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year, and deportations to the death camps began. Calculating the likelihood of
his being either killed in action, shot by the SS, or sent to the camps, Ligeti
deserted from the front line. He immediately fell into the hands of Soviet troops,
but once again managed to slip away. After a long walk home, he found that the
Russians were now in control and that strangers were living in his parents’
house. When the war ended, he learned of his family’s fate: his father had been
killed in BergenBelsen, his brother in Mauthausen, and his aunt and uncle in
Auschwitz. His mother somehow survived.
The nightmare did not end in 1945. Ligeti went to study at the Franz Liszt
Academy in Budapest, and he watched as the Soviets and their stooges took
control of Hungary; the same thugs who had committed atrocities on behalf of
the fascist Arrow Cross Party went to work for Mátyás Rákosi’s Communists.
For the most part, Ligeti managed to avoid the odious task of creating Party
propaganda. Instead, he buried himself in folk-music research, probably aware
that Bartók had collected songs in the vicinity of a Transylvanian town where
the Ligeti family had lived for a time. In secret, Ligeti dabbled in twelve-tone
writing, though his understanding of the method was gleaned haphazardly from
the pages of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which he read in 1952. The first
movement of Musica ricercata, written from 1951 to 1953, consists of nothing
more than the tuning note A arranged in various octaves, until a D enters at the
end. The second movement uses three pitches, the third movement four, and
so on. All twelve tones circulate in the final movement, but along the way the
composer enjoys a rich diversity of material, including a sweet-sad folkish
melody that he would revive decades later in his career-summarizing Violin
Concerto. He later described some stabbing single notes in the second
movement as “a knife in Stalin’s heart.”
In 1956, a reformist government in Budapest attempted to break away from
Soviet control, and troops quickly moved in to put down the uprising. Ligeti,
unable to face yet another wave of repression, escaped to the West, hiding
under mailbags in a postal train and then dashing over the Austrian border by
the light of military flares. He sought refuge in Vienna, where he formed
alliances with leaders of the Western European avant-garde. Back in Hungary,
he had cherished their works as symbols of creative freedom—on one bloody
night in 1956 he stayed glued to a radio broadcast of Stockhausen’s Gesang
der Jünglinge—and from 1957 onward he showed up at Darmstadt in the
company of his heroes. But his intimate knowledge of the totalitarian personality
made him wary of any musical ideology that was too sure of its rectitude. “I
don’t like gurus,” he said once in an interview, in a discussion of Stockhausen.
Years later he gave a testy interview in which he compared the warring camps
of Darmstadt to the power struggles within the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. “True,
there were no people being liquidated,” he said, “but there was certainly
character assassination.”
Ligeti naturally inclined toward the absurdist end of the avantgarde spectrum—
the music about music of Kagel and Schnebel, the conceptualism of Cage. In
his 1960 work Apparitions, bassoonists play their instruments without reeds,
brass players smack their mouthpieces with their hands, and a percussionist is
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asked to smash a bottle into a crate lined with metal plates (“Be sure to wear
protective goggles,” the score advises). In 1961 Ligeti performed a Cagean
conceptual piece titled The Future of Music, in which he stood in front of an
unsuspecting audience and wrote instructions on a blackboard: “Crescendo,”
“più forte,” “Silence.” The resulting hubbub was the composition. And in 1962
Ligeti unveiled the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, which, true to the
title, had one hundred windup metronomes ticking away in concert. Like many
Ligeti jokes, this one had a serious undertow. The initial hilarity of the scene—a
concert stage filled with inanimate antique machines—gives way to unexpected
complexity: as the faster metronomes wind down and stop, spiderwebs of
rhythm emerge from the cloud of ticks. As the last survivors wave their little
arms in the air, they look lonely, forlorn, almost human.
Impatient with the clichés of musical pointillism, with what he called the pattern
of “event - pause - event,” Ligeti resolved to restore spaciousness and long-
breathed lines to instrumental writing. He took inspiration from Xenakis’s
Metastaseis, Stockhausen’s Carré, and other examples of late-fifties “texture
music.” One of Ligeti’s characteristic techniques is called micropolyphony; large
structures grow from an insectoid buzz of activity, each instrument playing the
same material at its own pace. That sound first surfaces in the last part of
Apparitions and reappears in the famous Atmosphères of 1961. The opening
chord of the latter work has fifty-nine notes spread over five and a half octaves:
the effect is mysterious rather than assaultive, a seductive threshold to an alien
world. Later, half-familiar entities, quasi-or crypto-tonal chords, are glimpsed in
the sonic haze. The dominant process in Ligeti’s music is one of emergence—
shapes come out of the shadows, dark cedes to light.
Raised an atheist, Ligeti never accepted a religious doctrine. Nonetheless, in
the mid-sixties, he wrote two religiously inflected works of revelatory impact:
Requiem, for two soloists, double chorus, and orchestra, and Lux aeterna, for
sixteen solo voices. They are like no sacred pieces before them. Requiem is a
twenty-five-minute battering of the senses—a black mass in which singers
whisper, mutter, speak, shout, and shriek the Requiem text. In the “Kyrie,” the
overlapping of individual voices in micropolyphonic style creates the effect of a
subhuman howling, of souls melting into a hellish mob. In the closing
“Lacrimosa,” the cluster harmonies lose their diabolical aspect and give
intimations of the music of the spheres: the note G-flat fans out through a
widening series of intervals to a primordially humming open fifth on D and A.
Coincidentally or not, a similar transformation is said to happen in Adrian
Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris, where a choral passage moves “through
all the shades of graduated whispering, antiphonal speech, and quasi-chant on
up to the most polyphonic song—accompanied by songs that begin as simple
noise, as magical, fanatical African drums and booming gongs, only to attain the
highest music.”
The plateau of “highest music” is maintained in Lux aeterna and its companion
orchestral piece, Lontano. Both works have the character of occult objects, or of
dream landscapes in which sound becomes a tangible surface. In the opening
section of Lontano, micropolyphonic lines creep upward into the very highest
ranges of the orchestra, then stop at the edge of an abyss: a blistering high C
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gives way to an almost inaudibly low D-flat in the tuba and contrabassoon. In
the middle section the harmony gravitates toward the key of G minor, and the
orchestra plays a ghostly chorale, vaguely recalling the opening lament of
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. There is a second desperate surge into the treble,
followed by a second vertiginous collapse, but now the listener is led onward
into a secret tonal paradise of near-resolutions and almost-cadences. Blissful
Messiaen-like harmony seems within reach, but the brass push it away with a
mournful, honking chord. Triads are scattered through the score in the final
pages, but they are clouded and covered so that you can barely hear them.
What happens at the end can almost be heard as an “Amen” cadence.
In early 1968, a few months after Lontano’s premiere, an American friend wrote
to Ligeti with the news that the film director Stanley Kubrick had released a
science-fiction epic titled 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which no fewer than four
Ligeti scores— Requiem, Lux aeterna, Atmosphères, and Aventures—were
heard. Although the director had not asked permission, and paid a fee only after
a protracted legal squabble, Ligeti expressed admiration for Kubrick’s
achievement. The Requiem accompanies the various apparitions of an
inscrutable black monolith, which represents the invasion of a superior alien
intelligence. When the astronaut played by Keir Dullea undertakes his final
journey into the beyond, Ligeti’s micropolyphony merges hypnotically with
Kubrick’s abstract light patterns and negative-exposure images of natural
landscapes. Among other things, the film neatly brackets the entire arc of
twentieth-century musical history. It begins with Strauss’s Thus Spake
Zarathustra, the music of nature’s original majesty. In the final section, the
movie is subsumed into Ligeti’s alternate universe, spiraling through the outer
limits of expression before returning to the point of origin. As the august
Zarathustra chords sound again at the end, the cycle is ready to begin anew.
Kubrick’s
Saint Francis
2001 exhilarated sixties-era audiences because Western culture was
starved for sacred images. In Europe, churchgoing was in decline, and
churches had lost their community-forming function and their ability to generate
awe. In America, the theologian Harvey Cox made an improbable appearance
on the bestseller lists with the book The Secular City, analyzing the rituals of
desacralized man, and Time magazine ran a cover story asking, “Is God dead?”
Temples of culture doubled as sites of spiritual transport—rock arenas no less
than classical concert halls. This transference of roles goes back to the late
nineteenth century, when Wagner’s Parsifal created a new kind of sacred space
in an industrial world. The bourgeois nineteenth century brought forth relatively
few major works of a strictly religious nature; the requiems of Berlioz and Verdi,
to name two obvious exceptions, are really Romantic concert spectacles with a
Latin text. The godless twentieth century, by contrast, generated devotional
masterpieces by the dozen. It seems no accident that both Stravinsky and
Schoenberg responded to the decade of the twenties—the century’s first
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extended bout of mass consumption, youth rebellion, and sexual liberation—
with, respectively, the Symphony of Psalms and
French-speaking composers seemed particularly susceptible to religious
reawakenings. Francis Poulenc, the former prodigy of Les Six, reverted in the
thirties to the Catholicism of his childhood and made it his mission to bring
“peasant devotion” into his music. First in
Moses und Aron.
Litanies to the Black Virgin, then in
the Mass in G, the Stabat Mater, the Gloria, and the faith-based drama
Dialogues of the Carmelites, Poulenc deftly converted his lighter-than-air
twenties style into a medium of meditative simplicity, using the Symphony of
Psalms as a model. (Poulenc’s “peasant devotion” could be mistaken for
Copland’s “open prairie.”) Arthur Honegger, Poulenc’s comrade in Les Six,
broke away from twenties frivolity even as the decade was still getting under
way; in his 1921 oratorio King David, he told the biblical story ardently and
gravely, without a trace of Cocteau-like irony. The French Swiss composer
Frank Martin, the son of a Calvinist minister, saw faith as a path not of imminent
revelation but of unending struggle. If Messiaen’s consonances shine in
triumph, Martin’s waft enigmatically out of the fog, as in the final measures of
each movement of his Maria-Triptychon
The European avant-garde was generally secular in orientation, but it had a few
mystics in its midst. Stockhausen’s
(1968).
Gesang der Jünglinge
Tibetan chant generally consists of deviations around a fundamental tone, with
droning pipes and ringing bells as an accompaniment. Scelsi tried to enact
similar rituals on the piano, then made use of the ondiola, an electronic
keyboard whose dials allowed him to vary pitch and tone quality. He hired a
fellow composer, Vieri Tosatti, to help him shape his ondiola sketches and
improvisations into full-fledged orchestral, chamber, and vocal scores, which
began appearing in the late 1950s. They generally commence with a generative
monotone, and as the central pitch shifts, splits apart, and spreads, novel
landscapes open up before the ears. Orchestral works such as the
is the book of Daniel
gone high-tech: the electronic fabric approximates the flames that surrounded
the three boys in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Cage based his aesthetic partly
on the precepts of Zen Buddhism. And the unswervingly eccentric Italian
composer Giacinto Scelsi emerged from a long immersion in Eastern
philosophy with the conviction that he could approximate in instrumental forms
the sound of chanting Tibetan monks.
Four Pieces,
Aion, and Anahit build to crypto-Romantic climaxes worthy of Bruckner: horns
leap up an octave, winds trill on high, timpani bang out thirds, and the heavens
open. In Konx-Om-Pax,
It was left to Messiaen to write a religious work on a scale that no composer had
attempted since
a chorus is added to the mix, chanting an apocalyptic
“OM.”
Parsifal. The five-hour sacred opera Saint Francis of Assisi,
which he began sketching in 1975 and finished in 1983, served not merely as a
pageant in honor of the humble friar but as a kind of live-action reenactment of
the very process of sanctification. Parsifal enclosed sacred ritual within a
theatrical frame; Messiaen, by contrast, was enclosing theater within religion,
creating a new genre of operatic meditation. In the process, he made
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extraordinary demands on his audience. Act II stretches on for two hours and
ends with a forty-five-minute version of Francis’s sermon to the birds. Saint
Francis
Messiaen wrote the libretto himself, elaborating the standard legends of Francis
with theology out of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Almost nothing in the text would
have come as a shock to an audience of thirteenth-century Loire Valley
villagers. There are eight tableaux, each recording a stage in the life of the
saint. Francis kisses a leper, encounters a musician angel, speaks to the birds,
receives the stigmata, and dies in a state of suffering joy. He is sung by a
dramatic baritone voice and comes across as a flesh-and-blood figure. He might
be the haggard Francis as depicted in paintings by Caravaggio and Zurbarán—
a youngish man gazing ravenously toward the heavens, his mouth hanging
open, his hands wrapped around a skull.
harks back to those archaic liturgies in which spells of boredom give
way to precisely staged epiphanies—as when, in the Greek Orthodox Easter
service, the church goes dark and the light of a single candle remains.
The central epiphany of the opera takes place in the fifth tableau, in which
Francis meets the musician angel on the road. The episode is taken from
Franciscan hagiography, according to which the friar once fainted after hearing
an angel play a viol. He told his brethren, “If the Angel had played one more
note—if, after down-bowing, it had made an up-bow—from unbearable
sweetness my soul would have left my body.” In Messiaen’s version, the angel
prefaces his concert with lines adapted from Aquinas: “God dazzles us by an
excess of truth. Music carries us to God in default of truth.” (Human reason,
Aquinas wrote, is confounded equally by the elusiveness of poetic expression
and by the superabundance of the Word of God.) The strings play a soft,
unceasing C-major chord; over it, three ondes Martenot unwind a scarlet thread
of melody that touches on ten of the twelve chromatic notes. The ears are
teased by two textures—warm strings spreading out from the center, electronic
tones pinging everywhere. In the space between them listeners can catch a
glimpse of whatever they consider divine.
“Certain people are annoyed that I believe in God,” Messiaen said in January
1992, three months before his death. “But I want people to know that God is
present in everything, in the concert hall, in the ocean, on a mountain, even on
the underground.” In the end, Saint Francis is not as monumental as it appears;
it is really a village mystery play on a Wagnerian scale. Anthony Pople got to
the heart of the matter when he wrote of Messiaen’s refusal to “play God.”
These reverberating triads exercise such power because they don’t sound like
the calculated gestures of a master plan; they crash in from a more elemental
sphere. Saint Francis,
true to form, ends in twelve bars of hyperbright C major,
replete with rapidly gesticulating brass, trilling and groaning ondes Martenot,
madly glissandoing mallet instruments, and a shimmering cascade of bells and
gongs. It is the negation of the negation, the death of death.
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BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG
One night in 1967, György Ligeti was sitting with several colleagues at the
Darmstadt Schlosskeller, the favorite late-night hangout of teachers and
students at the Summer Courses for New Music, when
Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band, a new album by the Beatles, started playing over the
loudspeakers. Some of the sounds on the record bore a surprising resemblance
to the Darmstadters’ latest and most advanced experiments. The song “A Day
in the Life” included two spells of ad libitum
The Beatles had first dipped into the Darmstadt sound in March of the previous
year, while working on the album
playing, the second of them leading
into a gorgeously strange E-major chord played by three pianos and a
harmonium. Players were given a score indicating what register they should
have reached in any given bar. The last chord was executed in musique
concrète fashion, the attack cut off and the decay amplified over a long
duration.
Revolver. Paul McCartney had been checking
out Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, with its electronic layering of voices,
and Kontakte, with its swirling tape-loop patterns. At his request, engineers at
Abbey Road Studios inserted similar effects into the song “Tomorrow Never
Knows.” By way of thanks, the Beatles put Stockhausen’s face on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth-century musical upheaval must have
been startled to find that the postwar avant-garde was now serving as mood
music for the psychedelic generation. The wall separating classical music from
neighboring genres appeared ready to crumble, as it had momentarily in the
twenties and thirties, when Copland, Gershwin, and Ellington crossed paths at
Carnegie Hall. Classical record labels made amusing attempts to capitalize on
the phenomenon by marketing abstruse modern repertory to kids on LSD. An
LP of Bengt Hambraeus’s
in and among cutout pictures of other
mavericks and countercultural heroes. The following year, for the White Album,
John Lennon and Yoko Ono created the tape collage “Revolution 9,” where, for
a split second, the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard.
Adventurous rock bands on the West Coast also paid heed to the classical
avant-garde. Members of both the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane
attended Stockhausen’s lectures in Los Angeles in 1966 and 1967, while the
maverick rock star Frank Zappa spoke of his teenage love for the music of
Edgard Varèse, whom he once looked up in the phone book and called out of
the blue.
Constellations II and Interferences on the Limelight
label carried this text on the jacket: “Listening to Bengt Hambraeus’s fantastic
sound—it’s [sic] magnificent electronic and organ-organized electronic total
sound experience should involve you as much as any music that you are
capable of loving … be it the sound of The Beatles, Bach, Beethoven, Boulez,
Beach Boys, or Belefonte [sic], Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey, Blue Cheer, or
whatever. Hambraeus is really tuned in. Smashing!”
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Even as Stockhausen and Ligeti brushed against the counterculture, several
younger Americans—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—made a
different kind of breakthrough. They simplified their harmonic language and
rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse, devising a modern tonality that had
nothing nostalgic about it. What Weill said in the twenties held true again: “Once
musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams,
they started again from scratch.”
Riley, Reich, and Glass came to be called minimalists, although they are better
understood as the continuation of a circuitous, difficult-to-name development in
American music that dated back to the early years of the century, and more
often than not took root on the West Coast. This alternative canon includes
Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, who drew on non-Western traditions and built
up a hypnotic atmosphere through insistent repetition; Morton Feldman, who
distributed minimal parcels of sound over long durations; and La Monte Young,
who made music from long, buzzing drones. All of them in one way or another
set aside a premise that had governed classical composition for centuries—the
conception of a musical work as a self-contained linguistic activity that develops
relationships among discrete thematic characters over a well-marked period of
time. This music was, by contrast, open-ended, potentially limitless.
It was a purely American art, free of modernist angst and inflected with pop
optimism. Reich said: “Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his
times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and
Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the
pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in
1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions
of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-
brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie …” Reich and his colleagues
borrowed from popular music, especially from bebop and modern jazz, and they
affected pop music in turn. The Velvet Underground adopted Young’s drone
aesthetic. Art rockers such as David Bowie and Brian Eno showed up at Reich’s
and Glass’s shows. Minimalist influence radiated outward in the eighties and
nineties, to the point where you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge
and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s
Eno once summarized minimalism as “a drift away from narrative and towards
landscape, from performed event to sonic space.” Riley, Reich, and Glass spent
their formative years in the urban wilds of New York and San Francisco, but
their works have spiritual links to the capacious West. Unlike Copland’s sepia-
toned prairie, minimalist vistas are filtered through new ways of seeing and
hearing that relate to the technology of speed. They evoke the experience of
driving in a car across empty desert, the layered repetitions in the music
mirroring the changes that the eye perceives—road signs flashing by, a
mountain range shifting on the horizon, a pedal point of asphalt underneath.
Music for 18
Musicians.
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During the two-decade stretch from 1945 to 1965, when the minimalist
composers were growing from childhood to maturity, American popular music
exploded with creative energy. Jazz, blues, country, and gospel evolved into
rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and funk. Hank Williams, a white singer
with an ear for the blues, crafted country songs of gem-like beauty; Ray Charles
and James Brown fused gospel elation with blues sensuality; Chuck Berry let
loose the stripped-down anarchy of rock ‘n’ roll; Elvis Presley and the Beatles
repackaged rock for a huge youth public.
Bebop
For young American composers with open ears, the Cold War decades were,
above all, the age of bebop and modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker,
Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus burst
through the formal confines of swing and made music of ricocheting freedom
and imperturbable cool. At the height of bop, electric strings of notes lashed
around like downed power lines on wet pavement. Two sounds caught the ear
of the fourteen-year-old Steve Reich: the punch-drunk rhythm of The Rite of
Spring
It was at the end of the Second World War that many young jazz players began
to think of themselves as
and the blindsiding beat of Kenny Clarke. Terry Riley was a bebop kid
who later mastered ragtime piano. La Monte Young played excellent alto sax in
his youth and probably could have had a major jazz career if he had wanted
one. (When Young auditioned for a place in the top-notch Los Angeles City
College jazz band, he beat out Eric Dolphy.) Philip Glass never played jazz, but
listened avidly. The history of minimalism can’t be written without a cursory look
at postwar jazz.
“serious musicians,” to quote Amiri Baraka’s classic
book Blues People. Bebop, the poet said, articulated the self-esteem felt by
hundreds of thousands of black soldiers as they returned home from the
Second World War. When Parker inserted the opening notes of The Rite of
Spring
Ellington, in the twenties, had capitalized on the timbral possibilities of electrical
recording. Bebop players took advantage of the next big advance, the long-
playing record. The LP side allowed for the creation of half-composed, half-
improvised works of mesmerizing breadth, the logical descendants of
into “Salt Peanuts,” he was paying his respects while also declaring his
freedom with a somewhat impudent air. You couldn’t dance to “Koko”; you had
to sit back and listen as Parker scribbled lightning in the air. Monk threw in
angular lines and dissonant chords, softening them with the elegance of his
touch. Coltrane relished Bartók’s chords of fourths in the Concerto for
Orchestra. “We had some fundamental background training in European
harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-
American musical tradition,” Gillespie wrote. “We invented our own way of
getting from one place to the next.”
Black,
Brown, and Beige. In March 1959, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, which put
the brakes on bop’s forward drive. “So What,” the nine-minute opening track, is
a proto-minimalist piece, defined by the dreamlike slowness of the harmonic
rhythm. As the melodies drift by and change color, the underlying harmony
stays fixed on a D-minor seventh chord, with periodic sidesteps into E-flat
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minor. Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman also abandoned standard
progressions in favor of a more open-ended tonal language. Their writing had
much in common with the expanded tonality of Debussy, Stravinsky, and
Messiaen. When Mingus explicated his “pedal point” style in the notes to his
1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he could have been
paraphrasing Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language,
Jazz had entered its high-modern era, and assumed a modernist contempt for
convention. Monk set the tone: “You play what
with its schemes
of multiple modes.
you want, and let the public pick
up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Miles
Davis, in performance, turned his back to the crowd in Schoenbergian fashion.
Bebop and dissonant composition drew close enough that there was talk of a
merger. In the early sixties the composer and scholar Gunther Schuller
propagated the idea of “Third Stream,” a confluence of jazz and classical
energies. “It is a way of making music,” Schuller later wrote, “which holds that
all musics are created equal, coexisting in a beautiful brotherhood/sisterhood of
musics that complement and fructify each other.” Schuller brought in the likes of
Coleman and Eric Dolphy to perform his brawny twelve-tone compositions,
while Coleman asked Schuller for advice, notably while planning his epoch-
making 1960 album Free Jazz.
Even in its arcane phase, modern jazz hung on to its dynamism, its physical
energy. That spirit proved irresistible to younger classical composers looking for
a way out of Schoenberg’s maze. Jazz was intuitive, intimate, collaborative; it
was serious in thought but playful in execution. Steve Reich remembers
attending composition classes where students showed off byzantine scores
whose intellectual underpinnings could be discussed ad nauseam. Then he’d go
to see Coltrane play with his quartet. He liked the idea that Coltrane could walk
out with a saxophone, play freewheeling improvisations on just one or two
harmonies, and then disappear into the night. “The music just comes out,”
Reich later said. “There’s no argument. There it is. This presented me with a
human choice, almost an ethical, moral choice.”
Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, two other
pioneers of free jazz, sounded like atonal composers in exile.
The California Avant-Garde
Reich was living in northern California when he had his Coltrane revelation. A
few years later, he created It’s Gonna Rain, the first example of what he would
call “music as a gradual process.” Maybe this New York–born composer would
have found his way even if he had never left the East Coast, but his move
westward brought him into contact with alternative American traditions that had
been developing in relative isolation since the second decade of the century,
with sporadic infusions from the European émigrés who had come to Los
Angeles in the thirties and forties. In fact, the circuitous chain of events that led
to minimalism began with a kind of California mutation of the Second Viennese
School.
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The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician
of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California
at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a
university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the
Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining
Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in
place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory
of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and
also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-
Western traditions.
The first student to receive a thorough grounding in Seeger’s syllabus went on
to become the godfather of the American experimental tradition. Henry Cowell
was the son of a bohemian Irish poet who settled in San Francisco and hailed it
as “an undefiled Eden.” Young Henry attracted attention as a child prodigy and
gave solo recitals of his piano compositions. One precocious teenage piece,
Adventures in Harmony, included a flurry of cluster chords, dissonances
produced by hitting groups of adjacent keys with the entire hand. Other pieces
reduced music to a few essentials: for example, in The Anaemic Rag chains of
thirds unwind over an open-fifth ostinato.
Cowell enrolled at the University of California in 1914 and studied with Seeger
for two crucial years. He also joined a mildly cultish Pismo Beach community
called Temple of the People, led by the Theosophist poet John Varian, who
proclaimed, “There is a new race birthing here in the West. We are the germic
embryonic seed of future majesties of growth.” From Varian and other local
visionaries Cowell inherited the idea that California would be the eastern frontier
of a great Pacific Rim culture, an ecstatic commingling of far-flung peoples. His
vision of a Pacific Rim utopia grew to embrace the entire globe. Indian music,
Japanese koto and shakuhachi, Balinese gamelan, old American hymns, Gaelic
airs, and Icelandic rímur all figured in his music at one time or another. He
thought nothing of supplementing a string quintet with three Native American
thundersticks.
In 1930, Cowell summed up his and Seeger’s ideas in an astonishing little book
titled New Musical Resources, a kind of American Harmonielehre, which
anticipated many “big ideas” of the postwar avant-garde. One central concept of
the book was that harmony and rhythm should be interdependent; since any
resonating tone consists of a certain number of vibrations per second, the ratios
among the notes in any given chord could be used to dictate the rhythms of any
given bar. For example, a chord of G, C, and E would translate into
simultaneous pulses of three against four against five. Back in 1917 and 1919,
Cowell put these ideas into practice in his Quartet Romantic and Quartet
Euphometric, although he acknowledged that the pieces were (at that time)
unplayable.
On one page of New Musical Resources Cowell proposed in passing that
“highly engrossing rhythmical complexes” could be punched out on the paper
roll of a player piano. Conlon Nancarrow, an Arkansas-born composer of radical
tendencies who had fought for the Communists during the Spanish Civil War