The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Jazz had entered its high-modern era, and assumed a modernist contempt for convention. Monk set the tone: “You play what you want, and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.” Miles Davis, in performance, turned his back to the crowd in Schoenbergian fashion. Bebop and dissonant composition drew close enough that there was talk of a merger. In the early sixties the composer and scholar Gunther Schuller propagated the idea of “Third Stream,” a confluence of jazz and classical energies. “It is a way of making music,” Schuller later wrote, “which holds that all musics are created equal, coexisting in a beautiful brotherhood/sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other.” Schuller brought in the likes of Coleman and Eric Dolphy to perform his brawny twelve-tone compositions, while Coleman asked Schuller for advice, notably while planning his epoch-making 1960 album Free Jazz. Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor, two other pioneers of free jazz, sounded like atonal composers in exile.

  Even in its arcane phase, modern jazz hung on to its dynamism, its physical energy. That spirit proved irresistible to younger classical composers looking for a way out of Schoenberg’s maze. Jazz was intuitive, intimate, collaborative; it was serious in thought but playful in execution. Steve Reich remembers attending composition classes where students showed off byzantine scores whose intellectual underpinnings could be discussed ad nauseam. Then he’d go to see Coltrane play with his quartet. He liked the idea that Coltrane could walk out with a saxophone, play freewheeling improvisations on just one or two harmonies, and then disappear into the night. “The music just comes out,” Reich later said. “There’s no argument. There it is. This presented me with a human choice, almost an ethical, moral choice.”

  The California Avant-Garde

  Reich was living in northern California when he had his Coltrane revelation. A few years later, he created It’s Gonna Rain, the first example of what he would call “music as a gradual process.” Maybe this New York–born composer would have found his way even if he had never left the East Coast, but his move westward brought him into contact with alternative American traditions that had been developing in relative isolation since the second decade of the century, with sporadic infusions from the European émigrés who had come to Los Angeles in the thirties and forties. In fact, the circuitous chain of events that led to minimalism began with a kind of California mutation of the Second Viennese School.

  The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-Western traditions.

  The first student to receive a thorough grounding in Seeger’s syllabus went on to become the godfather of the American experimental tradition. Henry Cowell was the son of a bohemian Irish poet who settled in San Francisco and hailed it as “an undefiled Eden.” Young Henry attracted attention as a child prodigy and gave solo recitals of his piano compositions. One precocious teenage piece, Adventures in Harmony, included a flurry of cluster chords, dissonances produced by hitting groups of adjacent keys with the entire hand. Other pieces reduced music to a few essentials: for example, in The Anaemic Rag chains of thirds unwind over an open-fifth ostinato.

  Cowell enrolled at the University of California in 1914 and studied with Seeger for two crucial years. He also joined a mildly cultish Pismo Beach community called Temple of the People, led by the Theosophist poet John Varian, who proclaimed, “There is a new race birthing here in the West. We are the germic embryonic seed of future majesties of growth.” From Varian and other local visionaries Cowell inherited the idea that California would be the eastern frontier of a great Pacific Rim culture, an ecstatic commingling of far-flung peoples. His vision of a Pacific Rim utopia grew to embrace the entire globe. Indian music, Japanese koto and shakuhachi, Balinese gamelan, old American hymns, Gaelic airs, and Icelandic rímur all figured in his music at one time or another. He thought nothing of supplementing a string quintet with three Native American thundersticks.

  In 1930, Cowell summed up his and Seeger’s ideas in an astonishing little book titled New Musical Resources, a kind of American Harmonielehre, which anticipated many “big ideas” of the postwar avant-garde. One central concept of the book was that harmony and rhythm should be interdependent; since any resonating tone consists of a certain number of vibrations per second, the ratios among the notes in any given chord could be used to dictate the rhythms of any given bar. For example, a chord of G, C, and E would translate into simultaneous pulses of three against four against five. Back in 1917 and 1919, Cowell put these ideas into practice in his Quartet Romantic and Quartet Euphometric, although he acknowledged that the pieces were (at that time) unplayable.

  On one page of New Musical Resources Cowell proposed in passing that “highly engrossing rhythmical complexes” could be punched out on the paper roll of a player piano. Conlon Nancarrow, an Arkansas-born composer of radical tendencies who had fought for the Communists during the Spanish Civil War and then gone into Mexican exile, saw a world of possibility in Cowell’s suggestion, and relied on his mechanical instrument to execute insanely intricate rhythmic designs that only a many-armed robot pianist could have played. In the notorious Study No. 33, for example, tempos are superimposed according to the ratio 32/2. This music was maximal rather than minimal, but its jazzy, hyperkinetic energy put it far outside the postwar modernist mainstream.

  Harry Partch, the other great West Coast nonconformist of the twenties and thirties, wanted to “find a way outside”—to jettison the entire discourse of European music as it had been practiced since at least the time of Bach.

  Partch was a true child of the Wild West. He spent much of his childhood in the railway outpost of Benson, Arizona, where his father was a government inspector. According to Bob Gilmore’s biography, young Harry caught glimpses of old-school outlaws on the edge of town. Moving to Los Angeles in 1919, Partch studied at the University of Southern California and made money as a movie-house pianist. Stylish, handsome, and gay—homosexuality is a common thread among composers of this time and place—Partch fell in love with a struggling actor named Ramón Samaniego, whom he met when both men were ushers at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Samaniego ended the affair shortly after changing his name to Ramon Novarro and finding world fame as a silent-movie idol. That experience apparently cemented Partch’s determination to reject the mainstream in favor of the companionship of outcasts.

  One day Partch asked himself why there are twelve notes in an octave, and couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. He buried himself in a study of the history of tuning, paying particular attention to Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone. He emerged with the conviction that the modern Western system of equal-tempered tuning had to go. In its place, Partch would revive the tuning principles of the ancient Greeks, who, at least in theory, derived all musical pitches from the clean integer ratios of the natural harmonic series.

  To this end, Partch invented a scale made up not of twelve notes but of forty-three. Extant instruments were incapable of producing such microtonal shadings, so Partch invented his own; he started by building an Adapted Viola and eventually fashioned an entire private orchestra of bowed, plucked, and keyboard instruments, together with Cloud-Chamber Bowls (Pyrex carboys obtained from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory), the Kithara (modeled on a harp-like instrument seen on Greek vases), and the awesome Marimba Eroica (whose lowest notes boom forth from five-foot-high blocks). By the same token, Partch rejected modern styles
of singing, which he considered artificial. Like Leos? Janáček, he sought to close the gap between song and speech, and his annotations of overheard American conversations bear a striking resemblance to Janáček’s transcriptions of Czech. A Western tradition clotted with studied abstractions—what Partch called the “Faustian” strain—would give way to “corporeal music,” an art at one with the body and the soul.

  On a trip to Europe in the early thirties, Partch aroused the interest of William Butler Yeats, who watched as the young American composer chanted Psalm 137, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” while sawing on the Adapted Viola. Yeats was charmed, but the musical establishments of Europe and America ignored or mocked Partch’s ideas. By the time he returned to America in 1935, the Great Depression was at its height, and prospects for a conventional career seemed poor.

  Partch now made a momentous decision: instead of begging for assistance from patrons or the WPA bureaucracy, he dropped out of civilization entirely, and became a hobo. For several years he crisscrossed the country, riding trains, doing manual labor, sleeping in shelters or in the wild, contracting syphilis, working occasionally as a proofreader, and, all the while, rethinking every parameter of music. In the desert city of Barstow, California, he found a set of inscriptions on a highway railing, which he wrote down for future use. An excerpt:

  Car just passed by,

  Make that two more, three more.

  Do not think they’ll let me finish my story.

  Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck.

  Hoping to get the hell out, here’s my name—

  Johnnie Reinwald, nine-fifteen South Westlake Avenue, Los Angeles

  These words reappeared in the 1941 cycle Barstow, for baritone and Adapted Guitar. The landscape is nothing like Copland’s idealized heartland, where the wheat is plentiful and golden. Partch’s songs captured the roughness of life during the Great Depression—you can practically smell rye on the breath of the singer. A lot of people would be hard-pressed to identify Barstow as “classical music” at all. It comes closer to the twisted white blues of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tom Waits. The tenuous situation of classical music in America was, for this composer, not a deficit but an advantage. In one essay he wrote: “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J. S. Bach.”

  Harry Partch passed through the University of Southern California a few years too early to meet Arnold Schoenberg. This was probably just as well, because the grand old man of modern music would almost certainly have taken a dim view of Partch’s crusade against equal-temperament tuning. In general, Schoenberg was poorly equipped to comprehend the emergent West Coast aesthetic. For him, the ultimate sin was to repeat an idea unnecessarily (“Hi-yo, Silver!”), whereas the California composers were discovering the joys of insistent repetition and gradual change. Yet Schoenberg became an unlikely mentor for two other major figures of the California avant-garde: Lou Harrison and John Cage.

  Harrison, a gentle soul in a century of sacred monsters, was born in 1917, the son of a West Coast Chrysler salesman. His mentors were a formidable group: he studied first with Cowell in San Francisco and then with Schoenberg in Los Angeles, and, during a generally unhappy New York period, he worked closely with Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. From the ultra-moderns, Harrison acquired a flair for stark, prophetic utterances—questing rivers of chant, machinelike ostinatos, erupting dissonances, enveloping silences. From Cowell he picked up a lifelong love of non-Western traditions, especially the Javanese gamelan. And a reading of Partch’s Genesis of a Music in 1949 sparked an interest in just intonation, as pure-ratio tuning is known.

  Ingrained in Harrison’s personality was a love of musical merriment, of hummable song and rollicking dance. He managed to assimilate these diverse strains into forms of Baroque poise and precision; his favorite composer was Handel. “Use only the essentials,” Schoenberg once said to his pupil. Harrison’s career was a creative misinterpretation of that remark; it gave him permission to vacate the overcrowded city space of modern music and to camp out in a desert landscape of long drones and lulling patterns.

  As for Cage, he found the seeds for many of his most extreme inspirations on the West Coast. Cowell passed along his cherished ideas about flexibility of form and the interchangeability of music and noise. Cage took Cowell’s classes on non-Western music in New York in 1934 and drove across the country with him at the end of that year; American music was never the same afterward. Harrison helped Cage refine his writing for percussion; the two men organized annual concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in 1939. The California spirit persists in the music that Cage wrote after moving permanently to New York—notably in the string-of-pearl sounds of the prepared-piano pieces and in the “nearly stationary” textures of the String Quartet in Four Parts.

  Although Cage avoided tonality and repetition in his music from 1950 onward, he hovered over the radical end of American music as a liberating spirit. He had done the preliminary work of dismantling the European “vogue of profundity,” as he called it. In 1952, he scandalized a crowd at Black Mountain College by saying that Beethoven had misled generations of composers by structuring music in goal-oriented harmonic narratives instead of letting it unfold moment by moment. At a New York gathering, he was heard to say, “Beethoven was wrong!” The poet John Ashbery overheard the remark, and for years afterward wondered what Cage had meant. Eventually, Ashbery approached Cage again. “I once heard you say something about Beethoven,” the poet began, “and I’ve always wondered—” Cage’s eyes lit up. “Beethoven was wrong!” he exclaimed. “Beethoven was wrong!” And he walked away.

  Cage’s definitive refutation of Beethoven came in the form of an epic, almost daylong performance of Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations. The original score is only a page long and would normally take just a minute or two to play, but at the top appears this instruction: “In order to play this motif 840 times, one would have to prepare oneself in advance, and in the utmost silence, through serious immobilities.” Cage took this sentence at face value, and, on September 9 and 10, 1963, at the Pocket Theatre in New York, he presented Vexations complete. A team of twelve pianists played from 6:00 p.m. until 12:40 p.m. the following day. The New York Times responded by sending a gang of eight critics to cover the event, one of whom ended up performing. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who remembered the experience when he made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building the following year.

  The venue was equipped with a time clock, which patrons punched on entering and leaving. Listeners were reimbursed five cents for each twenty minutes they spent in the hall. Those who saw the entire performance received a twenty-cent bonus. Karl Schenzer, an off-Broadway actor, was the only one to get a full refund, having sat in the hall for nearly nineteen hours. “I feel exhilarated, not at all tired,” Schenzer told the Times. “Time? What is time? In this music the dichotomy between various aspects of art forms dissolves.”

  Feldman

  It was after a New York Philharmonic performance of Anton Webern’s Symphony, on January 26, 1950, that John Cage met a six-foot-tall, nearly three-hundred-pound Jewish guy named Morton Feldman. Both men had walked out of Carnegie Hall early—according to Feldman, because they were dismayed by the hostile response that Webern’s music had inspired in Philharmonic listeners; according to Cage, because they wanted to avoid hearing Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, which ended the program. When their paths crossed by the door, Feldman turned to Cage and asked, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” A lifelong friendship began.

  The two composers were often mentioned in the same breath, as part of the New York experimental school that also included Christian Wolff and Earle Brown. But Feldman was a singular character—in Steve Reich’s words, “an absolutely unforgettable human being.” As a conversationalist, he was verbose, egotistical, domineering, insulting, playful, flirtatious, and richly poetic—one of the great talkers in the modern h
istory of New York City. As a composer, he was inward and withdrawn, seldom raising his musical voice above a whisper. His preoccupation with vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound opened up yet another unmapped space in American music.

  Feldman, whom everyone called Morty, was born in 1926, the son of a manufacturer of children’s coats. He came of age in the cosmopolitan New York of the thirties and forties, when Fiorello La Guardia championed high art for the working man and European émigrés crowded the streets. In these years a resourceful youth could pick up a world-class education simply by hanging out in seminars and bars across the city. In 1944, Feldman enrolled at NYU, but dropped out after a day or two. Instead, he took a job at his father’s factory, and also worked part-time at his uncle’s dry cleaners. He held one or another of these jobs until he was forty-four.

  Two independent artists from Berlin and Paris—Stefan Wolpe and Edgard Varèse—served as Feldman’s mentors. Wolpe had come to New York by way of Palestine, holding fast to his far-left political convictions even as he adopted a hard-driving form of twelve-tone writing. Teacher and student would have long arguments about music’s role in society; once, when Wolpe pointed out the window of his Greenwich Village studio and exclaimed that one must write for the man in the street, Feldman looked down and saw, to his ironic delight, Jackson Pollock walking by. Feldman learned much from Wolpe’s tensile, shape-shifting atonal scores, but he was closer in spirit to Varèse, the master sculptor of abstract sound. Varèse would tell his young admirer to think of music as an arrangement of objects in space, and to keep in mind how long it takes for any sound to travel through the hall.