The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Largely self-taught, Takemitsu first studied Debussy and Messiaen, then moved on to Boulez and Cage. He refined his technique not only in concert works but in scores for various masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes. In the former he seduced the ears with popular airs, in the latter he raised goosebumps with Xenakis-like string glissandos and electronic noise. Like Messiaen, Takemitsu felt no need to choose between the sweet and the harsh. In the sixties, inspired partly by his film work, he added Japanese instruments such as shakuhachi flute and biwa lute to his Western-based ensembles. By the time of his early death, in 1996, Takemitsu had forged a late style that was precise in design, rich in timbre, tonal on the surface, mysterious at the core. He compared his music to a “picture scroll unrolled.”

  Chinese music has been operating at a high level of sophistication for several thousand years. The bianzhong bells of Marquis Yi, which rested undisturbed in a tomb for twenty-four hundred years before being uncovered in 1978, are meticulously tuned in twelve-note octaves, close to the modern Western chromatic scale. Nonetheless, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese composers defected from native traditions toward the West. They initially emulated Russian composers, and, a little later, Debussy, whose pentatonic harmony sounded as familiar to the Chinese as it did to Takemitsu in Japan. Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai’s absorbing history, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, offers a telling anecdote about the conversation between East and West. Some years ago, an American visitor to China commented that one composer’s music sounded like Debussy’s. The composer answered in irritation, “No, this piece doesn’t resemble Debussy! Not at all! Debussy resembles me! Debussy resembles China!”

  When Mao Zedong and the Communists took power in 1949, composers found themselves in a recognizable predicament. Like Hitler and Stalin, Mao fancied himself a patron of the arts, and he meddled incessantly in the cultural sphere, zigzagging between liberalization and repression. In the “Let a hundred flowers bloom” period of the late fifties, Western-style orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories multiplied, and composers such as He Luting tentatively tried out early twentieth-century styles. Then, in late 1965, Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, incited the anti-Western crusade of the Cultural Revolution, and a wave of terror engulfed every sector of society. Jiang Qing had strong ideas about music, although they added up to no coherent system. As Rhapsody in Red recounts, she expressed at various times a dislike of the sound of the trombone, a preference for Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony over the unscientifically “fateful” Fifth, and an admiration for Aaron Copland’s film score The Red Pony. In the spirit of proletarian solidarity, “bourgeois” artists were subject to vicious public humiliation, and some chose suicide as a way out.

  An astonishing incident took place on Chinese television. He Luting, who had drawn fire from a proletarian-minded critic for defending the music of Debussy, was subjected to a physically abusive interrogation but refused to apologize. “Your accusations are false!” he shouted. “Shame on you for lying!” No composer ever made a braver stand against totalitarianism. He Luting lived to the age of ninety-six.

  At the height of the madness, conservatories were closed and orchestras shut down. The few composers who continued working were confined to the task of perfecting Jiang Qing’s “shining-star models” of Communist musical theater—ballets and operas such as Red Detachment of Women, The Red Lantern, and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (a title later ironically appropriated by Brian Eno). These works were thuggishly simple in design, relying on a kitschy blend of pentatonic tunes and Tchaikovskyan Romanticism. Yet they hinted at a new direction for Chinese composition. At the same time that Takemitsu was mixing strings and taiko drums in the soundtrack for Woman in the Dunes, Wu Zuqiang and Du Mingxin, the composers of Red Detachment of Women, used makeshift but effective combinations of Western and Chinese timbres.

  Mao died in 1976, and the conservatories reopened in 1978. The first classes in composition brought forth a remarkable roster of talent: Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, and Guo Wenjing, among others. All were children of the Cultural Revolution, and their ignorance of tradition turned out to be a sort of bliss: they could start with a blank slate. Tan spent much of his childhood in a remote village in Hunan Province, singing folk songs while planting rice in the fields and playing fiddle in a provincial Peking opera troupe. When, at his entrance exam at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, he was told to play something by Mozart, he innocently asked his examiners, “Who’s Mozart?”

  In the eighties the Chinese “New Wave” composers caught up fast, treading the progressive path from Debussy to Boulez to Cage. Yet they did not forget the rural musical traditions to which they had been exposed while doing compulsory labor on collective farms. Tan juxtaposed Cagean water and paper noises with lavish Romantic orchestration and humble folkish melodies that might have brought a smile to the face of Jiang Qing. The irony is that most of the New Wave composers ended up in America, practicing cultural interpenetration within the familiar university setting. Back home, Western music commanded an enormous audience, but the repertory tended to stop short at Tchaikovsky. If the Chinese classical business can accommodate new music in the coming century, the center of gravity may shift permanently eastward.

  The term “classical music” changes meaning as it traverses the globe. It now connotes almost any ancient practice that has persisted into the modern era—the ritual opera of China, the imperial court music of Japanese gagaku, the radif or “order” of Persian melodies, the great classical traditions of India, and the polyrhythmic drumming of West African tribes, among a hundred others. Those who cherish the “classical musics” share a fear that the behemoth of mass-marketed pop will wipe out the wisdom of the centuries. To be “classical,” in this sense, is to protect tradition from the ravages of passing time, to perpetuate the musical past. Not surprisingly, coalitions have recently formed among “classical music” practitioners around the world: the Persian master Kayhan Kalhor has performed at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project has convened American, European, East Asian, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern musicians in programs of ear-catching intercultural design.

  All this activity renews the old folkish projects of Bartók, Janáček, the young Stravinsky, and de Falla—the quest for the real, the “dance of the earth.” Folkishness went out of fashion in the high avant-garde era, its ideal of communal wholeness compromised by the bloodthirsty nationalism of the world wars, but by century’s end it had regained its political virtue, counteracting the homogenizing force of corporate conglomerates.

  In the year 2000, the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, a descendant of Russian and Eastern European Jews, unveiled his St. Mark Passion, which trumpeted from a different station the end of European hegemony over modern composition. It opens with a barrage of Latin-American sounds: a rustling of Brazilian shakers and musical bows; spooky accordion moans, representing the voice of God; the hot tones of a chorus braying in Africanized Spanish over a soft roar of Afro-Cuban drumming. The listener is thrown into the middle of a Lenten street festival, one whose celebratory mood is filigreed by tension and dread. The work falls halfway between ritual and opera, in the manner of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. There are also mercurial minimalist canons in the manner of Steve Reich and timbral rustlings out of Luciano Berio and George Crumb. But Golijov transcends his models in repeatedly ceding creative control to his singers, players, and drummers, inviting them to improvise on given material.

  At the same time, the composer of this Passion proceeds according to a cannily controlled plan; he coaxes his sounds into a strong narrative arc and places at the climax a softly lamenting Kaddish for the man on the cross. Suddenly the language is Aramaic, the cantillation is Jewish, and the centuries have slipped away like sand.

  After Minimalism

  In 1907
, American music was almost invisible in listings of musical events in New York City. For the most part, concert life consisted of European musicians playing European composers either living or dead. One hundred years down the line, new music is omnipresent. On any given night at the height of the season, you can find up to a dozen competing new-music events in venues around the city, whether at Miller Theatre at Columbia, in Zankel Hall underneath Carnegie Hall, at downtown spaces such as the Kitchen and Roulette, or in Brooklyn warehouses. At Issue Project Room, a performance series temporarily located in an abandoned oil silo on the industrial Gowanus Canal, the composer-vocalist Joan La Barbara sings excerpts from Kenji Bunch’s electronically enhanced chamber opera Confessions of the Woman in the Dunes, inspired by Teshigahara’s movie. At Joe’s Pub, the young composer Nico Muhly performs delicate minimalist-inflected pieces with the Icelandic sound artist Valgeir Sigurbsson, who’s worked with the avant-pop star Björk. At the Stone, on Avenue C, the free-jazz saxophonist, klezmer aficionado, collage artist, and avant-garde composer John Zorn rallies all the sounds in his experience into music as coolly hectic as the city itself.

  The geography of New York—downtown and uptown, youthful and mature, rebellious and established—still serves as a convenient organizing principle for American music, although rising real-estate prices have made the notion of a cheap Manhattan loft a movie fantasy. To track the disparate activities of downtown composers, Kyle Gann has coined the term “postminimalism.” He describes it as a tonal, steady-pulsing kind of music that avoids defining itself through a controlling process, such as Reich’s phase shifting or Glass’s additive rhythm. Instead, repetition becomes a background grid on which a large variety of material can be plotted: everything from the Southern American shape-note singing in William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony to the microtonal electric-guitar soundscapes of Glenn Branca.

  Postminimalists tend also to be plugged-in composers. Each new technological advance—digital sampling, the MIDI interface for computers and synthesizers, computer music software, interactive Internet linkups—mandates a change in technique. The advent of laptop computers means that composers can carry their life’s work in a backpack, and via the Internet they can send it around the world at the touch of a button. Downtown composers also show sympathy for pop. The original minimalists revivified tonality in part by studying jazz, R & B, and early rock. Postminimalists have taken cues variously from funk, punk, heavy metal, electronic and DJ music, and hip-hop.

  In the 1980s, three composers from the Yale School of Music, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang, banded together under the name Bang on a Can. They summed up their thinking thus: “We had the simplicity, energy and drive of pop music in our ears—we’d heard it from the cradle. But we also had the idea from our classical music training that composing was exalted.” As the new century began, Gordon created a score for Bill Morrison’s film Decasia, a mind-altering cinematic collage in which pieces of archival footage melt before one’s eyes. Letting his own harmonies “decay” by way of microtonal tunings and glissandos, Gordon split the difference between minimalist transparency and modernist density, to superbly ominous effect.

  Refining his map of the musical city, Gann has introduced the category of “midtown” to cover the sizable number of composers who are still working in traditional orchestral, operatic, and chamber-music genres, their harmonies usually more tonal than not. The most successful members of this group—John Corigliano, Mark Adamo, Christopher Rouse, Joan Tower, and John Harbison, among others—have regained the confidence of mainstream classical listeners, who never quite got around to accepting Schoenberg, never mind Milton Babbitt. The challenge, as ever, is to honor the expectations of an audience weaned on Mozart without pandering or committing pastiche. A degree of wit often saves the day. Rouse’s Der gerettete Alberich, or Alberich Saved, for percussionist and orchestra, begins with the sublime final measures of Wagner’s Ring and goes on to answer the question of whatever became of Alberich, master of the Nibelungs, after the twilight of the gods. It turns out that the dwarf lord conquers the world at the head of a demonic high-school marching band playing covers of heavy-metal tunes.

  Downtown and midtown composers are alike in rejecting the prophet-in-the-wilderness, who-cares-if-you-listen mentality that prevailed after the Second World War. They often speak in terms of an atonal nightmare ending, of a melodic morning dawning. By now, members of these formerly suspect camps have achieved positions of eminence in American academia, and young composers no longer fear intellectual ostracism if they dabble in tonality.

  But the modernist impulse is by no means dead. For some years the British-born, American-based composer Brian Ferneyhough has been testing the outer limits of what players can play and listeners can hear, and he has become the somewhat unwilling figurehead for a movement known as the New Complexity. Ferneyhough may win the prize for inscribing more black dots per square inch than any composer in history: a characteristic bar of his Third String Quartet has the first violin setting forth jagged, double-stopped figures over a range of several octaves, replete with glissando, trills, and seven different dynamic markings; the second violin playing a stream of twenty-nine thirty-second notes; the viola playing a stream of thirty-three thirty-second notes; and the cello scrubbing out disjointed figures down below. Because not even the most expert performers can execute such notation precisely, it becomes a kind of planned improvisation, more akin to a free-jazz or avant-rock freak-out than to anything in the mainstream classical tradition—mutatis mutandis, a mosh pit for the mind.

  The New Complexity is not exactly new. Henry Cowell layered rhythm upon rhythm back in 1917. But the pursuit of extreme musical situations has eternal appeal. For the young composer it becomes another tough-walled refuge within a hypercommercialized culture that dictates artistic choices by way of audience surveys and focus groups. And it intersects in surprising ways with the noncommercial end of rock and electronic pop. In sticky-floored basement clubs across the country, young people compare notes on Sonic Youth and Morton Feldman, seeking the sound that will annul the norm. In the empire of noise, formal distinctions disappear, just as the gaps between continents vanish under the Arctic ice.

  After Modernism

  In Europe the long heyday of modernism continues. Hidden beneath the plaza outside the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, is the Institute for the Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music, or IRCAM, a subterranean electronic-music laboratory that opened in 1977 under the velvet-fist direction of Pierre Boulez. The mere existence of such a place, never mind its choice location, is testimony to the long-standing cultural largesse of the European welfare state, on which composers have for decades depended. Boulez formed IRCAM at the invitation of Georges Pompidou, the president of France from 1969 to 1974, and the financial outlay was huge: in the early years the institute and the allied Ensemble Intercontemporain consumed up to 70 percent of the government budget for contemporary music. Classical music may no longer be a European art, but composers from abroad almost invariably pass through Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna, or Munich at some point in their careers. They come because money is there, and the media attention, and the audience, and, perhaps most important, the continuity with the storied past. IRCAM’s address is symbolic: 1 place Igor-Stravinsky.

  The European modern-music utopia, which dates back to the founding of Darmstadt in 1946, will not last forever. In recent years, as welfarestate economies have struggled to stay afloat in the global free market, arts budgets have shrunk. European composers may soon be confronted with the interesting challenge, long familiar to American composers, of writing for a paying audience. In subtle ways this change is already under way, as younger composers modify or reject the classic avant-garde stance of the composer in opposition to society. Even Boulez has recalibrated a few of his more extreme positions. When, in 1999, he was asked why so few major works of the fifties and sixties had become repertory pieces, he blandly replied, “Well, perhaps we did
not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener.”

  Boulez’s recent music has a cool, silvery sheen. Made up of lush surfaces, rapid swirls of interior activity, and generously swooping forms, it resembles the rippling facades that architects such as Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry have devised for civic structures in the wealthy urban centers of the European Union. Boulez’s most formidable latter-day work is Répons (1980–84), which deploys various IRCAM technologies—electronic instruments, computerized sound synthesis, software for the instantaneous electronic manipulation of live sounds—to spectacular and satisfying effect. The big moment comes at the beginning of Section 1, when, after an extended instrumental introduction, bursts of electronically modified sound surge in from six separate stations that are distributed around the audience in a circle: thickly arpeggiated chords jump from one station to the next and build into a reverberating roar. On the whole, the music is closer to the ear-drenching aesthetic of Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Carré, or of later Luciano Berio works such as Coro, than to the clipped violence of Boulez’s youthful work.

  Stockhausen spent the last twenty-three years of the twentieth century—and the first three years of the twenty-first—laboring on Licht, a meta-Wagnerian cycle of seven operas, each named for a day of the week. It tells a ritualistic, symbolic story of relationships among three archetypal characters: the birth-giving Eva, the wisdom-seeking Michael, and the freedom-seeking Lucifer. The score makes extravagant demands; as of this writing, no opera house has yet succeeded in staging Wednesday, whose third scene calls for four string players to take off in helicopters. Friday requires, according to the composer’s prospectus, “twelve very different objects like rockets flying, a woman in the moon, a giant syringe moving towards a woman, a huge pencil sharpener about four meters high as a woman and a man who is a pencil pushing himself into the pencil sharpener; an enormous male raven flying around a woman nest.” In Sunday, the finale to the cycle, scents representing the days of the week are released into the audience.