The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
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Last annotated on November 8, 2016
14 BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG Bop, Rock, and the MinimalistsRead more at location 8960
when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a new album by the Beatles, started playing over the loudspeakers. Some of the sounds on the record bore a surprising resemblance to the Darmstadters’ latest and most advanced experiments. The song “A Day in the Life” included two spells of ad libitum playing, the second of them leading into a gorgeously strange E-major chord played by three pianos and a harmonium. Players were given a score indicating what register they should have reached in any given bar. The last chord was executed in musique concrète fashion, the attack cut off and the decay amplified over a long duration.Read more at location 8963
Beatles had first dipped into the Darmstadt sound in March of the previous year,Read more at location 8968
Paul McCartney had been checking out Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge,Read more at location 8969
Beatles put Stockhausen’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,Read more at location 8971
The following year, for the White Album, John Lennon and Yoko Ono created the tape collage “Revolution 9,” where, for a split second, the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard.Read more at location 8973
Members of both the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane attended Stockhausen’s lectures in Los Angeles in 1966 and 1967,Read more at location 8975
Frank Zappa spoke of his teenage love for the music of Edgard Varèse,Read more at location 8976
postwar avant-garde was now serving as mood music for the psychedelic generation.Read more at location 8978
The wall separating classical music from neighboring genres appeared ready to crumble,Read more at location 8978
in the twenties and thirties, when Copland, Gershwin, and Ellington crossed paths at Carnegie Hall.Read more at location 8979
younger Americans—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—madeRead more at location 8986
simplified their harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse,Read more at location 8986
“Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch.”Read more at location 8988
This alternative canon includes Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, who drew on non-Western traditionsRead more at location 8991
Morton Feldman, who distributed minimal parcels of sound over long durations;Read more at location 8992
centuries—the conception of a musical work as a self-contained linguistic activity that develops relationships among discrete thematic characters over a well-marked period of time.Read more at location 8994
This music was, by contrast, open-ended, potentially limitless.Read more at location 8995
“Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie …”Read more at location 8996
borrowed from popular music, especially from bebop and modern jazz,Read more at location 9000
David Bowie and Brian Eno showed up at Reich’s and Glass’s shows.Read more at location 9002
“a drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space.”Read more at location 9004
They evoke the experience of driving in a car across empty desert,Read more at location 9007
Hank Williams, a white singer with an ear for the blues, crafted countryRead more at location 9012
Ray Charles and James Brown fused gospel elation with blues sensuality;Read more at location 9012
Chuck Berry let loose the stripped-down anarchy of rock ’n’ roll;Read more at location 9013
Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles MingusRead more at location 9015
the punch-drunk rhythm of The Rite of Spring and the blindsiding beat of Kenny Clarke.Read more at location 9017
at the end of the Second World War that many young jazz players began to think of themselves as “serious musicians,”Read more at location 9022
When Parker inserted the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts,” he was paying his respects while also declaring his freedom with a somewhat impudent air.Read more at location 9024
Coltrane relished Bartók’s chords of fourths in the Concerto for Orchestra.Read more at location 9027
Ellington, in the twenties, had capitalized on the timbral possibilities of electrical recording.Read more at location 9030
“So What,” the nine-minute opening track, is a proto-minimalist piece,Read more at location 9033
Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman also abandoned standard progressions in favor of a more open-ended tonal language. Their writing had much in common with the expanded tonality of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Messiaen. When Mingus explicated his “pedal point” style in the notes to his 1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he could have been paraphrasing Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language, with its schemes of multiple modes.Read more at location 9035
“You play what you want, and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”Read more at location 9039
Gunther Schuller propagated the idea of “Third Stream,” a confluence of jazz and classical energies.Read more at location 9042
all musics are created equal, coexisting in a beautiful brother-hood/sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other.”Read more at location 9043
Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, two other pioneers of free jazz, sounded like atonal composers in exile.Read more at location 9046
Even in its arcane phase, modern jazz hung on to its dynamism, its physical energy.Read more at location 9047
Jazz was intuitive, intimate, collaborative;Read more at location 9048
composition classes where students showed off byzantine scores whose intellectual underpinnings could be discussed ad nauseam. Then he’d go to see Coltrane play with his quartet. He liked the idea that Coltrane could walk out with a saxophone, play freewheeling improvisations on just one or two harmonies, and then disappear into the night. “The music just comes out,” Reich later said. “There’s no argument. There it is. This presented me with a human choice, almost an ethical, moral choice.”Read more at location 9049
infusions from the European émigrés who had come to Los Angeles in the thirties and forties.Read more at location 9057
The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture.Read more at location 9059
Henry Cowell was the son of a bohemian Irish poet who settled in San FranciscoRead more at location 9066
He also joined a mildly cultish Pismo Beach community called Temple of the People,Read more at location 9071
“There is a new race birthing here in the West. We are the germic embryonic seed of future majesties of growth.”Read more at location 9071
embrace the entire globe. Indian music, Japanese koto and shakuhachi, Balinese gamelan, old American hymns, Gaelic airs, and Icelandic rímur all figured in his music at one time or another.Read more at location 9074
an astonishing little book titled New Musical Resources, a kind of American Harmonielehre, which anticipated many “big ideas” of the postwar avant-garde.Read more at location 9077
One central concept of the book was that harmony and rhythm should be interdependent; since any resonating tone consists of a certain number of vibrations per second, the ratios among the notes in any given chord could be used to dictate the rhythms of any given bar. For example, a chord of G, C, and E would translate into simultaneous pulses of three against four against five.Read more at location 9078
“highly engrossing rhythmical complexes” could be punched out on the paper roll of a player piano.Read more at location 9083
In the notorious Study No. 33, for example, tempos are superimposed according to the ratio √__2/2.Read more at location 9086
its jazzy, hyperkinetic energy put it far outside the postwar modernist mainstream.Read more at location 9087
Harry Partch, the other great West Coast nonconformist of the twenties and thirties,Read more at location 9089
outside”—to jettison the entire discourse of European music as it had been practiced since at least the time of Bach.Read more at location 9090
One day Partch asked himself why there are twelve notes in an octave,Read more at location 9097
who, at least in theory, derived all musical pitches from the clean integer ratios of the natural harmonic series.Read more at location 9100
Partch invented a scale made up not of twelve notes but of forty-three.Read more at location 9102
instruments were incapable of producing such microtonal shadings, so Partch invented his own;Read more at location 9102
an entire private orchestra of bowed, plucked, and keyboard instruments, together with Cloud-Chamber Bowls (Pyrex carboys obtained from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory), the Kithara (modeled on a harp-like instrument seen on Greek vases), and the awesome Marimba Eroica (whose lowest notes boom forth from five-foot-high blocks).Read more at location 9103
Like Leoš Janáček, he sought to close the gap between song and speech,Read more at location 9106
musical establishments of Europe and America ignored or mocked Partch’s ideas.Read more at location 9111
instead of begging for assistance from patrons or the WPA bureaucracy, he dropped out of civilization entirely, and became a hobo.Read more at location 9113
In the desert city of Barstow, California, he found a set of inscriptions on a highway railing,Read more at location 9116
Car just passed by, Make that two more, three more. Do not think they’ll let me finish my story. Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck. Hoping to get the hell out, here’s my name— Johnnie Reinwald, nine-fifteen South Westlake Avenue, Los AngelesRead more at location 9118
Partch’s songs captured the roughness of life during the Great Depression—youRead more at location 9122
A lot of people would be hard-pressed to identify Barstow as “classical music”Read more at location 9123
closer to the twisted white blues of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits.Read more at location 9124
“There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J. S. Bach.”Read more at location 9125
Schoenberg was poorly equipped to comprehend the emergent West Coast aesthetic.Read more at location 9129
California composers were discovering the joys of insistent repetition and gradual change.Read more at location 9130
From the ultra-moderns, Harrison acquired a flair for stark, prophetic utterances—questingRead more at location 9134
From Cowell he picked up a lifelong love of non-Western traditions,Read more at location 9135
love of musical merriment, of hummable song and rollicking dance.Read more at location 9138
assimilate these diverse strains into forms of Baroque poise and precision;Read more at location 9138
Harrison’s career was a creative misinterpretation of that remark;Read more at location 9140
flexibility of form and the interchangeability of music and noise.Read more at location 9142
he hovered over the radical end of American music as a liberating spirit.Read more at location 9148
In 1952, he scandalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring music in goal-oriented harmonic narratives instead of letting it unfold moment by moment.Read more at location 9149
Cage’s definitive refutation of Beethoven came in the form of an epic, almost daylong performance of Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations.Read more at location 9154
“In order to play this motif 840 times, one would have to prepare oneself in advance, and in the utmost silence, through serious immobilities.”Read more at location 9156
A team of twelve pianists played from 6:00 p.m. until 12:40 p.m. the following day.Read more at location 9158
York Times responded by sending a gang of eight critics to cover the event, one of whom ended up performing.Read more at location 9159
In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who remembered the experience when he made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building the following year.Read more at location 9160
Those who saw the entire performance received a twenty-cent bonus.Read more at location 9163
As a conversationalist, he was verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic—one of the great talkers in the modern history of New York City.Read more at location 9173
he was closer in spirit to Varèse, the master sculptor of abstract sound.Read more at location 9186
invent graphic notation and thereby to inaugurate the age of chance, indeterminacy, and improvisation.Read more at location 9190
Feldman, like Cage, understood music of the Second Viennese School as an invitingly strange, quasi-sacred space from which everything extraneous has been scrubbed away.Read more at location 9194
What Feldman did was to slow the pace of events in the Viennese universe.Read more at location 9197
Harmonies dwell in a no-man’s-land between consonance and dissonance,Read more at location 9202
His scores are close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and Rothko’s glowing fogbanks of color.Read more at location 9203
“Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.”Read more at location 9208
All of his music was a silent protest, cutting loose from the ghost-ridden European world.Read more at location 9214
Once, during a visit to Berlin, the American composer Alvin Curran asked him why he didn’t move to Germany, since audiences there responded so avidly to his music. Feldman stopped in the middle of the street, pointed down, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!”Read more at location 9214
“There’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning.Read more at location 9219
the most personal, affecting work of his life. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices but no words. Chords and melodic fragments float along like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distantly dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles.Read more at location 9222
No less than Messiaen, Feldman was in the business of creating places of spiritual otherness, which in his case may have had some connection to medieval kabbalistic thought.Read more at location 9239
his supreme goal of making music a life-changing force, a transcendent artRead more at location 9241
String Quartet (II) of 1983 and For Philip Guston of 1984, six and five hours long respectively—isRead more at location 9243
Feldman’s music can be called “minimalist” if the word is understood to mean a minimum of notes on the page.Read more at location 9247
No twentieth-century composer, with the possible exception of Sibelius in his last years, achieved such imperturbable separateness;Read more at location 9250
He starts out as a romantic, Feldman said, a budding genius overflowing with original ideas, or at least with ideas about originality. Then he goes off to university and discovers that romanticism is defunct. He studies for six years at Princeton or Yale, learning about twelve-tone writing, total serialism, indeterminacy, and the rest. He goes to Darmstadt and samples the latest wares of the European avant-garde. “He writes a piece occasionally,” Feldman wrote. “It is played occasionally. There is always the possibility of a performance on the Gunther Schuller series. His pieces are well made. He is not without talent. The reviews aren’t bad. A few awards—a Guggenheim, an Arts and Letters, a Fulbright—this is the official musical life of America.”Read more at location 9253
young composers with tonal yearnings found little happiness in academia,Read more at location 9267
George Rochberg said: “[Twelve-tone composers] have proclaimed an orthodox cultural church, with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs, and anathemas.” Michael Beckerman said: “Trying to write tonal music at a place like Columbia University in the 1960s and ’70s was like being a dissident in Prague in the same period, with similar professional consequences.” William Mayer used a homelier high-school metaphor: “To be a tonal composer in the ’60s and ’70s was a deeply dispiriting experience. One was shunned as the last teen-aged virgin.”Read more at location 9269
the youth were rebelling against what BabbittRead more at location 9273
reverted to the harmonic vocabulary of late-period Beethoven in his Third String Quartet.Read more at location 9274
Lukas Foss, in his 1967 Baroque Variations, distorted Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach;Read more at location 9277
quotations from Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and Ravel, not to mention all-American twangs of banjoRead more at location 9279
The boldest of neotonalists was William Bolcom, a devoted student of Milhaud,Read more at location 9279
For composers steeped in the experimental tradition of Cowell and Cage, this squabble between neo-Romantic and die-hard atonal composers meant nothing. From their vantage point, it was essentially a dispute over which aspect of the European inheritance—the late Romantic or the high modern—should hold sway.Read more at location 9285
“modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category,Read more at location 9288
Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch’s words, look for “a way outside”—anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic.Read more at location 9290
such composers have tended to congregate in loft spaces, art galleries, and rock clubs below Fourteenth Street.Read more at location 9292
Their chief gathering place was the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, which ran from 1961 to 1965.Read more at location 9304
on the West Coast, the “downtown” aesthetic was headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area,Read more at location 9317
Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone.Read more at location 9327
music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin.Read more at location 9328
he slowed the pace of events in the twelve-tone cosmos,Read more at location 9337
Twelve-tone writing became something like Tai Chi, combat in slow motion.Read more at location 9338
Events move so slowly that you can no longer detect the twelve-toneRead more at location 9344
Composition 1960 #10: Draw a straight line and follow it. Composition 1960 #15: This piece is little whirl pools out in the middle of the ocean. Piano Piece for David Tudor #3: Most of them were very old grasshoppers.Read more at location 9353
Young curated a series of concerts at the downtown loft of the expatriate Japanese artist Yoko Ono,Read more at location 9359
