The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  In the Mussorgsky chorus, the colours, voices and glittering effects, with its tolling bells and echoing orchestra chimes, make a joyous cacophony that couldn’t possibly be a Parisian, Viennese or Roman celebration. There is such daring, such exuberance in this sound that only a truly original composer could have dreamt it up, and sure enough it would soon become a template for others to follow. At the time of Mussorgsky’s death in 1881 his music was virtually unknown outside Russia. But that was about to change.

  So many of the seeds of the rebellions of late-nineteenth-century music can be traced to one extraordinarily fertile event. It took place in Paris in 1889 – the centenary year of the French Revolution – but this event was all about peace and shared humanity. It was the Exposition Universelle, the World’s Fair. Here music as an international pursuit, shared, developed and exchanged across frontiers – a defining feature of the coming twentieth century – really began to take shape.

  In the Palais du Trocadéro, which overlooked the newly built Eiffel Tower, Widor first played his famous organ ‘Toccata’, and it was here also that the visiting composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov conducted a series of concerts of Russian music that dazzled French and other Western musicians, among them the twenty-seven-year-old Claude Debussy. Debussy’s regular visits to the World’s Fair were to be for him a life- and music-changing experience. ‘Never has a more refined sensibility expressed itself by simpler means,’ he wrote on hearing Mussorgsky for the first time.

  It seems to be the doing of some curious savage led by nothing but his emotion to discover step by step what music is about. ‘Form’ is for him of no use whatever – or rather, the form he resorts to is ever-changing to the point of being quite unlike any of the established, so to speak administrative, forms. His music, drawn by light touches, holds together by some mysterious link between them – and by his gift of luminous clear-sightedness.

  What Debussy learnt from Mussorgsky was that there was an alternative way of building up the architecture of a piece of music to the developmental method introduced by Haydn and Mozart, which was still in service as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The development approach involved taking small cells of melody or rhythm, or both, and making up a whole discourse from them over a twenty- or thirty-minute period of growth. Beethoven notably constructed a whole movement from his fifth symphony from this tiny idea:

  Brahms, Liszt and Wagner greatly expanded the possibilities of developing big structures out of small or even minute ideas, but it was essentially the same concept. Mussorgsky, because he knew no better, and Debussy because it suited his taste for the manipulation of block chords merging into each other – of which more shortly – ditched a hundred years of studious development technique and started from scratch. Their approach was episodic. One musical idea would simply follow another. No transitional development was necessary to move from idea A to idea B, as had been the case in the symphony, the sonata and the concerto since Haydn; idea A could run its course then switch to idea B. Just like that.

  The strange, passionate marriage of Russian and French modernism that was born at those Trocadéro concerts was to turn into something big, noisy and rebellious. The invigorating newness of Mussorgsky, whose art, thought Debussy, was ‘free from artifice and arid formulae’, was but one of the extraordinarily fruitful imports to the Exposition Universelle. What revolutionised Debussy’s music more even than hearing Mussorgsky was a sound that came from much further afield, blown into Paris on an aromatic wind from Asia.

  The World’s Fair showcased exhibits and cultural tableaux from all over the planet. Thanks to increased communications, the ‘global village’ was starting to become a reality. Debussy, along with twenty-eight million other visitors, spent an engrossing time wandering around the exotic installations from distant continents. The most popular attraction after the Eiffel Tower, sad to say, was a human zoo of four hundred Africans. What particularly mesmerised Debussy, though – as well as painter John Singer Sargent and sculptor Auguste Rodin, both of whom made copious sketches, and Paul Gauguin, who struck up a relationship with a Javanese teenage girl who later became his maidservant and concubine – was a Javanese village, complete with dancers and musicians, sponsored by a Dutch tea company.

  Debussy certainly wasn’t the first European to be enchanted by the exoticism of Javanese music – Sir Francis Drake, mooring the Golden Hind off the south Javan coast in 1580, was treated to a performance by an ‘orchestra’ laid on by the local ruler, Raia Donan, in response to his English musicians’ serenading. He reported in the ship’s log that the Javanese players made ‘country musick… of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull’. In the early nineteenth century Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore, while supervising the British occupation of Java sent two gamelan sets back to Britain, housed today in the British Museum. His friend Raden Rana Dipura, a Javanese ‘chief’ and accomplished musician, travelled with Raffles to England in 1816 and performed in London on a number of occasions. Prior to the Paris Exposition, Javanese gamelan groups had performed at Dutch trade fairs in Arnhem (1879) and Amsterdam (1883), as exhibits of the Netherlands’ colonial riches. A commercial presentation of a gamelan troupe with dancers from the Javanese region of Yogyakarta took place at London’s Royal Aquarium in 1882, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and caused something of a sensation in the popular press, whose columnists were as enraptured as they were amused by an orchestra made up of metallic objects.

  The particular sonorities, harmonies and scales of the Javanese Gamelan Orchestra displayed and performed at the Paris fair, though, intrigued Debussy so much that he was inspired to attempt an evocation of its Eastern sounds on a Western piano. Although he couldn’t replicate the unfamiliar tuning of the bells, gongs and other metal bars of the gamelan, or the exact division of the musical scale used in Asian cultures, he could approximate it in two ways.

  One was to make copious use of the so-called pentatonic scale, the five notes that are common to all the world’s musical systems and are especially prevalent in Eastern music – these are the notes that can most easily be found by playing just the black notes on a keyboard. His ‘Pagodes’ of 1903, from a collection of three piano pieces called Estampes (prints), makes subtle use of pentatonic scales in homage to east Asia, and by 1910, when he produced his first book of piano preludes, whole sections of Voiles (veils, or sails) had fallen under the pentatonic spell. The pentatonic aspect of Debussy’s piano music provided much inspirational fuel for later generations of jazz pianists. Bill Evans’s ‘Peace Piece’ of 1958 is typical of the pentatonica inspired by Debussy, whereby the simpler, limited menu of pentatonic notes forms the basis of the melody – or, in Bill Evans’s case, improvised right-hand cascades – layered on to a more complete (i.e. Western) palette of notes for the left-hand harmonies.

  The other trick Debussy employed in his evocation of the gamelan was to allow his chords to hang over each other, overlapping and ricocheting from one to the next, rather in the way the different tones of bell-ringing overlap one another; a bell, once struck, is not dampened to stop at any point, rather it carries on until it dies away naturally. This same effect is achievable on a piano by depressing the right-hand (‘damper’) pedal – often erroneously called the ‘loud’ pedal – which lifts the row of felt dampers that normally prevent the notes from reverberating into one another. (Some very grand pianos, including those used by Debussy himself, have a third pedal –‘sostenuto’ – which allows the player to choose which notes hang and which are dampened, rather than all or nothing.) What this technique does is eke out as many as possible of the sympathetic resonances, or harmonics, latent in the reverberating strings, thus imitating the natural harmonics found in plucked strings and struck metal bars. Natural harmonics are ‘hidden’ notes, usually quite high in pitch, which are found within any given sound, like the additional colours of the spectrum that are contained within white light. So Debussy’s hanging chords, wi
th the dampers kept away from the strings, represented a kind of return to nature, a move away from the more artificial sound of block chords.

  Putting all these ideas into the music he composed after the Exposition Universelle, Debussy created a new soundscape for the piano. The reformation of scales and harmonies that he introduced offered a daringly new palette of aural possibilities.

  One way of looking at what Debussy did with his Asiatic sound colours is to brand it as colonial exploitation, a touristic theft no better than the Exposition’s human zoo, or the appropriation of exotic artefacts by European archaeologists and plunderers that was rampant at the turn of the twentieth century. It recalls, to some extent, the furore surrounding Dvořák’s interest in Native American tunes – although Dvořák at least was in America at the time. Certainly, Debussy’s dalliance with non-European culture – like his contemporary Paul Gauguin’s French Polynesia-inspired art – seems to be part of the ‘asymmetrical’ relationship between rich West and poor ‘Other’ that was famously and controversially identified by cultural historian Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), and which persisted until the late-twentieth century. Orientalism, in the form of a crude, one-sided peep show of the ‘sensual’ East, had been enjoying a boom in France for most of the nineteenth century, ever since Napoleon’s inept military adventures in Egypt and Syria, in fact, and the resulting unstoppable flood of artefacts, including the Rosetta Stone, from the Nile delta to the banks of the Seine. Exotica, fictional or actual, became commonplace among the French educated classes, whether they were devouring Victor Hugo’s poems, Les Orientates (1829), discreetly reading Gustave Flaubert’s bestselling erotic novel Salammbô (1862), feasting their eyes on the harems and naked slaves in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings, or flocking to operas like Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865), Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (1863), Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore (1877), Gounod’s Le Tribut de Zamora (1881) or Delibes’s still-popular Lakmé (1883).

  The French were not unique: the British had Kipling, the paintings of Frederick Goodall (no relation) and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, after all. But to the usual ingredients of the ludicrously contradictory Orientalist recipe – presumption of a childlike, uneducated civilisation, innate savagery, slaves to incomprehensible ritual, aptitude for servitude, propensity for laziness, dignified inscrutability, awe at European superiority – the French imagination added freely available, fetishistic sexuality.

  Debussy’s music, whether inspired by Javanese gamelan or his taste for le japonisme – an example of which is Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1829–33), which inspired the orchestral suite La Mer – is hardly exploitative in the way that Gauguin’s nude of his adolescent Eurasian servant may be. Indeed, viewed another way, one might even say Debussy was part of a healing process that would gradually reunite all the world’s musical cultures into one multitudinous (or dangerously homogenised, as some believe) mainstream, the reality of the twenty-first century. His harmonic experiments flowed freely into later incarnations of jazz, the origins of which were most certainly not European, and have become part of a common musical heritage. Edward Said himself believed music could be harnessed as a force for good in the resolving of cultural, political and social differences, even in the sublimating of national identity for a higher ideal, co-founding with Daniel Barenboim the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999. If the cooperative manner of music-making has any validity, it must surely allow not just for Palestinian and Israeli musicians to play Beethoven together, but also for the uninhibited interweaving of musical styles across geographical and racial boundaries.

  The Exposition Universelle of 1889 was, in effect, the starting point of the twentieth century’s preoccupation with what we now call ‘world music’. With the benefit of hindsight it marks the beginning of the end of Western European musical aloofness and the emergence of Russia as a major cultural presence. Few if any of the audience for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian concerts at the Trocadéro, though, could have guessed the scale, dynamism and turbulence that Russian music was to unleash on the world in the early twentieth century, through the shop window, once again, of Paris.

  The Russian Imperial capital of St Petersburg had, by the end of the nineteenth century, become one of the greatest musical centres in the world. A dynasty of outstanding composers, each the mentor of the next, had developed along a timeline that began with Glinka in the 1830s and Mily Balakirev in the 1860s, running through Borodin, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky to Rimsky-Korsakov, the teacher of Stravinsky.

  The years leading up to the October Revolution of 1905 had seen an awakening of interest in Russian ethnic art and architecture, a fashion to some extent promoted by the nationalist leanings of Tsars Alexander II and Nicholas II. The appointment of the patriotic Balakirev as director of music at the Russian Imperial Chapel in 1883 saw a deliberate abandonment of the Western-style choral chant in use at the time and the adoption of older, so-called Znamenny Russian Orthodox chants, with their deep basses and thick, eight- or sixteen-voice block chords. By 1900 this ancient sound had fed like a river into the choral texture of all Russian composers.

  Sergei Diaghilev, art, dance and music lover, saw in this upsurge of Russian cultural pride an opportunity. He mounted an art exhibition in St Petersburg in 1905 that was intended to show the educated classes of the Imperial capital the great wealth of the country’s artistic talents beyond the city’s parochial horizon, a collection that he had spent a year researching throughout Russia. He and his colleague, artist Alexandre Benois, who had formed an organisation and magazine called World of Art (Mup uckýccmea – Mir iskusstva) then took a similar exhibition to Paris the following year, the success of which encouraged Diaghilev to present a season of Russian concerts there in 1907 and to mount Mussorgsky’s 1874 opera Boris Godunov – in a revised version by Rimsky-Korsakov – in 1908.

  Boris Godunov was just one of a series of operas that cashed in on the Russian aristocracy’s growing obsession with the Empire’s Asiatic and Slavic folklore; Rimsky-Korsakov mined the same richly colourful seam with such pageants as Kaschei the Immortal, The Golden Cockerel, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, The Tsar’s Bride and The Tale of Tsar Saltan. These latter pieces, alongside his concert spectacular Scheherezade, and his completion and mounting of Borodin’s unfinished epic Prince Igor, were to prove a fertile starting point for his – then unknown – protégé Stravinsky’s first forays into a new breed of Russian ballet to be shown by Diaghilev in hyper-sophisticated Paris.

  The enormous critical success of Diaghilev and Benois’s 1908 production of Boris Godunov at the Paris Opéra (Palais Gamier) – its first performance outside Russia and starring the legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin – encouraged Diaghilev to plan further Russian spectacles in the French capital, which also had a promising community of wealthy Russian émigrés who had fled their homeland after the 1905 Revolution. Diaghilev was invited to return to Paris the following year; this time he presented five ballets and created a bespoke company of top dancers, including Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova, recruited from various Imperial ballet companies for the purpose: the Ballets Russes. Their first season from May 1909 included the Polovtsian dances from Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, Le Pavilion d’Armide, based on the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, with music by Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Les Sylphides, choreographed by Michel Fokine to music by Chopin – these last two being revivals of earlier Fokine productions for the Imperial Ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. Well received though the 1909 season undoubtedly was among the French – the Russians at home were surprised to see it greeted as so ‘new’, when it was in essence a compilation of what Russian ballet companies had been doing for a decade or more – Diaghilev made a huge loss of 76,000 francs, over £350,000 in today’s money. Consequently the expectations placed on the 1910 season were considerable: he needed to balance support from patrons in the West, hoping to be associated with something daring and novel, with the approval
of Russian dance critics, especially the influential André Levinson, so that the best dancers would be happy to join his troupe. In the end, he opted to please the Westerners.

  Diaghilev took one serious risk with his second season. He commissioned the unknown, untested Igor Stravinsky to provide music for one of the new ballets, The Firebird. It was a hunch, but an inspired one. Stravinsky hadn’t been Diaghilev’s first-choice composer for the proposed ballet, in fact – the more experienced Russians Nikolai Tcherepnin and Anatoly Lyadov both withdrew – but in one important respect the young Stravinsky was a better idea: namely that the Parisian press had criticised Diaghilev’s first season for the lack of adventure shown in the music. By commissioning Stravinsky for the 1910 season, no one could accuse Diaghilev of being sheepish with his choice of composer. Stravinsky’s first spell of collaboration with Diaghilev comprised three ballets: The Firebird in 1910, Petrushka in 1911 and The Rite of Spring in 1913. When he was commissioned to compose the first of these he was a nobody; by the morning after the première of the third, he was both the most notorious and the most eagerly championed composer in all Europe, seizing the crown from Richard Strauss in one fell swoop.