Today’s practitioners of what we after named “contemporary” music are locating themselves to be all of a sudden alone. A bewildering backlash is set against any music creating that calls for the disciplines and tools of analysis for its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It as soon as was that a single could not even method a big music school in the US unless well ready to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When one particular 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 now seem to be hiding from certain tricky truths concerning the creative approach. They have abandoned their search for the tools that will help them develop really striking and challenging listening experiences. I think that is because they are confused about many notions in contemporary music producing!
Very first, let’s examine the attitudes that are necessary, but that have been abandoned, for the improvement of particular disciplines in the creation of a lasting modern day music. This music that we can and will have to generate provides a crucible in which the magic inside our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our incredibly evolution in inventive thought. It is this generative method that had its flowering in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, quite a few 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 something, or so it seemed. At the time, most composers hadn’t genuinely examined serialism carefully for its inherent limitations. But it seemed so fresh. Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that it was Stockhausen’s thrilling musical method that was fresh, and not so much the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the techniques he used had been born of two specific considerations that in the end transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns and, in particular, the idea that treats pitch and timbre as particular instances 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 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 substantially these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this incredibly approach — serialism — on the other hand, that immediately after getting seemingly opened so quite a few new doors, germinated the incredibly seeds of modern day music’s personal demise. The process is very prone to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it makes composition quick, 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 strategy reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies one particular experiences from vital partnership with one’s essences (inside the mind and the soul — in a sense, our familiars) can be discarded conveniently. All is rote. All is compartmentalized. For a long time this was the honored system, extended hallowed by classroom teachers and young composers-to-be, alike, at least in the US. Quickly, mixing prices of sterility emerged in the musical atmosphere many composers started 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. On the other hand, shortly thereafter, Schonberg made a critical tactical faux pas. The ‘rescue’ was truncated by the introduction of a method by which the newly freed procedure could be subjected to handle and order! I have to express some sympathy right here for Schönberg, who felt adrift in the sea of freedom offered by the disconnexity of atonality. Big types depend upon some sense of sequence. For him a approach of ordering was required. Was serialism a fantastic answer? I am not so particular it was. Its introduction supplied a magnet that would attract all these who felt they required explicit maps from which they could develop 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 dilemma to light: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912 – pre-serial atonality) and the Suite, Op. 29 (1924 serial atonality). Pierrot… appears so very important, unchained, almost lunatic in its particular frenzy, even though the Suite sounds sterile, dry, forced. In the latter piece the excitement got lost. This is what serialism seems to have accomplished to music. Yet the consideration 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 terrible, a single of its ‘cures’ –absolutely free opportunity –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 indicates differs very small from that written working with serialism. Having said that, possibility seemed to leave the public bewildered and angry. Likelihood is chance. There is nothing on which to hold, nothing to guide the thoughts. Even highly effective musical personalities, such as Cage’s, normally have problems reining in the raging dispersions and diffusions that opportunity scatters, seemingly aimlessly. But, once more, a lot of schools, notably in the US, detected a sensation in the making with the entry of totally free opportunity into the music scene, and indeterminacy became a new mantra for anybody interested in producing anything, anything, so lengthy as it was new.
I think parenthetically that 1 can concede Cage some quarter that one particular may possibly be reluctant to cede to others. Usually opportunity has develop into a citadel of lack of discipline in music. As well often I’ve seen this outcome in university classes in the US that ‘teach ‘found (!)’ music. The rigor of discipline in music generating should under no circumstances be shunted away in search of a music that is ‘found’, rather than composed. Even so, in a most peculiar way, the energy of Cage’s personality, and his surprising sense of rigor and discipline seem to rescue his ‘chance’ art, exactly where other composers just flounder in the sea of uncertainty.
Nevertheless, as a remedy to the rigor mortis so cosmically bequeathed to music by serial controls, likelihood is a incredibly poor stepsister. The Cageian composer who can make opportunity music speak to the soul is a rare bird indeed. What seemed missing to a lot 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 of charge-spirited methods of the new musicians. Iannis Xenakis jolted the music globe with the potent solution in the guise of a ‘stochastic’ music. As Xenakis’ perform would evolve later into excursions into connexity and disconnexity, giving 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 strategy!
