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manner of Steve Reich and timbral rustlings out of Luciano Berio and George

Crumb. But Golijov transcends his models in repeatedly ceding creative control

to his singers, players, and drummers, inviting them to improvise on given

material.

At the same time, the composer of this Passion

proceeds according to a cannily

controlled plan; he coaxes his sounds into a strong narrative arc and places at

the climax a softly lamenting Kaddish for the man on the cross. Suddenly the

language is Aramaic, the cantillation is Jewish, and the centuries have slipped

away like sand.

In 1907, American music was almost invisible in listings of musical events in

New York City. For the most part, concert life consisted of European musicians

playing European composers either living or dead. One hundred years down the

line, new music is omnipresent. On any given night at the height of the season,

you can find up to a dozen competing new-music events in venues around the

city, whether at Miller Theatre at Columbia, in Zankel Hall underneath Carnegie

Hall, at downtown spaces such as the Kitchen and Roulette, or in Brooklyn

warehouses. At Issue Project Room, a performance series temporarily located

in an abandoned oil silo on the industrial Gowanus Canal, the composer-

vocalist Joan La Barbara sings excerpts from Kenji Bunch’s electronically

enhanced chamber opera

After Minimalism

Confessions of the Woman in the Dunes,

The geography of New York—downtown and uptown, youthful and mature,

rebellious and established—still serves as a convenient organizing principle for

American music, although rising real-estate prices have made the notion of a

cheap Manhattan loft a movie fantasy. To track the disparate activities of

downtown composers, Kyle Gann has coined the term “postminimalism.” He

describes it as a tonal, steady-pulsing kind of music that avoids defining itself

through a controlling process, such as Reich’s phase shifting or Glass’s additive

rhythm. Instead, repetition becomes a background grid on which a large variety

of material can be plotted: everything from the Southern American shape-note

singing in William Duckworth’s

inspired by

Teshigahara’s movie. At Joe’s Pub, the young composer Nico Muhly performs

delicate minimalist-inflected pieces with the Icelandic sound artist Valgeir

SigursÐson, who’s worked with the avant-pop star Björk. At the Stone, on

Avenue C, the free-jazz saxophonist, klezmer aficionado, collage artist, and

avant-garde composer John Zorn rallies all the sounds in his experience into

music as coolly hectic as the city itself.

Southern Harmony

Postminimalists tend also to be plugged-in composers. Each new technological

advance—digital sampling, the MIDI interface for computers and synthesizers,

computer music software, interactive Internet linkups—mandates a change in

technique. The advent of laptop computers means that composers can carry

to the microtonal electric-

guitar soundscapes of Glenn Branca.

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their life’s work in a backpack, and via the Internet they can send it around the

world at the touch of a button. Downtown composers also show sympathy for

pop. The original minimalists revivified tonality in part by studying jazz, R & B,

and early rock. Postminimalists have taken cues variously from funk, punk,

heavy metal, electronic and DJ music, and hip-hop.

In the 1980s, three composers from the Yale School of Music, Michael Gordon,

Julia Wolfe, and David Lang, banded together under the name Bang on a Can.

They summed up their thinking thus: “We had the simplicity, energy and drive of

pop music in our ears—we’d heard it from the cradle. But we also had the idea

from our classical music training that composing was exalted.” As the new

century began, Gordon created a score for Bill Morrison’s film Decasia,

Refining his map of the musical city, Gann has introduced the category of

“midtown” to cover the sizable number of composers who are still working in

traditional orchestral, operatic, and chamber-music genres, their harmonies

usually more tonal than not. The most successful members of this group—John

Corigliano, Mark Adamo, Christopher Rouse, Joan Tower, and John Harbison,

among others—have regained the confidence of mainstream classical listeners,

who never quite got around to accepting Schoenberg, never mind Milton

Babbitt. The challenge, as ever, is to honor the expectations of an audience

weaned on Mozart without pandering or committing pastiche. A degree of wit

often saves the day. Rouse’s

a mind-

altering cinematic collage in which pieces of archival footage melt before one’s

eyes. Letting his own harmonies “decay” by way of microtonal tunings and

glissandos, Gordon split the difference between minimalist transparency and

modernist density, to superbly ominous effect.

Der gerettete Alberich, or Alberich Saved, for

percussionist and orchestra, begins with the sublime final measures of

Wagner’s Ring

Downtown and midtown composers are alike in rejecting the prophet-in-the-

wilderness, who-cares-if-you-listen mentality that prevailed after the Second

World War. They often speak in terms of an atonal nightmare ending, of a

melodic morning dawning. By now, members of these formerly suspect camps

have achieved positions of eminence in American academia, and young

composers no longer fear intellectual ostracism if they dabble in tonality.

and goes on to answer the question of whatever became of

Alberich, master of the Nibelungs, after the twilight of the gods. It turns out that

the dwarf lord conquers the world at the head of a demonic high-school

marching band playing covers of heavy-metal tunes.

But the modernist impulse is by no means dead. For some years the British-

born, American-based composer Brian Ferneyhough has been testing the outer

limits of what players can play and listeners can hear, and he has become the

somewhat unwilling figurehead for a movement known as the New Complexity.

Ferneyhough may win the prize for inscribing more black dots per square inch

than any composer in history: a characteristic bar of his Third String Quartet has

the first violin setting forth jagged, double-stopped figures over a range of

several octaves, replete with glissando, trills, and seven different dynamic

markings; the second violin playing a stream of twenty-nine thirty-second notes;

the viola playing a stream of thirty-three thirty-second notes; and the cello

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scrubbing out disjointed figures down below. Because not even the most expert

performers can execute such notation precisely, it becomes a kind of planned

improvisation, more akin to a free-jazz or avant-rock freak-out than to anything

in the mainstream classical tradition—mutatis mutandis, a mosh pit for the mind.

The New Complexity is not exactly new. Henry Cowell layered rhythm upon

rhythm back in 1917. But the pursuit of extreme musical situations has eternal

appeal. For the young composer it becomes another tough-walled refuge within

a hypercommercialized culture that dictates artistic choices by way of audience

surveys and focus groups. And it intersects in surprising ways with the

noncommercial end of rock and electronic pop. In sticky-floored basement clubs

across the country, young people compare notes on Sonic Youth and Morton

Feldman, seeking the sound that will annul the norm. In the empire of noise,

formal distinctions disappear, just as the gaps between continents vanish under

the Arctic ice.

In Europe the long heyday of modernism continues. Hidden beneath the plaza

outside the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, is the Institute for the Research and

Coordination of Acoustics and Music, or IRCAM, a subterranean electronic-

music laboratory that opened in 1977 under the velvet-fist direction of Pierre

Boulez. The mere existence of such a place, never mind its choice location, is

testimony to the long-standing cultural largesse of the European welfare state,

on which composers have for decades depended. Boulez formed IRCAM at the

invitation of Georges Pompidou, the president of France from 1969 to 1974, and

the financial outlay was huge: in the early years the institute and the allied

Ensemble Intercontemporain consumed up to 70 percent of the government

budget for contemporary music. Classical music may no longer be a European

art, but composers from abroad almost invariably pass through Paris, London,

Berlin, Vienna, or Munich at some point in their careers. They come because

money is there, and the media attention, and the audience, and, perhaps most

important, the continuity with the storied past. IRCAM’s address is symbolic: 1

place Igor-Stravinsky.

After Modernism

The European modern-music utopia, which dates back to the founding of

Darmstadt in 1946, will not last forever. In recent years, as welfare-state

economies have struggled to stay afloat in the global free market, arts budgets

have shrunk. European composers may soon be confronted with the interesting

challenge, long familiar to American composers, of writing for a paying

audience. In subtle ways this change is already under way, as younger

composers modify or reject the classic avant-garde stance of the composer in

opposition to society. Even Boulez has recalibrated a few of his more extreme

positions. When, in 1999, he was asked why so few major works of the fifties

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and sixties had become repertory pieces, he blandly replied, “Well, perhaps we

did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener.”

Boulez’s recent music has a cool, silvery sheen. Made up of lush surfaces,

rapid swirls of interior activity, and generously swooping forms, it resembles the

rippling facades that architects such as Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry

have devised for civic structures in the wealthy urban centers of the European

Union. Boulez’s most formidable latter-day work is Répons (1980–84), which

deploys various IRCAM technologies—electronic instruments, computerized

sound synthesis, software for the instantaneous electronic manipulation of live

sounds—to spectacular and satisfying effect. The big moment comes at the

beginning of Section 1, when, after an extended instrumental introduction,

bursts of electronically modified sound surge in from six separate stations that

are distributed around the audience in a circle: thickly arpeggiated chords jump

from one station to the next and build into a reverberating roar. On the whole,

the music is closer to the ear-drenching aesthetic of Stockhausen’s Gruppen

and Carré, or of later Luciano Berio works such as Coro,

Stockhausen spent the last twenty-three years of the twentieth century—and

the first three years of the twenty-first—laboring on

than to the clipped

violence of Boulez’s youthful work.

Licht, a meta-Wagnerian

cycle of seven operas, each named for a day of the week. It tells a ritualistic,

symbolic story of relationships among three archetypal characters: the birth-

giving Eva, the wisdom-seeking Michael, and the freedom-seeking Lucifer. The

score makes extravagant demands; as of this writing, no opera house has yet

succeeded in staging Wednesday, whose third scene calls for four string

players to take off in helicopters. Friday requires, according to the composer’s

prospectus, “twelve very different objects like rockets flying, a woman in the

moon, a giant syringe moving towards a woman, a huge pencil sharpener about

four meters high as a woman and a man who is a pencil pushing himself into

the pencil sharpener; an enormous male raven flying around a woman nest.” In

Sunday,

The plot may be nuts, but grand sounds crop up all over

the finale to the cycle, scents representing the days of the week are

released into the audience.

Licht—the pealing,

quasi-tonal theme of Michael that resounds through Thursday; Lucifer’s

sneering glissandos in Saturday;

When Terry Riley’s

the phantasmagoric ending of that opera, with

boomings of the tam-tam, alternating chords of organ and trombones, ecstatic

shouts and murmurs, and endless ringing bells. Stockhausen, who died in

December 2007, went out in style.

In C was played at Darmstadt in 1969, it elicited lusty boos

from the rank and file of the avant-garde. Only a few European composers

understood that something revolutionary was happening in American music.

One close listener was György Ligeti, who included in his 1976 piece Three

Pieces for Two Pianos a playfully repetitive movement titled “Self-Portrait with

Reich and Riley (and Chopin Is Also There).” Another was the radical-anarchist

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who, after hearing In C in 1970, began

working out his own emphatically pulsing, pop-inflected language, which, in the

eighties, had a considerable impact on the composers of Bang on a Can.

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Andriessen went on to become the only major European minimalist. In 1976,

the year of Music for 18 Musicians and Einstein on the Beach, he finished a

large-scale work for voices and ensemble titled De Staat, or The Republic,

If minimalism made hardly a dent on mainstream European music—its reliance

on consonances and steady pulses broke all the modernist taboos at once—the

younger generation of composers, those who came of age in the era of the

student revolutions of May 1968, did find their own direction, distinct from that of

Boulez. In the seventies, three composers working at IRCAM—Tristan Murail,

Gérard Grisey, and Hugues Dufourt—used advanced computer software to

analyze the spectra of overtones that accompany any resonating tone, and from

the complex patterns that they found they extrapolated a new kind of music.

Their common effort, which came to be called Spectralism, had an

antiestablishment, back-to-nature aspect. It was, in a way, an oblique response

to minimalism and to the predecessor movements of the West Coast American

avant-garde, notably the work of Harry Partch and La Monte Young. If you are

faithful to the material of the natural harmonic series, you will not neglect the

intervals at the lower end of the spectrum of tone—the octave, the fifth, and the

major third, whence comes major- and minor-key tonality. Grisey later said in an

interview: “I have to acknowledge the differences [between consonance and

dissonance] and avoid flattening everything. Making everything flat and equal.

It’s a way of recovering the hierarchy.”

after

Plato. The choice of texts gives ironic prominence to Plato’s warnings about the

dangers of free musical expression (“Any alteration in the modes of music is

always followed by alteration in the most fundamental laws of the state”). The

score itself embodies the loudness and lewdness that Plato feared: a

swingband wall of brass, a trio of electric guitars, riff-like themes, funky rhythms.

All the same, Andriessen remains a recognizably European composer. The

harmonies are thicker and more changeable than Reich’s or Glass’s, the off-

kilter motor rhythms of Stravinsky lurk behind almost every bar. The music is

nervous rather than mellow, not the kind of thing you can bliss out to.

The exemplary Spectralist work is Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques, a ninety-

minute instrumental cycle whose material stems from a single low E on the

trombone. This music is by no means easy on the ears; the overtone-derived

material converges in forbiddingly thick, ultradissonant textures or goes

spinning through hectic patterns dictated by ring-modulator technology. Yet

there are arresting moments of simplification, as quasi-tonal harmonies rush to

the fore. Spectralism is often just a step or two removed from the singing and

shimmering textures of Debussy and Ravel. Floating through Murail’s orchestral

soundscape Gondwana

The Spectralists’ cautious rapprochement with consonance—call it détente—

stopped short at the German border. The reunification of East and West and the

emergence of the new Germany as the dominant player in the European Union

failed to distract the country’s composers from their wary brooding over the

past; indeed, Germans and Austrians seemed more conscious than ever before

of the “danger of resembling tonality,” as Schoenberg once put it. Sixty years

after the Wagner-loving Hitler killed himself in Berlin, pundits could still be heard

declaring that clear-cut repetition of material or a nonironic use of triads

is a citation of Sibelius, his time come around at last.

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betrayed a fascist mentality. With Stockhausen no longer taken as seriously as

before, the mantle of greatness fell on Helmut Lachenmann, who has said, “My

music has been concerned with rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of

what appears to me as listening expectations preformed by society.” One

analyst approvingly notes that Lachenmann’s work is “uncontaminated” by the

world around it. Familiar instruments are pushed to make unfamiliar sounds—

flutes are blown without mouthpieces, cellos are bowed on the body or the

tailpiece, piano pedals become instruments in themselves. Fragments of the

musical past float by in mangled, scorched form; childish melodies sputter into

futility. Frenzied blasts of flutter-tonguing brass alternate with passages of stasis

and near-silence.

Lachenmann’s fractured aesthetic is allied to political convictions of a far-leftist,

insurrectionary character. The libretto of his opera The Little Match Girl

We have heard this kind of talk before. The imagery of contamination recalls

Schoenberg’s theory of degeneration in

(1990–

96) augments the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale with a quotation from

Gudrun Ensslin, a leader of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang: “Criminal,

madman, and suicide … Their criminality, their madness, their death express

the revolt of the destroyed against his destruction.”

Harmonielehre, while the citation of

Ensslin smacks of the terrorist chic of Eisler’s The Measures Taken. As usual in

the German case, the music must be separated from the rhetoric: for all his

head-banging verbiage, Lachenmann is a sensitive composer who places his

cries and whispers with extraordinary care and keeps the listener in a tensely

riveted state. After a century of noise, he still succeeds in delivering authentic,

bracing shocks. In the most alarming section of The Little Match Girl,

Thrilling as the latest voyages in “novel spheres” may be, much contemporary

music in Austria and Germany seems constricted in emotional range—trapped

behind the modernist plate-glass window of Adorno’s “Grand Hotel Abyss.” The

great German tradition, with all its grandeurs and sorrows, is cordoned off, like a

crime scene under investigation.

fragments

of Mahler, Berg, Stravinsky, and Boulez flare out briefly from the orchestra, as if

someone were flipping the dial of an all-twentieth-century radio station.

Crashing in their midst is the A-minor chord that ends Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

East of Berlin and Vienna, the landscape ages. In the years immediately

following the fall of the Soviet Union, cities and towns all over Russia and

Eastern Europe looked frozen in time. In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, you

could sit outside a church in the Old Town on a Sunday morning and see little

evidence that the nineteenth century had ended. On the backstreets of East

Berlin, faded lettering on storefronts in the old Jewish neighborhoods spoke of

an annihilated world. And, backstage at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg,

the ghost of Chaliapin could be sensed lurking among the piles of decaying

After the Soviets

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scenery. Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky conductor, studied with the Soviet-era

pedagogue Ilya Musin, who continued teaching five classes a week at the

Petersburg Conservatory until a few days before his death in 1999, at the age of

ninety-five. On the day that Musin first enrolled as a student at the conservatory,

Shostakovich was standing behind him in line.

The Soviet era, for all its ravaging effects on the spirit, preserved prewar

musical culture as if in amber. As late as the 1980s, composers were still

lionized, opera houses and orchestras were generously funded, and an

imposing music-education system funneled major talents from the provinces to

the center. All that changed, of course, when the Communist Party fell from

power. In the new plutocratic Russian state, institutions such as the Mariinsky

are maintained as elite showplaces, but sponsorship of new music has all but

disappeared. Composers who were long accustomed to dachas and honoraria

now flounder in the open market. Others, mostly the younger ones, have

embraced the creative freedom that comes along with relative poverty.

American minimalism, pop and rock influences, and the ghosts of Russian

tradition are colliding and combining to sometimes scandalous effect—as in

Leonid Desyatnikov’s opera Rosenthal’s Children,

The death of Shostakovich, in 1975, left a temporary void at the heart of

Russian music, but a new cohort of composers quickly filled it. Born around the

same time as the American minimalists and the French Spectralists, the last

major Soviet generation radiated a disruptive, nonconformist energy, openly

defiant of official direction where their predecessors had been accommodating

or ambivalent. Alfred Schnittke spiked his orchestra with electric guitars. Sofia

Gubaidulina wrote a Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings in which the soloist

issues a bloodcurdling yell in the middle. Arvo Pärt, of Estonia, participated in a

Cagean happening at which a violin caught fire. In later years provocation gave

way to meditation: the long twilight of the Brezhnev regime brought a midnight

harvest of religious music.

in which an émigré German-

Jewish geneticist establishes a secret biological laboratory at Stalin’s behest

and succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky.

Schnittke, a man of haunted, sallow visage, Russian-Jewish and Volga German

in origin, was Shostakovich’s heir apparent. A master ironist, he developed a

language that he called “polystylistics,” gathering up in a troubled stream of

consciousness the detritus of a millennium of music: medieval chant,

Renaissance mass, Baroque figuration, Classical sonata principle, Viennese

waltz, Mahlerian orchestration, twelve-tone writing, aleatory chaos, and touches

of modern pop. Schnittke told a friend: “I set down a beautiful chord on paper—

and suddenly it rusts.” In his First Symphony of 1972, the opening theme of

Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto fights like a wounded animal against a

fusillade of sound.

Wandering deeper into the labyrinth of the past, Schnittke ceased to be an

ironic commentator on Romantic style and instead became a phantom

Romantic himself. He fell under the spell of the ultimate Romantic myth, the life

and death of Faust, and, like so many postwar composers, he read Thomas

Mann’s novel, which, he said, “had an incredible influence on me.” His

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unfinished magnum opus was the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten, which,

like Adrian Leverkühn’s fictional Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, employed the

original Faust

Shostakovich looked askance at Schnittke, perhaps because the two

composers were close in temperament. Toward Gubaidulina he extended a

warmer hand. “I want you to continue along on your mistaken path,”

Shostakovich told her, presumably with an enigmatic smile. In a career that has

gone from strength to strength, Gubaidulina has aimed at nothing less than

“spiritual renewal” in the act of composing. An admirer of Cage among others,

she fills her scores with farout sounds—buzzing, throbbing textures,

caterwauling glissandos in the wind and brass, scrapings and whisperings of

strings, spells of improvisation (sometimes with Russian, Caucasian, Central

Asian, and East Asian folk instruments). Episodes of extreme quiet, in which

serpentine chromatic figures curl through small groups of instruments, give way

to roarings of tam-tams, tubas, and electric guitars. These free, wild, organic

narratives often culminate in what Gubaidulina calls, in a Messiaen-like turn of

phrase, “transfigurations,” moments of radiant clarity. Her 1980 work

text of 1587. In a late-twentieth-century twist, Schnittke’s hero

goes down to hell to the accompaniment of a satanic tango, with an amplified

mezzosoprano presiding like an Ethel Merman of the apocalypse.

Offertorium, for violin and orchestra, deconstructs the “royal theme” from Bach’s

Musical Offering,

In the music of Pärt, the icon is all. The Estonian turned to religious subjects at

the end of the sixties, defying the official atheism of the Soviet Union. In his

1968 cantata

distributing the notes among different instruments in Second

Viennese School style. By the end, Bach’s theme has somehow mutated into an

ancient-sounding liturgical melody, passing through a murmuring orchestra like

an icon in a procession.

Credo, the words “Credo in Jesum Christum” are set to the tune of

Bach’s Prelude in C Major and beset with aleatory bedlam. After that, for a

period of eight years, Pärt composed little, immersing himself in a study of

medieval and Renaissance polyphony. Then, in 1976, the year of Reich’s Music

for 18 Musicians and of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Pärt reemerged with a

stunningly simple piano piece titled For Alina, which consists of just two voices,

one moving by melodic steps and the other rotating through the pitches of a B-

minor triad. The following year he wrote a Cantus in memory of Benjamin

Britten, whose music haunted him in ways he could not quite put into words.

The technique of Cantus is like that of Reich’s phase-shifting music, with

downward A-minor scales unfurling in different voices and at different speeds.

In the two-violin concerto Tabula Rasa,

The quietude of Pärt’s music did not mean that he had become a quietist.

References to him as “monkish” miss the mark; behind his sad eyes and long

beard is a steely will. In 1979 he performed the un-Shostakovich-like gesture of

donning a long-haired wig and haranguing the Estonian Composers’ Union on

also from 1977, Pärt goes from strict

process to free expression; at the beginning of the second movement,

“Silentium,” a rustling arpeggio on a prepared piano, like the rustling of wings,

ushers in icily beautiful chords of D minor. Both the invocation of silence and the

use of a prepared piano acknowledge John Cage, who opened so many doors

in colleagues’ minds.

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the subject of official restrictions. He defected to the West the following year;

Schnittke, who had played the prepared-piano part in the first Western

performances of Tabula Rasa,

A lonely exile might have awaited him; the German music establishment

opposed minimalism in any form. But when the German label ECM began

issuing recordings of Pärt’s music in the eighties, they sold copies into the

millions, unheard-of quantities for new music. It is not hard to guess why Pärt

and several like-minded composers—notably Henryk Górecki and John

Tavener—achieved a degree of mass appeal during the global economic

booms of the eighties and nineties; they provided oases of repose in a

technologically oversaturated culture. For some, Pärt’s strange spiritual purity

filled a more desperate need; a nurse in a hospital ward in New York regularly

played

arranged for Pärt and his wife to stay in Vienna,

and the couple ended up settling in Berlin.

Tabula Rasa

When the Berlin Wall was broached on November 9, 1989, seventy-one years

to the day after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic and fifty-one years

after Kristallnacht, Leonard Bernstein rushed to the scene to conduct

performances of Beethoven’s Ninth on both sides of the crumbling wall. The

grand old man of American music had less than a year to live, but he seized the

world’s attention one last time with a typically gaudy and soulful act; Schiller’s

“Ode to Joy” was rewritten as an “Ode to Freedom.” Thomas Mann would have

smiled at the gesture: the Ninth had been “taken back” again. All over Eastern

Europe that fall, and in Russia in the years to come, peoples who had lived

under the fear of the Soviet regime glimpsed freedom, and Bernstein’s revision

of the Ninth symbolized burgeoning hopes for the future. Freedom arrived

quickly in some places, more slowly in others, and in more than a few former

Soviet republics it never showed up at all.

for young men who were dying of AIDS, and in their last

days they asked to hear it again and again.

As it happens, allusions to Beethoven crop up in several major late-period

works by celebrated composers from Eastern European countries, although

none delivered anything like an ode to joy. In 1981, just as the Polish

Communist leadership was trying to shut down the Solidarity movement, Witold

Lutosławski began writing his Third Symphony, and his point of departure was

four sharp iterations of the note E—a martial signal that recalls the attention-

grabbing opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. For most of the symphony’s half-hour

duration, the orchestra seems to be trying to figure out how to respond to that

initial blast of energy, testing pathways that in one way or another appear to be

blocked. Only in the last few minutes does it find a resolution—a kind of

magnificence without triumph. Cellos and basses intone a low E, and then

match it with a B, forming a rock-solid perfect fifth. Arcs of melody extend from

that foundation, intersecting into a convulsive twelve-note dissonance.

Gleaming atop the tower of sound is the note B-flat, a tritone away from the

original E. Then the music wheels back to the fundamental tone, which is

blasted out four times to close. Lutosławski was in his late sixties when he wrote

this music, but it has the dynamism of raging, blissful youth.

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György Ligeti, in his last years, adopted an idiosyncratic language that he called

“non-atonality”—a kind of harmonic kaleidoscope in which tonal chords, quasi-

folkish melodies, natural tuning, and other relics of the past swirled around one

another in fractured counterpoint. Ligeti’s Horn Trio of 1982 begins with a

distorted variation of the “farewell” motif from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus

81a. It ends with a Lamento, a ravaged landscape full of dying cries, in which

the composer seems to gaze back on a century that killed off most of his family

and his faith in humanity. But the harmony never turns as grim as it might. Faint

triads, stretched over many octaves, provide a tremor of hope. At the end, three

tones glow in the night: a G, low on the horn; a C, high on the violin; and an A,

sounding weakly in the middle range of the piano. These same notes appear in

reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string

quartet, in F major—the music to which the composer attached the words “It

must be!”

Ligeti’s fellow Hungarian György Kurtág chose to remain in Budapest through

the worst years of the Cold War. Kurtág, too, was a master of the art of neither-

nor—a composer neither traditional nor avant-garde, neither nationalist nor

cosmopolitan, neither tonal nor atonal. Every attempt at a description of

Kurtág’s music has to be qualified: it is compressed but not dense, lyrical but

not sweet, dark but not dismal, quiet but not calm. In 1994, for the Berlin

Philharmonic, Kurtág composed a piece titled Stele (Greek for “memorial slab”),

in which Beethoven’s ghost walks again. At the beginning, octave Gs make an

unmistakable reference to the opening of Beethoven’s Leonore

Beethoven’s overture marches off to C-major jubilation.

Overture No.

3—a representation of the topmost step of the staircase that goes down to

Florestan’s dungeon. Kurtág, too, leads us into a subterranean space, but we

never get out. The final movement, muted and maximally eerie, fixates on a

spread-out chord that repeatedly quivers forth in quintuplet rhythm. At the very

end the harmony shifts to the white-key notes of the C-major scale, all seven of

them sounding in a luminous smear.

Stele, by contrast, limps

through a parched, depopulated landscape. But the white-note chords at the

end aren’t quite hopeless; they fall short of the total desolation of Adrian

Leverkühn’s “I have found that it is not to be

.” Instead, as Kurtág himself once

indicated, in conversation with the conductor Claudio Abbado, they have the

rhythm of a gaunt figure staggering on.

The East Anglian coast looks much as it did when Benjamin Britten passed his

childhood writing moody settings of Verlaine and listening to the crash of the

German Ocean. On the Aldeburgh beach you still see the old houses of the

town sloping against the sky, the tall chimneys of the Moot Hall, an old fishing

boat resting on its side, nets and buoys scattered about. The Aldeburgh Festival

continues to present Britten’s works in the local spaces for which he designed

them. Yet the management has changed. In 2000, the artistic director was the

After Britten