The State of Contemporary Music
Today’s practitioners of what we as soon as called “modern day” music are finding themselves to be abruptly alone. A bewildering backlash is set against any music creating that demands the disciplines and tools of investigation for its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It as soon as was that one could not even method a big music school in the US unless properly prepared to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When one hears now of professors shamelessly studying scores of Respighi in order to extract the magic of their mass audience appeal, we know there is a crisis. This crisis exists in the perceptions of even the most educated musicians. Composers currently seem to be hiding from particular tricky truths regarding the creative course of action. They have abandoned their search for the tools that will support them make seriously striking and challenging listening experiences. I believe that is for the reason that they are confused about numerous notions in modern day music generating!
1st, let’s examine the attitudes that are necessary, but that have been abandoned, for the improvement of specific disciplines in the creation of a lasting modern day music. This music that we can and ought to generate supplies a crucible in which the magic inside our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our extremely evolution in creative thought. It is this generative course of action that had its flowering in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, quite a few emerging musicians had develop into enamored of the wonders of the fresh and fascinating new planet of Stockhausen’s integral serialism that was then the rage. There seemed limitless excitement, then. It seemed there would be no bounds to the inventive impulse composers could do anything, or so it seemed. At the time, most composers hadn’t seriously examined serialism meticulously for its inherent limitations. But it seemed so fresh. However, it soon became apparent that it was Stockhausen’s exciting musical approach that was fresh, and not so substantially the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the solutions he employed had been born of two unique considerations that in the end transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns and, in particular, the idea that treats pitch and timbre as special situations of rhythm. (Stockhausen referred to the crossovers as “contacts”, and he even entitled one particular of his compositions that explored this realm Kontakte.) These gestures, it turns out, are actually independent from serialism in that they can be explored from distinctive approaches.
The most spectacular approach at that time was serialism, although, and not so a lot these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this pretty strategy — serialism — nevertheless, that right after having seemingly opened so lots of new doors, germinated the really seeds of contemporary music’s personal demise. The system is highly prone to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it tends to make composition simple, like following a recipe. In serial composition, the significantly less thoughtful composer seemingly can divert his/her soul away from the compositional process. Inspiration can be buried, as method reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies one particular experiences from required partnership with one’s essences (inside the thoughts and the soul — in a sense, our familiars) can be discarded conveniently. All is rote. All is compartmentalized. For a long time this was the honored method, long hallowed by classroom teachers and young composers-to-be, alike, at least in the US. Soon, a sense of sterility emerged in the musical atmosphere many composers started to examine what was taking location.
The replacement of sentimental romanticism with atonal music had been a crucial step in the extrication of music from a torpid cul-de-sac. A music that would closet itself in banal self-indulgence, such as what seemed to be occurring with romanticism, would decay. Here came a time for exploration. The new alternative –atonality — arrived. It was the fresh, if seemingly harsh, antidote. Arnold Schonberg had saved music, for the time getting. Even so, shortly thereafter, Schonberg created a critical tactical faux pas. The ‘rescue’ was truncated by the introduction of a technique by which the newly freed course of action could be subjected to handle and order! I have to express some sympathy here for Schönberg, who felt adrift in the sea of freedom offered by the disconnexity of atonality. Massive types depend upon some sense of sequence. For beat for sale of ordering was necessary. Was serialism a excellent answer? I’m not so particular it was. Its introduction supplied a magnet that would attract all these who felt they necessary explicit maps from which they could develop patterns. By the time Stockhausen and Boulez arrived on the scene, serialism was touted as the remedy for all musical difficulties, even for lack of inspiration!
Pause for a minute and think of two pieces of Schonberg that bring the problem to light: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912 – pre-serial atonality) and the Suite, Op. 29 (1924 serial atonality). Pierrot… appears so essential, unchained, virtually lunatic in its special frenzy, although the Suite sounds sterile, dry, forced. In the latter piece the excitement got lost. This is what serialism seems to have done to music. However the focus it received was all out of proportion to its generative power. Boulez when even proclaimed all other composition to be “useless”! If the ‘disease’ –serialism –was negative, a single of its ‘cures’ –no cost chance –was worse. In a series of lectures in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1958, John Cage managed to prove that the outcome of music written by chance implies differs extremely small from that written using serialism. Nonetheless, likelihood seemed to leave the public bewildered and angry. Likelihood is possibility. There is absolutely nothing on which to hold, nothing at all to guide the mind. Even highly effective musical personalities, such as Cage’s, typically have trouble reining in the raging dispersions and diffusions that possibility scatters, seemingly aimlessly. But, once again, quite a few schools, notably in the US, detected a sensation in the making with the entry of free opportunity into the music scene, and indeterminacy became a new mantra for everyone interested in making some thing, anything, so lengthy as it was new.
I believe parenthetically that a single can concede Cage some quarter that a single may possibly be reluctant to cede to other individuals. Typically chance has develop into a citadel of lack of discipline in music. Too usually I’ve seen this outcome in university classes in the US that ‘teach ‘found (!)’ music. The rigor of discipline in music producing must by no means be shunted away in search of a music that is ‘found’, rather than composed. Nonetheless, in a most peculiar way, the energy of Cage’s character, and his surprising sense of rigor and discipline seem to rescue his ‘chance’ art, exactly where other composers basically flounder in the sea of uncertainty.
Nonetheless, as a option to the rigor mortis so cosmically bequeathed to music by serial controls, possibility is a extremely poor stepsister. The Cageian composer who can make possibility music speak to the soul is a uncommon bird indeed. What seemed missing to numerous was the perfume that tends to make music so wonderfully evocative. The ambiance that a Debussy could evoke, or the fright that a Schonberg could invoke (or provoke), seemed to evaporate with the modern day technocratic or no cost-spirited approaches of the new musicians. Iannis Xenakis jolted the music planet with the potent remedy in the guise of a ‘stochastic’ music. As Xenakis’ work would evolve later into excursions into connexity and disconnexity, giving a template for Julio Estrada’s Continuum, the path toward re-introducing energy, beauty and fragrance into sound became clear. All this in a ‘modernist’ conceptual method!