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One Saturday in early March, Craft joined the Stravinskys for an expedition to a
barbecue restaurant in the Mojave Desert, and during the long drive back the
old man suddenly broke down, lamenting that he had nothing more to say and
that history was passing him by. “For a moment he actually seems ready to
weep,” Craft confided to his diary. “He is suffering the shock of recognition that
Schoenberg’s music is richer in substance than his own.”
It is unlikely that Stravinsky thought any such thing. But he did know that
Schoenberg mattered more at the present historical moment. And so, in this
same period, he made his initial ventures into twelve-tone writing, or, more
precisely, into composition using extended rows of mostly non-repeating notes.
He had been working on a Cantata based on old English texts, and on February
8, 1952, he started to set to music “To-Morrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” the
source of the modern poem “Lord of the Dance.” After some days of tinkering,
he hit upon an eleven-note series as his main melody. The text reads, in part:
The Jews on me they made great suit,
And with me made great variance;
Because they lov’d darkness rather than light …
Before Pilate the Jews me brought,
Where Barabbas had deliverance,
They scourg’d me and set me at nought
Judg’d me to die to lead the dance.
Schoenberg would not have been flattered to know that Stravinsky’s adventures
in serial writing began with a song about the alleged Christ-killing machinations
of the Jews.
In May 1952, Stravinsky returned to Paris for the first time since the war, to
attend an elaborate, expensive, and incoherent festival called Masterpieces of
the XXth Century. The organizer was Nicolas Nabokov, whom Stravinsky had
known since the Diaghilev days. Now occupying the impressive-sounding post
of general secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Nabokov was trying
to counter the spread of Communism in Western Europe by producing model
festivals of democratic culture.
The programming ranged from tonally oriented works such as Benjamin
Britten’s Billy Budd and Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts to the
expressionistic violence of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Berg’s Wozzeck and
onward to the futuristic bleeps of musique concrète. Although Nabokov never
warmed to atonality and twelve-tone writing-in a 1948 article for the Partisan
Review he spoke of Schoenberg’s method as “a hermetic cult, mechanistic in its
technique”-he appreciated its ideological value. “Advanced” styles symbolized
the freedom to do what one wanted, which, as Nabokov wrote in an introduction
to a special festival issue of the journal La Revue musicale, was the dominant
theme of the festival—“the liberty to experiment … to be esoteric or familiar.”
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Funding for Masterpieces of the XXth Century was said to have come from the
Farfield Foundation, a coalition of arts patrons under the leadership of a yeast-
and-gin millionaire named Julius Fleischmann. In fact, Farfield was a front, its
financing arranged entirely by the CIA.
Stravinsky had the lead role in Nabokov’s jamboree. He conducted his
Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements while Pierre Monteux led
the Boston Symphony in the Rite of Spring. All performances took place at the
Théâtre des Champs-Èlysées. George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet also
came to town; Balanchine had wanted to stage the Rite with designs by
Picasso, but Nabokov quashed the plan because “Comrade Picasso” had
compromised himself with pro-Communist statements.
The climax of the festivities came with two staged performances of Oedipus
Rex, but these were marred by yet another scandal. Nabokov had unwisely
paired the second Oedipus with Erwartung, both under the direction of Hans
Rosbaud. The Schoenberg came first, and a bevy of young people, presumably
of the Boulezian type, applauded it. Then, at intermission, many of them walked
out. Jean Cocteau delivered the Oedipus narration, and at one point he was
interrupted by boos. When Cocteau asked the audience to respect the
composer, the boos did not abate, though they were now mixed with bravos.
Stravinsky got up from his seat and returned to his hotel. Once more the creator
of the Rite was being booed on the avenue Montaigne, only now, instead of
being too radical, he was considered not radical enough.
Boulez’s Structures 1a figured in Masterpieces of the XXth Century as a sample
of what the younger generation was doing. The composer and his erstwhile
teacher Messiaen played it at 5:30 one afternoon, with Stravinsky and Craft in
attendance. Boulez’s involvement in Nabokov’s festival was grudging; he could
not have been pleased to be lumped together with the likes of Britten and
Thomson. Two years later he would accuse Nabokov of creating a “folklore of
mediocrity” and recommend that a future festival celebrate the twentieth-century
condom.
Boulez also made his presence felt in the special Masterpieces of the XXth
Century issue of La Revue musicale, contributing a lengthy essay titled
“Eventually …,” which laid out the particulars of the total-serialist system. What
got everyone’s attention was a polemical section toward the beginning of the
article, which started off with the ominous line “Why not play the sniper for a few
moments?” and ended thus: “What to conclude? The unexpected: we assert for
our part that any musician who has not experienced-we do not say understood,
but experienced—the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS.” A
close reader might have guessed that the sniper’s rifle was aimed straight at
Stravinsky, who, in his Poetics of Music, had written that the artist should
concern himself with the “beautiful” and the “useful.”
As if emigrating yet again, Stravinsky set about learning a new language. In a
score of Structures 1a, he dutifully noted each instance of the twelve-tone
series, though he gave up after a couple of pages.
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Over the next several years, Stravinsky absorbed Schoenberg’s method, but on
his own terms. Tone-row melodies appeared in the Septet of 1952-53. Full-
blown dodecaphony became operational in the ballet Agon, which Stravinsky
began in late 1953 and finished in 1957. Finally, by the end of the fifties, he was
writing music from which nearly all traces of tonality have disappeared: the
oratorio Threni, based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the Movements for
piano and orchestra. Nicolas Nabokov’s well of funds helped to finance these
adventures. The scholar Anne Shreffler has assembled evidence suggesting
that the five thousand dollars that Stravinsky received for Threni came from the
coffers of the CIA. The fifteen-thousand-dollar fee for the Movements appears
to have been paid by a Swiss industrialist, although Nabokov had a hand in
arranging the commission.
Knowing who held the power in the new postwar dispensation, Stravinsky
cultivated a friendship with Boulez. The two met in New York in December
1952, at a party at Virgil Thomson’s apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The
following year Stravinsky read Boulez’s intermittently dismissive essay
“Stravinsky Remains …,” but was still friendly at later meetings. When Boulez
came to Los Angeles in early 1957, Stravinsky arranged for him to stay at the
Tropicana Motor Hotel, just down the hill from his house. That summer the
seventy-five-year-old composer made the ultimate gesture of respect—or self-
abasement—when he walked up the long flight of stairs to Boulez’s Paris garret.
Yet as the years went by Stravinsky found it increasingly difficult to ignore
Boulez’s ill-concealed contempt for everything he had written after Les Noces,
whether neoclassical or twelve-tone. There were suggestions that Boulez’s
Domaine Musical series was using the great Stravinsky name mainly for its
publicity value. In 1958 Stravinsky came to Paris to conduct Threni at the
Domaine Musical; after the performance devolved into a near-fiasco, Boulez
was blamed for failing to rehearse the ensemble adequately. In 1970, after
sundry other ups and downs, Stravinsky finally came to grips with the younger
man’s “unforgivable condescension,” as he or Craft put it in a letter to the Los
Angeles Times.
If Stravinsky’s twelve-tone writing failed to satisfy the implacable Boulez, it did
restore the composer’s faith in himself. Despite the change of technique,
characteristic traits and tics remained. Like Berg before him, Stravinsky
manipulated the series in order to generate whatever material, tonal or atonal,
he required; and he delighted in the hidden continuities that emerge from
repetitions of the twelve-tone row—“like so many changes in a peal of bells,” to
quote Stephen Walsh. In other words, Stravinsky’s old bopping, bouncing
patterns keep churning beneath the variegated surface.
The Movements and the Variations draw microscopic worlds from
supercompressed material, in the manner of the later Webern. Atonal harmony
lends a somber, solemn aura to a final series of religious works—Threni,
Canticum sacrum, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, The Flood, and
Abraham and Isaac—although even here the rows are stacked in favor of
consonant chords: triads flicker like shafts of light in a darkened church. And the
two late-period masterpieces, Agon and Requiem Canticles, synthesize all the
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voices of Stravinsky’s long and varied career—the Russian-primitive, the
Parisian-neoclassical, the American-modernistic—into works of untrammeled
expressive urgency.
Agon came into being at the behest of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein,
the choreographer and impresario, respectively, of the New York City Ballet.
Balanchine had been living in America since 1933, and, in the course of staging
Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes, Danses concertantes, Circus Polka, and Orpheus,
had formed a close-to-ideal partnership with a composer who had always
thrived on cross-disciplinary collaboration. Stravinsky filled Balanchine’s time
slots down to the second; Balanchine invented moves that were organically
related to Stravinsky’s gestures, at once athletic and abstract.
The choreographer dreamed of summoning forth the definitive Stravinsky
ballet—as Kirstein put it, “a ballet which would seem to be the enormous finale
of a ballet to end all the ballets the world has ever seen.” It would consist of a
“contest” or vigorous interplay among informally dressed dancers on a blank
stage. Kirstein had sent along a copy of François de Lauze’s seventeenth-
century manual Apologie de la danse; Stravinsky and Balanchine eventually
decided to translate these ancient steps into modern forms, radically reinventing
them in the process. Reading the manual, Stravinsky underlined passages that
noted how certain dances had originated in pagan festivals, witch ceremonies,
and ring dances around a stone representing the devil. In writing Agon, he was
feeling his way back to energies that had lain dormant since the Rite.
This last great Stravinsky ballet, for twelve dancers in twelve sections, mixes
sounds and styles from several centuries of musical history as well as from
several decades of the composer’s career. Regal, neo-Renaissance trumpet
fanfares set the piece in motion and return several times as organizing
punctuation. Driving Rite-like rhythms and creeping chromatic lines give shape
to the Double and Triple Pas-de-Quatre. Stately Baroque rhythms decorate the
Sarabande, surreal Renaissance twanglings animate the Gailliarde. Twelve-
tone writing comes into play in the Coda of the First Pas-de-Trois, joined to
scrappy violin solos that recall Histoire du soldat. Tensely expressive string
lines, vaguely reminiscent of Berg’s Lyric Suite, make for a melancholy Pas de
Deux. Finally, in the Four Duos and Four Trios, the archaic-modern ritual
acquires a jitter of jazz.
All this is highly absorbing in itself, but the music really pulses with life when it is
played alongside the Balanchine action that Stravinsky had in mind as he wrote:
the streetwise look of the dancers in their rehearsal clothes; the four males
standing stone-still at the outset of the piece, their backs turned to the audience;
the acting out of the smallest details in the score, not just the rhythms but the
placement of chords high or low, the differentiation of timbre, the lengthening or
shortening of note values; the way the dancers register beats in every part of
their bodies, with twitchings of the shoulder, snaps of the wrist, extensions or
lashings of the arm; and the cohesiveness of the entire conception, reconciling
brain and body, the cerebral and the sexual.
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If Agon is a refined reprise of the visceral Rite, Requiem Canticles is the late-
period counterpart of the Symphony of Psalms. It grew out of the most
momentous experience of Stravinsky’s last years—his return, after an absence
of five decades, to his Russian homeland, in 1962. Inevitably, Cold War
calculations were required to set the trip in motion, with Nabokov playing his
usual rainmaker role. One day in 1961 Nabokov told Stravinsky, “Someone has
said that you’re going to Moscow.” Two days later, an inquiry was made by the
U.S. State Department. The following month a delegation of Soviet musicians,
led by Tikhon Khrennikov, Shostakovich’s sometime nemesis, showed up in Los
Angeles and invited Stravinsky to Moscow.
Stravinsky, coolest of customers, was thunderstruck by the experience of going
to Moscow and revisiting what used to be St. Petersburg. He saw old relatives,
passed old haunts, soaked up the adulation of Russian crowds. Long-
suppressed traits reappeared in his personality and in his music. Requiem
Canticles, written in 1965 and 1966, makes systematic use, for the first time in
decades, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s octatonic scale and other devices that had
anchored Stravinsky’s youthful works. There are chords like the famous
polytonal dissonances in the second section of the Rite, only now they move
more slowly, as if in mourning. At the end, bell chords ring into the middle
distance. In the one Romantic gesture of his career, the composer had written a
Requiem for himself. He died in 1971, and was buried in Venice, near the grave
of Serge Diaghilev.
Once the avatar of a primitivist-modernist Russia, Stravinsky ended up as the
perfect cosmopolitan, everywhere and nowhere at home. “He wanted,” Stephen
Walsh writes, “to be thought of as a free spirit, a phenomenon without a history.”
Even as his music grew too recondite for the taste of general audiences, his
fame increased to global proportions. The Kennedys invited him to dinner at the
White House; Frank Sinatra and Pope John XXIII asked for his autograph. He
was the living composer whom everyone professed to know; the premiere of the
Rite was the measuring stick of artistic daring, inevitably cited in any encomium
to a rock ‘n’ roll act or art film or fashion show that purported to shock the
middle classes. But the man was more famous than his music.
By the time Stravinsky began writing twelve-tone music, most of the younger
composers considered the method out of date. Yesterday’s revolt was today’s
status quo: music had entered a state of perpetual revolution.
Darmstadt
The principal showplace of the avant-garde was the Darmstadt Summer
Courses for New Music—the composers’ institute that OMGUS had helped
bring into existence in 1946. Nearly as important were two German radio
stations, Northwest German Radio in Hamburg and Cologne and Southwest
Radio in BadenBaden, which commissioned, presented, and publicized the
leading composers of the day. In 1950, Heinrich Strobel, the music director of
Southwest Radio, relaunched the old Donaueschingen Festival, while in 1951
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Northwest German Radio began building up an electronic-music studio in
Cologne. Conditions were nearly as favorable in Italy, where socialist and
Communist politicians generously funded the arts. In 1955, an electronic studio
opened in Milan. By the end of the fifties, not only Europeans but also
experimentalists from America and composers from Japan and South Korea
were sharing in this generous apparatus of support. Boulez was sufficiently
pleased with conditions in Germany that in 1959 he moved to Baden-Baden.
The former Fascist nations could thus demonstrate how far they had evolved
from the days when Schoenberg’s work had been labeled “degenerate music.”
In a larger sense, composers were creating a kind of esoteric mirror image of
the emergent Western European economic and political community. Just as the
proud old nation-states gave up certain of their cultural idiosyncrasies in order
to assimilate themselves into the European Community, composers abandoned
the national-folkish styles they had cultivated in former years in the name of
joining a cosmopolitan conversation.
For a time, modern composition had the appearance of another form of high-
tech, hush-hush Cold War work. Composers dressed like scientists, wearing
thick black glasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts with pens in the pocket.
Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of musique concrète, noted proudly that music had
become a team effort rather than a labor of solitude, and went so far as to
compare French composers to atomic physicists working together in a
laboratory.
The advent of a pseudoscientific mentality is evident in the titles of works that
were performed at Darmstadt from 1946 on. The first few years saw an
abundance of neoclassical lingo—Sonatine, Scherzo, Concertino, and
Sinfonietta. Then, after 1949, the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by
phrases with a cerebral tinge: Music in Two Dimensions, Syntaxis,
Anepigraphe. There was a vogue for abstractions in the plural: Perspectives,
Structures, Quantities, Configurations. Audiences enjoyed Spectrogram,
Seismogramme, Audiogramme, and Sphenogramme. Emblematic was the
career of Hermann Heiss, who, back in the Nazi time, had written a Fighter Pilot
March. At the first Darmstadt gathering, in 1946, he was represented by a
Sonata for Flute and Piano. Ten years later, he showed up with
The watchword at Darmstadt, as at Nabokov’s festivals, was “freedom.” After
centuries of subservience to the Church, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and
the mass public, composers could finally do as they pleased—even embrace
styles that took away freedom of choice. Stockhausen, the leader of the young
German composers, put it this way: “Schoenberg’s great achievement … was to
claim freedom for composers: freedom
Expression K.
from the prevailing taste of society and
its media; freedom for music to evolve without interference. In other words, here
was a composer who made it clear to society that he would not allow himself to
be kicked about like Mozart who was kicked in the backside by a court official of
the Archbishop of Salzburg when he was eight days late returning from a
vacation in Vienna.”
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Yet not everyone felt free. There was the freedom to go forward, but not to go
back. The young German composer Hans Werner Henze, who had been
attending Darmstadt from the start, became frustrated with its more or less
official ban on tonal writing, and, in his memoirs, he wrote in bitterly mocking
terms of its faddish tendencies: “Everything had to be stylized and made
abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead-game, a fossil of life. Discipline was
the order of the day … The existing audience of music-lovers, music-
consumers, was to be ignored … Any encounter with the listeners that was not
catastrophic and scandalous would defile the artist, and would mobilize distrust
against us … As Adorno decreed, the job of a composer was to write music that
would repel, shock, and be the vehicle for ‘unmitigated cruelty.’”
In 1953, feeling oppressed by the breathless forward march of German music,
Henze fled to the island of Ischia, where, under the spell of the Mediterranean
sun, he reincorporated tonal material, Stravinskyan neoclassicism, and
Romantic textures. His nervously expressive operas caught the ear of the
general public, but the new-music community regarded him as an apostate. The
conductor Hermann Scherchen dismissed Henze’s voluptuously neo-Romantic
opera König Hirsch by saying, “But, my dear, we don’t write arias today.” When
a smattering of triads in Henze’s Nocturnes and Arias
By common consent, Stockhausen was the crown prince of the new-music
kingdom. No composer was more tireless in inventing or appropriating new
ideas, more ambitious in articulating the avant-garde’s historical and spiritual
mission, more adept at assembling the latest sounds into jaw-dropping
spectacles. Stockhausen had the dash of a great colonial adventurer,
proceeding through jungles of sound. He described himself as the purveyor
variously of “serial music,” “point music,” “electronic music,” “new percussion
music,” “new piano music,” “spatial music,” “statistical music,” “aleatoric music,”
“live electronic music,” “new syntheses of music and speech,” “musical theatre,”
“ritual music,” “scenic music,” “group composition,” “process composition,”
“moment composition,” “formula composition,” “multiformula composition,”
“universal music,” “telemusic,” “spiritual music,” “intuitive music,” “mantric
music,” and, last but not least, “cosmic music.”
sullied the hall at
Donaueschingen in 1957, Boulez and colleagues walked out, turning their
backs in Schoenberg fashion.
Bright, glib, fair-haired, collegial, Stockhausen exuded what would later be
called positive energy, although deep-seated authoritarian tendencies made
him a sometimes insufferable colleague. In later years he revealed a mystical
streak, bordering on the hippie-dippy; it turned out that he had lived many past
lives, and that he claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin.
Stockhausen was, in fact, born in a village outside Cologne, in 1928. At the
Musikhochschule and the university in that city he received fairly conventional
musical training. As the Second World War raged, he began opening his ears to
new sounds; like many young Germans, he tuned in to American military
broadcasts, and the bopping rhythms of Glenn Miller’s band relieved the tedium
of wartime discipline. Robin Maconie, Stockhausen’s most assiduous chronicler,
reports that the young composer took a particular interest in the semi-
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independent movement of jazz melodies, the way they floated above the beat in
changing values.
On arriving in Darmstadt in 1951, Stockhausen heard a tape of Messiaen’s
Scale of Durations and Dynamics and immediately became excited by the idea
of a totally organized serialist music. His first mature piece, Kreuzspiel, or Cross
Play, is notable for its quasi-jazzy insouciance and quasi-sensuous appeal,
beginning as it does with the sound of conga drums and tom-toms pattering
quietly beneath three-note piano chords splayed across various registers.
Stockhausen’s first set of Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces),
The new art of electronic music riveted Stockhausen from the start. His gurus
were Werner Meyer-Eppler, an experimental physicist who specialized in the
study of synthetic sound and speech, and the composer-theorist Herbert Eimert,
who headed the nascent electronic studio in Cologne. Their vision of the
musical future diverged from that of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in Paris,
and, not surprisingly, a familiar Franco-German cultural split defined the
difference between the two electronic schools. Eimert deprecated French
musique concrète as parasitical dilettantism, a facile rearrangement of familiar
sonic objects. Instead, he said, electronic music must be generated entirely
within the studio, thereby attaining a “pure” existence outside the known and the
conventional. In 1951 and 1952, Eimert and Robert Beyer together created
by contrast, exemplifies
the reigning aesthetic of pulverization: sounds ricochet from the top to the
bottom of the piano, as if the instrument were a pinball machine.
Sound in Unlimited Space,
Stockhausen, to his credit, refused to be blinkered by Meyer-Eppler and
Eimert’s purist ideology. Before establishing himself at the Cologne studio, in
1953, he spent an exploratory year in Paris, attending Messiaen’s classes,
exchanging ideas with Boulez, and working in Schaeffer’s studio.
Stockhausen’s first electronic pieces,
which is more or less the first work of synthesized
music—a bubbling, moaning landscape of sine tones.
Konkrete Etude and Electronic Studies,
neatly synthesized the Germanic and Gallic approaches to the brand-new
medium. On the one hand, the composer made methodical use of serialist
processes, arraying gradations of pitch, duration, and dynamics in series. On
the other, he relished the exoticism of the medium, enveloping the listener in
disordered images and sensations. “This music sounds indescribably pure and
beautiful!” Stockhausen wrote excitedly to Karel Goeyvaerts, one of the co-
inventors of the total-serialist language. He likened it to “raindrops in the sun.”
Gesang der Jünglinge, or Song of the Youths, created in 1955-56, is
Stockhausen’s most original electronic creation and perhaps the most influential
electronic piece ever composed. The youths in question are Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego, from the book of Daniel, whom Nebuchadnezzar
throws in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship a golden idol. The music is
built up in layers from the recorded voice of a choirboy singing “Praise the
Lord!” (from the canticle of praise that is included in Catholic and Orthodox
versions of the tale). The boy’s song is broken down into phonetic fragments
and remixed in the style of musique concrète. All around is a flickering mass of
electronic sound, which goes from eruptions of synthesized noise—
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Stockhausen was particularly proud of what he called “showers of impulses”—to
hauntingly voicelike phrases. Boy and machine imitate each other, uniting
natural and artificial worlds. Stockhausen heightened the impact of the work by
recording it on five channels: at the 1956 Cologne premiere, the audience was
placed inside a pentaphonic cauldron.
Two years later Stockhausen unveiled a new marvel, Gruppen, in which a 109-
piece orchestra is divided into three “groups,” each with its own conductor. The
orchestration ingeniously duplicates electronic practice: a chord “pans” from one
channel to another, instruments trade lines stereophonically, musical lines are
“tracked” at independent tempos, one timbre dissolves into the next. Much of
the time the work sounds improvised, even though serialist procedures apply.
The climax is a wild squall of drumming and a great wall of noise for the three
orchestras in tandem—a thirteen-bar freak-out, free jazz or avant-rock before
the fact. At the same time, the sheer bombast of the design harks back to the
tone painting of Mahler and Strauss and to Wagnerian spectacles such as
Hagen’s calling of the vassals in Götterdämmerung. What separates Gruppen
Behind Darmstadt’s hypermodern facade lurked some thoroughly traditional
twentieth-century or even nineteenth-century obsessions: the revolutionary
impulse, the urge to overthrow the bourgeois order, the age-old longing for
sublimity and transcendence. Luigi Nono’s defining move was to breach the wall
that had been built up between “advanced” modern music and potitical music. In
Weimar Berlin, the twelve-tone Schoenberg and the leftist-populist Weill had
stood on opposite ends of the spectrum; in Nono, they were one and the same.
from its monumental Romantic predecessors is its relative emotional neutrality;
it lacks the grandeur and sorrow that Thomas Mann identified with Wagner.
German music was renouncing its “special path,” its Faustian urge, and joining
the cosmopolitan frenzy of the postwar world.
The scion of a notable old Venetian family, Nono dabbled in various media
before settling on music at the age of twenty. He was second to none in his
worship of the Second Viennese School, and went so far as to marry
Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria. But he did not see composition as a withdrawal
from the world; instead, he believed that radical sounds could serve as a vehicle
for radical politics, awakening listeners’ minds and preparing them for concerted
action.
Nono’s signature piece was the choral work Il canto sospeso (1955-56), whose
title means “suspended song,” and whose texts consists of letters from anti-
Fascist resistance fighters who had been condemned to death. As in
Stockhausen’s Gesang, the vocal lines crumble under the pressure of serialist
technique. In the ninth song, which sets the texts “I am not afraid of death,” “I
will be calm and at peace facing the execution squad,” and “I go in the belief of
a better life for you,” words are broken into syllables and scattered through
many parts. Stockhausen, when he heard the piece, congratulated Nono for
having “composed the text as if to withdraw it from the public eye where it has
no place.” Nono was irritated by this assumption; by making the words less
easily accessible to the casual listener, he intended them to matter more.
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Iannis Xenakis was the other unclassifiable radical in the European avant-
garde. In 1947 he fled from his native Greece, where the British and the
Americans were propping up a right-wing, anti-Communist government, and
sought asylum in Paris. There he sat in on Messiaen’s classes at the
conservatory and worked in Schaeffer’s electronic studio. With Messiaen’s
encouragement, he began thinking about how instrumental sound could be
“built” as a structure is built, without breaks or seams in the construction. He
pursued a parallel interest in architecture and worked for a number of years as
an engineer and later as a designer in the studio of Le Corbusier, specializing in
complex architectural models with undulating convex and concave shapes.
Xenakis’s masterstroke as a composer was to apply those models to musical
space, writing out waveforms on graph paper and then translating them into
conventional notation. As the fifties went on, he introduced an even more
elaborate method known as “stochastic music,” referring to the branch of
mathematics that studies the random or irregular activity of particles. In other
words, he began looking at the orchestra as a scientist looks at a gas cloud.
Yet Xenakis never quite fit the profile of the laboratory composer. He gave
considerable thought to how his music would be perceived by the novice
listener and wished to seize the attention with gestures of high impact. “The
listener must be gripped,” he once said, “and—whether he likes it or not—drawn
into the flight path of the sounds, without a special training being necessary.
The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder
or looks into a bottomless abyss.”
The title of Xenakis’s first waveform composition, Metastaseis
In a rather more pointed metaphor, Xenakis cited memories of an anti-Nazi
demonstration in Athens: a slogan is chanted by a crowd, another slogan
comes forward to replace it, “the perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a
huge cluster of chaotic shouts,” machine guns are fired, and a “detonating calm,
full of despair, dust, and death,” settles. But the unison note at the end—one
half step higher than at the beginning—suggests that some kind of battle has
been won.
(1953-54), sets
forth his intention of overcoming the stasis of total serialism: the Greek word
translates as “beyond immobilities.” It begins with a stupefying sound: forty-six
string instruments playing the note G in unison, then sliding away from it in
upward or downward glissandos, each glissando moving at a different rate. By
the end of the process, the strings have become a buzzing mass of forty-six
separate notes. The string clusters are soon infiltrated by sneering trombone
glissandos and other razzing brass sounds. At the height of this meticulously
planned bedlam, the listener is incapable of perceiving what any one instrument
is doing; only the sum of the actions is apparent. Xenakis likened the effect to
the sound of hail drumming on a hard surface or millions of cicadas singing in a
field on a summer night.
The collegiality of Darmstadt broke down as the fifties gave way to the sixties.
Nono criticized Stockhausen and Cage for what he considered to be an excess
of self-referential, hermetic activity. “Their freedom is spiritual suicide,” Nono