitarian aesthetics: “My adoption of the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be interpreted as an expression of protest and thus a result of their influence.” Many who abandoned neoclassicism and other between-the-war styles may have thought the same. René Leibowitz argued in his book Schoenberg and His School that atonality displayed “uncompromising moral strength.”

Back on North Rockingham Avenue, Schoenberg delightedly witnessed the resurgence of his music and ideas. Yet the fanaticism of some of his adherents disturbed him. When Leibowitz criticized the persistence of tonal elements in works such as the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Schoenberg replied, “I do not compose principles, but music.” He explained that in earlier years he had avoided tonality in order to differentiate himself from what had gone before; now, he said, “I would not consider the danger of resembling tonality as tragically as formerly.” Schoenberg disowned Adorno’s attacks on Stravinsky (“One should not write like that”) and found little more to like in the theorist’s panegyrics to atonality (“this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors”). Schoenberg probably had both Adorno and Leibowitz in mind when he made a note to himself that the influence of the “Schbrg clique” would have to be broken before his music could gain a proper hearing. He repeated a remarkable prophecy that he had delivered back in 1909: “The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation, all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation, has left intact.”

In his seeing-through-walls way, Schoenberg had mapped out the coming era. He understood that he was being elevated as the patron saint of a newly militant avant-garde mentality, with whose premises he did not agree. While he remained fiercely loyal to the nontonal language that he had pioneered at the beginning of the century, he was no longer so quick to condemn his rivals. Better than Adorno, Schoenberg understood the master dialectic of musical history, the back-and-forth between simplicity and complexity. “I cannot deny the possibility,” Schoenberg once wrote, “that as often in the musical past, when harmony has developed to a certain high point, a change will occur which will bring with it entirely different and unexpected things.”




Radical Reconstruction: Boulez and Cage


The avant-garde era may be said to have begun a few years early, on a cold winter night in 1941, when Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time had its first performance, at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A.

A composer of advanced ideas and strong religious feeling, Messiaen had been serving as a medical orderly when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He was captured near Nancy with two other musician-soldiers, the cellist Étienne Pasquier and the clarinetist Henri Akoka. While the three were being held with other French captives in an open field, Akoka played through a newly composed Messiaen piece titled “Abyss of the Birds”—a clarinet solo that took the form of precise yet disconnected gestures, slow, trancelike chanting lines intertwining with rapid runs and squawks and trills. When Messiaen was sent with his musician friends to Stalag VIII A, near Görlitz, Germany, he set about composing seven other movements for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, those being the instruments that he and his fellow inmates played. At the head of the finished score he wrote an inscription alluding to the book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, �There shall be time no longer.’”

Stalag VIII A was staffed by several officers who lacked true devotion to the Hitler regime. As Rebecca Rischin reveals in a book about the Quartet, one of the guards, Karl-Albert Brüll, advised French-Jewish prisoners not to try to escape, on the grounds that they were safer in the camp than they would be in Vichy France. Brüll also took up the cause of Messiaen’s music, giving the composer pencils, erasers, and music paper with which to work. The prisoner was relieved of his duties and placed in an empty barracks so that he could compose in peace, with a guard posted at the door to turn away intruders.

The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp’s makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed. Messiaen returned to France shortly thereafter, Brüll having connived in the forging of documents in order to speed his release.

By this point in his career, Messiaen had worked out an idiosyncratic musical language, with an especially compelling conception of rhythm. The biblical phrase “There shall be time no longer” turned out to have a strict technical meaning: music would no longer keep to an unvarying meter. A steady beat, Messiaen liked to say, had no life in it; there had been enough of the old one-two-three-four during the war. For inspiration, he looked to The Rite of Spring, with its irregular, ever-changing rhythmic schemes, and also to the talas, or rhythmic patterns, of Hindustani Indian music. He showed how rhythmic cells—a simple telegraphic pulse of long-short, for example—could take on the character of musical themes, as the cells multiplied (long-short long-short long-short) or mutated (long-short-short-short). This, in essence, is the beat of Stravinsky’s “Danse sacrale”—the sound of “implacable destiny,” Messiaen said.

Such ideas won the respect of Messiaen’s sharp-witted students at the Paris Conservatory, several future celebrities of postwar music among them. When the Quartet was played, they were impressed by the novel way it moved through time, in a succession of self-contained moments. What they tended to ignore, however, was the end point of the narrative: sweetly ringing chords in the key of E major. Like Britten in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Messiaen responded to the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.

A few weeks after Allied forces landed at Normandy, a new student, nineteen years old, knocked at Messiaen’s door. “M. Boulez (pupil of Pierre Jamet) at my house at 9:30,” he wrote in his diary. “Likes modern music,” he added. It was the understatement of the century. Pierre Boulez went on to become the perfect avatar of the postwar avant-garde, the one who permitted “no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values,” to quote Mann’s story “At the Prophet’s.”

At first glance, Boulez was a kind of intellectual dreamboat, elegant in manner and dress, charming to men and women alike—“like a young cat,” said the actor Jean-Louis Barrault, for whom Boulez worked as musical director from 1946 to 1956. Yet, in feline fashion, he could turn ferocious in an instant, mastering the put-down as a way of ending arguments. He was a brilliant politician, equally skilled at persuasion and attack. At all times he seemed absolutely sure of what he was doing. Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many old truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring. As Joan Peyser notes in her biography of Boulez, an early admirer was the literary socialite Suzanne Tézenas, formerly the companion of the novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Drieu had been an ardent fascist and had committed suicide shortly before the end of the war. Tézenas greeted Boulez as her new artist savior. She had no particular interest in music, but she liked the way the young man talked.

Unlike so many others of his generation, Boulez suffered little during the war. He was fifteen years old when Germany invaded, and was therefore too young to fight in France’s brief war against Hitler. According to Peyser, he actually welcomed the infusions of German culture that were administered by the Nazi authorities. “The Germans virtually brought high culture to France,” he was quoted as saying. The son of a prosperous factory engineer, he studied higher mathematics before turning to music. Upon enrolling in the Paris Conservatory, he made his presence felt almost immediately. “When he first entered class,” Messiaen recalled, “he was very nice. But soon he became angry with the whole world. He thought everything was wrong with music.” Messiaen also said that Boulez was “like a lion that had been flayed alive, he was terrible!”

In the spring of 1945, French radio organized a seven-concert survey of Stravinsky’s works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the fabled premiere of The Rite of Spring had taken place more than thirty years before. On March 15 a group of young composers, all of them students from the conservatory, disrupted a performance of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods by booing, shouting, whistling, and, according to one report, banging with a hammer. A second demonstration followed, with Boulez among the participants.

Afterward, the French musical world struggled to make sense of the episode. Francis Poulenc, a longtime Stravinskyite, wrote an article for Le Figaro titled “Vive Strawinsky,” in which he lashed out against the “imitation Left” of “youths” and “pseudo-youths” who had insulted his hero. In a letter to Darius Milhaud, Poulenc described the troublemakers as a “fanatic sect” of “Messiaenistes.”

By this time Boulez was a Messiaeniste no longer. Messiaen had proved insufficiently ruthless in his methods, his sentimentality embarrassingly on display when, in a response to the Stravinsky booing affair, he decried “dry and inhuman” tendencies in contemporary music and called for “a little celestial tenderness.” Instead, Boulez sought out lessons from René Leibowitz, who drilled him in twelve-tone procedures. After a year, Leibowitz, too, was found wanting. One day in 1946, Peyser tells us, Boulez brought in the manuscript of his First Piano Sonata, which he wished to dedicate to his teacher. When Leibowitz set about noting various procedural errors, Boulez threw a tantrum, shouted “Vous êtes merde!” and ran from the room. Later, while preparing the sonata for publication, Boulez saw Leibowitz’s name at the top of the first page and stabbed it repeatedly with a letter opener. Boulez also showed animosity toward fellow composers who neglected to follow him on the high modern road. When, in 1951, Henri Dutilleux presented his vibrantly diatonic First Symphony, Boulez greeted him by turning his back.

In the First Sonata, Boulez’s rage exploded into sound. Gone was the French taste for crisp construction. Gone too was Schoenberg’s habit of couching his twelve-tone material in Classical forms and Romantic phrases. Webern was the chief model, although Webern’s lyricism was minimized. Smatterings of pointillistic detail gave way to jabbing, crashing, keyboard-spanning gestures. Aided by Messiaen’s researches, Boulez maximized rhythmic contrast, creating an asymmetry of pulse to match atonality in harmony. The first movement climaxes with an arpeggiated chord marked “violent and rapid,” the second with a chord marked “very brutal and very dry.”

Violence is the leitmotif of other Boulez works of this period: Le Visage nuptial for voice and orchestra, a setting of poems by René Char (“Take leave, my allies, my violent ones”); and Le Soleil des eaux, also based on poems by Char (“River with an indestructible heart in this mad prison-world, keep us violent”). Boulez wrote in 1948, “I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time.” In the same year he finished his Second Piano Sonata, whose final movement builds through stepwise intensifications of expression—“more and more staccato and brutal,” “still more violent”—to a passage in which the pianist is asked to “pulverize the sound; quick, dry attack, as if from bottom to top; stay without nuances at very high volume.”

“Without nuances” is an apt phrase for a spate of polemical articles that Boulez began issuing in 1948. The essay “Trajectories: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg” cleared away extant compositional styles in an ticipation of the next wave. Ravel was a gold mine of sounds, but cir cumscribed by “false discoveries,” “impotence.” The critique of Stravinsky resembled Adorno’s in Philosophy of New Music; neoclassicism was “schematic, arbitrary, stereo typed.” The attack on twelve-tone writing also echoed Adorno’s sociological cant; Schoenberg used his technique “to enclose classic and preclassic forms in the elaboration of a world ruled by functions antagonistic to those very forms.” The one bright light was Webern, whose orientation was “more virulent than that of his master’s works of the same era, a position that in a sense would lead to their annihilation.”

When Schoenberg died in the summer of 1951, Boulez penned a breathtakingly pitiless obituary. “The Schoenberg �case’ is irritating,” he wrote. The old man had revolutionized the art of harmony while leaving rhythm, structure, and form untouched. He had displayed “the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism.” It was time to “neutralize the setback,” to rectify the situation. “Therefore,” Boulez concluded, “I do not hesitate to write, not out of any desire to provoke a stupid scandal, but equally without bashful hypocrisy and pointless melancholy: SCHOENBERG IS DEAD.”

What could replace Schoenberg’s antiquated paradigm? Messiaen supplied the beginning of an answer. Back in 1946 he had planned a “ballet on Time”—a piece in which he would “develop timbres, durations, and nuances according to the principles of serialism.” In the summer of 1949, he set to work on a piano piece called Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, or Scale of Durations and Dynamics, which became the springboard for a new compositional technique known as “total serialism.”

In the interest of cultivating rhythmic variety, Messiaen decided that the lengths of notes—sixteenth, eighth, quarter, and so forth—should be arranged in a scale parallel to the scale of pitches. He also made rows of dynamic levels (ppp, fff, pp, ff, and so on) and of attacks (accented, staccato, legato, and so on). A particular note is always assigned the same values. Thus, the high E-flat is always a thirty-second note, is always played ppp, and is (almost) always slurred. The idea of “scales of rhythm” was not new, having already been theorized by two American experimenters, Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell. Messiaen was, however, the first to coordinate all the variables in one system.

Scale of Durations and Dynamics, which appeared in the collection Four Rhythm Études, was the work that really electrified Messiaen’s current and former students, among them Boulez, Jean Barraqué, and Karel Goeyvaerts. Here was the maximally differentiated music that they had been seeking. Barraqué, in fact, had already begun serializing rhythm and register, and would put the method into action in his sprawling, jaggedly eloquent Piano Sonata of 1952. But Boulez went furthest, organizing Messiaen’s parameters—pitch, duration, volume, and attack—into sets of twelve, along the lines of twelve-tone writing. Pitches do not repeat until all twelve have sounded. Durations do not repeat until all twelve have been used. Dynamics and attacks vary from section to section. The result is a music in constant flux.

In 1950 and 1951, Boulez deployed his new procedures in Polyphonie X, for large ensemble, and Structures 1a, for two pianos. The latter piece begins grandiloquently, at maximum volume: an E-flat sounds in the topmost octave of the first piano, setting off two simultaneous twelve-tone rows, one in original form and one in inversion, unfolding in all registers and in rotating durations, with the lower end defined by a stentorian B-flat. One more heroic musical law is being graven in stone.

The emotional content of the music is elusive. The feeling of delirium wears off after a few minutes, giving way to a kind of objectified, mechanized savagery. The serialist principle, with its surfeit of ever-changing musical data, has the effect of erasing at any given moment whatever impressions the listener may have formed about previous passages in the piece. The present moment is all there is. Boulez’s early works, notably the two Sonatas, Structures, and Le Visage nuptial, are perhaps best understood not as intellectual experiences but as athletic, even cerebrally sexual ones. Michel Foucault, the great theorist of power and sexuality, seemed almost turned on by Boulez’s music, and for a time he was the lover of Boulez’s fellow serialist Barraqué. “They represented for me the first �tear’ in the dialectical universe in which I had lived,” Foucault said of the serialists. What drove Boulez’s own rage for order remains unknown.



In the spring of 1949, John Cage, aged thirty-six, arrived in Paris with his professional and personal partner, the dancer Merce Cunningham. At the suggestion of Virgil Thomson, Cage went to see Boulez, and an unlikely, short-lived, but mutually influential friendship was born.

Already the most radical American composer of the time, Cage proceeded to unleash some of the most startling events and non-events in musical history: tape and radio collages, works composed by chance process, multimedia happenings, and, most famously, 49330, during which the performer makes no sound. Some years later, in conversation with Calvin Tomkins, Cage defined himself in terms that Boulez would have readily understood: “I am going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure—because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed.” And yet Cage’s enterprise lacked the pitilessness of Boulez’s assault on the past. In place of the term “avant-garde,” which implied a quasi-military forward drive, Cage preferred “experimental,” which, he said, was “inclusive rather than exclusive.” In truth, Cage was capable both of great violence and of great tenderness, and his music wavers tensely between those extremes.

Cage was a Los Angeles native, the son of an inventor who built one of the earliest functioning submarines. He had a Roman nose, a gaunt face, and a reedy voice, like that of the actor Vincent Price. In the early fifties he assumed the look of a hip young physicist, cropping his hair short and dressing in stiff-collared white shirts. He had moved to New York in 1942, and by the end of the decade he was living on the top floor of a crumbling tenement on the East River, where he fashioned a bohemian-Zen utopia of white walls and minimal furnishings. He worked at a drafting table outfitted with a fluorescent lamp, etching his scores with German-made Rapidograph pens. Cage’s personality was a curious mix of eccentricity and worldliness; even as he explored esoteric musical regions, his activities seldom went unrecorded in the press.

Cage began as an acolyte of Arnold Schoenberg. In 1935 and 1936 he attended several of the great man’s classes at USC and UCLA. His attempts at twelve-tone writing were peculiar, featuring rows of up to twenty-five notes. From the start, he expressed disdain for the conventions of mainstream classical music and looked around for alternatives. In 1930, when he was only eighteen, he made a trip to Berlin and received stimulation from the culture of the Weimar Republic. He happened to attend a “phonograph concert” presented by Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, at which phonographs played prerecorded sounds onstage, including a “spoken music” of phonetic syllables. In 1939 Cage wrote a work in which a phonograph becomes a musical instrument—Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for muted piano, Chinese cymbal, and variable-speed turntables. Three years later came Credo in Us, which includes a part for a record player or radio; the score suggests, with apparent sarcasm, that the operator “use some classic: e.g. Dvořák, Beethoven, Sibelius, or Shostakovich.”

For Cage, the classical tradition was worn-out kitsch ripe for de-construction, in the manner of his intellectual hero, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. A record player squawking random bits of Beethoven or Shostakovich became the sonic equivalent of painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa or displaying a urinal as sculpture.

Also, Cage loved noise. In a 1940 manifesto he declared, “I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.” He made his name as a composer for percussion, manufacturing instruments from brake drums, hubcaps, spring coils, and other cast-off car parts. At the same time, he was bewitched by soft sounds, rustlings on the border between noise and silence. The prepared piano, his most famous invention, never fails to surprise listeners expecting to be battered by some unholy racket; the preparation process, involving the insertion of bolts, screws, coins, pieces of wood and felt, and other objects between the strings, is conceptually violent, but the sounds themselves are innately sweet. Cage’s prepared-piano pieces—among them The Perilous Night, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle, and the cycle Sonatas and Interludes—have some of the supernatural poignancy of Erik Satie, whose music Cage loved from an early age.

The same gentleness governs the String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–50), whose movements are titled “Quietly Flowing Along,” “Slowly Rocking,” “Nearly Stationary,” and “Quodlibet.” Underneath the ethereal surface, however, unsettling new processes are at work. In the quartet Cage gathers various kernels of musical sound and arranges them in a “gamut,” a kind of chessboard of possibilities. He moves from one sound to another in a detached frame of mind, trying not to push them where they do not want to go. This abdication of control sets the stage for an enormous shock.

When Cage heard Boulez’s Second Sonata, he was, in his own words, “stupefied by its activism, by the sum of the activities inherent in it.” In his next works, Sixteen Dances and the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, everything disintegrated. At first, Cage maintained the method of the String Quartet in Four Parts, making moves on a chart of sixty-four sounds, containing notes, chords, trills, and so on. Then, while writing the final movement of the Concerto, in late 1950 and early 1951, the composer began tossing coins in order to determine what should come next. He followed the rules of the Chinese divinatory practice of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which uses random operations to generate any one of sixty-four hexagrams, each describing a different state of mind or being (“force,” “radiance,” and so on). The piano cycle Music of Changes, composed in 1951, depended on the I Ching throughout; successive coin tosses determined what sound would be heard, how long it should last, how loud it should be, what tempo should be observed, and how many simultaneous layers of activity should accumulate. When the process called for maximum density, Cage wrote down what he acknowledged to be an “irrational” quantity of notes, leaving the execution to the performer’s discretion.

Half the sounds on the charts were, in fact, silences. As James Pritchett writes in a study of Cage’s music, the composer was becoming interested in the “interchangeability of sound and silence.”

The use of chance—Cage would later make musical decisions based on imperfections in manuscript paper, star charts, and computer-generated numbers—strayed far outside European classical tradition. By downtown New York standards, however, it was nothing terribly outlandish. In these years Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg were throwing down violent swirls of paint, stark monochrome patterns, and shiny geometric lines, or making canvases entirely black or entirely white. Pollock’s “drip paintings” used a semi-chance process.

Cage consorted with the painters, following them from the Artists’ Club on East Eighth Street to the Cedar Tavern. He also worked in tandem with Merce Cunningham, who had created the role of the Revivalist in Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring and later devised his own joltingly free and fluid choreographic language. Together, Cunningham and Cage invented a new kind of chance-driven dance in which sound and movement went their separate ways only to meet up again on a deeper conceptual level. Around this time, Cage browsed through the literature of Zen Buddhism, which supplied him with an all-accepting, “whatever happens will happen” approach to the creative process.

A few other New York–based composers were thinking along similar lines, and they gravitated into Cage’s orbit. The most important of these was Morton Feldman, a New York native who had steeped himself in Bartók, Varèse, the Second Viennese School, and Abstract Expressionist painting. It was Feldman who set loose the imp of chance; one day at Cage’s apartment he offered up for inspection a draft of a piece titled Projection 1, whose score consisted not of notes on staves but of a grid of boxes, each box lasting a certain period of time and indicating a high, middle, or low range. This novel practice came to be known as graphic notation: the composer was no longer telling performers exactly which notes to play at any given time.

A laboratory atmosphere developed in Cage’s apartment. Other frequent visitors were the teenage experimental prodigy Christian Wolff, whose early works drew on severely limited gamuts of three or four pitches; Earle Brown, whose open-form pieces imported some of the energy of bebop; and the pianist David Tudor, whose realizations of his friends’ graphic and chance scores were compositions in themselves.

Cage launched his revolution at three historic concerts in the spring and summer of 1952. First came Water Music, at the New School for Social Research, in May. David Tudor not only played the prepared piano but shuffled cards, poured water from one receptacle to another, blew a duck whistle, and changed stations on a radio. Each action was plotted on a time continuum. Then came Black Mountain Piece, at Black Mountain College, the first true “happening.” The boundary between artist and audience disappeared as participants stepped out of the crowd to perform musical or extramusical actions. Martin Duberman, in his history of the college, valiantly tried to determine what happened at the happening, but no two accounts agreed. Cage lectured on Zen Buddhism, perhaps standing on a ladder. Robert Rauschenberg exhibited artworks and/or played Edith Piaf records at double speed. Merce Cunningham danced. David Tudor played prepared piano. Movies of some kind were shown, boys or girls served coffee, a dog may or may not have barked. Black Mountain had always been a haven for adventurous spirits, but some of the faculty felt that Cage had gone too far. Stefan Wolpe, who had gone through his own Dada phase in 1920s Berlin, walked out in protest.

The final breakthrough was the premiere of 49330, the so-called silent piece, on August 29, in the upstate New York town of Woodstock. Cage later said that he had been inspired to write 49330 after seeing a group of all-white Rauschenberg canvases at Black Mountain the previous year. “Music is lagging,” he thought to himself, on encountering Rauschenberg’s work. In fact, he had already experimented with spells of silence in Music of Changes, and, back in 1948, he had talked about writing a four-and-a-half-minute soundless piece titled Silent Prayer. Rauschenberg simply emboldened him to do the unthinkable.

The original score was written out on conventional music paper, tempo = 60, in three movements. David Tudor walked onstage, sat down at the piano, opened the piano lid, and did nothing, except to close the lid and open it again at the beginning of each subsequent movement. The music was the sound of the surrounding space. It was at once a head-spinning philosophical statement and a Zen-like ritual of contemplation. It was a piece that anyone could have written, as skeptics never failed to point out, but, as Cage seldom failed to respond, no one else did.



The bourgeois piano having been silenced, the age of the machines could begin. On his European trip of 1949, Cage encountered several pioneering technicians of electronic music, who had set in motion the most sweeping of all postwar campaigns against the musical past.

The previous year, Pierre Schaeffer, an engineer at the French national radio network, had devised five electronic Études of Noises, one movement of which consisted of the huffing, chugging, and whistling of six locomotives that he had recorded in the Batignolles train station. Schaeffer worked initially with phonograph discs, but he soon realized that magnetic-tape recording, which German engineers had perfected during the war, allowed for the making of sound collages by way of cutting and splicing bits of tape. (His initial research into musical acoustics had actually taken place during the war, with the approval of the occupying German forces.) Schaeffer went on to create, in collaboration with another Messiaen pupil, Pierre Henry, an extended collage work titled Symphony for a Solitary Man. Schaeffer dubbed his work musique concrète and developed his tape fragments with contrapuntal intensity—playing them backward, speeding them up, slowing them down, slicing off the attack, or turning them into loops.

When Cage came to Paris, Boulez, knowing of his long-standing fascination with electronic gizmos, introduced him to Schaeffer. A few years later, in New York, Cage gained access to German-style magnetic-tape recorders, and, at the studio of Louis and Bebe Barron, he laboriously put together the four-minute tape collage Williams Mix, one of a group of pieces that emerged from the collaborative Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. The material came from an enormous heap of tape fragments, which were distributed in six categories: city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced sounds, wind sounds, and “small” sounds. Cage subjected these to I Ching manipulations, producing constant jumps from one sound to another or buzzing, scrambled textures of up to sixteen simultaneous layers. Notwithstanding the emotional detachment of the method, Williams Mix has the air of a world gone berserk, of modernity imploding on itself.

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for twelve radios, partakes of the same mad house atmosphere: two players are positioned at each radio, one switching stations according to patterns specified in the score, the other making adjustments to volume. A more pointed satire of media-saturated society could hardly be imagined, although, as ever, the composer’s attitude is studiously deadpan. Some part of Cage longed for pretechnological, even preindustrial life. In his 1950 “Lecture on Nothing,” he quoted a woman from Texas who told him, “We have no music in Texas.” He then said, “The reason they’ve no music in Texas is because they have recordings in Texas. Remove the records from Texas and someone will learn to sing.”

All this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as with-eringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies he was calling his former friend a “performing monkey” whose methods betrayed “fascist tendencies”—thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius, and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.




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