The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Agon came into being at the behest of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, the choreographer and impresario, respectively, of the New York City Ballet. Balanchine had been living in America since 1933, and, in the course of staging Stravinsky’s Jeu de cartes, Danses concertantes, Circus Polka, and Orpheus, had formed a close-to-ideal partnership with a composer who had always thrived on cross-disciplinary collaboration. Stravinsky filled Balanchine’s time slots down to the second; Balanchine invented moves that were organically related to Stravinsky’s gestures, at once athletic and abstract.

  The choreographer dreamed of summoning forth the definitive Stravinsky ballet—as Kirstein put it, “a ballet which would seem to be the enormous finale of a ballet to end all the ballets the world has ever seen.” It would consist of a “contest” or vigorous interplay among informally dressed dancers on a blank stage. Kirstein had sent along a copy of François de Lauze’s seventeenth-century manual Apologie de la danse; Stravinsky and Balanchine eventually decided to translate these ancient steps into modern forms, radically reinventing them in the process. Reading the manual, Stravinsky underlined passages that noted how certain dances had originated in pagan festivals, witch ceremonies, and ring dances around a stone representing the devil. In writing Agon, he was feeling his way back to energies that had lain dormant since the Rite.

  This last great Stravinsky ballet, for twelve dancers in twelve sections, mixes sounds and styles from several centuries of musical history as well as from several decades of the composer’s career. Regal, neo-Renaissance trumpet fanfares set the piece in motion and return several times as organizing punctuation. Driving Rite-like rhythms and creeping chromatic lines give shape to the Double and Triple Pas-de-Quatre. Stately Baroque rhythms decorate the Sarabande, surreal Renaissance twanglings animate the Gailliarde. Twelve-tone writing comes into play in the Coda of the First Pas-de-Trois, joined to scrappy violin solos that recall Histoire du soldat. Tensely expressive string lines, vaguely reminiscent of Berg’s Lyric Suite, make for a melancholy Pas de Deux. Finally, in the Four Duos and Four Trios, the archaic-modern ritual acquires a jitter of jazz.

  All this is highly absorbing in itself, but the music really pulses with life when it is played alongside the Balanchine action that Stravinsky had in mind as he wrote: the streetwise look of the dancers in their rehearsal clothes; the four males standing stone-still at the outset of the piece, their backs turned to the audience; the acting out of the smallest details in the score, not just the rhythms but the placement of chords high or low, the differentiation of timbre, the lengthening or shortening of note values; the way the dancers register beats in every part of their bodies, with twitchings of the shoulder, snaps of the wrist, extensions or lashings of the arm; and the cohesiveness of the entire conception, reconciling brain and body, the cerebral and the sexual.

  If Agon is a refined reprise of the visceral Rite, Requiem Canticles is the late-period counterpart of the Symphony of Psalms. It grew out of the most momentous experience of Stravinsky’s last years—his return, after an absence of five decades, to his Russian homeland, in 1962. Inevitably, Cold War calculations were required to set the trip in motion, with Nabokov playing his usual rainmaker role. One day in 1961 Nabokov told Stravinsky, “Someone has said that you’re going to Moscow.” Two days later, an inquiry was made by the U.S. State Department. The following month a delegation of Soviet musicians, led by Tikhon Khrennikov, Shostakovich’s sometime nemesis, showed up in Los Angeles and invited Stravinsky to Moscow.

  Stravinsky, coolest of customers, was thunderstruck by the experience of going to Moscow and revisiting what used to be St. Petersburg. He saw old relatives, passed old haunts, soaked up the adulation of Russian crowds. Long-suppressed traits reappeared in his personality and in his music. Requiem Canticles, written in 1965 and 1966, makes systematic use, for the first time in decades, of Rimsky-Korsakov’s octatonic scale and other devices that had anchored Stravinsky’s youthful works. There are chords like the famous polytonal dissonances in the second section of the Rite, only now they move more slowly, as if in mourning. At the end, bell chords ring into the middle distance. In the one Romantic gesture of his career, the composer had written a Requiem for himself. He died in 1971, and was buried in Venice, near the grave of Serge Diaghilev.

  Once the avatar of a primitivist-modernist Russia, Stravinsky ended up as the perfect cosmopolitan, everywhere and nowhere at home. “He wanted,” Stephen Walsh writes, “to be thought of as a free spirit, a phenomenon without a history.” Even as his music grew too recondite for the taste of general audiences, his fame increased to global proportions. The Kennedys invited him to dinner at the White House; Frank Sinatra and Pope John XXIII asked for his autograph. He was the living composer whom everyone professed to know; the premiere of the Rite was the measuring stick of artistic daring, inevitably cited in any encomium to a rock ’n’ roll act or art film or fashion show that purported to shock the middle classes. But the man was more famous than his music.

  Darmstadt

  By the time Stravinsky began writing twelve-tone music, most of the younger composers considered the method out of date. Yesterday’s revolt was today’s status quo: music had entered a state of perpetual revolution.

  The principal showplace of the avant-garde was the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music—the composers’ institute that OMGUS had helped bring into existence in 1946. Nearly as important were two German radio stations, Northwest German Radio in Hamburg and Cologne and Southwest Radio in Baden-Baden, which commissioned, presented, and publicized the leading composers of the day. In 1950, Heinrich Strobel, the music director of Southwest Radio, relaunched the old Donaueschingen Festival, while in 1951 Northwest German Radio began building up an electronic-music studio in Cologne. Conditions were nearly as favorable in Italy, where socialist and Communist politicians generously funded the arts. In 1955, an electronic studio opened in Milan. By the end of the fifties, not only Europeans but also experimentalists from America and composers from Japan and South Korea were sharing in this generous apparatus of support. Boulez was sufficiently pleased with conditions in Germany that in 1959 he moved to Baden-Baden.

  The former Fascist nations could thus demonstrate how far they had evolved from the days when Schoenberg’s work had been labeled “degenerate music.” In a larger sense, composers were creating a kind of esoteric mirror image of the emergent Western European economic and political community. Just as the proud old nation-states gave up certain of their cultural idiosyncrasies in order to assimilate themselves into the European Community, composers abandoned the national-folkish styles they had cultivated in former years in the name of joining a cosmopolitan conversation.

  For a time, modern composition had the appearence of another form of high-tech, hush-hush Cold War work. Composers dressed like scientists, wearing thick black glasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts with pens in the pocket. Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of musique concrète, noted proudly that music had become a team effort rather than a labor of solitude, and went so far as to compare French composers to atomic physicists working together in a laboratory.

  The advent of a pseudoscientific mentality is evident in the titles of works that were performed at Darmstadt from 1946 on. The first few years saw an abundance of neoclassical lingo—Sonatine, Scherzo, Concertino, and Sinfonietta. Then, after 1949, the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by phrases with a cerebral tinge: Music in Two Dimensions, Syntaxis, Anepigraphe. There was a vogue for abstractions in the plural: Perspectives, Structures, Quantities, Configurations. Audiences enjoyed Spectrogram, Seismogramme, Audiogramme, and Sphenogramme. Emblematic was the career of Hermann Heiss, who, back in the Nazi time, had written a Fighter Pilot March. At the first Darmstadt gathering, in 1946, he was represented by a Sonata for Flute and Piano. Ten years later, he showed up with Expression K.

  The watchword at Darmstadt, as at Nabokov’s festivals, was “freedom.” After centuries of subservience to the Church, th
e aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the mass public, composers could finally do as they pleased—even embrace styles that took away freedom of choice. Stockhausen, the leader of the young German composers, put it this way: “Schoenberg’s great achievement…was to claim freedom for composers: freedom from the prevailing taste of society and its media; freedom for music to evolve without interference. In other words, here was a composer who made it clear to society that he would not allow himself to be kicked about like Mozart who was kicked in the backside by a court official of the Archbishop of Salzburg when he was eight days late returning from a vacation in Vienna.”

  Yet not everyone felt free. There was the freedom to go forward, but not to go back. The young German composer Hans Werner Henze, who had been attending Darmstadt from the start, became frustrated with its more or less official ban on tonal writing, and, in his memoirs, he wrote in bitterly mocking terms of its faddish tendencies: “Everything had to be stylized and made abstract: music regarded as a glass-bead-game, a fossil of life. Discipline was the order of the day…The existing audience of music-lovers, music-consumers, was to be ignored…Any encounter with the listeners that was not catastrophic and scandalous would defile the artist, and would mobilize distrust against us…As Adorno decreed, the job of a composer was to write music that would repel, shock, and be the vehicle for ‘unmitigated cruelty.’”

  In 1953, feeling oppressed by the breathless forward march of German music, Henze fled to the island of Ischia, where, under the spell of the Mediterranean sun, he reincorporated tonal material, Stravinskyan neoclassicism, and Romantic textures. His nervously expressive operas caught the ear of the general public, but the new-music community regarded him as an apostate. The conductor Hermann Scherchen dismissed Henze’s voluptuously neo-Romantic opera König Hirsch by saying, “But, my dear, we don’t write arias today.” When a smattering of triads in Henze’s Nocturnes and Arias sullied the hall at Donaueschingen in 1957, Boulez and colleagues walked out, turning their backs in Schoenberg fashion.

  By common consent, Stockhausen was the crown prince of the new-music kingdom. No composer was more tireless in inventing or appropriating new ideas, more ambitious in articulating the avant-garde’s historical and spiritual mission, more adept at assembling the latest sounds into jaw-dropping spectacles. Stockhausen had the dash of a great colonial adventurer, proceeding through jungles of sound. He described himself as the purveyor variously of “serial music,” “point music,” “electronic music,” “new percussion music,” “new piano music,” “spatial music,” “statistical music,” “aleatoric music,” “live electronic music,” “new syntheses of music and speech,” “musical theatre,” “ritual music,” “scenic music,” “group composition,” “process composition,” “moment composition,” “formula composition,” “multiformula composition,” “universal music,” “telemusic,” “spiritual music,” “intuitive music,” “mantric music,” and, last but not least, “cosmic music.”

  Bright, glib, fair-haired, collegial, Stockhausen exuded what would later be called positive energy, although deep-seated authoritarian tendencies made him a sometimes insufferable colleague. In later years he revealed a mystical streak, bordering on the hippie-dippy; it turned out that he had lived many past lives, and that he claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin.

  Stockhausen was, in fact, born in a village outside Cologne, in 1928. At the Musikhochschule and the university in that city he received fairly conventional musical training. As the Second World War raged, he began opening his ears to new sounds; like many young Germans, he tuned in to American military broadcasts, and the bopping rhythms of Glenn Miller’s band relieved the tedium of wartime discipline. Robin Maconie, Stockhausen’s most assiduous chronicler, reports that the young composer took a particular interest in the semi-independent movement of jazz melodies, the way they floated above the beat in changing values.

  On arriving in Darmstadt in 1951, Stockhausen heard a tape of Messiaen’s Scale of Durations and Dynamics and immediately became excited by the idea of a totally organized serialist music. His first mature piece, Kreuzspiel, or Cross Play, is notable for its quasi-jazzy insouciance and quasi-sensuous appeal, beginning as it does with the sound of conga drums and tom-toms pattering quietly beneath three-note piano chords splayed across various registers. Stockhausen’s first set of Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), by contrast, exemplifies the reigning aesthetic of pulverization: sounds ricochet from the top to the bottom of the piano, as if the instrument were a pinball machine.

  The new art of electronic music riveted Stockhausen from the start. His gurus were Werner Meyer-Eppler, an experimental physicist who specialized in the study of synthetic sound and speech, and the composer-theorist Herbert Eimert, who headed the nascent electronic studio in Cologne. Their vision of the musical future diverged from that of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in Paris, and, not surprisingly, a familiar Franco-German cultural split defined the difference between the two electronic schools. Eimert deprecated French musique concrète as parasitical dilettantism, a facile rearrangement of familiar sonic objects. Instead, he said, electronic music must be generated entirely within the studio, thereby attaining a “pure” existence outside the known and the conventional. In 1951 and 1952, Eimert and Robert Beyer together created Sound in Unlimited Space, which is more or less the first work of synthesized music—a bubbling, moaning landscape of sine tones.

  Stockhausen, to his credit, refused to be blinkered by Meyer-Eppler and Eimert’s purist ideology. Before establishing himself at the Cologne studio, in 1953, he spent an exploratory year in Paris, attending Messiaen’s classes, exchanging ideas with Boulez, and working in Schaeffer’s studio. Stockhausen’s first electronic pieces, Konkrete Etude and Electronic Studies, neatly synthesized the Germanic and Gallic approaches to the brand-new medium. On the one hand, the composer made methodical use of serialist processes, arraying gradations of pitch, duration, and dynamics in series. On the other, he relished the exoticism of the medium, enveloping the listener in disordered images and sensations. “This music sounds indescribably pure and beautiful!” Stockhausen wrote excitedly to Karel Goeyvaerts, one of the co-inventors of the total-serialist language. He likened it to “raindrops in the sun.”

  Gesang der Jünglinge, or Song of the Youths, created in 1955–56, is Stockhausen’s most original electronic creation and perhaps the most influential electronic piece ever composed. The youths in question are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, from the book of Daniel, whom Nebuchadnezzar throws in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship a golden idol. The music is built up in layers from the recorded voice of a choirboy singing “Praise the Lord!” (from the canticle of praise that is included in Catholic and Orthodox versions of the tale). The boy’s song is broken down into phonetic fragments and remixed in the style of musique concrète. All around is a flickering mass of electronic sound, which goes from eruptions of synthesized noise—Stockhausen was particularly proud of what he called “showers of impulses”—to hauntingly voicelike phrases. Boy and machine imitate each other, uniting natural and artificial worlds. Stockhausen heightened the impact of the work by recording it on five channels: at the 1956 Cologne premiere, the audience was placed inside a pentaphonic cauldron.

  Two years later Stockhausen unveiled a new marvel, Gruppen, in which a 109-piece orchestra is divided into three “groups,” each with its own conductor. The orchestration ingeniously duplicates electronic practice: a chord “pans” from one channel to another, instruments trade lines stereophonically, musical lines are “tracked” at independent tempos, one timbre dissolves into the next. Much of the time the work sounds improvised, even though serialist procedures apply. The climax is a wild squall of drumming and a great wall of noise for the three orchestras in tandem—a thirteen-bar freak-out, free jazz or avant-rock before the fact. At the same time, the sheer bombast of the design harks back to the tone painting of Mahler and Strauss and to Wagnerian spectacles such as Hagen’s calling of th
e vassals in Götterdämmerung. What separates Gruppen from its monumental Romantic predecessors is its relative emotional neutrality; it lacks the grandeur and sorrow that Thomas Mann identified with Wagner. German music was renouncing its “special path,” its Faustian urge, and joining the cosmopolitan frenzy of the postwar world.

  Behind Darmstadt’s hypermodern facade lurked some thoroughly traditional twentieth-century or even nineteenth-century obsessions: the revolutionary impulse, the urge to overthrow the bourgeois order, the age-old longing for sublimity and transcendence. Luigi Nono’s defining move was to breach the wall that had been built up between “advanced” modern music and political music. In Weimar Berlin, the twelve-tone Schoenberg and the leftist-populist Weill had stood on opposite ends of the spectrum; in Nono, they were one and the same.

  The scion of a notable old Venetian family, Nono dabbled in various media before settling on music at the age of twenty. He was second to none in his worship of the Second Viennese School, and went so far as to marry Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria. But he did not see composition as a withdrawal from the world; instead, he believed that radical sounds could serve as a vehicle for radical politics, awakening listeners’ minds and preparing them for concerted action.

  Nono’s signature piece was the choral work Il canto sospeso (1955–56), whose title means “suspended song,” and whose texts consists of letters from anti-Fascist resistance fighters who had been condemned to death. As in Stockhausen’s Gesang, the vocal lines crumble under the pressure of serialist technique. In the ninth song, which sets the texts “I am not afraid of death,” “I will be calm and at peace facing the execution squad,” and “I go in the belief of a better life for you,” words are broken into syllables and scattered through many parts. Stockhausen, when he heard the piece, congratulated Nono for having “composed the text as if to withdraw it from the public eye where it has no place.” Nono was irritated by this assumption; by making the words less easily accessible to the casual listener, he intended them to matter more.