Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 7

The other major figure of the European avant-garde to appear next, around 1952-53, was Karlheinz Stockhausen, of whom we heard and saw quite a lot. He had a wider range of musical interests and curiosity than Boulez and a considerable capacity for absorbing and turning to his own use new musical ideas, especially those coming from the U.S. It was Stockhausen who first helped arrange for Cage and Tudor to come to present our music in Europe in 1954.

In an article called “A Life without Bach and Beethoven” (written in 1964) Feldman spoke of the “frontier atmosphere” of the early 50s art and music scene. This feeling of new territory opening up came shortly after the end of World War II. The older modernists were long established, if not always widely loved. By the 30s some composers in the U.S. were, in a counter movement, not only identifying their work more directly as American but taking also a turn towards a more or less left-wing populism. Both the experimentalist Henry Cowell, for instance, and the traditionalist Aaron Copland, along with many others, were involved with the Composers Collective of New York which was devoted to discussions about and the writing of left political songs. (It was at about this time that Jackson Pollock was studying painting with Thomas Hart Benton.) All this went into a holding pattern for the duration of the war; most populism became patriotic support of the war effort. Then, by 1950, the cold war was well under way. President Truman’s aggressive anti-communist “security program” was started in 1947; McCarthyism was firmly settled in. Postwar artistic energies were certainly let loose. We had a feeling in music that the established composers were spinning their wheels, caught in one or the other of the post-Schoenberg or post-Stravinsky camps, in serialism or neo-classicism. It felt like a time in which to make new beginnings. But not politically. We might, in retrospect, be thought to have been involved in a kind of utopian response, a resistant withdrawal from the political world around us, but, as best I can remember, we simply paid no attention to it. Being a-political or keeping politically under cover was the norm at that time.

There was also a near hopeless situation with regard to money and public performance of the music. Only the dancers, who were already mostly very poor, paid for newly composed music. There was no public arts funding. Cage was tireless in his efforts to raise private money for concerts, and he just managed to organize one or two a year in New York along with a Cunningham recital. All contemporary music was well at the margins of New York concert life, and we were somewhere outside of those margins. (I did hear in 1950 Cage’s String Quartet (1949-50) in a concert with a wide variety of 20th century music, sponsored by, I think, the League of Composers, at the old Miller theater at Columbia; and I took part in another a year later, in a performance of his Imaginary Landscape No. 4, for 12 radios. Cage then gave up this kind of association to organize our concerts, in which, because of Tudor, he was also able to include the most recent work from Europe of Boulez, Stockhausen and others.)