The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Howard Pollack, in his biography of Copland, declares that the composer’s political ordeal, grueling as it was, did not bring about a dramatic change in his style. He did not “convert” to twelve-tone writing, as is often stated. Only four certifiably dodecaphonic pieces ensued: the Piano Quartet of 1950, Piano Fantasy, Connotations, and Inscape. In other works, Copland still employed one form or another of his populist manner. His most ambitious project of the fifties was the opera The Tender Land, which applied the language of Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring to a quietly moving tale of life on the open prairie. Erik Johns’s scenario had undercurrents of social protest: the community becomes irrationally suspicious of two strangers in their midst, enacting in microcosm the paranoias of McCarthyite America. Open-interval melodies and spare instrumentation bathe the scene in the familiar Edenic light.

  Copland hoped that The Tender Land would be broadcast on television, but the networks took no interest. New York City Opera presented it instead. Copland’s thousand-dollar commissioning fee was a gift from Rodgers and Hammerstein, the creators of Oklahoma!

  With The Tender Land overlooked, Copland’s most conspicuous postwar statement was Connotations, whose first performance took place in September 1962. Hardly any American orchestral work had ever enjoyed such a heavy media glare: the occasion of the premiere was the opening of Philharmonic Hall, the flagship venue of the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. CBS broadcast the concert live to a television audience of twenty-six million people. Here was the mass public of which American composers had long dreamed.

  But Copland was no longer in an ingratiating mood; some sudden rage welled up in him, some urge to confront the gala Lincoln Center audience with an old whiff of revolutionary mystique. Connotations is by some margin the most dissonant score of Copland’s career, and it culminates in an apoplectically orchestrated sequence of chords encompassing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. At intermission, the composer was greeted by none other than Mrs. John F. Kennedy, who had come up from Washington for the event. Ordinarily at ease in cultural settings, the First Lady was this time rendered more or less speechless. “Oh, Mr. Copland,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Copland…”

  After that barbaric yawp of a piece, Copland’s output rapidly dwindled. Inscape, which Bernstein’s Philharmonic played in 1967, was of more subdued, mysterious character. His last extended piece, the Duo for Flute and Piano from 1971, returns to a language of plainspoken eloquence, the flute’s opening solo sounding like a pastoral version of the adamantine trumpet line that begins Fanfare for the Common Man. Around the same time, Copland published a poignant little piano piece called In Evening Air, reviving some music that he had written in 1945 for the Office of War Information documentary The Cummington Story, which showed how a group of Eastern European refugees were initially spurned and later embraced by a New England town. Some of the same material, including a Polish lullaby, appears in one of his very last works, Midday Thoughts, from 1982. It’s as if Copland were dreaming back to a more hopeful time.

  After a point, music stopped running through his head. “It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet,” he told the critic Paul Moor. He began to suffer memory loss, the first sign of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He lived until the age of ninety, fading into a tender silence. The epigraph for In Evening Air, from Theodore Roethke, told the story of his last years with heartbreaking simplicity: “I see, in evening air, / How slowly dark comes down on what we do.”

  Many leading lights of the New Deal period either fell silent in the postwar years or had difficulty carrying on as before. In some cases, politics had a chilling effect; in others, a general demoralization set in, as the mass audience disappeared into the television ether. Marc Blitzstein failed to capitalize on the success of The Cradle Will Rock; his first major opera, the torrid Southern tragedy Regina, fizzled on Broadway in 1949, and his most-talked-about achievement of the postwar period was his adaptation of The Threepenny Opera. He died in 1964 at the hands of three sailors on the isle of Martinique, the victim of a homophobic assault. Roy Harris never duplicated the triumph of his Third Symphony, despite many noble attempts. Virgil Thomson was much in demand, but mainly as a critic; there were few professional stagings of his Gertrude Stein operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All, and the Metropolitan Opera declined to produce his final effort, Lord Byron. Paul Bowles essentially stopped writing music and moved to Morocco, where he concentrated his talents on autobiographical fiction. Morton Gould was denied a commission by the Louisville Orchestra, which had a $400,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to subsidize new music, on the grounds that his radio and pops work made him something other than a “serious composer.” Samuel Barber subjected himself to debilitating self-criticism, intensified by alcoholism, and, in a Sibelian gesture, tried to destroy the score of his Second Symphony.

  Copland provided the perfect epitaph for the era when he said, at the Waldorf-Astoria conference, that an artist who is forced to live in an atmosphere of “suspicion, ill-will and dread” will end up creating nothing.

  Stravinsky Defects

  Igor Stravinsky, who had long dismissed twelve-tone composition as so much Teutonic obscurantism, watched and brooded as Schoenberg’s method spread across Europe and America in the late forties and early fifties. He received multiple reports of the 1945 Paris concerts at which Boulez and company jeered his Danses concertantes and Four Norwegian Moods, although he did not learn of Boulez’s instigating role until many years later. “It seems that once the violent has been accepted,” he grumbled in a letter, “the amiable, in turn, is no longer tolerable.” He read with annoyance a Virgil Thomson column in which Webern was hailed as the new god of the young and the Rite was relegated to historical status. Meanwhile, the critic-philosopher Pierre Souvtchinsky, who a few years before had helped to write Stravinsky’s neoclassical manifesto Poetics of Music, was now denigrating his former idol and acclaiming Boulez as “a Mozart.”

  Stylistic politics affected the reception of the opera The Rake’s Progress, on which Stravinsky had been working since 1947, in collaboration with W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. After the 1951 Venice premiere, critics wrote of the composer’s “worn out invention,” his “artifice” and “impotence.” Many of the younger generation were flatly contemptuous. “What ugliness!” Boulez wrote to Cage.

  Commentators have periodically proposed that the Stravinsky of the late forties had run creatively aground, that twelve-tone writing saved him from obsolescence. In fact, between 1945 and 1951, the composer was at the very height of his abilities. The Symphony in Three Movements, picturing a world at war, proved to be his most potent music for orchestra since the Rite. The Rake’s Progress, his first attempt at an evening-length theater work, glowed with a surprising new warmth of feeling. The ballet Orpheus, from 1947, maintained the classical equipoise of Apollo; the Mass of 1944–48 echoed the grave beauties of the Symphony of Psalms; the Ebony Concerto of 1945 was Stravinsky’s craftiest tribute to jazz. Yet the quality of the music mattered little. What mattered was Stravinsky’s perception of the music, and others’ perceptions of it, and his perception of their perceptions.

  Enter Robert Craft, a brash, young, Juilliard-trained conductor, who became Stravinsky’s assistant, adviser, and intellectual guide. Craft began corresponding with Stravinsky in 1947, when he was only twenty-three, and met him the following year; almost immediately, the two men developed a remarkably close, almost father-son-like relationship. Craft facilitated the subsequent transformation of Stravinsky’s style, though it would be too much to say, as some have done, that he cajoled the old man into writing twelve-tone music. He had the political advantage of being intimately familiar not only with Stravinsky’s works but also with those of Schoenberg and Webern. Indeed, he was one of the very few who were welcome in both camps—bei Schoenberg on North Rockingham Avenue and chez Stravinsky on North Wetherly Drive.

  When Schoenberg
died, Stravinsky’s attitude toward his old rival changed almost overnight. On July 19, 1951, while dining at Alma Mahler-Werfel’s, he was shown Schoenberg’s death mask, and according to Craft he was deeply moved. A methodical exploration of the Second Viennese School began. During a German tour in the fall of 1951, Stravinsky heard tapes of Schoenberg’s “Dance Around the Golden Calf,” Webern’s Variations for Orchestra (which, Craft excitedly noted, he listened to “three times!”), and Boulez’s Polyphonie X (one audition apparently sufficed). The following February, Stravinsky looked on and asked questions as Craft rehearsed Schoenberg’s Septet Suite.

  One Saturday in early March, Craft joined the Stravinskys for an expedition to a barbecue restaurant in the Mojave Desert, and during the long drive back the old man suddenly broke down, lamenting that he had nothing more to say and that history was passing him by. “For a moment he actually seems ready to weep,” Craft confided to his diary. “He is suffering the shock of recognition that Schoenberg’s music is richer in substance than his own.”

  It is unlikely that Stravinsky thought any such thing. But he did know that Schoenberg mattered more at the present historical moment. And so, in this same period, he made his initial ventures into twelve-tone writing, or, more precisely, into composition using extended rows of mostly nonrepeating notes. He had been working on a Cantata based on old English texts, and on February 8, 1952, he started to set to music “To-Morrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” the source of the modern poem “Lord of the Dance.” After some days of tinkering, he hit upon an eleven-note series as his main melody. The text reads, in part:

  The Jews on me they made great suit,

  And with me made great variance;

  Because they lov’d darkness rather than light…

  Before Pilate the Jews me brought,

  Where Barabbas had deliverance,

  They scourg’d me and set me at nought

  Judg’d me to die to lead the dance.

  Schoenberg would not have been flattered to know that Stravinsky’s adventures in serial writing began with a song about the alleged Christ-killing machinations of the Jews.

  In May 1952, Stravinsky returned to Paris for the first time since the war, to attend an elaborate, expensive, and incoherent festival called Masterpieces of the XXth Century. The organizer was Nicolas Nabokov, whom Stravinsky had known since the Diaghilev days. Now occupying the impressive-sounding post of general secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Nabokov was trying to counter the spread of Communism in Western Europe by producing model festivals of democratic culture.

  The programming ranged from tonally oriented works such as Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd and Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts to the expressionistic violence of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Berg’s Wozzeck and onward to the futuristic bleeps of musique concrète. Although Nabokov never warmed to atonality and twelve-tone writing—in a 1948 article for the Partisan Review he spoke of Schoenberg’s method as “a hermetic cult, mechanistic in its technique”—he appreciated its ideological value. “Advanced” styles symbolized the freedom to do what one wanted, which, as Nabokov wrote in an introduction to a special festival issue of the journal La Revue musicale, was the dominant theme of the festival—“the liberty to experiment…to be esoteric or familiar.”

  Funding for Masterpieces of the XXth Century was said to have come from the Farfield Foundation, a coalition of arts patrons under the leadership of a yeast-and-gin millionaire named Julius Fleischmann. In fact, Farfield was a front, its financing arranged entirely by the CIA.

  Stravinsky had the lead role in Nabokov’s jamboree. He conducted his Symphony in C and Symphony in Three Movements while Pierre Monteux led the Boston Symphony in the Rite of Spring. All performances took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet also came to town; Balanchine had wanted to stage the Rite with designs by Picasso, but Nabokov quashed the plan because “Comrade Picasso” had compromised himself with pro-Communist statements.

  The climax of the festivities came with two staged performances of Oedipus Rex, but these were marred by yet another scandal. Nabokov had unwisely paired the second Oedipus with Erwartung, both under the direction of Hans Rosbaud. The Schoenberg came first, and a bevy of young people, presumably of the Boulezian type, applauded it. Then, at intermission, many of them walked out. Jean Cocteau delivered the Oedipus narration, and at one point he was interrupted by boos. When Cocteau asked the audience to respect the composer, the boos did not abate, though they were now mixed with bravos. Stravinsky got up from his seat and returned to his hotel. Once more the creator of the Rite was being booed on the avenue Montaigne, only now, instead of being too radical, he was considered not radical enough.

  Boulez’s Structures 1a figured in Masterpieces of the XXth Century as a sample of what the younger generation was doing. The composer and his erstwhile teacher Messiaen played it at 5:30 one afternoon, with Stravinsky and Craft in attendance. Boulez’s involvement in Nabokov’s festival was grudging; he could not have been pleased to be lumped together with the likes of Britten and Thomson. Two years later he would accuse Nabokov of creating a “folklore of mediocrity” and recommend that a future festival celebrate the twentieth-century condom.

  Boulez also made his presence felt in the special Masterpieces of the XXth Century issue of La Revue musicale, contributing a lengthy essay titled “Eventually…,” which laid out the particulars of the total-serialist system. What got everyone’s attention was a polemical section toward the beginning of the article, which started off with the ominous line “Why not play the sniper for a few moments?” and ended thus: “What to conclude? The unexpected: we assert for our part that any musician who has not experienced—we do not say understood, but experienced—the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS.” A close reader might have guessed that the sniper’s rifle was aimed straight at Stravinsky, who, in his Poetics of Music, had written that the artist should concern himself with the “beautiful” and the “useful.”

  As if emigrating yet again, Stravinsky set about learning a new language. In a score of Structures 1a, he dutifully noted each instance of the twelve-tone series, though he gave up after a couple of pages.

  Over the next several years, Stravinsky absorbed Schoenberg’s method, but on his own terms. Tone-row melodies appeared in the Septet of 1952–53. Full-blown dodecaphony became operational in the ballet Agon, which Stravinsky began in late 1953 and finished in 1957. Finally, by the end of the fifties, he was writing music from which nearly all traces of tonality have disappeared: the oratorio Threni, based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the Movements for piano and orchestra. Nicolas Nabokov’s well of funds helped to finance these adventures. The scholar Anne Shreffler has assembled evidence suggesting that the five thousand dollars that Stravinsky received for Threni came from the coffers of the CIA. The fifteen-thousand-dollar fee for the Movements appears to have been paid by a Swiss industrialist, although Nabokov had a hand in arranging the commission.

  Knowing who held the power in the new postwar dispensation, Stravinsky cultivated a friendship with Boulez. The two met in New York in December 1952, at a party at Virgil Thomson’s apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The following year Stravinsky read Boulez’s intermittently dismissive essay “Stravinsky Remains…,” but was still friendly at later meetings. When Boulez came to Los Angeles in early 1957, Stravinsky arranged for him to stay at the Tropicana Motor Hotel, just down the hill from his house. That summer the seventy-five-year-old composer made the ultimate gesture of respect—or self-abasement—when he walked up the long flight of stairs to Boulez’s Paris garret.

  Yet as the years went by Stravinsky found it increasingly difficult to ignore Boulez’s ill-concealed contempt for everything he had written after Les Noces, whether neoclassical or twelve-tone. There were suggestions that Boulez’s Domaine Musical series was using the great Stravinsky name mainly for its publicity value. In 1958 Stravinsky came to Pa
ris to conduct Threni at the Domaine Musical; after the performance devolved into a near-fiasco, Boulez was blamed for failing to rehearse the ensemble adequately. In 1970, after sundry other ups and downs, Stravinsky finally came to grips with the younger man’s “unforgivable condescension,” as he or Craft put it in a letter to the Los Angeles Times.

  If Stravinsky’s twelve-tone writing failed to satisfy the implacable Boulez, it did restore the composer’s faith in himself. Despite the change of technique, characteristic traits and tics remained. Like Berg before him, Stravinsky manipulated the series in order to generate whatever material, tonal or atonal, he required; and he delighted in the hidden continuities that emerge from repetitions of the twelve-tone row—“like so many changes in a peal of bells,” to quote Stephen Walsh. In other words, Stravinsky’s old bopping, bouncing patterns keep churning beneath the variegated surface.

  The Movements and the Variations draw microscopic worlds from supercompressed material, in the manner of the later Webern. Atonal harmony lends a somber, solemn aura to a final series of religious works—Threni, Canticum sacrum, A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer, The Flood, and Abraham and Isaac—although even here the rows are stacked in favor of consonant chords: triads flicker like shafts of light in a darkened church. And the two late-period masterpieces, Agon and Requiem Canticles, synthesize all the voices of Stravinsky’s long and varied career—the Russian-primitive, the Parisian-neoclassical, the American-modernistic—into works of untrammeled expressive urgency.