MSM CPP Survey EC 1. New Beginnings “The destruction, havoc, grief, and misery felt across the world — and the widespread hopes for a new social order, and therefore a new culture — demanded not just reconstruction but an alternate paradigm.” Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After, 1.

New Tools: Technology

Pierre Schaeffer Etude aux chemins de fer (1948) Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949-50) Etude violette (1948) Etude noire (1948) Diapason Concertino (1948) Bilude (1979)

“So these were the three circumstances that compelled me to experiment in music: I was involved in music; I was working with turntables (then with tape-recorders); I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, ‘Maybe I can find something different… maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.’ Seeing that no-one knew what to do anymore with DoReMi, maybe we had to look outside that. Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi… In other words, I wasted my life.” Pierre Schaeffer with Tim Hodgkinson. An Interview with Pierre Schaeffer.

Halim El-Dabh The Expression of Zaar (aka The Wire Recorder Piece) (1944) Symphonies in Sonic Vibration-Spectrum No. 1

“I’ve always been interested in zaar, particularly since it’s a women-only ceremony… Women are the center of our civilization… [The Wire Recorder Piece] was all women and it was all chanting. I wanted to find the inner sound, that vibration that’s always necessary for transcendence. I eliminated the fundamental tones of the harmony by changing the voltage — it changes the quality of the music, it seeks another quality in the voice, the hidden material, the inner part of the voice. That’s what the whole idea of electronic music is. You have a recording and you go inside the recording to find the hidden meaning.” Maha ElNabawi, Media Masr (http://www.madamasr.com/sections/culture/‘music-permeates- everything’).

John Cage Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952) Williams Mix (1952/53) MSM CPP Survey EC

WILLIAMS MIX (EXCERPT)

“I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD.” Cage, Future of Music: Credo.

Vladimir Ussachevsky Sonic Contours (1952)

Otto Luening Fantasy in Space (1952) MSM CPP Survey EC

New Goals: Total Organization (Withdrawing the Self 1)

Boulez: “Structure: one of the key words of our time.”

Olivier Messiaen Mode de valeurs et d’intensités for piano (1949)

Stockhausen: “fantastic music of the stars… [single notes] existing for themselves in complete freedom… and formulated individually in considerable isolation from each other.” K. H. Wörner, Stockhausen: Life and Work (London, 1973), 61.

Karel Goeyvaerts Sonata for two pianos (1950-51)

“You know I want to arrive at a music where everything — absolutely everything — is contained in one fundamental generating idea. The pitch, the duration, the intensity, the density, the timbre and the attack are subjected to a general synthetic number with its subdivisions… The whole thing appears as something immobile, static, which is, so to say, the analysis of the structure of ‘Being’, its adaptation to time.” Goeyvaerts to Barraqué. Paul Griffiths, The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué (Rochester, N.Y. 2003), 32).

Karlheinz Stockhausen Kreuzspiel for piano, percussion trio, 2 winds (1951)

“the new ‘thorough-organized’ music demanded a new kind of ‘meditative’ listening: ‘one stays in the music… one needs nothing before or after in order to perceive the individual now (the individual sound)’… The process enacted in the music is a way of making it, not a way of hearing it.” Stockhausen, Texte, i (Cologne, 1963), 21

Pierre Boulez Structures 1a (1952) Structures 1b (1952)

“I wanted to use the potential of a given material to find out how far automatism in musical relationships would go, with individual invention appearing only in some very simple forms of disposition — in the matter of densities, for example.” Pierre Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège (London, 1977), 55.

“The virtue of automatism, for him, was that it provided an escape from tastes and learned techniques: there was no danger, for instance, of imitating past ways of shaping melodic ideas, because the shaping was done by the scheme.” Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After, (Oxford, 2010), 45. MSM CPP Survey EC

STRUCTURES 1A (EXCERPT)

Contrast: Luigi Nono Polifonica–mondia–ritmica for 5 winds, piano, percussion (1951) Epitaffio for Lorca for soloists, chorus, orchestra (1952-53)

“Pointillism is contrary to my technique of sound relations.”

Milton Babbitt Three Compositions for Piano (1947)

“Babbitt’s ability [is] to make everything in his compositions serve a constructive function, and to have a reason for everything. This no doubt reflects his cast of mind, but it may be symptomatic, too, of a postwar distrust of irrational genius (whose effects had been witnessed), and it was a position that gained support from the success of Schenkerian analysis in the United States. If tonal masterpieces could be shown to be full of structure unsuspected by the naive listener, it might well be possible that consciously evolved serial structure, though not identifiable by the unaided ear, would nevertheless contribute to music being perceived as homogenous and purposeful.” Griffiths, 67. Griffiths, 68. Objective Expressive

Serial/polyphonic Babbitt Boulez

Anti-polyphonic Cage Messiaen MSM CPP Survey EC

New Goals: Chance - Indeterminacy (Withdrawing the Self 2)

Morton Feldman Projections (1. for solo cello, 2. for flute, trumpet, piano, violin and cello, 3. for 2 pianos, 4. for violin and piano, 5. for 3 flutes, trumpet, 2 pianos and 3 cellos) (1951)

“My desire here was not to ‘compose’ but to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric that had no place here.” Feldman, Predeterminate/Indeterminate (1965), Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: 2000), 35.

“Up to now the various elements of music (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc.) were only recognizable in terms of their formal relationship to each other. As controls were given up, one finds that these elements lose their initial, inherent identity…. Only by ‘unfixing’ the elements traditionally used to construct a piece could the sounds exist in themselves – not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.” Feldman, 34-35

“One evening Morton Feldman said that when he composed he was dead… The ego no longer blocks action. A fluency obtains which is characteristic of nature.” Cage, Silence, 37.

John Cage Concerto for prepared piano (1951) Music of Changes (1952)

“[One could] make a composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and ‘traditions’ of the art. The sounds enter the time-space centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their 360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration. Value judgments are not in the nature of this work as regards either composition, performance, or listening. MSM CPP Survey EC

The idea of relation (the idea: 2) being absent, anything (the idea: 1) may happen. A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.” Cage, 59.

“Nonintention was itself an intention, and what allows us to go on speaking of Cage as a composer after the Concerto is the unparalleled determination with which he pursued that intention through an extraordinary variety of ways and means.” Grffiths, 27.

“The Music of Changes is an object more inhuman than human, since chance operations brought it into being. The fact that these things that constitute it, through only sounds, have come to control a human being, the performer, gives the work the alarming aspect of a Frankenstein monster. The situation is of course characteristic of Western music, the masterpieces of which are its most frightening examples, which when concerned with humane communication only move over from Frankenstein monster to Dictator.” Cage, 36.

Earle Brown December 1952

“I continue to seem to be a very performance-oriented composer, which is to say I am very, very intrigued and interested in the performance itself. I very much like conducting and rehearsing the music. I am not so much interested in the piece ultimately being a monument as I am in the piece existing as a kind of field of the MSM CPP Survey EC

activity of music-making which can exist between sympathetic and reasonable kinds of people.” Earle Brown, On December 1952. American Music, Vol. 26, No. 1 (University of Illinois Press: 2008).

DECEMBER 1952