The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Such language, reminiscent of the sermons of Thomas Mann’s aesthetes (“Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths”), made perfect sense to the young composers who had recently witnessed oblivion at close range. Schoenberg, having been denounced by Hitler and Stalin alike, carried no taint from totalitarianism either on the left or on the right, or so it seemed. Ernst Krenek went so far as to suggest that he had converted to twelve-tone writing in order to distance himself from totalitarian aesthetics: “My adoption of the musical technique that the tyrants hated most of all may be interpreted as an expression of protest and thus a result of their influence.” Many who abandoned neoclassicism and other between-the-war styles may have thought the same. René Leibowitz argued in his book Schoenberg and His School that atonality displayed “uncompromising moral strength.”

  Back on North Rockingham Avenue, Schoenberg delightedly witnessed the resurgence of his music and ideas. Yet the fanaticism of some of his adherents disturbed him. When Leibowitz criticized the persistence of tonal elements in works such as the Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Schoenberg replied, “I do not compose principles, but music.” He explained that in earlier years he had avoided tonality in order to differentiate himself from what had gone before; now, he said, “I would not consider the danger of resembling tonality as tragically as formerly.” Schoenberg disowned Adorno’s attacks on Stravinsky (“One should not write like that”) and found little more to like in the theorist’s panegyrics to atonality (“this blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors”). Schoenberg probably had both Adorno and Leibowitz in mind when he made a note to himself that the influence of the “Schbrg clique” would have to be broken before his music could gain a proper hearing. He repeated a remarkable prophecy that he had delivered back in 1909: “The second half of this century will spoil by overestimation, all the good of me that the first half, by underestimation, has left intact.”

  In his seeing-through-walls way, Schoenberg had mapped out the coming era. He understood that he was being elevated as the patron saint of a newly militant avant-grade mentality, with whose premises he did not agree. While he remained fiercely loyal to the nontonal language that he had pioneered at the beginning of the century, he was no longer so quick to condemn his rivals. Better than Adorno, Schoenberg understood the master dialectic of musical history, the back-and-forth between simplicity and complexity. “I cannot deny the possibility,” Schoenberg once wrote, “that as often in the musical past, when harmony has developed to a certain high point, a change will occur which will bring with it entirely different and unexpected things.”

  Radical Reconstruction: Boulez and Cage

  The avant-garde era may be said to have begun a few years early, on a cold winter night in 1941, when Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time had its first performance, at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag VIII A.

  A composer of advanced ideas and strong religious feeling, Messiaen had been serving as a medical orderly when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He was captured near Nancy with two other musician-soldiers, the cellist Étienne Pasquier and the clarinetist Henri Akoka. While the three were being held with other French captives in an open field, Akoka played through a newly composed Messiaen piece titled “Abyss of the Birds”—a clarinet solo that took the form of precise yet disconnected gestures, slow, trancelike chanting lines intertwining with rapid runs and squawks and trills. When Messiaen was sent with his musician friends to Stalag VIII A, near Görlitz, Germany, he set about composing seven other movements for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, those being the instruments that he and his fellow inmates played. At the head of the finished score he wrote an inscription alluding to the book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’”

  Stalag VIII A was staffed by several officers who lacked true devotion to the Hitler regime. As Rebecca Rischin reveals in a book about the Quartet, one of the guards, Karl-Albert Brüll, advised French-Jewish prisoners not to try to escape, on the grounds that they were safer in the camp than they would be in Vichy France. Brüll also took up the cause of Messiaen’s music, giving the composer pencils, erasers, and music paper with which to work. The prisoner was relieved of his duties and placed in an empty barracks so that he could compose in peace, with a guard posted at the door to turn away intruders.

  The premiere of the Quartet took place on January 15, 1941. Several hundred prisoners of many nations crowded into the camp’s makeshift theater, with the German officers sitting up front. The work bewildered much of the audience, but a respectful silence prevailed. Messiaen returned to France shortly thereafter, Brüll having connived in the forging of documents in order to speed his release.

  By this point in his career, Messiaen had worked out an idiosyncratic musical language, with an especially compelling conception of rhythm. The biblical phrase “There shall be time no longer” turned out to have a strict technical meaning: music would no longer keep to an unvarying meter. A steady beat, Messiaen liked to say, had no life in it; there had been enough of the old one-two-three-four during the war. For inspiration, he looked to The Rite of Spring, with its irregular, ever-changing rhythmic schemes, and also to the talas, or rhythmic patterns, of Hindustani Indian music. He showed how rhythmic cells—a simple telegraphic pulse of long-short, for example—could take on the character of musical themes, as the cells multiplied (long-short long-short long-short) or mutated (long-short-short-short). This, in essence, is the beat of Stravinsky’s “Danse sacrale”—the sound of “implacable destiny,” Messiaen said.

  Such ideas won the respect of Messiaen’s sharp-witted students at the Paris Conservatory, several future celebrities of postwar music among them. When the Quartet was played, they were impressed by the novel way it moved through time, in a succession of self-contained moments. What they tended to ignore, however, was the end point of the narrative: sweetly ringing chords in the key of E major. Like Britten in The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Messiaen responded to the mechanized insanity of the Second World War by offering up the purest, simplest sounds he could find.

  A few weeks after Allied forces landed at Normandy, a new student, nineteen years old, knocked at Messiaen’s door. “M. Boulez (pupil of Pierre Jamet) at my house at 9:30,” he wrote in his diary. “Likes modern music,” he added. It was the understatement of the century. Pierre Boulez went on to become the perfect avatar of the postwar avant-grade, the one who permitted “no compromise, no concession, no half-way, no consideration of values,” to quote Mann’s story “At the Prophet’s.”

  At first glance, Boulez was a kind of intellectual dreamboat, elegant in manner and dress, charming to men and women alike—“like a young cat,” said the playwright Jean-Louis Barrault, for whom Boulez worked as musical director from 1946 to 1956. Yet, in feline fashion, he could turn ferocious in an instant, mastering the put-down as a way of ending arguments. He was a brilliant politician, equally skilled at persuasion and attack. At all times he seemed absolutely sure of what he was doing. Amid the confusion of postwar life, with so many old truths discredited, his certitude was reassuring. As Joan Peyser notes in her biography of Boulez, an early admirer was the literary socialite Suzanne Tézenas, formerly the companion of the novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Drieu had been an ardent fascist and had committed suicide shortly before the end of the war. Tézenas greeted Boulez as her new artist savior. She had no particular interest in music, but she liked the way the young man talked.

  Unlike so many others of his generation, Boulez suffered little during the war. He was fifteen years old when Germany invaded, and was therefore too young to fight in France’s brief war against Hitler. According to Peyser, he actually welcomed the infusions of German culture that were administered by the Nazi authorities. “The Germans virtually brought high culture to France,” he was quoted as saying. The son of a pro
sperous factory engineer, he studied higher mathematics before turning to music. Upon enrolling in the Paris Conservatory, he made his presence felt almost immediately. “When he first entered class,” Messiaen recalled, “he was very nice. But soon he became angry with the whole world. He thought everything was wrong with music.” Messiaen also said that Boulez was “like a lion that had been flayed alive, he was terrible!”

  In the spring of 1945, French radio organized a seven-concert survey of Stravinsky’s works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the fabled premiere of The Rite of Spring had taken place more than thirty years before. On March 15 a group of young composers, all of them students from the conservatory, disrupted a performance of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods by booing, shouting, whistling, and, according to one report, banging with a hammer.

  Afterward, the French musical world struggled to make sense of the episode. Francis Poulenc, a longtime Stravinskyite, wrote an article for Le Figaro titled “Vive Strawinsky,” in which he lashed out against the “imitation Left” of “youths” and “pseudo-youths” who had insulted his hero. In a letter to Darius Milhaud, Poulenc described the troublemakers as a “fanatic sect” of “Messiaenistes.” He apparently did not yet know the name of the ringleader: Boulez.

  By this time Boulez was a Messiaeniste no longer. Messiaen had proved insufficiently ruthless in his methods, his sentimentality embarrassingly on display when, in a response to the Stravinsky booing affair, he decried “dry and inhuman” tendencies in contemporary music and called for “a little celestial tenderness.” Instead, Boulez sought out lessons from René Leibowitz, who drilled him in twelve-tone procedures. After a year, Leibowitz, too, was found wanting. One day in 1946, Peyser tells us, Boulez brought in the manuscript of his First Piano Sonata, which he wished to dedicate to his teacher. When Leibowitz set about noting various procedural errors, Boulez threw a tantrum, shouted “Vous êtes merde!” and ran from the room. Later, while preparing the sonata for publication, Boulez saw Leibowitz’s name at the top of the first page and stabbed it repeatedly with a letter opener. Boulez also showed animosity toward fellow composers who neglected to follow him on the high modern road. When, in 1951, Henri Dutilleux presented his vibrantly diatonic First Symphony, Boulez greeted him by turning his back.

  In the First Sonata, Boulez’s rage exploded into sound. Gone was the French taste for crisp construction. Gone too was Schoenberg’s habit of couching his twelve-tone material in Classical forms and Romantic phrases. Webern was the chief model, although Webern’s lyricism was minimized. Smatterings of pointillistic detail gave way to jabbing, crashing, keyboard-spanning gestures. Aided by Messiaen’s researches, Boulez maximized rhythmic contrast, creating an asymmetry of pulse to match atonality in harmony. The first movement climaxes with an arpeggiated chord marked “violent and rapid,” the second with a chord marked “very brutal and very dry.”

  Violence is the leitmotif of other Boulez works of this period: Le Visage nuptial for voice and orchestra, a setting of poems by René Char (“Take leave, my allies, my violent ones”); and Le Soleil des eaux, also based on poems by Char (“River with an indestructible heart in this mad prison-world, keep us violent”). Boulez wrote in 1948, “I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time.” In the same year he finished his Second Piano Sonata, whose final movement builds through stepwise intensifications of expression—“more and more staccato and brutal,” “still more violent”—to a passage in which the pianist is asked to “pulverize the sound; quick, dry attack, as if from bottom to top; stay without nuances at very high volume.”

  “Without nuances” is an apt phrase for a spate of polemical articles that Boulez began issuing in 1948. The essay “Trajectories: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg” cleared away extant compositional styles in anticipation of the next wave. Ravel was a gold mine of sounds, but circumscribed by “false discoveries,” “impotence.” The critique of Stravinsky resembled Adorno’s in Philosophy of New Music; neoclassicism was “schematic, arbitrary, stereotyped.” The attack on twelve-tone writing also echoed Adorno’s sociological cant; Schoenberg used his technique “to enclose classic and preclassic forms in the elaboration of a world ruled by functions antagonistic to those very forms.” The one bright light was Webern, whose orientation was “more virulent than that of his master’s works of the same era, a position that in a sense would lead to their annihilation.”

  When Schoenberg died in the summer of 1951, Boulez penned a breathtakingly pitiless obituary. “The Schoenberg ‘case’ is irritating,” he wrote. The old man had revolutionized the art of harmony while leaving rhythm, structure, and form untouched. He had displayed “the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism.” It was time to “neutralize the setback,” to rectify the situation. “Therefore,” Boulez concluded, “I do not hesitate to write, not out of any desire to provoke a stupid scandal, but equally without bashful hypocrisy and pointless melancholy: SCHOENBERG IS DEAD.”

  What could replace Schoenberg’s antiquated paradigm? Messiaen supplied the beginning of an answer. Back in 1946 he had planned a “ballet on Time”—a piece in which he would “develop timbres, durations, and nuances according to the principles of serialism.” In the summer of 1949, he set to work on a piano piece called Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, or Scale of Durations and Dynamics, which became the springboard for a new compositional technique known as “total serialism.”

  In the interest of cultivating rhythmic variety, Messiaen decided that the lengths of notes—sixteenth, eighth, quarter, and so forth—should be arranged in a scale parallel to the scale of pitches. He also made rows of dynamic levels (ppp, fff, pp, ff, and so on) and of attacks (accented, staccato, legato, and so on). A particular note is always assigned the same values. Thus, the high E-flat is always a thirty-second note, is always played ppp, and is (almost) always slurred. The idea of “scales of rhythm” was not new, having already been theorized by two American experimenters, Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell. Messiaen was, however, the first to coordinate all the variables in one system.

  Scale of Durations and Dynamics, which appeared in the collection Four Rhythm Études, was the work that really electrified Messiaen’s current and former students, among them Boulez, Jean Barraqué, and Karel Goeyvaerts. Here was the maximally differentiated music that they had been seeking. Barraqué, in fact, had already begun serializing rhythm and register, and would put the method into action in his sprawling, jaggedly eloquent Piano Sonata of 1952. But Boulez went furthest, organizing Messiaen’s parameters—pitch, duration, volume, and attack—into sets of twelve, along the lines of twelve-tone writing. Pitches do not repeat until all twelve have sounded. Durations do not repeat until all twelve have been used. Dynamics and attacks vary from section to section. The result is a music in constant flux.

  In 1950 and 1951, Boulez deployed his new procedures in Polyphonie X, for large ensemble, and Structures 1 a, for two pianos. The latter piece begins grandiloquently, at maximum volume: an E-flat sounds in the topmost octave of the first piano, setting off two simultaneous twelve-tone rows, one in original form and one in inversion, unfolding in all registers and in rotating durations, with the lower end defined by a stentorian B-flat. One more heroic musical law is being graven in stone.

  The emotional content of the music is elusive. The feeling of delirium wears off after a few minutes, giving way to a kind of objectified, mechanized savagery. The serialist principle, with its surfeit of ever-changing musical data, has the effect of erasing at any given moment whatever impressions the listener may have formed about previous passages in the piece. The present moment is all there is. Boulez’s early works, notably the two Sonatas, Structures, and Le Visage nuptial, are perhaps best understood not as intellectual experiences but as athletic, even cerebrally sexual ones. Michel Foucault, the great theorist of power and sexuality, seemed almost turned on by Boulez’s music, and for a time he was the lover of Boulez’s fellow serialist Ba
rraqué. “They represented for me the first ‘tear’ in the dialectical universe in which I had lived,” Foucault said of the serialists. What drove Boulez’s own rage for order remains unknown.

  In the spring of 1949, John Cage, aged thirty-six, arrived in Paris with his professional and personal partner, the dancer Merce Cunningham. At the suggestion of Virgil Thomson, Cage went to see Boulez, and an unlikely, short-lived, but mutually influential friendship was born.

  Already the most radical American composer of the time, Cage proceeded to unleash some of the most startling events and nonevents in musical history: tape and radio collages, works composed with rolls of dice, multimedia happenings, and, most famously, 4´33?, during which the performer makes no sound. Some years later, in conversation with Calvin Tomkins, Cage defined himself in terms that Boulez would have readily understood: “I am going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure—because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed.” And yet Cage’s enterprise lacked the pitilessness of Boulez’s assault on the past. In place of the term “avant-garde,” which implied a quasi-military forward drive, Cage preferred “experimental,” which, he said, was “inclusive rather than exclusive.” In truth, Cage was capable both of great violence and of great tenderness, and his music wavers tensely between those extremes.

  Cage was a Los Angeles native, the son of an inventor who built one of the earliest functioning submarines. He had a Roman nose, a gaunt face, and a reedy voice, like that of the actor Vincent Price. In the early fifties he assumed the look of a hip young physicist, cropping his hair short and dressing in stiff-collared white shirts. He had moved to New York in 1942, and by the end of the decade he was living on the top floor of a crumbling tenement on the East River, where he fashioned a bohemian-Zen utopia of white walls and minimal furnishings. He worked at a drafting table outfitted with a fluorescent lamp, etching his scores with German-made Rapidograph pens. Cage’s personality was a curious mix of eccentricity and worldliness; even as he explored esoteric musical regions, his activities seldom went unrecorded in the press.