Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 6

Two more items of historical context:

Around 1950 the contemporary music establishment centered on Aaron Copland and included a generation of composers who had emerged in the 1930s as more or less “native,” composers like Roy Harris, Samuel Barber or David Diamond. Others, like Walter Piston, William Schuman or Roger Sessions, were academically based. Sessions, along with Milton Babbitt (both at Princeton), tended to a harder-edged, more abstract music, and Babbitt became the most distinguished and influential indigenous proponent of serial music in the U.S. Elliott Carter’s newly complex music with its intricately elaborated rhythmic and pitch schemes was just emerging, notably with the first String Quartet in 1950-5l. The great experimental individualists, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow, were all but invisible in the background.

Of more importance for us were the emerging European avant-garde composers. Cage had become close to Pierre Boulez during a stay in Paris in 1949 and was much impressed by the complexity and forcefulness of Boulez’s early music and the vigor and edge of his thinking. Boulez was attracted by the new sound of Cage’s percussion and prepared piano music and by his liveliness of mind. (In 1951 Cage arranged for me to visit Boulez while I was on a trip to Europe. For a week Boulez generously showed me his work and looked at mine, and we talked about developments in New York and Paris – the latter few, apart from Boulez’s own work and recent work, especially on rhythm, of Messiaen, who had been Boulez’s teacher.) The closeness of Boulez and Cage did not survive the latter’s turn to the use of chance operations in composing and Boulez’s absolute conviction that total serialism (the extension of twelve-tone procedures, in their strict form, from pitch to the other parameters of sound – duration, amplitude, timbre and articulation) was the only way of composing.

This totalizing micro-management of sound would not have been usable for the inherently indeterminate sound complexes of percussion and prepared piano. The most notable effect of Boulez on Cage, as David Tudor who played the music of both observed, could be heard in Cage’s piano piece Music of Changes in 1951, by far the most complex music he had so far written (this was partly because he knew Tudor would find a way to play it), a music including extremes of density and force, and requiring in its choice of pitch configurations a systematic use of the chromatic twelve tones. Un-Boulezian were the occasional uses of noise (striking the piano body, slamming the piano lid down), the appearance of extended spaces of silence and a general feeling of static equilibrium. And of course Cage’s use of chance procedures to determine how all the various parameters of the sound and the durations of silences actually came together. On the other hand, this anatomizing of separate sound parameters again followed Boulez’s example. That the piece of Cage’s with the most Boulezian elements should have been put together by the chance means that Boulez most strongly rejected is both an irony and an illustration of something later observed: that the extremes of total musical organization and the radical subjection of the musical material to randomness could emerge at something very like the same place.

One could see the linking idea in a kind of organicism, that is, in the case of the Europeans, the notion that all aspects of the sound material should be integrated through internal relationships (thus, in a given piece, the 12-tone pitch organization would allow the pitch of every note to be exactly accounted for; this was extended, analogously – an analogy whose logic was not too closely examined, to durations, dynamics, articulation and instrumental color). It was thought that a musical composition should be (as Aristotle had said of a tragic drama) like a living being all of whose parts related to one another and had a function in its totality. Cage a few years before had embraced the classical Indian idea that art should imitate nature in her manner of operation. In any case, both the Europeans and Cage were thinking of music as something other than the self-expression of the legacy of romanticism. Though one could say that the Europeans were concerned with self-assertion, if in a quite abstract way, while Cage was concerned with self-abnegation. That’s what the chance operations were for. They were also, I think, a kind of heuristic device, a way of discovering sounds and combinations of sound one would not otherwise have thought of. The Europeans’ idea seemed hermetic, organic only in the self-enclosed world of the piece itself, and it applied only to the composition of the piece. The Americans were more pragmatic. Performance was regarded as an essential component of the music. Cage insisted that a piece was not finished until it had been performed. Its life was bound up with the contingencies of performance and performance situations, including the presence of unpredictable sounds or noises from the environment. The music would be organic in the sense that it was to be a part of the world around it.

As for Feldman’s and my work, by the end of 1951, Boulez had dismissed it as too simple and naive.