Today’s practitioners of what we once referred to as “modern day” music are finding themselves to be abruptly alone. A bewildering backlash is set against any music producing that requires the disciplines and tools of investigation for its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It once was that 1 could not even method a major music school in the US unless nicely prepared to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When one hears now of professors shamelessly studying scores of Respighi in order to extract the magic of their mass audience appeal, we know there’s a crisis. This crisis exists in the perceptions of even the most educated musicians. Composers currently appear to be hiding from specific tough truths relating to the creative process. They have abandoned their search for the tools that will assist them develop actually striking and difficult listening experiences. I think that is since they are confused about lots of notions in modern music producing!
Initially, let’s examine the attitudes that are required, but that have been abandoned, for the improvement of specific disciplines in the creation of a lasting modern day music. This music that we can and should make supplies a crucible in which the magic inside our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our quite evolution in inventive believed. It is this generative approach that had its flowering in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, quite a few emerging musicians had develop into enamored of the wonders of the fresh and thrilling new world of Stockhausen’s integral serialism that was then the rage. There seemed limitless excitement, then. It seemed there would be no bounds to the creative impulse composers could do something, or so it seemed. At the time, most composers hadn’t genuinely examined serialism meticulously for its inherent limitations. But it seemed so fresh. On the other hand, it quickly became apparent that it was Stockhausen’s thrilling musical strategy that was fresh, and not so considerably the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the strategies he used were born of two unique considerations that ultimately transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns and, especially, the idea that treats pitch and timbre as specific situations of rhythm. (Stockhausen referred to the crossovers as “contacts”, and he even entitled one particular of his compositions that explored this realm Kontakte.) These gestures, it turns out, are definitely independent from serialism in that they can be explored from unique approaches.
The most spectacular method at that time was serialism, even though, and not so a lot these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this extremely method — serialism — nonetheless, that just after getting seemingly opened so many new doors, germinated the really seeds of modern music’s own demise. The process is extremely prone to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it tends to make composition straightforward, like following a recipe. In serial composition, the much less thoughtful composer seemingly can divert his/her soul away from the compositional method. Inspiration can be buried, as strategy reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies a single experiences from required partnership with one’s essences (inside the thoughts and the soul — in a sense, our familiars) can be discarded conveniently. All is rote. All is compartmentalized. For a lengthy time this was the honored process, extended hallowed by classroom teachers and young composers-to-be, alike, at least in the US. Quickly, a sense of sterility emerged in the musical atmosphere quite a few composers began to examine what was taking location.
The replacement of sentimental romanticism with atonal music had been a vital step in the extrication of music from a torpid cul-de-sac. A music that would closet itself in banal self-indulgence, such as what seemed to be occurring with romanticism, would decay. Right here came a time for exploration. The new alternative –atonality — arrived. It was the fresh, if seemingly harsh, antidote. Arnold Schonberg had saved music, for the time getting. However, shortly thereafter, Schonberg produced a significant tactical faux pas. The ‘rescue’ was truncated by the introduction of a method by which the newly freed course of action could be subjected to control and order! I have to express some sympathy here for Schönberg, who felt adrift in the sea of freedom offered by the disconnexity of atonality. Substantial forms depend upon some sense of sequence. For him a method of ordering was necessary. Was serialism a great answer? I am not so certain it was. Its introduction offered a magnet that would attract all those who felt they required explicit maps from which they could construct patterns. By the time Stockhausen and Boulez arrived on the scene, serialism was touted as the cure for all musical issues, even for lack of inspiration!
Pause for a minute and think of two pieces of Schonberg that bring the issue to light: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912 – pre-serial atonality) and the Suite, Op. 29 (1924 serial atonality). Pierrot… seems so vital, unchained, nearly lunatic in its specific frenzy, while the Suite sounds sterile, dry, forced. In the latter piece the excitement got lost. This is what serialism appears to have completed to music. But the attention it received was all out of proportion to its generative energy. Boulez when even proclaimed all other composition to be “useless”! If the ‘disease’ –serialism –was terrible, 1 of its ‘cures’ –free possibility –was worse. In a series of lectures in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1958, John Cage managed to prove that the outcome of music written by possibility suggests differs quite tiny from that written using serialism. On the other hand, possibility seemed to leave the public bewildered and angry. Possibility is opportunity. There is nothing at all on which to hold, absolutely nothing to guide the mind. Even potent musical personalities, such as Cage’s, generally have problems reining in the raging dispersions and diffusions that chance scatters, seemingly aimlessly. But, once again, a lot of schools, notably in the US, detected a sensation in the producing with the entry of absolutely free chance into the music scene, and indeterminacy became a new mantra for any person interested in developing a thing, something, so extended as it was new.
I believe parenthetically that 1 can concede Cage some quarter that 1 could be reluctant to cede to other folks. Generally possibility has grow to be a citadel of lack of discipline in music. As well frequently I’ve noticed this outcome in university classes in the US that ‘teach ‘found (!)’ music. listen to music of discipline in music generating really should never be shunted away in search of a music that is ‘found’, rather than composed. Nevertheless, in a most peculiar way, the power of Cage’s personality, and his surprising sense of rigor and discipline seem to rescue his ‘chance’ art, where other composers simply flounder in the sea of uncertainty.
Still, as a remedy to the rigor mortis so cosmically bequeathed to music by serial controls, opportunity is a pretty poor stepsister. The Cageian composer who can make opportunity music speak to the soul is a uncommon bird certainly. What seemed missing to lots of was the perfume that makes music so wonderfully evocative. The ambiance that a Debussy could evoke, or the fright that a Schonberg could invoke (or provoke), seemed to evaporate with the modern day technocratic or free-spirited methods of the new musicians. Iannis Xenakis jolted the music planet with the potent remedy in the guise of a ‘stochastic’ music. As Xenakis’ operate would evolve later into excursions into connexity and disconnexity, offering a template for Julio Estrada’s Continuum, the path toward re-introducing power, beauty and fragrance into sound became clear. All this in a ‘modernist’ conceptual strategy!