In music composition at the present time, anything goes. Vanished are the days of the enforced styles associated with post-World War II modernism—serialism, neo-Dadaism, and indeterminacy among them. The erstwhile avant-garde has retreated to the academy in two senses: not only has it exchanged the living present for historical status, but in many cases its remaining younger practitioners are contentedly giving up any dream of liberation for the reality of college tenure.
In the place of the dogmatic styles of Stockhausen and Boulez, of Babbitt and even Cage, we now find—especially in the United States—the aesthetics of the cafeteria. Suddenly everything from both the present and the past has become available for a composer’s use. Going vastly beyond the immersion in antique idioms associated with Stravinsky and Hindemith, even a single piece—as in works of the American George Rochberg (born 1918)—can contain a medley of several composers’ musical styles and even contents. And increasingly, musical elements both basic and simple, and dating back hundreds of years, can once again be presented proudly as the latest discovery.
It is plain that this lack of a single, unified aesthetic is itself an aesthetic. In the same way as Stravinsky’s very impersonality constituted his musical personality, the multiplicity of available choices marks the character of today’s new music, both in what composers are searching for and in what they have found.
No artistic movement, no matter how unprecedented it may seem, arises out of nothing. The roots of the present post-avant-garde compositions lie, not surprisingly, in the avant-garde itself. Notwithstanding the evident failure of the modernist movement of the past generation to achieve its twin goals of destroying and replacing the past, that movement did—from 1945 to the end of the 1960’s—train a generation of students, critics, and intellectual hangers-on; indeed, from its current commanding position in musical education, it continues to do so.
So it is only to be expected that many of its leading ideas—in such attenuated form as befits the survival of a failed ideology—should exist in the present to inform contemporary activity. This is the case with the central preoccupations of musical modernism: freedom—expressed internally as experimentation and externally as social provocation—and order—advocated as a means of extracting an aesthetic product from an originally anarchic insight. What once bound these two conflicting aesthetic principles together was the artist’s inarticulate major premise, that somewhere, somehow, an audience existed for his compositions. Whether the avant-garde would have declined and died eventually from intrinsic musical causes alone is perhaps inherently unknowable; in any case, it can hardly be doubted that the avant-garde in music carried no audience with it, and that the internal disabilities of the new were more than matched by the apathy and outright hostility of a sophisticated music-loving public.
This hankering after an audience—a dirty little secret which so many avant-gardists always denied and continue to minimize—came out into the open with the rise of the youth culture more than a decade ago. The social sex appeal of the educated young masses, so seductive when exhibited in front of the Pentagon, seemed to provide both an irresistible inspiration and a tempting market for the artist. What was true for the painter and the writer was true for the composer as well; an honorable way had to be found to seek out this pleasurable destiny which had for so long eluded the musical avant-garde.
It can now be seen that the way which was found involved the putting into effect of avant-garde ideas stemming exactly from the notions of freedom and order—but without making any attempt to combine them. And still more important, whatever the value of these notions as jumping-off points, no attempt was made to carry them out rigorously, to pursue their logical implications to the absurd conclusion of popular failure. In this combination—the splitting up of hitherto yoked conceptions and the avoidance of their logical (and ideological) denouement—may be found the key to understanding today’s new music.
_____________
This new music would seem to be made up of three major strains. Purely for the sake of descriptive convenience I have chosen to call them the aurally-sensuous, the revolutionary-political, and the pop-hopeful. Not only are they brought together by their common descent from the avant-garde, and their obvious interest in finding an audience; as a corollary of their efforts to implement this interest, they have been successful, in a way quite foreign to the products of the real avant-garde, in reaping favorable comments from critics and publications hostile in the past as well as from those friendly to musical modernism.
Beauty of sound, of course, has always been one of the features and attractions of music. A sweet voice, a rich-toned violin, a noble concert-grand piano, a symphony orchestra of varied colors and wide dynamic range—all these have served to carry melody, harmony, and structure, thus enabling music to make its obviously powerful effect. At various moments in the history of music, and especially in the hands of a few distinctively gifted performers, sound per se has assumed dominant interest; the careers of vocal and instrumental virtuosos (and more recently conductors) have been often based on their own “special” sound. And regardless of who might be playing it, the rise of the piano, for example, in the 19th century, was particularly marked by the appeal of its basic acoustical character. Similarly, the continuing development of new orchestral instruments and their featured use in romantic music served as a means of exciting the rapidly growing audience.
But essentially, as virtuosos came and went and orchestral colors became familiar to the public, more purely musical considerations—which notes were written and played, rather than just how they sounded—became once again the basis for judgment. Such a process operated, for example, with the music of Liszt, initially so successful because of its brilliant use of the characteristic sound of the piano. As time passed, however, the critical verdict has tended to find musical substance lacking in Liszt, and thus to relegate him as a composer to the second rank. This process has had a rather different outcome in the case of Debussy, whose initial impact was owed so largely to the vague “impressionist” sound he drew from the orchestra and the piano alike; but here critical judgment has increasingly stressed rich and profound harmonic and structural features.
_____________
For the avant-garde after 1945 (basing itself solidly upon pre-World War II developments) new aural possibilities—pursued in the name of the liberation of sound from the tyranny of music—became, to a historically unparalleled extent, an end in themselves. Not only was magnetic tape established as a means of bringing the “concrete” noises of everyday life into this new kind of music, but electronics itself was seen as a means of generating hitherto unheard and even unimagined sounds. In the non-electronically generated field, so-called “acoustic” instruments were explored in three areas: non-conventional methods of playing conventional instruments (including new techniques of vocal production); use of non-European instruments drawn from Oriental cultures as well as from non-white peoples previously considered primitive; and sounds produced by everyday objects mostly used percussively but sometimes in ways producing perceptible pitches. And as part of the spillover from the general fascination with electronics, all these sound sources, new and old alike, were subject to often massive electrical amplification.
In the hands of avant-garde composers, these sounds only seemed to repel rather than attract audiences, a consequence which at least fit well into the modernists’ public mission of social provocation. But as the avant-garde weakened in the 1960’s under the impact of the revolution of the young, it began to appear possible that sounds which had been used so often to offend could also be used to charm. It is precisely this search for pleasure rather than pain which has marked the compositional career of the most widely successful of the aural sensualists, George Crumb.
Born in West Virginia in 1929, Crumb studied with Ross Lee Finney, an American composer who was himself a student of such earlier avant-garde musicians as Nadia Boulanger, Alban Berg, and Roger Sessions. It is already possible to find in Crumb’s Five Pieces for Piano (1962), one of the first of his works still played today, the composer’s interest in varied instrumental usages—in this case playing on the strings as well as on the keys. His Night Music I and II (Four Nocturnes), written in 1963 and 1964, share a title derived (one assumes consciously) from the most atmospherically colorful music of Bartók; the second work in particular seems a kind of Webern without tears, as if the composer had deliberately set out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
This impression is reinforced by the two sets of Madrigals of 1965. Here the use of avant-garde writing techniques, including a singer employing glissando and flutter-tongue in addition to conventionally sung notes and the non-classical sound of a vibraphone, creates the unsettling paradox of modern means being used for sensual and even sentimental aesthetic purposes. Nor is this paradox anything but heightened by the fact that the Madrigals are settings of fragments from the poems of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca; the fragments include such lines as “To see you naked is to remember the earth” and “Drink the tranquil water of the antique songs.”
_____________
Crumb’s next works, Echoes I (“Of Autumn”) and Echoes II (“Of Time and the River”) were written in 1966 and 1967 and are nostalgically concerned with the passage of time. Echoes I is again based on words by Lorca: “. . . and the broken arches where time suffers.” Echoes II (winner of a Pulitzer Prize for 1968), in addition to quoting again the preceding Lorca phrase, also quotes the West Virginia state motto Montani semper liberi (“Mountaineers are always free”) with a question mark added by the composer; one of the movements ends with the strings using the eerie-sounding harmonics so beloved of the avant-garde to muse on “Were You There When They Crucified the Lord?” Additional instrumental effects in these works include a xylophone tapping out the name of the composer in Morse code and the equipping of the strings with antique cymbals and glockenspiel plates.
More Lorca-inspired pieces followed, including the Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), two further sets of Madrigals (1969), and Night of the Four Moons (1969), a work (according to the composer) expressing an ambivalent attitude toward the Apollo lunar landing. In the last work, the earlier marked resemblance to Webern disappears, for thinness of sound is replaced by lushness, and increasingly the music becomes intermittently more tonal and more reflective of great works and styles of the past.
All this can be seen to best advantage in Crumb’s most highly publicized and best-known work, Ancient Voices of Children (1970), a cycle of songs on texts by Lorca, for mezzo-soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp, electric piano, and percussion. Ranked by hopeful critics soon after its appearance with such pillars of modernism as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître (1954, revised 1957), and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56), it suggests in its text the mood of Mahler’s Kin-dertotenlieder; as for the music, it veers in style from flamenco Spain to the spooky Orient and the Casbah, and along the way employs a fragment (played on a child’s toy piano) from the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook and a gentle reminiscence (again from Mahler) of Das Lied von der Erde. The instruments, in addition to those listed above, include Tibetan prayer stones, Japanese temple bells, tuned tom-toms, a harmonica, and a musical saw (to be played “hauntingly”). The sounds are not so much combined as alternated, and the general effect is of a tuneful, albeit melancholy, radio trip to the exotic lands and peoples far from our provincial shores.
This impression of tunefulness is increased in Black Angels (1970), written for electrified string quartet, and by Vox Balenae (“Voice of the Whale”), in which whale sounds are imitated by a masked flutist singing into his flute. Still more tuneful is Lux Aeterna (1971), a setting of the Latin requiem text; in this work, the performers are requested to wear black masks and robes, and a single candle is to be seen burning at the center of an otherwise dark stage.
_____________
Just how Crumb’s music sounds when deprived of the sentimental associations of Lorca’s poetry, the washes of color provided by unfamiliar instruments and vocal techniques, and the theatrical effect of costumes and stage lighting, may be gathered from his most recent sets of solo piano pieces, Makrokosmos I (1972) and Makrokosmos II (1973). These works are each subtitled “Twelve Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac for Amplified Piano,” and come, as is typical of Crumb’s music, with extended directions in the score for producing the requisite sound effects. Each individual piece is assigned to an astrological sign, and further associated with someone of the composer’s acquaintance born under that sign. In some of the pieces, the musical notation is contained (as is often the case with post-1945 music) on staves running in directions other than the customary left to right. This eye-catching layout, not required in Crumb’s case for reasons of performer convenience, is employed to reinforce the programmatic mood of the pieces’ titles; thus in Crucifixus (associated with Capricorn) a cruciform arrangement of the staves is used, with the left arm of the cross played first, followed by the right arm, and only then the notes on the upright staff.
But purged of all these extramusical elements, the music—given the piano’s characteristic timbre, which is so much more easily degraded than varied—sounds at its best like warmed-over Debussy, as comparison, for example, with the piano prelude “What the West Wind Has Seen” will quickly show. Indeed, it is plain that to a large extent the music of Crumb represents an advance backward from avant-gardism to impressionism. It is this impressionism which has been responsible for Crumb’s work being seen, as by Donal Henahan in the New York Times, as “ritual music for a religion of pure sound, a religion without dogma or guilt.” But at the same time it is impressionism with a difference: for this new emphasis on sheer sound is not rooted, as was the music of Debussy, in a still creative 19th-century musical culture and, at the same time, an intellectual and social culture capable of informing both private creation and public loyalty.
Crumb is hardly to be blamed for not having been born in another time and another place. Still, however praiseworthy his interest in other cultures and the popular symbols of our time may be, more is required for authentic art than sensitivity to outside stimulus. Shorn of the necessary internal foundation, Crumb’s music seems all too solidly based on the sacred icons of the fashionable liberal culture, from the work of a Spanish poet killed by the Franco regime to astrology and concern about the humpback whale, all expressed by an arbitrary choice of instruments chosen from the world over.
_____________
The attempt to interest and please an audience through the essentially passive contemplation of sound is clearly one way to write new music. Another seemingly viable way is to concentrate on a different element of the avant-garde inheritance—its concern with the artist’s revolutionary social and political position and mission.
The idea of the artist as vanguard element in society is hardly new; in the popular mind it goes back at least to the rise of the artist as bohemian in 19th-century France. Even earlier, Beethoven saw his work as the carrier of a revolutionary message of freedom and brotherhood. Chopin, writing from France, expressed in his piano pieces the stirrings of Polish nationalism. Wagner actually went so far as to draft lengthy schemes for the far-reaching reconstruction of the individual and the state.
In our own century, the relations between politics and the arts have been tangled, perhaps ultimately to the severe disadvantage of the artist. Nowhere has this been more true than in the Soviet Union, where music carrying a governmentally approved revolutionary message has been regularly produced by and required from Russian composers. But in the West it is significant that, whatever the political alignments of such aesthetic movements as Dadaism and Surrealism, and whatever the politics of such writers as the Mann brothers, among leading composers of the inter-war period the provocations offered were musical, not political; the politics of Bartók and Hindemith, of Schoenberg and Berg, of Stravinsky and Poulenc, hardly seem determining of or relevant (even where known) to their music. And in the few cases where politics were important—as with the German Communist Hanns Eisler—the result has been to relegate the music to the status of propaganda.
After World War II, however, a new edge of churlishness and polemics appeared in the way modernist musicians saw their artistic role. The fight for new music seemed a part of the general struggle against the “system.” Less than a decade ago, John Cage was speaking admiringly of Mao; Pierre Boulez, almost at the same time as he was becoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, was saying:
Our Western civilization would need Red Guards to get rid of a good number of statues or even decapitate them. The French revolution decapitated statues in churches; one may regret this now, but it was proof of civilization on the march.
And while Boulez’s compositions have seemed apolitical, those of the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono (an avowed Communist) have in several cases been based on Third World liberation movements.1
_____________
Though by the end of the 1960’s a large number of avant-garde works were informed by explicit political inspiration, the same questions could be raised about them as were asked about avant-garde music in general: for whom were these productions meant, and who, in actual fact, was listening to them? These questions were themselves the subject of a savage polemic entitled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism (1974),2 by the sometime British avant-gardist Cornelius Cardew. For Cardew, now a Maoist, avant-gardism, under the conditions of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance,” meant writing for coterie audiences and capitulation to the ruling class. Even those of his colleagues who agreed with him politically were found guilty of obscuring the clarity and ease of communication of their revolutionary message to a wide, musically unsophisticated working-class audience.
One of Cardew’s colleagues so criticized was the American composer Frederic Rzewski, born in Massachusetts in 1938 and educated at Phillips Andover Academy, Harvard College, and Princeton University. His early interest in avant-garde music led to an acquaintance with the work of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, and the composer-pianist David Tudor (the first performer of Cage’s “silent” piece, 4′33″). In 1966 Rzewski became a co-founder of the Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) Group in Rome, a pioneer in experimental electronic improvisation.
The earliest of Rzewski’s pieces available on records, Les Moutons de Panurge (1969), plainly emerges from his avant-garde interest in improvisation. In this work, a single melody is played in ever lengthening and then diminishing segments by “any number of instruments of any kind” in unison; when the players lose their place and are no longer playing with each other in unison, they are directed to continue to play without reuniting. The monotonous nature of the composition is thus enlivened by a whiff of anarchy, in which the worst (i.e., the most disorganized) performance is the best one.
While the social message of Les Moutons is implicit rather than explicit, the composer’s next work, Coming Together (1972), is quite frank. The music is a setting of eight sentences out of a letter written from prison by Sam Melville—a radical terrorist of the 1960’s who was later killed in the Attica rebellion—describing his feelings in confinement. The sentences begin
I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. . . .
and end
I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.
The eight sentences are each broken into seven parts; each sentence is declaimed seven times by an actor (on the record, a long-time member of the Living Theater). The music consists of a single seventh chord on G with one note added, a C. All the musicians play essentially similar material, and are encouraged to improvise as long as they do not get lost. The result is jazzy, and by the end monotonous, for in the last section the performers are all playing in unison or in octaves—a reference to the “coming together” mentioned in Melville’s letter and the work’s title. Unfortunately, both the text, in its concern with self, and the music, with its emphasis on unity, suggest that the fulfillment so broadly hinted at in the phrase “coming together” is rather more solitary than reciprocal.
A 1973 work, the piano Variations on “No Place To Go But Around” (originally conceived for the Living Theater) is chiefly interesting for its demonstration, in the composer’s own recording, of his colorful, warm-toned, and altogether extraordinary piano playing, and also of the use of revolutionary songs as melodic material. For Rzewski this technique came to fruition in the 1975 Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated.” This gigantic work—it lasts over 49 minutes—is based on a radical song dating from the Allende period in Chile. It is simple, singable, catchy, and written in a multiplicity of styles, from Beethoven to jazz; Rzewski’s treatment of it uses every conceivable kind of variation writing, classical and modern, to clothe the tune, but nonetheless the theme is usually recognizable and almost always close to the music being played. For all its occasional use of avant-garde devices, the work too rarely covers territory any more interesting than the Horowitz version of the Liszt variations on Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” As a result, Rzewski’s piece resembles at bottom 19th-century paraphrases of contemporary operatic or orchestral hits, and gives pleasure for the same reason these chestnuts do-melodic appeal and virtuoso display.
A recent New York performance of the work by a pianist closely associated with the avant-garde occasioned the following praise from the New York Times’s musically conservative senior critic, Harold Schonberg:
It is an ingenious, heartfelt piece.
. . .It is of course not necessary to consider Mr. Rzewski’s politics or the message he was clearly trying to convey. The set of variations stands by itself as one of the few piano works of our time with real substance.
One may wonder whether a similarly ingenious and heartfelt piece based on an Afrikaner marching song would be granted a similar exemption from consideration of its politics. But in any case, Schonberg is right: so unrelated is the style of the music to Rzewski’s revolutionary ideology that here, at least, politics can safely be ignored.
_____________
Whereas Rzewski’s music now seems more conventional than innovative, another contemporary trend features what has variously been called solid state, minimalist, or trance music. There can be little question that this music depends heavily on transistor technology (frequently for tone generation and always for audibility) and that it resembles 1960’s conceptual art in its emphasis on repetitive elements and its stripping down of both content and style. But there can also be little doubt that, as in other areas of the youth culture, it is the drug experience which has somehow provided the formative inspiration.
Whether the experience of this music is meant to substitute for or enhance drug usage, the first impression a listener gains is boredom. The music goes on at great length, changes little, and achieves no noticeable climax. Drugs aside, such music, at least in a superficial way, was not unknown in the past. Though it is impossible to know how listeners of the time heard the less distinguished music of the 18th century, it now seems to many music lovers attractive precisely because of its availability in large quantities, its moment-to-moment predictability, its relative lack of contrast and of specific memorability. All this, of course, changed in the 19th century; here the emphasis for composer as well as listener was on the assertion of the individual composer’s personality in its differences from the work of others. As a result, part of the early 20th-century reaction against the immediate past took the form of denigrating the composer’s pretensions and relegating music from the foreground of listener attention to the background.
Much of this change can be seen mirrored in the work of an avant-garde cult figure, the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). His music, though sometimes deeply moving, was heavy on charm and wit, but light in traditional weight and “significance.” Two works of his are often cited as prophetic of later modernist developments: the Musique d’Ameublement (“Furniture Music”) was conceived with Darius Milhaud in 1920 as something to be performed but not listened to while people went about their business, and the earlier Vexations (c. 1892-93) simply directed the performance of a half-page of music 840 times slowly and quietly.
_____________
But however provocatively this music was meant, Satie could not have hoped—or even wanted—it to be taken seriously. It was quite otherwise with the avant-garde productions of the 1950’s and 1960’s, which owe so much to Satie’s example; for these composers, their work was conceived as an unlocking and a new definition of the very nature of the musical experience. No more typical representative of this new ambition, so different from the devil-may-care attitude of Satie and his followers, may be found than La Monte Young (born 1935), a reclusive and hermetic figure on today’s new music scene. Trained as an avant-garde musician, Young was a pioneer in the writing of works in which (as in the case of Cage’s 4′33″) a few words replaced all the notes. In his Composition 1960 #9, even words disappear. In Young’s own description, the work “consists of a straight line drawn on a piece of paper. It is to be performed and comes with no instructions.” What remains to be explained is how this trifling content quickly became transmuted by Young and his followers into a music of enormous dimensions in time, frequent sound levels of barely tolerable loudness, and grandiose philosophical and artistic claims.
The answer is that this minimum of music now was to be clothed in a maximum of technology. In the work of Young himself, the process may be seen in Dream House 78′17″, the only recording (made in 1973) of his music now available. One side of this record consists of chants and drones, particularly influenced by Indian music, performed by two voices—the composer’s and his wife’s—a trumpet and trombone, and electronically generated sine waves controlled by the composer. This music is a subsection of Map of 49’s Dream: The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornaments Lightyears Tracery, itself a section of the even longer work, The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964-), the tortoise in question being a pet turtle; named 49, now roaming the Pennsylvania woods. The entire composition is, in the composer’s words, meant to be “perpetuated through the establishment of . . . long-term Dream Houses designed especially for its continuous performance.” The second side of the record contains three sine waves (again controlled by the composer) all coming from the bass end of the audio spectrum.
The pitches sung and sounded are in a complicated system of tuning based upon a just intonation rather than the tempered scale used in Western music since the 18th century. The outstanding characteristic of this tuning system is the extent to which pitches so derived form pure intervals with each other, thus providing a sense of harmonic resonance and reinforcement rather than the frequent semi-clashings of our established even temperament. But whatever the theoretical complexities—and despite the composer’s subtitling the recording “The Theater of Eternal Music”—the musical effect is one of interminable repetition of uninteresting fragments, extreme monotony when produced by voices, and total nullity when produced by electronic means alone.
_____________
At this point, Young’s work seems the focus of a narrow, if dedicated, cult; he has, however, influenced several figures whose primary orientation has been toward an altogether wider, less committed, and quite unrigorously selected audience. The first of these more popular successes was Terry Riley (born 1935). He burst on the scene with In C (1964), called (by the respected new music critic Alfred Frankenstein in High Fidelity) upon its recorded appearance in 1968, “one of the definitive masterpieces of the 20th century . . . conceivably the most important since the Sacre [du Printemps]” and “the global village’s first ritual symphonic piece” (by Janet Rotter in Glamour). This composition, its complete score reprinted on the record jacket, is in C major and consists of 53 separate motifs played against a steady background of a repeated C octave on the piano. The motifs are played in order, each one as many times as each individual performer wishes; when all the performers arrive at motif 53, the performance is over.
Later recorded works by Riley, Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1968) and A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), both more dependent on electronics and more pop-oriented in sound and jacket copy, lack the ealier work’s obsession and discipline. Something of the accommodation of the later works to the then prevailing youth culture may be gathered from the poem quoted on the jacket to accompany Rainbow, it describes the ending of all wars, the Pentagon “painted purple, yellow and green,” “the energy from dismantled nuclear weapons” providing “free heat and light,” and the “concept of work . . . forgotten.”
_____________
In turning from these juvenile banalities to another practitioner of minimalist music, Steve Reich (born 1936), one finds early work based upon the use of tape, and particularly the use of loops (short pieces of tape of pre-recorded material) as a means of infinite repetition. In Come Out (1966), Reich combined this technical device with the principle of phase shifting, in which identical material, recorded on different tape tracks, is allowed to grow slightly but increasingly apart, and then is just as gradually rejoined in perfect unison. The text of Come Out, again showing the heavy influence of avant-garde political ideas in some post-avant-garde music, comes from the words of a member of the “Harlem Six,” a group arrested for murder during the Harlem riots of 1964. The passage describing how one of the prisoners got hospital treatment for his police-inflicted wounds—“I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”—is endlessly repeated and divided, first into two voices, and then into four and eight. Not surprisingly, the resultant unexpected dislocations of sense and timing do little to relieve the ponderous didacticism; the work, however, only lasts 13 minutes.
From these weighty beginnings, Reich has moved on to a more widely appealing music. Significantly, he has dropped the use of tape, though hardly of amplification. Four Organs (1970) is 24 minutes of a repeated, gradually augmented and lengthened chord, played by electric organs against a steady maracas beat. After listening to the piece awhile, the listener becomes conscious of many tiny changes, all adding up to a set of distinctions without any real difference, of change without development, of process without direction. More ambitious still is Drumming (1971), influenced by the composer’s trip to Africa to study native percussion performance techniques. While the work uses some African instruments, its sound is more that of a rhythm band substituting busyness for exoticism and mystery. Though the whole piece, which lasts 90 minutes, uses voices (and also whistling) and piccolo in addition to drums, glockenspiels, and marimbas, the total effect, because of the slow rate of change and the lack of perceptible growth, remains lackluster.
The same can be said of Six Pianos (1973), a cut-down version of Reich’s idea to write a piece using all the pianos in a piano store. Strikingly different, however, is Reich’s most recent work, Music for Eighteen Musicians (1974—76). Now available in a recording by the composer’s own ensemble, it presents the familiar combination of repetition and length in an overall pop sound, justifying its release on a popular label rather than the classical labels of the previous Reich records. Totally gone are the telltale avant-garde characteristics of simultaneous thinness and stridency, of dryness and provocation. In place of these adversary elements is a sound that is soft-edged no matter how loud, harmonically lush, and altogether perfect for a family Christmas. The release was met with universal applause: the New York Times’s John Rockwell called it one of the ten best pop records of 1978, and the New Yorker’s Andrew Porter thought it “well described as ‘an unbroken hour-long stretch of scintillating sounds in joyous patterns.’”
_____________
Even more successful, however, than Reich in achieving public recognition for his music has been another American, Philip Glass (born 1937). A student of the traditionalist composers William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard, and of Milhaud at Aspen and Boulanger in France, Glass became interested in non-Western music through writing for the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in 1966; soon thereafter he studied the tabla with Alla Rakha. By 1968 he had founded his own ensemble (Steve Reich was a member for two years) of amplified keyboard and wind instruments which is to this day associated with his music.
An early work for amplified solo violin, Strung Out (1967), in most ways stakes out Glass’s harmonic, structural, and rhythmic territory: simple modal and diatonic harmonies, simple melodic fragments augmented and diminished but always repeated and recognizable, and an insistent rhythmic pulse. These features—rhythmic and structural especially—may be assigned to the influence of non-Western music; still present in Strung Out is a pervasive aridity of texture, no doubt a legacy of the avant-garde propensity for transforming music into a lecture.
But from that point on, Glass’s music was to lose this debilitating quality. Subsequent works, beginning with Music in Similar Motion and Music in Fifths (both 1969), explored rudimentary musical procedures aptly described by the titles; the violin used earlier was replaced by an ensemble including electric organs and saxophones. What had previously seemed at least partially non-Western now seemed, due to the triumph of rock music’s heavy, electrified beat and repetitive chord structures, thoroughly domesticated.
In Music with Changing Parts (undated on the record jacket but presumably 1972 or before), Glass’s sonic mix was augmented by the addition of amplified voices contributing quasi-instrumental sonorities; the result faintly suggests the then pandemic sound of longhaired girl folksingers crooning into microphones about the villainy of technology. This work, and its immediate successors—Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74) and Contrary Motion and Two Pages (both apparently circa 1974)—might, in their incessant iteration and underlining of patterns and progressions, strike a hostile observer as what Bach would sound like to a tone-deaf listener.
_____________
After this period of striving for a means of converting the basic elements of music into a personal language, Glass was able, in 1974, to produce his most successful work. Einstein on the Beach, a five-hour opera written in collaboration with the post-avant-garde scenic designer and quasi-dramatist Robert Wilson, was performed numerous times across Europe, and twice in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1976. It is not clear that this static and massive work is an opera in any conventional vocal or dramatic sense; still less clear is any real association with Einstein, though the use of “On the Beach” in the title (referring to Nevil Shute’s novel about the fate of mankind after a nuclear holocaust) seems to see the great scientist as symbolic of our contemporary plight. Viewers of Einstein in performance were enthusiastic in their appreciation of the striking stage images, and of the cumulative effect of the music as well.
Condensed in its just-issued recording to under three hours, the music is divided into four acts containing nine scenes and five connecting interludes (called, for no explained reason, “knee plays”). All this is performed by four actors with speaking roles, a solo violin (a further suggestion of Einstein), a small and a large chorus, and the usual Philip Glass ensemble. The music was written to accompany—and perhaps to intensify—such stage images as a train, a trial, a prison, a building, a bed, and a space ship. Also heard, sometimes in the background and often in the foreground, are six speeches, three of them surrealistically evoking, among other pictures, a child’s sailboat, the problems of eyeglass wearers, and an earthquake. Three apparently straightforward passages include a long sentence about a supermarket, a purposely clumsy tribute to Paris, and a sentimental story about two lovers on a park bench with which the opera closes.
To those who have listened to Glass’s earlier music, what he has written here is almost entirely familiar. But the total effect is vastly greater and indeed moving. No longer is Glass writing pure music, expressive of the technical concerns so perfectly encapsulated in his simple titles. Now there are powerful symbols, informing both the composer in his writing and the listener (through the extensive text and illustrations which come with the recording).3
The images which Glass (and of course Wilson) have chosen to include, beginning with the genius and the devastation of the work’s title and including the train, the trial, the prison, the bed, and the spaceship, are central to our modern mass sensibility. This is imagery which the pop-musical sound authentically reflects, and which deeply moves creators and audiences alike. And not content with these powerful pictures, the opera ends with the thrice-familiar harmonic cadences providing background for the following tremulously spoken romantic sentiments:
“How much do you love me, John?,” she asked. He answered “How much do I love you? Count the stars in the sky. Measure the waters of the oceans with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the seashore. . . .”
The return from the avant-garde is thus complete. What began as musical revolution and social provocation has ended with hymn-tune harmonies and a homily to true love which every teenager in the throes of puppy love will find immediately convincing. In the context of a historical triumph so massive and unexpected as this one, it is hardly possible to begrudge Glass the commercial success for which he is striving and which the applause of the New York Times’s John Rockwell and Robert Palmer would seem to augur.
Much has been made of the extent to which Reich and Glass represent a crossover phenomenon—the replacement of the traditional narrow audience for serious music by the masses who attend popular culture. This proposed convergence of elite and mass art, which assumes the possibility of a wide audience for this new music, founders on two observations. The music is not casually danceable and it lacks lyrics. It thus requires for its appreciation a kind of sophistication no broad group possesses. So it is not surprising that when a recent Carnegie Hall benefit, sponsored by the Columbia University student radio station WKCR, featured personal appearances by both Reich and Glass (among others less well known), it attracted only an overwhelmingly white, educated, and affluent audience. The conclusion is inescapable: Reich and Glass have lately written what is no more than a pop music for intellectuals, an easy-to-listen-to music shorn of the rage so marked in black-oriented music and the pop culture of the 1960’s.
_____________
But, as far as serious music itself is concerned, the musical and ideological implications of the rise of this new music seem hardly comforting, save on the principle that any enemy of an enemy is a friend. No matter how much music in general will profit when shorn of the anger and bitterness of the avant-garde, the consequences of these new developments are hardly positive. While the avant-garde has indeed lost, no one has won. Wherever one looks, whether at Crumb’s sensuous sounds, or at Rzewski’s return to the writing of 19th-century entertainments, or at Glass’s employment of an idiom taught at the beginning of first-year harmony, one finds little on which serious musicians can grow. However attractive a return to simplicity may seem in moments of complex failure, recapture of a discarded innocence is as impossible in art as it is in life.
Unless a way can be found to use the past as foundation rather than shelter, the defeat of the avant-garde will have been in vain. And no matter how much the ideological opponents of modernism in general may rejoice to see it replaced by the eternal verities, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the wider culture will be impoverished by the loss of a leading edge, even if that edge has all too often arrayed itself with the forces of social dissolution. What price we shall pay for the end of a two-party system in culture is unclear; it does not seem too much to say that, in being deprived of a force against which it might define itself, conservatism has lost as much as our rejected modernism.
_____________
Note
The music of the composers discussed in this article is currently available on records as follows:
George Crumb:
Sonata for Solo Violoncello (1955): Desto 7169
Five Pieces for Piano (1962): Advance 3
Night Music I (1963): CRI 218
Four Nocturnes (1964), Lux Aeterna (1971), Dream Sequence (1976): Columbia/ Odyssey 35201
Madrigals, Books 7-77 (1965), III-IV (1969): Turnabout 34523
Echoes I (1966): CRI 233
Echoes II (1967): Louisville S-711
Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968): Desto 7155
Night of the Four Moons (1969), Voice of the Whale (1971): Columbia M 32739
Ancient Voices of Children (1970): Nonesuch 71255
Black Angels (1970): Vox SVBX-5306, Turnabout 34610, Philips 6500881, CRI S-283
Makrokosmos I (1972): Nonesuch 71293
Makrokosmos II (1973): Columbia/Odyssey 34135
Music for a Summer Evening (1974): Nonesuch 71311
Frederic Rzewski:
Live Electronic Music Improvised (with others): Mainstream 5002
Les Moutons de Panurge (1969), Coming Together (1972), Attica (1972): Opus One 20
Variations on “No Place To Go But Around” (1973): Finnadar 9011
Three Songs (1974): Folkways 33903
Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” (1975): Vanguard 71248
La Monte Young:
Dream House 78′17″ (1973): Shandar (France) 83-510
Terry Riley:
In C (1964): Columbia MS 7178 Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1968), A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969): Columbia MS 7315
Steve Reich:
Come Out (1966): Columbia/Odyssey 32 16 0160
Four Organs (1970): Angel S-36059
Drumming (1971), Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973), Six Pianos (1973): Deutsche Grammophon 2740 106
Music for 18 Musicians (1976): Warner Records ECM-1-1129
Philip Glass:
Strung Out (1967): CP2 Recordings 6
Music in Similar Motion (1969), Music in Fifths (1969): Chatham Square 1003
Music with Changing Parts (1972 or before): Chatham Square 1001/2
Music in Twelve Parts, Parts 1 and 2 (1971-74): Virgin Records (England) CA 2010
Contrary Motion and Two Pages (both 1974 or before): Shandar (France) 83-515
Einstein on the Beach (1974): Tomato 4-2901
North Star (1977): Virgin Records 34669
1 For a description of one such work, see my article, “Yesterday's New Music,” in COMMENTARY, March 1979.
2 For my review of this book, see COMMENTARY, December 1975.
3 In this connection, it is significant that the recording of Glass's latest work, North Star (written for a film about the sculptor Mark Di Suvero), seems to the listener, because it lacks any accompanying descriptive material, an altogether less affecting experience than Einstein.
