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polyphonic chaos. Then we go toward the silence of noon, and the birds fall

asleep in the heat. In a way, this new technique could be compared to Cagean

chance; Messiaen surrendered control of his music to outside forces. “I’m

anxious to disappear behind the birds,” he said before the premiere.

On the surface, Messiaen was indeed “developing wonderfully.” In keeping with

the aesthetic of the Darmstadt generation, his bird music of the fifties had an

impeccably fragmented and pointillistic sound, as if the Cetti’s warbler, the blue

tit, and the great spotted woodpecker had propounded serialism in advance of

Babbitt and Boulez. Exotic Birds (1956), Chronochromie (1960), Seven Haikus

(1963), Colors of the Celestial City (1964), and Et exspecto resurrectionem

mortuorum (1965) all duly appeared on Boulez’s programs in Paris and

elsewhere. Yet the opulent language of the Quartet for the End of Time and

Turangalîla has not vanished completely. Messiaen’s birds seem conversant

with the modes of limited transposition, and unlike birds in nature they gravitate

toward a tonal center; the nightingale at the beginning of Réveil des oiseaux

sings unmistakably in the neighborhood of the key of D. Triads are tucked away

in the innards of the harmony, submerged beneath layers of upper-harmonic

tones, and melodies coalesce suddenly from clouds of timbre; the fourth of the

Seven Haikus,

Messiaen completed his great harmonic U-turn in the course of writing the

almost three-hour-long piano cycle

for example, has a luxurious lyric solo for trumpet, doubled by

winds and cosseted by strings. The reliance on birdsong allowed Messiaen to

restore the primacy of a singing line. It showed him a way out of the “profound

night.”

Catalogue d’oiseaux,or Catalog of Birds

Thus, Boulezian piano effects become simply another “color” of the composer’s

palette; as Robert Sherlaw Johnson has observed, a twelve-note array is used

to suggest the grittier aspects of the natural setting, such as the dirty ice of an

Alpine glacier or the sinister hooting of owls in the dead of night. Triads

delineate nature’s brighter hues—the “joy of the blue sea,” the broad movement

of the river, the glow of the sunset. The birds are bustling, hyperactive,

dissonant; sometimes they even sound like human tourists intruding on the

mystery of nature. In the thirteenth and final piece, a mood of contemplative

silence is broken several times by a shattering discord, which represents the

foghorn of the Créac’h lighthouse, on the northwestern tip of France. The chord

is a close cousin of the one that pounds repeatedly in “The Augurs of Spring” of

the

(1956–58). The music is built up from Messiaen’s impressions of various scenic

places in France and the birds that inhabit them. Faced with a teeming

landscape of images and feelings, Messiaen realized that he no longer needed

to choose among his various styles, the sensualism of his “Tristan” works and

the thorniness of his early-fifties music; instead, he could, in a sense, have it all.

Rite.

Having reclaimed his rainbow chords, Messiaen felt free to return to religious

subjects, which he had generally avoided since 1950.

The closing bars are marked “tragic and desolate,” with the call of the

curlew ringing over a low D-minor chord and an arpeggio of surf fading into

silence. Whether this is a tragic ending—man stamping his foot on the surface

of nature—or a glimpse of some outer mystery is left for the listener to decide.

The Transfiguration of

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Our Lord Jesus Christ (1965–69), a fourteen-movement work for chorus, seven

instrumental soloists, and large orchestra, begins with a descending sequence

of pitched gongs, in the manner of Boulez’s Marteau sans maître. The chorus

then unfurls an un-Boulezian ribbon of Gregorian chant. (The Second Vatican

Council had just admitted vernacular music to the Mass, and, as the scholar

Christopher Dingle notes, Messiaen declared his opposition to the change by

filling the Transfiguration with Latin liturgical material.) In the first of eight

“meditations,” the music gravitates toward the key of E, the work’s ultimate

destination. Yet, as in Catalogue d’oiseaux,

In 1970 the New York arts patron Alice Tully asked Messiaen to write a work in

commemoration of the upcoming American bicentennial. It was an unlikely

assignment, since Messiaen had little love for American culture and a special

antipathy for New York. His reluctance gave way when Tully, well briefed on the

composer’s vulnerabilities, served him a sumptuous repast capped with “an

immense cake crowned with pistachio frogs spewing

discord repeatedly crashes through

the frame. The twelfth movement, “Terrbilis est locus iste,” ends with three

gigantic chords of twelve notes each; the triads that follow in “Tota Trinitas

apparuit” (“The Entire Trinity Appears”) and the closing “Chorus of the Light of

Glory” sound all the more brilliant for having been blasted out of dissonant

ground. Indeed, the consonances are sometimes more terrifying than the

dissonances that surround them. They are tonality transfigured, rising from the

dead.

crème Chantilly

In 1972, in the company of Loriod, Messiaen traveled to the canyons of Utah—

Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks, Zion Park—and gazed for days at the boldly

colored terrain, listening also to the songs of the local birds. Loriod

photographed him standing alone in one of the crevasses of Cedar Breaks,

reddish sandstone walls towering above him. In his sketchbook he wrote of the

“immense solitude” of the place, of the whiff of terror and death in its hot and

cold hues. He collected his impressions in a programmatic narrative that was

variously ornithological, geological, astronomical, and spiritual. The piece would

ascend “from the canyons to the stars and higher up to the resurrected souls in

Heaven, so as to glorify God in all his Creation: the beauty of the earth (its

rocks, its birdsong), the beauty of the physical sky, the beauty of the heavenly

one.”

.”

Messiaen accepted under the condition that he could write in praise of the

mountainous landscapes of the American West rather than the cities of the

East.

From the Canyons to the Stars …, the result of Tully’s commission, is perhaps

Messiaen’s greatest achievement. The majesty of the Utah canyons

reawakened in the composer a songfulness that had long been missing from his

music. The sound palette of Canyons is dominated by solo instruments singing

out in a wide-open space—piano, horn, other solo winds, brass—with an

ensemble of thirteen strings suggesting effects of resonance and reverberation.

In a way, it is a colossal magnification of the instrumental drama of the Quartet

for the End of Time. The clarinet solo in the Quartet, “Abyss of the Birds,” has

its counterpart in an extended movement for horn, “Interstellar Call.” Other short

movements in the first section depict the primordial desert out of which the

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canyons formed, the calls of the orioles, the glimmering of stars above. (In an

early indication of the work’s theological dimension, the last is titled “What is

written in the stars”; the message in question is “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,”

the writing on the wall in the book of Daniel.) The piano then takes over with a

solo movement more or less in the style of Catalogue d’oiseaux,

At the heart of the work are movements celebrating the canyons themselves—

“Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe,” “Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange

Rocks,” and “Zion Park and the Celestial City.” “Cedar Breaks” is the music of

the bedrock. Orations for brass in unison alternate with pulsing dissonant

chords, rugged writing for piano, and quasi-jazzy episodes, replete with wah-

wah trumpet and glissando trombone. “Bryce Canyon” recycles certain of those

motifs of geological violence, but they give way to a series of mighty chorales, in

which the silent splendor of the canyon resonates within the observer’s mind.

Messiaen, like his teacher Dukas, identified certain harmonies with certain

colors; E major is red, and the final chords evoke not only the red-orange rock

formations of Bryce Canyon but also the geology of the book of Revelation—the

sardius, topaz, and amethyst stones embedded in the foundation of the celestial

Jerusalem.

mimicking the

calls of the white-browed robin.

After “Bryce Canyon” comes a series of episodes in which the music swings

back and forth between intricacy and purity. A euphoric song for strings depicts

the reddish glow of the star Aldebaran; a second piano solo honors the

mockingbird; a succulent instrumental intermezzo is based on the triadic call of

the wood thrush; and, oddly, there’s a busy fantasia on the birds of Hawaii.

Finally, the apotheosis of “Zion Park.” Mormon settlers named the dazzling

white and pink sandstone cliffs of this canyon “the natural temples of God”;

Messiaen saw nothing less than celestial Jerusalem. He uses an elementary

trick to create an atmosphere of enormous anticipation: several times he starts

a progression in A major but does not complete it, and for the ten-minute span

of the movement the cadence is withheld. It is as if the composer were afraid to

finish his creation, preferring to take refuge one more time in his beloved

birdsong, his disparate rhythms and modes. When the hunger for the missing

chord becomes unbearable—the brass cry out for it three times, lustily,

desperately—there is a supernova of A major, billowing into the lowest and

highest reaches of the orchestra and whiting out in fortissimo

strings.

As Messiaen presided over the transfiguration of tonality, the European avant-

garde was entering its carnivalesque, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass

period. These were the years of the great rock ‘n’ roll rebellion, of sexual

liberation and drug experimentation and psychedelic culture. In the

rambunctious spirit of the time, a second wave of avant-gardists rejected the

previous generation’s obsession with purity and abstraction. Chance,

The Avant-Garde of the Sixties

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indeterminacy, graphic notation, and other forms of unconventionally notated

music enjoyed a European vogue. Some gravitated toward the musical past,

cutting it up by way of quotation and collage. Others pushed out into interstellar

spaces, abandoning any pretense of an organizing system. There were Dada

pranks, references to pop, a renewed fad for singable Communist ditties (this

time in the name of Castro and Mao). A few composers in a dizzyingly self-

referential vein made the situation of the international avant-garde their subject.

Dieter Schnebel’s 1961 work Abfälle I/1

John Cage was entering his period of maximum influence. In 1958 he traveled

to Germany to give a series of lectures at Darmstadt—substituting for Boulez—

and European music was never quite the same afterward. Anyone who knew

Cage’s history should have been prepared for something unusual; back in 1950,

his “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club had begun with the announcement

“I am here and there is nothing to say,” and the question period was derailed by

Cage’s decision to respond to all queries with a set of six fixed answers, one of

which was “Please repeat the question … And again … And again …” Cage’s

Darmstadt lectures had episodes of coherence, but chance operations

progressively took over, and by the third lecture he was lighting cigarettes at

intervals specified by the

invited audience members to contribute

to the performance by conversing among themselves, making noises of

approval or disapproval, coughing, and moving chairs.

I Ching.

Boulez was not there, but Stockhausen was, listening intently. The German

visionary had first encountered Cage back in 1954, and had fallen under the

spell of the American’s ideas just as Boulez was becoming disenchanted with

them. Early symptoms of Stockhausen’s exposure to Cage can be detected in

Most of the final talk took the form of a long

string of questions, for example: “Do you agree with Boulez when he says what

he says? Are you getting hungry? Twelve. Why should you (you know more or

less what you’re going to get)? Will Boulez be there or did he go away when I

wasn’t looking?”

Zeitmasse (1955–56), in which five woodwinds periodically break free of a

common tempo and buzz around one another in accelerating or decelerating

patterns. Stockhausen also wrote a new series of Klavierstücke for David

Tudor, Cage’s favorite interpreter, tailoring them to the pianist’s uninhibited

style. Klavierstück IX (1954/61) begins with 139 repetitions of a strongly

dissonant, Schoenbergian chord, fading slowly toward silence. Klavierstück X

(1954/61) features cascades of cluster chords pounded out with the hands,

fists, and forearms. In Klavierstück XI

Many young Darmstadt composers followed Stockhausen in flocking after

Cage. One was Sylvano Bussotti, a flamboyant Florentine whose scores in

graphic notation looked liked surrealist cartoons, with notes splattered all over

and staves bent apart or tangled. (Tudor responded to these ambiguities by

attacking the piano with boxing gloves.) Another mischief maker was the

Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel, whose

(1956), nineteen fragments are spread

across the page, and the performer decides in what order they should be

played; this is an obvious imitation of open-form pieces by Earle Brown and

Morton Feldman.

Anagrama (1957–58)

offered up a new repertoire of vocal sounds—“stuttering, molto vibrato, with

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shaking voice, with a foreign accent, with almost closed mouth, quasi senza

voce, speaking while inhaling, etc.,” as the composer put it in the score.

In his 1960 work Sur scène,

The Italian composer Luciano Berio, who had been summering in Darmstadt

since 1954, found a way out of the “crisis of modern music” by indulging in a

touch of nostalgia: avant-garde practice was infused with age-old strategies of

instrumental and vocal display. Berio’s fantastic reconstructions of the art of

singing owed much to the interpretive creativity of his wife, the American-born

singer Cathy Berberian, who ran the gamut from primitive growls to angelically

pure tone. For the 1958 electronic piece

Kagel made Darmstadt itself the object of his

sophisticated ridicule. An instrumental ensemble provides a ramshackle

accompaniment to a spoken monologue on the crisis of modern music, which

reads in part: “We cannot, with this never-ending talk about a crisis, lay bare all

the problematic constituents of its problematic essence and simply bypass

them, and yet we cannot get around the fact, to employ a consideration, again

we take cognizance of the fact that this obscurity, impenetrability, this absence

of resonance in extreme situations is something which—under these

circumstances we cannot but reach a conclusion which sound common sense

had indicated from the beginning: our perception at the end of the sound

spectrum is by nature dim. I am sitting in the smallest room of my house.”

Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), Berio

recorded Berberian reciting the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s

Ulysses, a passage that is itself a contrapuntal swirl of images, a literary

approximation of serialism. Atomization of the voice leads not to a crisis

atmosphere, as so often in Nono’s music, but to an ecstatic, erotic, quasi-

operatic frenzy. The extract begins with the words “A sail!” (Joyce’s allusion to

the first line of Verdi’s Otello) and ends with whispered intonations of the name

of Liszt. In the same year Berio wrote Sequenza I for flute, commencing a vivid

series of Sequenza

By the early sixties, the fascination with behind-the-scenes process—whether

twelve-tone or chance-produced—had given way to a new appreciation of

surfaces. The most-talked-about works of the period resembled a bubbling flow

of timbres and textures, a sonic stream of consciousness. Xenakis had

pioneered texture music in

pieces—fourteen in all by the time of the composer’s death

in 2003—in which solo performers unloose a new kind of avantgarde virtuosity,

exploiting every noise, tone, sound, and timbre that instruments can make.

Later, Berio would criticize his colleagues for creating false dichotomies—

between “style” and “expression,” between virtuosity and structure, between the

music of the daily world and the harmony of the spheres.

Metastaseis and Pithoprakta; Stockhausen, with his

usual panache, made it his own by dubbing it “field composition” (which pointed

toward a later category, “moment form”). The German trendsetter showed a

new appreciation for continuous droning sounds, not unrelated to his American

interests. On airplane flights to and from America in 1958, he listened intently to

the propellers vibrating against the body of the plane, and reproduced those

effects in a monster piece for four choirs and four orchestras titled Carré, which

he composed with the help of his English assistant Cornelius Cardew.

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In 1960, Stockhausen completed Kontakte, where live and electronic sounds

bounce off each other or blur together. While writing it, the composer took

advantage of a newly discovered method of generating tape loops by reversing

the heads on a tape recorder. He also showed how tones are related to periodic

beats; in the most electrifying passage of Kontakte, microscopic pulses are

gradually lengthened until they form a pitch, which the piano confirms by playing

a low E. Finally, in 1962, the world had its first glimpse of what would turn out to

be the almost two-hour-long Momente,

Several prizewinning samples of texture music turned up in Poland, from which

little had been heard since Karol Szymanowski’s death in 1937. In the early

postwar years, Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe had effectively stifled

creative activity, but during the partial liberalization of the Khrushchev thaw the

Soviet satellite nations found it convenient to encourage progressive artistic

activity within their borders, knowing that the results could be exploited for

propaganda purposes. The Warsaw Autumn festival, which began in 1956, was

the Warsaw Pact’s answer to Darmstadt and Donaueschingen; leading Western

avant-gardists such as Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and David Tudor

performed there, and younger Polish composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki,

Henryk Górecki, Kazimierz Serocki, and Wojciech Kilar came to the fore,

bringing with them a version of texture music that acquired the name sonorism.

involving four choirs, a soprano soloist,

a phalanx of trumpets and trombones, a pair of Hammond and Lowrey electric

organs, and a percussion battery centered on an extra-large Japanese tam-tam.

This was the bacchanalia of the avant-garde, a shouting, clapping, stamping

liberation of the senses.

The usual political issues arose. When Penderecki produced a floridly

experimental piece called 8’37”—an affair of shrieking cluster chords, sputtering

streams of pizzicato, siren-like glissandos, and other Xenakis-like sounds—

officialdom took a favorable view only when someone suggested that the work

be retitled Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

The major figure in the Polish Renaissance was Witold Lutosławski, an older,

established composer who, amid the relative freedom of the thaw, happily took

possession of avant-garde methods that he had long studied in secret. In 1960

Lutosławski heard a radio broadcast of Cage’s

It went on to have a

successful career in the West.

Concert for Piano and

Orchestra, which sent him into a creative trance. As he later said, “Composers

often do not hear the music that is being played … We are listening to

something and at the same time creating something else.” Lutosławski

responded by reconciling chance and order: semi-improvisatory episodes

alternated with passages in strict notation. “I could start out from chaos,” the

composer said, “and create order in it, gradually.” Another time he spoke of

looking down at a city from a great height and then descending until streets and

buildings come into view. Lutosławski’s chief works of the sixties— Venetian

Games, Three Poems of Henri Michaux, Paroles tissées, the Second

Symphony, the Cello Concerto—stand out for their explosively precise musical

images and their clear-cut, surging narratives. Often they pivot on sudden

epiphanies, akin to the discovery of a clearing in thick woods; one such moment

occurs at the end of the Michaux settings, when delicately piercing F-sharps

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underpin the phrase “I let myself go.” Paroles tissées was written for Peter

Pears, and it combines ad libitum passages with spells of near-tonal lyricism.

Benjamin Britten, no friend of the avantgarde, admiringly presented Paroles

The improvised episodes in Polish sonorist works—“aleatory” was the approved

European term for randomized activity—reflected a general trend toward

collective and collaborative creation, which intensified in the last years of the

decade. Amid the worldwide student protests of May 1968, Stockhausen sat

down to write

the Aldeburgh Festival in 1965.

Aus den sieben Tagen, or From the Seven Days,

In the central scene of

whose score

consisted of textual instructions for the composer’s ensemble on the order of

“Play a vibration in the rhythm of your body” and “Play a vibration in the rhythm

of the universe.” Musica Elettronica Viva, an improvisational collaboration

among American composers based in Rome (Frederic Rzewski, Richard

Teitelbaum, Alvin Curran, Allan Bryant, and others), jammed with the then

brand-new Moog synthesizer. Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen’s former

assistant, sat in with the London-based group AMM, which moved beyond

notated composition, beyond the avant-garde, beyond even free jazz, into the

spontaneous production of unanalyzably dense sonorities—noise so engulfing

that the listener can neither hear nor imagine other sound. Cardew, for one,

could go no further. In 1972, he denounced the avant-garde as a bourgeois

luxury, wrote an incendiary essay titled “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” and

set about writing simple songs in praise of Mao Zedong.

Doctor Faustus, Leverkühn conducts a hallucinatory

dialogue with the devil, who keeps changing guises and at one point assumes

the form of “an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers,

a theorist and critic, who is himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows”—

Mann’s wry portrait of Theodor Adorno. The critic-devil hands down judgments

on the state of contemporary music, eliminating all possibilities except the

Schoenbergian path, the one that follows “an implacable imperative of density.”

Leverkühn counters, “One could know all that and yet acknowledge freedom

again beyond any criticism. One could raise the game to a yet higher power by

playing with forms from which, as one knows, life has vanished.” The devil

dismisses such an approach as “aristocratic nihilism.” Yet Leverkühn goes on to

realize this possibility in his Violin Concerto. It is a self-aware, ironic work, its

tenderness bordering on mockery. Leverkühn’s oratorio Apocalipsis cum figuris,

Music about music had always been part of twentieth-century discourse, going

back to the neo-Baroque stylings of Strauss’s

likewise, is enlivened by “parodies of the diverse musical styles in which hell’s

insipid excess indulges: burlesqued French impressionism, bourgeois drawing-

room music, Tchaikovsky, music hall songs, the syncopations and rhythmic

somersaults of jazz—it all whirls round like a brightly glittering tilting match, yet

always sustained by the main orchestra, speaking its serious, dark, difficult

language.”

Ariadne auf Naxos and

Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. But in the sixties games of parody and play caught on

everywhere. Composers talked of “pluralistic sound composition,” “polystylism,”

and “metacollage” (as the tirelessly neologistic Stockhausen called it). Works

incorporated fragments of Beethoven and Mahler, imitated Renaissance

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masses and Baroque concertos, absorbed jazz, pop songs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Eastern European composers championed pluralism as a compromise position

between tradition and the avant-garde: Penderecki, for one, introduced

medieval organum and old church chorales into his St. Luke Passion (1963–

65). Stockhausen weighed in with Hymnen (1966–67), a two-hour electronic-

instrumental fantasy on the world’s national anthems. Perhaps the ultimate

collage work was the score that Kagel wrote for his own mind-bending film

Ludwig van

Devices of collage, quotation, and pastiche efficiently performed the service of

twitting the bourgeois audience, to the extent that such an entity still existed.

Familiar classical strains run up against an abrupt noise, signaling a return to

contemporary reality. But sometimes this music concealed a clandestine

longing for the former tonal world. The modern European composer could

commandeer tonal music without committing the sin of writing tonal music as

such. This was the canny compromise that Berio presented in two of his most

immediately appealing works:

(1969), in which bits and pieces of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and

other works are transcribed for a ragtag band whose players seem to have

incomplete mastery of their instruments.

Folk Songs (1964), an imaginative arrangement-

deconstruction of traditional tunes from France, Italy, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and

America; and Sinfonia (1968–69), which reclaimed the late-Romantic symphony

by annexing the music of Gustav Mahler. Throughout the third movement of

Sinfonia, the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony is heard playing in the

background, its progress interrupted by quotations from more than a hundred

other composers from Bach to Boulez, each one dovetailed ingeniously with

Mahler’s score. Over that grand collage, amplified voices enunciate fragments

of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable,

In sixties Britain, two radical youths, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison

Birtwistle, used quotation and pastiche to thumb their noses at the conservatism

of the English musical scene. Both came from northern working-class

backgrounds and never identified with the sensibility of “Land of Hope and

Glory.” They met at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where

experimentation reigned, and they resolved to catch up with the latest European

developments. On moving to London in the late sixties, they organized a group

called the Pierrot Players, which was modeled on the versatile ensemble for

which Schoenberg wrote

and a speaker delivers a satirical text of

the composer’s devising. At one point the narrator announces in soothing tones

that there is “nothing more restful than chamber music,” implicitly mocking

ordinary listeners’ preference for cozy bits of Mozart and Brahms.

The spirit of Swinging London mated with the European avantgarde. In Davies’s

Pierrot lunaire.

Revelation and Fall (1965–66), the solo soprano shrieks poetry of Georg Trakl

into a megaphone while the ensemble satirizes the operettas of Lehár. In the

same composer’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), the madness of King

George III is enacted as avant-garde street theater, the lead vocalist reciting the

text in a gibbering delirium while sentimental Handelian, Victorian, and

Edwardian musical strains are chewed to pieces by the players. In Birtwistle’s

Punch and Judy, likewise, mangled Baroque numbers limp through a dimly lit,

indistinct, eerily groaning instrumental landscape. A wide gulf separated this

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stony music from the work of Britten, who had by this time become an

establishment icon, somewhat against his will. Britten hosted the premiere of

Punch and Judy

The collage works of Kagel, Berio, Davies, and Birtwistle have an exuberant,

insolent tone. Those of the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann are, by

contrast, tortured and tragic. Educated in a monastery school, Zimmermann

came of age just before the Second World War and served in the cavalry both

in France and on the Russian front. Circa 1945 he was still writing in a style that

owed much to Hindemith, middle-period Stravinsky, even Anton Bruckner. At

first, the hardened ex-soldier was reluctant to let go of German-nationalist

attitudes that had been drilled into him; in his diary he denounced the

Nuremberg trials and other anti-Nazi proceedings as “witch hunts.” At the same

time, he despaired of Germany’s future: “O Germany, what has become of you?

How your people have come to naught, have even destroyed themselves… Are

not fear and anxiety, insecurity and terror standing on the horizon of our future

like dark storm clouds in front of a setting sun? ‘Abide with us; for it is toward

evening.’” The diary bears an astonishing resemblance to passages in

at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival, but, after a certain interval, he

and Pears retired from the directors’ box in search of drinks.

Doctor

Faustus,

Zimmermann arrived at Darmstadt in 1948. Although he admired Schoenberg,

he initially looked askance at twelve-tone writing as propagated by René

Leibowitz, fearing that the technique would lead to an overintellectualized,

technically overdetermined mode of composition. Still, the lure of progress

proved irresistible. The composer’s manuscripts, held at the Akademie der

Künste in Berlin, show him steadily scrubbing out “backward” elements in his

scores and installing devices more amenable to the temper of the times. In the

second version of his unpublished Concerto for Orchestra, harp is replaced by

piano, the texture is thickened with rapid-moving figuration, exotic percussion

comes to the fore, octave doublings are eliminated, and heavy ostinato figures

disappear.

which Mann was writing in Los Angeles at this time. Mann’s narrator

assumes the same biblical tone: “Watch with me … Forsake me not.”

Still, Zimmermann remained a recognizably German composer, exuding a

Gothic-Romantic aura that was foreign to his compatriots Stockhausen and

Henze. The opening bars of his opera Die Soldaten

In 1969 Zimmermann finished what would become his final major work,

(1958–64) are a

cataclysmic revision of Brahms’s First Symphony, with the timpani pounding a

single note against screaming cluster chords. When masterpieces of the

German canon are directly quoted in his works, they flow seamlessly out of the

“serious, dark, difficult” language beneath them.

Requiem for a Young Poet. It calls for huge and varied forces, including

orchestra, organ, three choruses, three solo voices, a jazz combo, and

electronic elements. There are quotations from Prime Minister George

Papandreou of Greece (“Democracy will triumph!”), Mao (“A revolution is no

banquet, not like writing an essay or painting pictures or embroidering”), and

Joyce’s Ulysses; the sounds of tanks, jets, artillery; recordings of Wagner’s

Tristan and Messiaen’s Ascension; poems of Mayakovsky (“My song rends the

350

times with force”); and the voice of Hitler (“I lead you back into that homeland,

which you have not forgotten and which has not forgotten you!”). In the climax

of the piece, loudspeakers blare a collage of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the

Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” the voices of Goebbels and Stalin, and radio transmissions

by Allied bomber pilots. Soprano and bass sing from the Revelation of Saint

John while the chorus chants, “Dona nobis pacem.” The moral of all this seems

to be that classical and popular music have bled together into cultural white

noise obscuring imminent technological disaster. It all sounds very much like

Leverkühn’s “tilting match” of irreconcilable sounds, and in the middle is the

Ninth, the work that Leverkühn had “taken back.”

Zimmermann’s despair over music’s future was also despair over his own. On

August 10, 1970, he committed suicide.

Ligeti

The predicament of the avant-garde composer seemed complete. To continue

in pursuit of the “modern” was to go over the brink into absurdity; to retreat into

the past was to admit defeat. In a talk delivered in 1993, György Ligeti put it this

way:

When you are accepted in a club, without willing or without noticing you

take over certain habits of what is in and what is out. Tonality was

definitely out. To write melodies, even non-tonal melodies, was

absolutely taboo. Periodic rhythm, pulsation, was taboo, not possible.

Music has to be a priori … It worked when it was new, but it became

stale. Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot

simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither

going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is

the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

Ligeti escaped by not saying no. He opened himself to all music past and

present, absorbing everything from the Renaissance masses of Johannes

Ockeghem to the saxophone solos of Eric Dolphy, from the virtuoso piano

writing of Liszt to the rhythmic polyphony of African Pygmy tribes. At the same

time, he succeeded in imprinting his prickly, melancholy, ever-restless

personality on whatever he caught in the web.

Many composers of the early avant-garde period witnessed horrific things in

their youth. What Ligeti saw with his own eyes is practically unimaginable. He

was born in 1923, in Transylvania, to a family of Hungarian Jews. Three years

before he was born, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Ligeti went to

study at the conservatory in Cluj, which had been called Kolozsvár. In 1940, the

fascist government in Hungary regained control of Transylvania, and Cluj

became Kolozsvár again. Ligeti was mobilized into a forced-labor gang in 1944,

wearing the yellow armband required by anti-Semitic regulations, and carried

heavy explosives on the eastern front. The Nazis took over the country later that