Though the passage of time irrevocably obscures novelty of any kind, one of the most striking features of the avant-garde music of the 1950s and early 1960s remains its isolation, in so many respects of aim and technique, from any immediate precedent. Separation from the past became an item of belief: every feature cherished in the great Western tradition was now to be abandoned, whether by destruction, in Boulez, by blithe disregard, in Cage, or by intensive searching elsewhere, in Stockhausen. Of course, the extreme apartness of 1951–52—the pe-riod of Cage’s 4´ 33”, Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel, and Boulez’s fi rst book of Structures—was soon compromised in all kinds of ways, and rap-prochements were made: Cage returned to writing music, and Boulez and Stockhausen found themselves caught up in more continuous ways of moving through time. But making things new was still the ideal.
Boulez has consistently been the most vociferous spokesman for this position, despite his vigorous conducting activity, especially dur-ing the 1970s, within the museum of musical tradition. Writdur-ing in the middle of that decade, fanfaring the foundation of his Institut de Re-cherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, he insisted that: ‘Our age is one of persistent, relentless, almost unbearable inquiry. In its exaltation it cuts off all retreats and bans all sanctuaries;
its passion is contagious, its thirst for the unknown projects us force-fully, violently into the future. . . . Despite the skillful ruses we have cultivated in our desperate effort to make the world of the past serve our present-day needs, we can no longer elude the essential trial: that
168 Modern Music and After
of becoming an absolute part of the present, of forsaking all memory to forge a perception without precedent, of renouncing the legacies of the past, to discover yet undreamed-of territories.’1
But this is perhaps too lyrical to be true, even allowing for the fact that Boulez was hoping to justify the considerable state expenditure involved in establishing and maintaining his institution. The position is—given the replacement of a thirty-year-old’s abruptness by a fi fty-year-old’s more mannered discourse—little changed since the days of Le Marteau sans maître, except that where Boulez in the mid-1950s could plausibly feel himself to be spearheading a great musical movement, by the mid-1970s this was no longer the case, and the adherence to an old revolutionary rhetoric was to stymie both IRCAM and Boulez’s own creative endeavours. For by 1974 it had become very clear that ‘re-nouncing the legacies of the past’ was no simple matter. What about the revolutionary asceticism that was itself a legacy of the past? Am-nesia is the privilege of the young, and even by the later 1960s the new wave was growing up. As that wave broke up, as the arrow of deter-mined progress splintered, so the possibilities multiplied of touching back to what had been.
The Distant Past
The achievement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains the great sun of the Western musical solar system: the repertory that dominates performance and recording. Composers who approach it must either maintain their ironic distance, as Stravinsky did, and later Ligeti, or be content to turn into its orbit, adopt its premises and its modes of thought. The further past offers less gravitational pull—partly just because it is further off, but also partly because its forces seem to be complemented by, rather than at war with, those of our own age.
Pertinent here is Stravinsky’s progress during the 1950s: forward to Webern and Boulez, but at the same time backward to Gesualdo and to pre-Renaissance music. The more general growth of interest in ‘early music’, following behind Stravinsky by a decade or so, may be evidence of a community of thought and feeling; it has also made it possible for composers to write for instruments that had been extinct for centuries, as Kagel did in his quite un-Renaissance-sounding Musik für Renais-sance-Instrumente (1965). As for matters of compositional technique rather than instrumental means, the medieval view of rhythm as num-ber suggests comparison with the attitudes of Messiaen and of those composers who, infl uenced by him, developed rhythmic serialization in Europe: Barraqué drew attention to that in an article on rhythm, where, with no sense of incongruity, he moves directly from Machaut’s Messe
1. IRCAM press brochure (Paris, 1974), 6–7.
Of Elsewhen and Elsewhere 169
de Notre Dame to The Rite of Spring.2 Also, as Charles Wuorinen (b. 1938) pointed out, the rhythmic complexities cultivated by composers of the post-Machaut generation are such as to make Le Marteau sans maître appear quite normal.3
But these are instances of correspondence rather than infl uence.
For examples of the latter, British music of the 1950s and 1960s pro-vides the richest fi eld, perhaps for various reasons: the fact that British musicians and musicologists were taking a leading part in the rediscov-ery of early music, the fact that composers of an older generation, such as Britten and Tippett, had interested themselves in Tudor music and Purcell, the fact that musical culture in Britain had last been actively progressive in the age of Dunstable. Three composers who were fel-low students in Manchester during the early 1950s—Alexander Goehr (b. 1932), Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934), and Peter Maxwell Davies (b.
1934)—were quite aware that what they were learning from the re-cent music of Boulez and Nono had its parallels in the pages of Musica Britannica.
Davies’s concern with the further past stayed intense, and the role of pre-Baroque music in his work has been various and profound. A great many of his works are founded—as the music of the medieval and Renaissance polyphonists was founded—on fragments of plainsong;
example 36 shows an instance of this in a comparison of the opening of the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes, transposed up a semitone, with the cello solo from the fi nal scene of the composer’s opera Taverner of 1962–70. Clearly, his processes of transformation leave little kinship between the music and its seed: even in his transcriptions—and he has made many, of works by Machaut, Dunstable, Purcell, Buxtehude, and others—the original is often twisted into alien, and sometimes per-versely alien, harmonic or instrumental territory. At the simplest level, a plainsong theme may be subjected to octave displacement of its pitches,
2. Jean Barraqué, ‘Rythme et développement’, Polyphonie, 9–10 (1954), 47–73.
3. Charles Wuorinen, ‘Notes on the Performance of Contemporary Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 3/1 (1964), 10–21.
Example 36b Peter Maxwell Davies, Taverner Example 36a Victimae paschali laudes
170 Modern Music and After
melodic alteration, and a very un-chantlike rhythmic presentation, combining sixteenth-century techniques of parody with nineteenth-century variation and twentieth-nineteenth-century serialism. In the particular case from Taverner, as Stephen Arnold has pointed out,4 the plainsong serves not only as a musical source but as a symbol of resurrection by virtue of its text. (For Taverner, the Catholic composer who turns him-self into a zealous despoiler of his heritage, it is a deceptive resurrection he attains in having the White Abbot put to death.) The use of plain-song themes at once for their musical qualities and for their associated meanings is common in Davies’s music, though normally the relation-ship between chant and variant is more complex.
A counter-example is provided in Messiaen’s music. Like Davies, Messiaen was alive to the textual connotations of the melodies he used, and when he returned to explicitly religious subject matter, in Couleurs de la Cité Céleste for piano, wind, and percussion (1963), he began bringing appropriate chant melodies into his music. One instance is the alleluia for the eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Magnus Dominus, which Messiaen accepts without melodic change and integrates into his musical world by means of harmonization (in this case using his fourth mode of limited transpositions) and orchestration (for wind and bells). Because his music is essentially modal, rather than, like Davies’s, essentially chromatic, this acceptance is musically possible. But it is also spiritually essential in the music of a man whose fi rst creative effort, as he said, was ‘to express . . . the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith’.5
Davies has another standpoint. His is a music not of exposition but of questioning, even to the extent of negation—negation that can be musically effected by the gradual melodic transformation of a melody into its precise inversion,6 and that stands behind his abiding concern with themes of betrayal. In his dramatic works, betrayal is staged: Tav-erner betrays himself in extinguishing what was good and creative in his personality; the protagonist in Vesalii icones for dancer, cellist, and quintet (1969) betrays the image of Christ he has presented by turning, fi nally, into a vision of Antichrist, cavorting to a foxtrot. Outside the theatrical context, music itself can be betrayed by means of this sort of parody—the parody of distortion and mockery, rather than the expres-sively neutral parody of elaboration conducted in Renaissance masses.
Many of Davies’s earlier works are parodies of parodies, in that they are based on polyphonic pieces themselves based on plainsongs:
examples include the wind sextet Alma redemptoris mater (1957) after a Dunstable motet, the String Quartet (1961) and other works linked in
4. Stephen Arnold, ‘The Music of Taverner’, Tempo, 101 (1972), 20–39.
5. Claude Samuel, Olivier Messiean: Music and Color (Portland, Oreg., 1964), 20.
6. See Arnold, ‘Music of Taverner’.
Of Elsewhen and Elsewhere 171 some way to the Monteverdi Vespers, and a larger family of composi-tions derived from the Benedictus of Taverner’s Gloria Tibi Trinitas mass—a family including not only the opera Taverner but also two orchestral fantasias (1962 and 1964) and the Seven In Nomine for cham-ber ensemble (1963–65). In these works, Davies’s parody is to a large degree secret and, for that reason, not expressed, though the music in other respects may be fi ercely expressive, in ways that strike back to Mahler and Schoenberg. In pieces from the late 1960s, however, par-ody becomes overt and takes on its modern sense, dramatized in the theatre works (such as Taverner and Vesalii icones), but no less disturb-ing in orchestral and chamber works, where it may be felt to infect the whole substance of the music.
Davies has described his ‘foxtrot for orchestra’ St Thomas Wake (1969) as being based on ‘three levels of musical experience—that of the original sixteenth century “St Thomas Wake” pavan, played on the harp, the level of the foxtrots derived from this, played by a foxtrot band, and the level of my “real” music, also derived from the pavan, played by the symphony orchestra.’7 But there remain the questions—
as evidently Davies’s scare quotes show he recognizes—as to how ‘real’
his ‘real’ music can be, and why we should accept one level of music as being more ‘real’ than the foxtrots that crop up in so many of his works of this period (see also, besides Vesalii icones, the Fantasia on a Ground and Two Pavans after Purcell), and that may even be felt to identify those works. There is no obvious reason why his post-Schoenberg style of endless development should be presumed to have a ‘reality’ not shared with the other guises his music was capable of taking—or why, to look at it the other way, that style should not also be interpreted as a man-ner of pastiche. These uncertainties Davies seemed to be acknowledg-ing in concludacknowledg-ing his Second Taverner Fantasia—which powerfully en-shrines the Schoenbergian weight and drift of argumentation—with a woodwind dispatch that swiftly and grotesquely parodies half an hour of searching, string-led music. The pathos and musical tension accu-mulated through a long and troubled development are simply cast aside, and at the same time redoubled by being cast aside, because now the foundations are under attack: the music is questioning its own as-sumptions, even its own honesty.
His bigger orchestral work of this period, Worldes Blis (1966–69), Davies has presented as a recuperation, ‘a conscious attempt to reinte-grate the shattered and scattered fragments of my creative persona’.8 This is again an immense musical edifi ce founded on given material—
a medieval English song—but now there is no separation of levels and 7. Programme note for the fi rst performance of Vesalii icones, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on December 9, 1969; the note is reprinted in Paul Griffi ths, Peter Maxwell Davies (London, 1981), 152–54.
8. Ibid., 150.
172 Modern Music and After
no blatant autodestruction: the quest for reintegration imposes rather a steady progress in which constant self-interrogation answers itself. As Stephen Pruslin has observed: ‘The main allegro pays only lip-service to closure and after the transition the music careens through a whole series of sections, all of them unclosed. The effect is that of amassing a series of left-hand parentheses without bothering about the correspond-ing right-hand ones, so that one builds up a large “structural overdraft”.’9 Where the Second Taverner Fantasia had presented a process of growth whose premises were alarmingly shaken at the end, Worldes Blis ad-vances in momentous instability, and only in conclusion comes over-whelmingly to affi rmation. Its thirteenth-century source, speaking of bitter resignation to the vanity of the world, seems to have offered not only musical stimulus but also a poetic metaphor for this harsh vision.
(The Imaginary Past)
In avoiding the close, familiar past of the central tradition, avant-garde techniques lent themselves to summoning not only the future but also prehistory, as foreshadowed in Varèse’s incantatory Ecuatorial. There are many examples of such hypothetical musical archaeology in the works of Xenakis, such as his score for the Oresteia, fi rst performed in 1966, and Scelsi, whose Uaxactumfor chorus and orchestra, redolent of ancient Mexico, dates from the same year. Another composer fasci-nated by lost musical cultures was Maurice Ohana (1913–92), who spent his adult life in Paris but had been brought up in Morocco and Spain. Between 1966 and 1976 he devoted himself almost exclusively to a sequence of magical works whose titles all start with ‘S’. Among them,Sacral d’Ilx (1976) is for the trio Debussy planned for his fourth sonata, comprising oboe, horn, and harpsichord, a grouping Barraqué included in his Concerto and to which Boulez alluded in Domaines, where the harpsichord is updated into an electric guitar. Ohana char-acteristically uses estranged sonorities—third-tones and ‘multiphon-ics’, or chords produced by means of particular fi ngerings—as evoca-tive of strangeness, while chantlike melodic lines and a percussive use of the harpsichord suggest mysterious ceremonial. (‘Ilx’ is the ancient name for the Spanish town of Elche, an important site of Phoenician settlement.)
The Distant or Not So Distant East
Davies’s engagement with medieval and Renaissance music, and with techniques of parody, may perhaps be a legitimation (a legitimation according to Boulezian criteria that structure be articulable but not
ar-9. Stephen Pruslin, ‘Returns and Departures: Recent Maxwell Davies’, Tempo, 113 (1975), 22–28.
Of Elsewhen and Elsewhere 173 ticulate) for a composer whose musical business is essentially modern and Romantic: the violence with which he has treated his source mate-rial (most dramatically in the arrangements of his ‘expressionist’ period, such as the Seven In Nomine and the Fantasia on a Ground and Two Pa-vans) may almost suggest as much, since the effect is not so much to cherish as to dismember. It is from a modern, even modernist, view-point that retroversion becomes a cause for anxiety; those who are determined to move forward have most to lose by looking back.
Composers disinclined to progress, though, risk nothing: found ma-terials for them are objects requiring placement, not subjects demand-ing consideration. Hence the very different tone of Messiaen’s appro-priation of medieval material, and his ability to make use of materials from other places, as well as other times, with the same combination of care and detachment: the Indian rhythmic fi gures he found in an en-cyclopedia, or the gamelanlike metallophone section he incorporated in the orchestra of Turangalîla and many later scores, or the complete tradition copied into the ‘Gagaku’ movement of Sept Haïkaï. Messiaen’s imitations regard Asian music (and also avian music) as closer to the timelessness of paradise, and it is perhaps the lack in such music of post-Renaissance Europe’s manifold dynamisms (harmonic, metric, formal) that is responsible for its claim on so many composers since the abandonment or destruction of those dynamic principles became an aim around 1945. It was no accident that Messiaen, open to non-European music, should have been the most prestigious European composition teacher from the 1950s to the 1980s, or that non-Western composers should then have begun to contribute signifi cantly to what had hith-erto been a predominantly Western tradition.
In Japan, To¯ru Takemitsu (b. 1930) showed quite explicitly how close European and U.S. composers had come, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to oriental ways of considering time as unthrusted blank space, of accommodating the unpredictable, and of attuning art to na-ture. His solo piece Piano Distance (1961), for example, has connec-tions with Boulez’s Third Sonata and second book of Structures in its feeling for resonance, and with Cage in its inscription of sound calli-grams on silence. Other works of this radical period include Ring for fl ute, guitar, and lute (also 1961), whose four movements can be played in any order, with a graphically scored improvisation interpolated, sev-eral electronic pieces, and—following a meeting with Cage in 1964—
happenings.November Steps (1967) combined a Western orchestra with Eastern soloists (on shakuhachi and biwa), but marked a withdrawal from experiment back to developing the francophone style of Take-mitsu’s earliest works. Much of his later music is close to Messiaen, though with a gentler, more yielding character.
Takemitsu’s acceptance in the West—where his music has been per-formed far more than that of any other Asian musician—may have to do not only with his music’s quality but also with Western expectations
174 Modern Music and After
of Asian art as serene, passive, decorative, and subsidiary, since it re-mains diffi cult for even the most sympathetic Western observers to separate a real appreciation of Asian art from an idolization of stereo-type, or for even the most sympathetic Western composers to accept Asian music on its own terms rather than draw it into Western con-texts. Equally, there must be problems for Asian musicians who seek, as Takemitsu sought, a particularly Asian understanding of what remain fundamentally Western media, such as the orchestra or twelve-note equal temperament.
Some intriguing if innocent, perhaps insolent, responses to these questions came from Lou Harrison, who, like his teacher Cowell be-fore, was excited by the variety of musical cultures he found around him in San Francisco and kept himself open to learning non-Western instruments and traditions, which he would not so much incorporate as advance towards with whatever Western means he chose to keep (notably the notions of composer and score), and on which he would also draw in gently undermining Western privileges. From reading Partch’s Genesis of a Music he came to prefer just intonation, and in the early 1970s he and William Colvig, his life partner, constructed an
‘American gamelan’ of justly tuned metallophones, which he used in, for example, La Koro Sutro (‘The Heart Sutra’, translated into Esperanto) with chorus and his Suite with solo violin, works written in 1972 and 1974 respectively.
Harrison’s music exhibits a rare humility in the face of non- Western traditions. More generally the ideas, ever prone to wishful interpreta-tion, have fl own faster than any deep acquaintance with traditions and instruments, and fusions, whether made by Western or non-Western composers, have had to take place on Western territory, using Western media. The point was made satirically in reverse by Kagel in his Exotica (1971), which depends precisely on the lack of familiarity and exper-tise that six European musicians will bring to a collection of at least sixty non-European instruments. When Boulez and Stockhausen took up ideals of instrumentation from Asian or African music, they did so, like Messiaen, with European ensembles, as in the former’s Le Marteau sans maître and Improvisations sur Mallarmé or the latter’s Kreuzspiel and Refrain.
The possibility that non-Western artistic practices and philosophies will unsettle Western music more profoundly remains for the future, however much noise there has been. Even Cage, in his pursuit of a zen music of nonintention, could not escape Western conditions of musical communication (the score, the rehearsal, the concert, the recording), let alone Western notions of artist and oeuvre. With other composers, even the attempt is doubtful. Boulez, for example, has recorded that, when he fi rst heard examples of Asian and African music on records, he was struck not only by their beauty but also ‘by the concepts behind these elaborate works of art. Nothing, I found, was based on the
“mas-Of Elsewhen and Elsewhere 175 terpiece”, on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure. In these civilizations music is a way of existence in the world of which it forms an integral part and with which it is indis-solubly linked—an ethical rather than simply an aesthetic category.’10 This insistence on music as an active mode of being in the world is arguably a legacy more from Artaud than from Messiaen, but by this point in Boulez’s career (the article was fi rst published in 1960) there was a contradiction, or at least a tension, between such infl ammatory pronouncements and the man’s musical routines. (That contradiction or tension was most famously exposed in 1967, when in an interview withDer Spiegel11 he called for opera houses to be blown up, while at the same time he must have been preparing to conduct Parsifal at Bayreuth the next summer and Pelléas at Covent Garden the following year.) The Third Piano Sonata, which provided the occasion for this article, surely was intended as a ‘masterpiece’, and a masterpiece indeed by virtue of—not despite—its innovation in respecting ‘the “fi -nite” quality of western art, with its closed circle, . . . while introducing the element of “chance” from the open circle of oriental art’.12 Besides, this talk of chance and openness suggests that Boulez was really talking about Cage rather than about anything directly from the east, which might explain the bleak decisiveness of his last statements on Eastern music, in another interview of 1967: ‘The music of Asia and India is to be admired because it has reached a stage of perfection, and it is this perfection that interests me. But otherwise the music is dead.’13
Quite apart from the problem that Cage appeared to have taken out rights in music east of the Indus, Boulez seems to have been caught between a fascination with oriental art and a horror of imitation or even conspicuous reference. The things that captivated him in music from outside the cultivated European tradition were sounds and the sense of time: suppleness and fl uidity of pulse, hospitality to improvisa-tion, slowness and length, a comparative unimportance of the end. In publicly introducing his second Improvisation sur Mallarmé in 1960, for instance, he remarked how he had ‘heard Andean peasants in Peru playing harps with a most extraordinary sonority and learned from them the use of the instrument’s highest notes and a variety of “dampings”’,14 while the third Improvisation—at least in the version that was current between 1959 and the mid-1980s—clearly shows both kinds of indebt-edness: to exotic sounds in its clattering heterophonies for homoge-neous percussion ensembles (of two xylophones, three harps, etc) and
10. Pierre Boulez, ‘“Sonate, que me veux-tu?”’, Orientations, 145.
11. In No. 40 of that year.
12. Pierre Boulez, ‘Alea’, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship (Oxford and New York, 1991), 35.
13. Boulez, Orientations, 421.
14. Ibid., 158.