The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Messiaen completed his great harmonic U-turn in the course of writing the almost three-hour-long piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux, or Catalog of Birds (1956–58). The music is built up from Messiaen’s impressions of various scenic places in France and the birds that inhabit them. Faced with a teeming landscape of images and feelings, Messiaen realized that he no longer needed to choose among his various styles, the sensualism of his “Tristan” works and the thorniness of his early-fifties music; instead, he could, in a sense, have it all.

  Thus, Boulezian piano effects become simply another “color” of the composer’s palette; as Robert Sherlaw Johnson has observed, a twelve-note array is used to suggest the grittier aspects of the natural setting, such as the dirty ice of an Alpine glacier or the sinister hooting of owls in the dead of night. Triads delineate nature’s brighter hues—the “joy of the blue sea,” the broad movement of the river, the glow of the sunset. The birds are bustling, hyperactive, dissonant; sometimes they even sound like human tourists intruding on the mystery of nature. In the thirteenth and final piece, a mood of contemplative silence is broken several times by a shattering discord, which represents the foghorn of the Créac’h lighthouse, on the northwestern tip of France. The chord is a close cousin of the one that pounds repeatedly in “The Augurs of Spring” of the Rite. The closing bars are marked “tragic and desolate,” with the call of the curlew ringing over a low D-minor chord and an arpeggio of surf fading into silence. Whether this is a tragic ending—man stamping his foot on the surface of nature—or a glimpse of some outer mystery is left for the listener to decide.

  Having reclaimed his rainbow chords, Messiaen felt free to return to religious subjects, which he had generally avoided since 1950. The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1965–69), a fourteen-movement work for chorus, seven instrumental soloists, and large orchestra, begins with a descending sequence of pitched gongs, in the manner of Boulez’s Marteau sans maître. The chorus then unfurls an un-Boulezian ribbon of Gregorian chant. (The Second Vatican Council had just admitted vernacular music to the Mass, and, as the scholar Christopher Dingle notes, Messiaen declared his opposition to the change by filling the Transfiguration with Latin liturgical material.) In the first of eight “meditations,” the music gravitates toward the key of E, the work’s ultimate destination. Yet, as in Catalogue d’oiseaux, discord repeatedly crashes through the frame. The twelfth movement, “Terribilis est locus iste,” ends with three gigantic chords of twelve notes each; the triads that follow in “Tota Trinitas apparuit” (“The Entire Trinity Appears”) and the closing “Chorus of the Light of Glory” sound all the more brilliant for having been blasted out of dissonant ground. Indeed, the consonances are sometimes more terrifying than the dissonances that surround them. They are tonality transfigured, rising from the dead.

  In 1970 the New York arts patron Alice Tully asked Messiaen to write a work in commemoration of the upcoming American bicentennial. It was an unlikely assignment, since Messiaen had little love for American culture and a special antipathy for New York. His reluctance gave way when Tully, well briefed on the composer’s vulnerabilities, served him a sumptuous repast capped with “an immense cake crowned with pistachio frogs spewing crème Chantilly.” Messiaen accepted under the condition that he could write in praise of the mountainous landscapes of the American West rather than the cities of the East.

  In 1972, in the company of Loriod, Messiaen traveled to the canyons of Utah—Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks, Zion Park—and gazed for days at the boldly colored terrain, listening also to the songs of the local birds. Loriod photographed him standing alone in one of the crevasses of Cedar Breaks, reddish sandstone walls towering above him. In his sketchbook he wrote of the “immense solitude” of the place, of the whiff of terror and death in its hot and cold hues. He collected his impressions in a programmatic narrative that was variously ornithological, geological, astronomical, and spiritual. The piece would ascend “from the canyons to the stars and higher up to the resurrected souls in Heaven, so as to glorify God in all his Creation: the beauty of the earth (its rocks, its birdsong), the beauty of the physical sky, the beauty of the heavenly one.”

  From the Canyons to the Stars…, the result of Tully’s commission, is perhaps Messiaen’s greatest achievement. The majesty of the Utah canyons reawakened in the composer a songfulness that had long been missing from his music. The sound palette of Canyons is dominated by solo instruments singing out in a wide-open space—piano, horn, other solo winds, brass—with an ensemble of thirteen strings suggesting effects of resonance and reverberation. In a way, it is a colossal magnification of the instrumental drama of the Quartet for the End of Time. The clarinet solo in the Quartet, “Abyss of the Birds,” has its counterpart in an extended movement for horn, “Interstellar Call.” Other short movements in the first section depict the primordial desert out of which the canyons formed, the calls of the orioles, the glimmering of stars above. (In an early indication of the work’s theological dimension, the last is titled “What is written in the stars”; the message in question is “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,” the writing on the wall in the book of Daniel.) The piano then takes over with a solo movement more or less in the style of Catalogue d’oiseaux, mimicking the calls of the white-browed robin.

  At the heart of the work are movements celebrating the canyons themselves—“Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe,” “Bryce Canyon and the Red-Orange Rocks,” and “Zion Park and the Celestial City.” “Cedar Breaks” is the music of the bedrock. Orations for brass in unison alternate with pulsing dissonant chords, rugged writing for piano, and quasi-jazzy episodes, replete with wah-wah trumpet and glissando trombone. “Bryce Canyon” recycles certain of those motifs of geological violence, but they give way to a series of mighty chorales, in which the silent splendor of the canyon resonates within the observer’s mind. Messiaen, like his teacher Dukas, identified certain harmonies with certain colors; E major is red, and the final chords evoke not only the red-orange rock formations of Bryce Canyon but also the geology of the book of Revelation—the sardius, topaz, and amethyst stones embedded in the foundation of the celestial Jerusalem.

  After “Bryce Canyon” comes a series of episodes in which the music swings back and forth between intricacy and purity. A euphoric song for strings depicts the reddish glow of the star Aldebaran; a second piano solo honors the mockingbird; a succulent instrumental intermezzo is based on the triadic call of the wood thrush; and, oddly, there’s a busy fantasia on the birds of Hawaii.

  Finally, the apotheosis of “Zion Park.” Mormon settlers named the dazzling white and pink sandstone cliffs of this canyon “the natural temples of God”; Messiaen saw nothing less than celestial Jerusalem. He uses an elementary trick to create an atmosphere of enormous anticipation: several times he starts a progression in A major but does not complete it, and for the ten-minute span of the movement the cadence is withheld. It is as if the composer were afraid to finish his creation, preferring to take refuge one more time in his beloved birdsong, his disparate rhythms and modes. When the hunger for the missing chord becomes unbearable—the brass cry out for it three times, lustily, desperately—there is a supernova of A major, billowing into the lowest and highest reaches of the orchestra and whiting out in fortissimo strings.

  The Avant-Garde of the Sixties

  As Messiaen presided over the transfiguration of tonality, the European avant-garde was entering its carnivalesque, topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass period. These were the years of the great rock ’n’ roll rebellion, of sexual liberation and drug experimentation and psychedelic culture. In the rambunctious spirit of the time, a second wave of avant-gardists rejected the previous generation’s obsession with purity and abstraction. Chance, indeterminacy, graphic notation, and other forms of unconventionally notated music enjoyed a European vogue. Some gravitated toward the musical past, cutting it up by way of quotation and collage. Others pushed out into interstellar spaces, abandoning any pretense of an organ
izing system. There were Dada pranks, references to pop, a renewed fad for singable Communist ditties (this time in the name of Castro and Mao). A few composers in a dizzyingly self-referential vein made the situation of the international avant-garde their subject. Dieter Schnebel’s 1961 work Abfälle I/1 invited audience members to contribute to the performance by conversing among themselves, making noises of approval or disapproval, coughing, and moving chairs.

  John Cage was entering his period of maximum influence. In 1958 he traveled to Germany to give a series of lectures at Darmstadt—substituting for Boulez—and European music was never quite the same afterward. Anyone who knew Cage’s history should have been prepared for something unusual; back in 1950, his “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists’ Club had begun with the announcement “I am here and there is nothing to say,” and the question period was derailed by Cage’s decision to respond to all queries with a set of six fixed answers, one of which was “Please repeat the question…And again…And again…” Cage’s Darmstadt lectures had episodes of coherence, but chance operations progressively took over, and by the third lecture he was lighting cigarettes at intervals specified by the I Ching. Most of the final talk took the form of a long string of questions, for example: “Do you agree with Boulez when he says what he says? Are you getting hungry? Twelve. Why should you (you know more or less what you’re going to get)? Will Boulez be there or did he go away when I wasn’t looking?”

  Boulez was not there, but Stockhausen was, listening intently. The German visionary had first encountered Cage back in 1954, and had fallen under the spell of the American’s ideas just as Boulez was becoming disenchanted with them. Early symptoms of Stockhausen’s exposure to Cage can be detected in Zeitmasse (1955–56), in which five woodwinds periodically break free of a common tempo and buzz around one another in accelerating or decelerating patterns. Stockhausen also wrote a new series of Klavierstücke for David Tudor, Cage’s favorite interpreter, tailoring them to the pianist’s uninhibited style. Klavierstück IX (1954/61) begins with 139 repetitions of a strongly dissonant, Schoenbergian chord, fading slowly toward silence. Klavierstück X (1954/61) features cascades of cluster chords pounded out with the hands, fists, and forearms. In Klavierstück XI(1956), nineteen fragments are spread across the page, and the performer decides in what order they should be played; this is an obvious imitation of open-form pieces by Earle Brown and Morton Feldman.

  Many young Darmstadt composers followed Stockhausen in flocking after Cage. One was Sylvano Bussotti, a flamboyant Florentine whose scores in graphic notation looked liked surrealist cartoons, with notes splattered all over and staves bent apart or tangled. (Tudor responded to these ambiguities by attacking the piano with boxing gloves.) Another mischief maker was the Argentine-German composer Mauricio Kagel, whose Anagrama (1957–58) offered up a new repertoire of vocal sounds—“stuttering, molto vibrato, with shaking voice, with a foreign accent, with almost closed mouth, quasi senza voce, speaking while inhaling, etc.,” as the composer put it in the score.

  In his 1960 work Sur scène, Kagel made Darmstadt itself the object of his sophisticated ridicule. An instrumental ensemble provides a ramshackle accompaniment to a spoken monologue on the crisis of modern music, which reads in part: “We cannot, with this never-ending talk about a crisis, lay bare all the problematic constituents of its problematic essence and simply bypass them, and yet we cannot get around the fact, to employ a consideration, again we take cognizance of the fact that this obscurity, impenetrability, this absence of resonance in extreme situations is something which—under these circumstances we cannot but reach a conclusion which sound common sense had indicated from the beginning: our perception at the end of the sound spectrum is by nature dim. I am sitting in the smallest room of my house.”

  The Italian composer Luciano Berio, who had been summering in Darmstadt since 1954, found a way out of the “crisis of modern music” by indulging in a touch of nostalgia: avant-garde practice was infused with age-old strategies of instrumental and vocal display. Berio’s fantastic reconstructions of the art of singing owed much to the interpretive creativity of his wife, the American-born singer Cathy Berberian, who ran the gamut from primitive growls to angelically pure tone. For the 1958 electronic piece Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), Berio recorded Berberian reciting the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, a passage that is itself a contrapuntal swirl of images, a literary approximation of serialism. Atomization of the voice leads not to a crisis atmosphere, as so often in Nono’s music, but to an ecstatic, erotic, quasi-operatic frenzy. The extract begins with the words “A sail!” ( Joyce’s allusion to the first line of Verdi’s Otello) and ends with whispered intonations of the name of Liszt. In the same year Berio wrote Sequenza I for flute, commencing a vivid series of Sequenza pieces—fourteen in all by the time of the composer’s death in 2003—in which solo performers unloose a new kind of avant-garde virtuosity, exploiting every noise, tone, sound, and timbre that instruments can make. Later, Berio would criticize his colleagues for creating false dichotomies—between “style” and “expression,” between virtuosity and structure, between the music of the daily world and the harmony of the spheres.

  By the early sixties, the fascination with behind-the-scenes process—whether twelve-tone or chance-produced—had given way to a new appreciation of surfaces. The most-talked-about works of the period resembled a bubbling flow of timbres and textures, a sonic stream of consciousness. Xenakis had pioneered texture music in Metastaseis and Pithoprakta; Stockhausen, with his usual panache, made it his own by dubbing it “field composition” (which pointed toward a later category, “moment form”). The German trendsetter showed a new appreciation for continuous droning sounds, not unrelated to his American interests. On airplane flights to and from America in 1958, he listened intently to the propellers vibrating against the body of the plane, and reproduced those effects in a monster piece for four choirs and four orchestras titled Carré, which he composed with the help of his English assistant Cornelius Cardew.

  In 1960, Stockhausen completed Kontakte, where live and electronic sounds bounce off each other or blur together. While writing it, the composer took advantage of a newly discovered method of generating tape loops by reversing the heads on a tape recorder. He also showed how tones are related to periodic beats; in the most electrifying passage of Kontakte, microscopic pulses are gradually lengthened until they form a pitch, which the piano confirms by playing a low E. Finally, in 1962, the world had its first glimpse of what would turn out to be the almost two-hour-long Momente, involving four choirs, a soprano soloist, a phalanx of trumpets and trombones, a pair of Hammond and Lowrey electric organs, and a percussion battery centered on an extra-large Japanese tam-tam. This was the bacchanalia of the avant-garde, a shouting, clapping, stamping liberation of the senses.

  Several prizewinning samples of texture music turned up in Poland, from which little had been heard since Karol Szymanowski’s death in 1937. In the early postwar years, Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe had effectively stifled creative activity, but during the partial liberalization of the Khrushchev thaw the Soviet satellite nations found it convenient to encourage progressive artistic activity within their borders, knowing that the results could be exploited for propaganda purposes. The Warsaw Autumn festival, which began in 1956, was the Warsaw Pact’s answer to Darmstadt and Donaueschingen; leading Western avant-gardists such as Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and David Tudor performed there, and younger Polish composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Górecki, Kazimierz Serocki, and Wojciech Kilar came to the fore, bringing with them a version of texture music that acquired the name sonorism.

  The usual political issues arose. When Penderecki produced a floridly experimental piece called 8´37?—an affair of shrieking cluster chords, sputtering streams of pizzicato, siren-like glissandos, and other Xenakis-like sounds—officialdom took a favorable view only when someone suggested that the work be retitled Threnody for the Victim
s of Hiroshima. It went on to have a successful career in the West.

  The major figure in the Polish Renaissance was Witold Lutosławski, an older, established composer who, amid the relative freedom of the thaw, happily took possession of avant-garde methods that he had long studied in secret. In 1960 Lutosławski heard a radio broadcast of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which sent him into a creative trance. As he later said, “Composers often do not hear the music that is being played…We are listening to something and at the same time creating something else.” Lutosławski responded by reconciling chance and order: semi-improvisatory episodes alternated with passages in strict notation. “I could start out from chaos,” the composer said, “and create order in it, gradually.” Another time he spoke of looking down at a city from a great height and then descending until streets and buildings come into view. Lutosławski’s chief works of the sixties—Venetian Games, Three Poems of Henri Michaux, Paroles tissées, the Second Symphony, the Cello Concerto—stand out for their explosively precise musical images and their clear-cut, surging narratives. Often they pivot on sudden epiphanies, akin to the discovery of a clearing in thick woods; one such moment occurs at the end of the Michaux settings, when delicately piercing F-sharps underpin the phrase “I let myself go.” Paroles tissées was written for Peter Pears, and it combines ad libitum passages with spells of near-tonal lyricism. Benjamin Britten, no friend of the avant-garde, admiringly presented Paroles at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1965.

  The improvised episodes in Polish sonorist works—“aleatory” was the approved European term for randomized activity—reflected a general trend toward collective and collaborative creation, which intensified in the last years of the decade. Amid the worldwide student protests of May 1968, Stockhausen sat down to write Aus den sieben Tagen, or From the Seven Days, whose score consisted of textual instructions for the composer’s ensemble on the order of “Play a vibration in the rhythm of your body” and “Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe.” Musica Elettronica Viva, an improvisational collaboration among American composers based in Rome (Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Alvin Curran, Allan Bryant, and others), jammed with the then brand-new Moog synthesizer. Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen’s former assistant, sat in with the London-based group AMM, which moved beyond notated composition, beyond the avant-garde, beyond even free jazz, into the spontaneous production of unanalyzably dense sonorities—noise so engulfing that the listener can neither hear nor imagine other sound. Cardew, for one, could go no further. In 1972, he denounced the avant-garde as a bourgeois luxury, wrote an incendiary essay titled “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism,” and set about writing simple songs in praise of Mao Zedong.