Today’s practitioners of what we once called “contemporary” music are locating themselves to be suddenly alone. A bewildering backlash is set against any music generating that needs the disciplines and tools of analysis for its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It once was that one particular could not even strategy a key music school in the US unless nicely ready to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When 1 hears now of professors shamelessly studying scores of Respighi in order to extract the magic of their mass audience appeal, we know there is a crisis. This crisis exists in the perceptions of even the most educated musicians. Composers now look to be hiding from certain difficult truths with regards to the creative course of action. They have abandoned their search for the tools that will aid them create actually striking and challenging listening experiences. I believe that is because they are confused about a lot of notions in modern music creating!
First, let’s examine the attitudes that are necessary, 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 have to produce gives a crucible in which the magic inside our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our extremely evolution in inventive thought. It is this generative procedure that had its flowering in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, numerous emerging musicians had come to be enamored of the wonders of the fresh and exciting new planet 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 anything, or so it seemed. At the time, most composers hadn’t definitely examined serialism very carefully for its inherent limitations. But it seemed so fresh. Nevertheless, it quickly became apparent that it was Stockhausen’s exciting musical strategy that was fresh, and not so substantially the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the procedures he used have been born of two specific considerations that ultimately transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns and, particularly, the concept that treats pitch and timbre as special situations of rhythm. (Stockhausen referred to the crossovers as “contacts”, and he even entitled 1 of his compositions that explored this realm Kontakte.) These gestures, it turns out, are actually independent from serialism in that they can be explored from different approaches.
The most spectacular strategy at that time was serialism, although, and not so significantly these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this really strategy — serialism — even so, that right after possessing seemingly opened so many new doors, germinated the quite seeds of modern music’s own demise. The approach is highly prone to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it tends to make composition straightforward, like following a recipe. In serial composition, the significantly less thoughtful composer seemingly can divert his/her soul away from the compositional process. Inspiration can be buried, as system reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies 1 experiences from important 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 extended time this was the honored system, 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 numerous composers began to examine what was taking spot.
The replacement of sentimental romanticism with atonal music had been a crucial 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 option –atonality — arrived. It was the fresh, if seemingly harsh, antidote. Arnold Schonberg had saved music, for the time being. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, kenget e fundit made a serious tactical faux pas. The ‘rescue’ was truncated by the introduction of a process by which the newly freed method could be subjected to handle and order! I have to express some sympathy here for Schönberg, who felt adrift in the sea of freedom supplied by the disconnexity of atonality. Significant forms depend upon some sense of sequence. For him a technique of ordering was needed. Was serialism a great answer? I am not so specific it was. Its introduction offered a magnet that would attract all these who felt they required explicit maps from which they could build patterns. By the time Stockhausen and Boulez arrived on the scene, serialism was touted as the cure for all musical challenges, even for lack of inspiration!
Pause for a minute and feel of two pieces of Schonberg that bring the challenge to light: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912 – pre-serial atonality) and the Suite, Op. 29 (1924 serial atonality). Pierrot… seems so very important, unchained, nearly lunatic in its particular frenzy, whilst the Suite sounds sterile, dry, forced. In the latter piece the excitement got lost. This is what serialism seems to have accomplished to music. But the focus it received was all out of proportion to its generative energy. Boulez once even proclaimed all other composition to be “useless”! If the ‘disease’ –serialism –was undesirable, one particular of its ‘cures’ –no cost chance –was worse. In a series of lectures in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1958, John Cage managed to prove that the outcome of music written by likelihood suggests differs really tiny from that written working with serialism. Having said that, opportunity seemed to leave the public bewildered and angry. Chance is likelihood. There is absolutely nothing on which to hold, nothing at all to guide the thoughts. Even effective musical personalities, such as Cage’s, usually have trouble reining in the raging dispersions and diffusions that opportunity scatters, seemingly aimlessly. But, once again, many schools, notably in the US, detected a sensation in the creating with the entry of no cost opportunity into the music scene, and indeterminacy became a new mantra for everyone interested in building anything, anything, so long as it was new.
I believe parenthetically that one particular can concede Cage some quarter that one might be reluctant to cede to other folks. Usually opportunity has become a citadel of lack of discipline in music. Also frequently I’ve observed this outcome in university classes in the US that ‘teach ‘found (!)’ music. The rigor of discipline in music generating ought to never ever be shunted away in search of a music that is ‘found’, rather than composed. However, in a most peculiar way, the power of Cage’s character, and his surprising sense of rigor and discipline appear to rescue his ‘chance’ art, exactly where other composers merely flounder in the sea of uncertainty.
Nonetheless, as a resolution to the rigor mortis so cosmically bequeathed to music by serial controls, likelihood is a pretty poor stepsister. The Cageian composer who can make opportunity music talk to the soul is a uncommon bird indeed. What seemed missing to many 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 contemporary technocratic or cost-free-spirited methods of the new musicians. Iannis Xenakis jolted the music planet with the potent solution in the guise of a ‘stochastic’ music. As Xenakis’ work would evolve later into excursions into connexity and disconnexity, delivering a template for Julio Estrada’s Continuum, the path toward re-introducing energy, beauty and fragrance into sound became clear. All this in a ‘modernist’ conceptual method!