Ghosts in the Machine the Making of European Serialism, 1945–1955
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Ghosts in the Machine The Making of European Serialism, 1945–1955 Max Owen Erwin Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Leeds School of Music December 2019 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. 3 Acknowledgments It is typical in a work of this length and involvement that numerous individuals make extremely significant contributions which nevertheless fail to pass the threshold required for legal authorship. In deference to a recurring theme in this work, I would like to proceed by acknowledging these individuals systematically. First of all, there are those whose professional obligations necessitated at least degree of oversight on this project – these would include Martin Iddon and Scott McLaughlin, my supervisors, and Matthew Pritchard and Mic Spencer, the examiners for my transfer. All of those involved went above and beyond, and their plentiful feedback helped to make this study what it is. Next, there are those scholars who lent their expertise to various facets of this project, including Gianmario Borio, Seth Brodsky, Georgina Born, Pascal Decroupet, Lois Fitch, Christopher Fox, Björn Heile, Ian Pace, Lauren Redhead, Herman Sabbe, and Derek Scott. I should especially single out Mark Delaere and Laurent Feneyrou, who provided me with copies of their scholarship which was either unpublished or difficult to find. For translation assistance, I am grateful to Ine Vanoeveren for augmenting my very shaky Dutch, Julien Malaussena for augmenting my pedestrian French, and Wieland Hoban for augmenting my formidable yet imperfect German. Julien also acted in situ as my translator in numerous conversations with the composer Michel Fano; I am in their debt for choosing to spend such an immeasurably fascinating time talking to me. I am further thankful for the support of my peers both within West Yorkshire and without, including Nigel McBride, Celeste Oram, Heather Roche, Oliver Thurley, Monika Voithofer, Kathryn Williams, and particularly Sam Ridout, who all had to endure more discussions of the esoteric byways of serialism than would be expected from normal friendships. Not that the above didn’t also have to deal with this, but at least that was part of their job. I am further thankful to my parents for their tireless support and encouragement. Subsequently there is the matter of financial acknowledgements. I am very grateful indeed to the University of Leeds for providing me with a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship, without which this project would have been impossible. I am also thankful to the Royal Musical Association and the School of Music for travel grants which allowed me to disseminate research from this project at international conferences. Finally, I absolutely would not have been able to undertake and conclude this work without Maria, to whom I dedicate it with love. 4 Abstract This study demonstrates how a particular discourse was adopted in Western Europe in the early 1950s to explicate musical practices of the avant-garde. Developed by Theodor W. Adorno, René Leibowitz, and Herbert Eimert, this discourse presented New Music as the universalisation of formal techniques which, these theorists argued, demonstrated the most advanced, unflinching engagement with the objective historical condition of musical material. The result, so the story goes, was that young generation of composers broke with the past in toto to write a rigorously anti-intuitive music inspired solely by the work of Anton Webern: the Darmstadt School. At the point of writing, the inadequacies and outright fabrications of this discourse have been repeatedly detailed by an increasingly rich body of scholarship. But this discourse nevertheless continues to ground the available historical understanding of New Music of the post-war era. In an effort to discover the reasons for its remarkable longevity, this study scrutinises this discourse with a particular attention to how it explicates the practices of composers it describes. Through this analysis, it becomes clear that this discourse is not so much concerned with composition proper but rather with the universalisation of technical processes. The question, then, becomes which practices supplied such techniques that were universalised as the ‘Darmstadt School’, and at what cost? Accordingly, this study also evaluates works of ‘total’ serialism – those of now-marginal composers such as Karel Goeyvaerts and Michel Fano – within an alternative, self-sufficient tradition, thereby describing how such an avant-garde was constructed on the aesthetic foundations of composers and practices which were excluded from it. 5 Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 9 Chapter 1: From Schoenberg to Darmstadt ………………………………………………………… 24 Chapter 2: From Schoenberg to Webern; from Leibowitz to Messiaen …………………… 56 Chapter 3: From Machaut to Webern ………………………………………………………………… 76 Chapter 4: Webern Remains (und Eimert ist auch dabei) ...….….………….………………… 174 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 200 Bibliography ……………………………….………………….……………………………………………… 214 Appendix A: Modern edition of Étude for 15 instruments by Michel Fano ……………… 224 6 List of Illustrations 3.1: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Drei Lieder, opening bars of ‘Der Rebell’ ………….…………. 96 3.2: Jean Barraqué, Melos, third movement, ‘Entrée de la Peinture’, bars 26–28 …...…… 102 3.3: Karel Goeyvaerts, row forms in ‘Prolégomènes’, Second Violin Concerto ……….…. 103 3.4: Karel Goeyvaerts, Sonata for Two Pianos, cross in central movements ……………… 106 3.5: Karel Goeyvaerts, Sonata for Two Pianos, heptachords in central movements ……. 107 3.6: Karel Goeyvaerts, Sonata for Two Pianos, presentation scheme of heptachords …. 107 3.7: Karel Goeyvaerts, Sonata for Two Pianos, formal outline of second movement ….. 108 3.8: Presentation scheme of stimmtauch technique in early motets ………………………….. 112 3.9: Karel Goeyvaerts, annotated copy of Webern, Symphony op. 21, second movement, bars 1–11 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 115 Figure 3.10: Michel Fano, Sonata for Two Pianos, first paired series ……………………….. 118 3.11: Michel Fano, Étude for 15 instruments, sketch in corner of corrected MS ………….. 119 3.12: Michel Fano, Étude for 15 instruments, fair copy bars 89–93, brass section ………… 120 3.13: Michel Fano, Étude for 15 instruments, corrected MS bar 98, violin …………………... 121 3.14: Herbert Eimert, demonstration of punctual music, Lehrbuch der Zwölftontechnik ... 159 7 Abbreviations ALKG: The Artistic Legacy of Karel Goeyvaerts, KU Leuven ISCM: International Society for Contemporary Music 8 A friend of mine, years ago, after a first trip to Mexico, was deeply impressed by the Mexican Indians. He had read The Plumed Serpent and tripped over it. What most struck him was the image, bright in his mind, of these Indians, squatting by the side of the road, impassive, “their eyes like black stone, onyx, sitting there as if waiting for death.” In his speech, “death” came out “Death.” Another friend, who was a Mexican, said that they were waiting for the bus to come along and didn’t feel like standing. So Lawrence and a dozen movies were shaken to their foundations. The first friend was outraged and wouldn’t speak to the Mexican friend for two weeks. His Plato was impugned. The world is NOT what I want to make it? He returned to Lawrence in a rage. Those Indians! A bus? A bus!? He was personally attacked, he felt. They were waiting for Death! The reader will see that what I am driving at is that these words that he is reading—are words. – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things Introduction Subject and scope This study is about the relationship between two topics, both of which are familiar. The first is the Darmstadt School as it is deployed as a discursive formation in an extremely broad range of texts, both general and specialised, but most prominently and consistently in English- language textbook accounts of the post-war musical avant-garde.1 These accounts give descriptions and explanations for an austere, crypto-mathematical music – the post- Webernian, pointillist serialism of the Darmstadt School – which predetermined every imaginable aspect of musical composition out of some blinkered obsession with technical progress. But a look at the scores (or, more rarely, the hearing of a performance) of the music these accounts do mention reveals almost no relationship to the description given. How did these historians arrive at such a description, then, and what music might it have described? This situation leads onto the second topic, of a somewhat more recent vintage but nevertheless fairly well established: the vivid multiplicity of practices attributed to various composers, musicians, and theorists operating within the context of the post-war avant-garde. More often than not, these two topics have appeared posed against each other as polemic rejoinders, arguments from ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-Darmstadt’ factions: the unifying discursive totality of the Darmstadt School and its doctrine of ‘total serialism’ operates as a condemnation of elitist, ‘anti-human’ music meticulously crafted to repel audiences,2 while more detailed studies on the irreconcilable differences of ideology, aesthetics, and technique