Music of The Absurd

As he faces the audience, the artist is at the focus of a battery of eight tape recorders, with an attendant by each. At a signal, he begins to speak. So do all eight tape recorders. Each one is playing a speech in his voice--but all the speeches are different, and in addition none of them is the speech the live artist himself is delivering.

Let us pause here, dear friends and gentle hearts, and ask: What is going on here? Is the artist actually a mad-man addressing an audience of psychiatrists? Or is it an experiment in one-man choral poetry reading which has gotten out of sync? Or is it just a Greenwich Village "happening"?

Any of these explanations would make sense, but the truth is almost beyond belief. The truth is:

This is supposed to be music.

The man with the nine voices is a dead-serious American composer named John Cage, and his composition of the moment is far from the weirdest he has concocted in the course of a relatively short career. If there are any committable cases in this hall, they are all in the audience, which consists almost entirely of people who are so afraid of being thought Philistines by posterity that they will sit earnestly still for anything that is offered to them as serious modern music, even if--as in this and a number of other famous cases--not a single musical note can be heard.

Let us repeat, this is by no means an extreme example, nor is Cage the only offender. The new concert music of the 20th Century has finally gone off the deep end, and is now more remote from its potential audience than the worst of avant-garde poetry ever was in any danger of becoming. If this trend continues--and it is in fact accelerating--the concert music that will be offered our children will be as minor an art as flower arranging, and communicating just as little.

The essence of this change is remarkably simple, though it has a complicated history and a disastrous outcome. Until our century, the serious composer's main concern was primarily to show that he was a better master of his medium than his predecessors. Today, with few but important exceptions, his primary concern is to be different.

Nobody denies, or would want to deny, the great changes that have occurred in Western music since the Greeks made the primary harmonic discovery--that women tend to sing the "same" melody an octave higher than men do. Almost all of these changes added to the expressivity of formal composition by allowing into the art devices, procedures, instruments and forms thought inadmissible by the preceding era. And it's also true that most of the innovators were denounced by their peers--composers and critics alike--as musical (continued on page 196) Music of The Absurd (continued from page 140) anarchists; and that in general, it is the innovators to whom we still listen with pleasure.

What's often forgotten in this defense of change for its own sake, however, is that the innovation did not always increase the expressivity of music by expanding the resources available to the composer, but sometimes by contracting them. For example, in Bach's time, the elaborately contrapuntal Baroque style reached the end of its resources in the work of Bach himself, and was about to slide into decadence. At the time of his death, he was engaged in writing The Art of the Fugue, the definitive summary of what Baroque counterpoint alone could be expected to accomplish. The succeeding homophonic style, the style galant pioneered by the Mannheim school (which included several of Bach's own sons, two of them brilliant composers), was strikingly less demanding both to write and to listen to than the fugal knots into which Baroque music customarily tied itself.

None of the historical expansions and contractions are analogous in the least to what has been happening to music lately. All the changes of the past, no matter how radical, were changes within the traditional language in which music is written. Today's serious composers--or at least those who are being taken most seriously--have abandoned that language entirely, with results as predictable as those which would follow were a poet or novelist to abandon the use of words.

This comparison is not the utterance of a fanatic musical reactionary--the sort of concertgoing John Bircher who thinks that nothing worth listening to was written after Palestrina, Bach or Mozart--but that of a man who has drawn joy and sustenance from composers of all periods for all of his listening years. Worse: It is not even a metaphor, wild-eyed or otherwise, but a literal description of the situation as it obtains now.

What are we to make, for instance, of a composition for piano in which the hammers of the instrument are forbidden to strike the strings? In this work, only two sorts of sounds are to be heard: first, the almost inaudible percussive thump of a key being depressed, gently enough so that no note results; and second, the clicking of the pianist's fingernails as he draws the backs of his fingers over the ivory surfaces of the keyboard.

This composition is relatively conservative by present-day standards; that is, it is written in something vaguely resembling standard musical notation, and the instrument to be used is specified. A more typical product of this school of scoring is a geometrical diagram, in no way resembling the standard musical staff, over which the composer shakes ink blots from an old-fashioned fountain pen. It is then up to the performer to decide what these blots may represent in terms of standard musical notation, and what instruments, time signatures, durations of performance, and other musical parameters shall be assigned to them. This is called "realizing" the music, and of course every performer's realization is different, and a complete surprise to the composer.

Any man with a normal indignation quotient will decide for himself which composition of this school he considers most outrageous. My favorite, which is also one of the funniest, is a piece in which the notes (of which there are only a few, covering almost the entire possible tonal range) are written in a highly deformed oval, like a botched Rorschach test. The composer (guess who?) "specifies" that these notes may be played backward or forward, that the piece may last any length of time, and that any number and kinds of instruments may be used. One that actually has been used is the kazoo. (Many readers by now probably suspect me of making all this up, and I can't say that I blame them. I refer these doubters to Avakian JC-1, a recording of a 25-Year Retrospective Concert [1934--1958] of Cage's music, including jeers and catcalls from the audience [which the random-music purist considers properly a part of the composition]. The recording is a three-record set, will cost you $25, and goes on forever.)

One of the most recent outbursts of the random composers is a subschool called "gestural," because it gives you something to look at as well as listen to. Gestural compositions were the core of six concerts at New York's Judson Hall in the fall of 1963. Their flavor is hard to convey, but it can be vaguely suggested. One composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen required the pianist (Frederic Rzewski, himself a gestural composer) to hammer the piano so mercilessly that he had to wear cutout gloves and dust the piano keys with baby powder. As critic John Gruen of the New York Herald Tribune remarked, "Avant-garde piano music is decidedly something to watch--it might even get worse."

Rzewski also participated in a thing called Teatrino, by Giuseppe Chiari, which called for, in addition to the piano, an alarm clock, a tape recorder, a power saw, a meat grinder, a phonograph, a ping-pong ball and a family of squeaking rubber dolls. Against this assemblage poor Mr. Rzewski, who has only himself to blame, was required to read poetry.

This situation must seem truly incredible to anyone who has not been following the devolution of concert music over the past three decades, but such a reader can be assured that the compositions I've described above are not freaks. The men who are writing them do not represent the only group of serious lunatics in operation in our concert halls today, but about the only good thing that can be said for the competing schools is that most of their music is at least audible.

How did we get into this cul-de-sac?

The sequence of events isn't difficult to describe, but the fundamental misconceptions involved are extraordinarily rarefied. They have their common origin in the 19th Century notion that change means progress, which in the 20th Century has changed from a notion to a form of mental disease. It is a disease that has emerged from the blatant misuse of Darwin's scholium by the economic royalists, who assumed that all change must necessarily be for the better, an assumption of which we should have been thoroughly disabused by now.

In particular, there is no such thing as progress in the arts. As Richard H. Rovere remarked in an article about Ezra Pound, poetry is not a horse race. Poets differ from one another absolutely as well as relatively; and so it is with composers. The fact that Beethoven used a larger orchestra, a wider harmonic palette and a greater range of forms than Mozart did is no guarantee that he was a "greater" composer. In fact, in all of these categories a good case could be made for the contention that he was a worse one. This case--to which I enthusiastically subscribe--would consist in showing that Mozart worked within his more limited compass better than Beethoven worked in his enlarged one. (As Stokowski has remarked, "Mozart understands instruments; Beethoven never did.") The ability to make a louder and more complicated noise than one's predecessor is not a patent of excellence, but a by-product of technology.

The history of the decay of 20th Century music into either noise or silence is rather straightforward. It begins almost exactly 100 years ago, when Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde crawled out on the limb of what was then common harmonic practice in Western music and sawed it off. Tristan is a work of magic, and there is much that is traditional in it; but the parts of the opera that most disastrously influenced later composers are the sections where no one, not even Wagner, can tell you what key it is in. Wagner leaves the listener no way of avoiding this problem--he begins with it. From its very opening notes, the prelude to the first act of the opera is harmonically a seething mass of ambiguities, a snake pit of chromatic melodies squirming around one another without ever coming to rest.

Wagner's mastery of every procedure employed by his predecessors, however, was so complete that his departures from common practice are no longer in dispute; in context, they work. He was followed immediately by Richard Strauss, a thoroughgoing traditionalist who liked to mix keys occasionally, and to vary his melodies by interval stretching. The latter practice consists simply of jumping the second note in a melodic sequence to the same note one or more octaves away. Traditionally, the stretched note is considered to be harmonically equivalent to the original--but the unstretched interval can be sung, whereas the stretched one can't. (In one Strauss composition, a simple theme originally heard within the compass of a single octave is pulled out to cover nine.)

Strauss' contemporaries--he has had few successors, since he died only recently--sneered at his Mozartean formalism, but they loved his mixing of keys and the pulled-out intervals. The chromaticism of Tristan, the melodic leaps and clashing chords of Elektra and Salome fell on fertile ground in the person of Arnold Schoenberg, a late-Romantic composer who, finding himself unable to compete with Strauss or Gustav Mahler on traditional grounds, erected a whole church around a music which was forbidden to have any key at all, and in which the notes of the melodies are as isolated from one another as lighted windows in a deserted skyscraper.

Early on, this idiom, called atonality, was wedded to the very large late-Romantic orchestra of Strauss, Wagner and Mahler, producing a general roar of unfocused noise interesting only occasionally for its color (Schoenberg was an expert orchestrater). In response, Schoenberg--with monomaniac German thoroughness--went all the way back to the Baroque style of composition, with its overriding emphasis on counterpoint.

This was an inevitable retreat, for a music to which harmony is impossible has no other recourse but counterpoint. Thus was created the 12-tone scale, in which no key is to be respected, but the theme of any given composition is to contain all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, and the logic of all the rest of the work is to depend upon the order in which these tones occur.

This system of composition was the first major break in common practice in the history of Western music. Schoenberg was enough of a systematist to organize the new theory from top to bottom, all by himself. He was also so arid a composer that most of the works he wrote in the new idiom have as little emotional impact--though at least as much intellectual interest--as a Double-Crostic. Men of much greater gifts, among them Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky, have since made much better use of the 12-tone system than Schoenberg was ever able to.

It is in fact impossible to manage duodecimal composition without genius, because it is so radical a departure from the whole corpus of common practice that the listener is confronted with an all-or-nothing situation: Either the music is great, or it's nowhere. As a result, there is no such thing as a minor 12-tone composer, and the system has never established itself as a new form of common practice. Instead, it went without any transition from being radical to being old hat.

But it established a precedent of enormous importance. Once given the notion that they were free to invent whole new systems of musical practice, innumerable pip-squeaks proceeded to do so with nothing else in mind but originality. One of these was Anton Webern, who had the sensible-silly notion of compressing bloop-bleep music in the Schoenberg system to a kind of pointillisme, to the point where each instrument in a major Webern work has only one or two notes to play, and the total work may last no longer than it would take the listener to desert the concert hall to mail a letter.

In the meantime, Schoenberg himself was further deserting music with the invention of the Sprechstimme, a style of vocalization in which the performer does not sing the note written, but just bleats in its approximate vicinity. The notes are written into the score, but the singer is not required to respect them.

The moment this invention was accepted, music slid all the way back to Greek drama, in which all the lines were intoned. The reintroduction of groaning and intoning into the complexities of Western concert music suddenly made it impossible for the listener to understand not only exactly what he was hearing, but what he was being asked to hear. Music now was no longer an art of organized, specific notes--which had been explored intensively by Pythagoras--but again one of the hoarse, nonspecific intonations of the jungle and the weather.

An offshoot of duodecimal composition is a system called microtonal music, in which the ordinary 12-tone octave is subdivided into further steps--usually 64. Again there is a certain maniacal logic to this procedure: All string and wind instruments can play the quarter tones impossible to the piano, and orchestral musicians with fine ears produce them automatically, thus giving the various keys their characteristic colors. (For example, to anyone but a pianist, B# is not the same note as C.)

Increased fragmentation of the steps between notes, however, generates differences so small that only a very few exceedingly acute ears even profess to be able to hear them. Furthermore, if such tiny changes are to be detected at all they must be contiguous, with the inevitable result that most microtonal compositions sound like a cross between a cat fight and a distant four-alarm fire.

Microtonal music has been around at least 50 years without getting anywhere. The American composer Harry Partch, celebrated at length by Time, is only the most recent of a long line--though it must be admitted that Mr. Partch's names for his instruments (the Spoils of War, the Surrogate Kithara) and his compositions (Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room) have a certain post-Satie charm, and his 43-tone octave is engagingly independent of any sort of theory.

Some of the experimentation that went on in this period was viable, as the example of Stravinsky shows. Stravinsky, like the composers of the Mannheim school, is one of music's great simplifiers: He weeded out the lush tangles of Romantic orchestration; dropped counterpoint almost completely; adopted a harmonic style which, though frequently dissonant, was much more diatonic and foursquare than the chromaticism with which his contemporaries surrounded him. All this was done in the interests of a rhythmic style of fearsome complexity, which could be sustained only by the fact that Stravinsky was--and is--a great melodist.

Stravinsky has worked in as many styles as Picasso, and, like the painter, none of his disciples have been able to make them work nearly as well. The most respected of such disciples today, the German composer Carl Orff, has not yet succeeded in saying anything that Stravinsky did not say better and with more economy 50 years ago in Les Noces. The years have neither forgotten nor looked kindly upon George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique for player pianos and an airplane engine, nor on Edgar Varèse's Ionisation for percussion instruments and fire siren. Yet compared to what the cringing concertgoer is often asked to sit through today, these were conservative compositions--it has even become possible, given a creative imagination, to hear a sort of tune in Ionisation.

Today, originality in concert music is actually dominated by three different sorts of camp followers. The first of these schools contains the composers of random music, some of whom we have already met. Random music employs procedures that make it impossible for the composer to hear the work in his head as he writes it down, and no performance of a given composition can sound even remotely like another performance. The chief architect of this heap of rubble is our friend Mr. Cage, a composer of once burgeoning gifts who is now engaged in a prolonged act of artistic suicide.

Cage first came to the attention of the listening public with several compositions for what he called a "prepared" piano. The preparation consisted in placing inside the piano various objects, such as coins, erasers, bits of sponge and wooden matches, to modify the tones of various strings. There is obvious if limited promise in this invention: It makes it possible to write a work for piano and a large group of percussion instruments all of which can be handled by a single performer. Having in effect invented a whole new set of instruments, however, the composer is then obligated to go ahead and do something with them, which is exactly what John Cage has not done. Instead, he abandoned the prepared piano for his present career of noncomposition. In one work, he raises the lid of the piano keyboard, sits for three minutes listening to the noises the audience makes, and then closes the lid again. There exist concertgoers who take this seriously; perhaps they even exit whistling. Among these is the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, whose own music is of the simplest and most melodic sort; he finds the work of the random composers "rather jolly."

The second school of contemporary composition is musique concrète, a child of the tape recorder. Here the composer uses any sound that suits him--whether it is produced by a flute or a passing politician--either as is, or distorted by altering the speed of the tape. These snippets of tape are then pasted together to make a composition.

Cage has played with this idiom, too, though his finest effort with the loud-speaker is a composition that employs a number of radios, randomly tuned to whatever local stations happen to be broadcasting on the night of the concert, thus achieving a synthesis of musique concrète and the laws of chance.

The third school is electronic music, in which the sounds are produced directly by oscillators, such as those that make a Hammond organ go, but without any concern for whether or not the resulting notes sound like an organ, or like anything else you have ever heard in your life. Most composers in this group use pure sounds without overtones, which have no counterparts in nature or in the notes produced by any instrument--indeed, they were not even possible to produce until the age of electronics. This style attained some popular recognition a few years ago as the idiom for the musical score to an expensive but half-baked science-fiction movie called Forbidden Planet; and you may hear it at will by picking up your telephone, for the little tune that automatic dialing plays back to you these days is produced in the same way. Real notes are involved here, for the most part, which is a blessing; but again, all that has happened thus far is the invention of a new kind of instrument, with which nothing noteworthy has yet been done. There is a subgroup of this school: a team of French composers and engineers engaged in turning out whole new families of nonelectronic instruments. This is a good thing in itself--almost nothing new has entered the orchestra since the 18th Century--but thus far these developments are purely technological, and have no underlying inherent musical interest.

It is of course possible that both musique concrète and electronic noises might become beautiful in the hands of a genius, as did the 12-tone system in the hands of Berg. They are both in their infancy, and apparently still mostly in the hands of engineers and other aesthetic know-nothings. But the possibility exists. A model for it may be heard in the works of Béla Bartók, who used the 12-tone system, polytonality, interval stretching and everything else in the repertoire of his time as it suited him, without ever becoming a victim of the strictures of any single system. The recent space-travel opera, Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara, is largely a 12-tone work which also uses musique concrète, electronic sounds, traditional tonalities and even folk tunes freely as expressive devices. It is a particularly interesting work, not because of its sensational libretto, but because the electronic and nonmusical sounds are thoroughly integrated into the score, and serve a musical function; they are not just sound effects.

No such hope, however, can be held out for random music, since it is and must always be in the hands of the laws of chance--not a notable source of masterpieces. It would seem axiomatic that no listener can learn to love a composition, especially if it is strange to his experience as well as to his ears, if he can hear it only once. Yet this system is inherent in random composition, and the preserving of such performances on tape or disc bears the same relationship to the theory of this kind of music as a blurred photograph of a man sliding into third base does to the game as a whole.

In the meantime, however, these schools multiply confusion, repel the listener and dehumanize the art. One of the most curious side effects is the increasing interest in computer-composer music, such as the suite for string quartet composed by a University of Illinois machine in the styles of four different (flesh-and-blood) composers. Such works attract even musicians, because the computer can only be programed to follow set conventions, which must be fed to it by a human operator. When you set a computer to write like Bartók, it will do so faithfully (though not the least bit inventively). The computer represents the opposite side of an apothegm attributed to Arthur Miller: "We are all creative, but we are not all artists." The computer can be made to be an artist, but it cannot be made to be creative.

Most composers today are neither. Until some semblance of a common practice--either old or new--begins to emerge among them, most listeners (even the polite and the timid) will return in their hearts to a previous century, when even the most difficult music could be counted upon, with study and devotion, to make some sense.