CHAPTER 9
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. After one final battle, the Red Army raised the Soviet flag over Berlin’s Reichstag on May 2. Six weeks later, on July 17, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Harry Truman, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin met in nearby (and Soviet controlled) Potsdam at the Cecilienhof palace—just far enough away from the stench of dead bodies, starvation, rubble, and smoke—to determine the future of Europe. The “Big Three” met for thirteen sessions every afternoon at 5:00 p.m. for an hour or two, followed by a banquet dinner, entertainment, and the singing of jubilant songs.
In an attempt not to repeat the errors of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, Germany was divided into four zones occupied by France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Berlin, which was in the middle of East Germany, would itself be carved up into four sectors. Early in the morning of August 13, 1961, with East Berlin hemorrhaging approximately 1,000 of its citizens to the West every day, East German soldiers began building what would become the six-foot-high, ninety-six-mile-long concrete Berlin Wall—which would stand until November 9, 1989.
The Potsdam Conference managed to keep Europe free of another hot war, but it also gave the Soviet Union de facto control over Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Albania—all of which became satellite “republics” under Stalin’s control.
Thus the scene was set for the Quo vadis? (Where are you going?) moment for new classical music in Europe. You may ask why classical music took on this question, whereas popular music just kept bringing new love songs, lively dances, and joy to the world. Popular music cannot easily be controlled: too many people want to hear it. Because of a uniquely twentieth-century use of “art” music—that of its being an official marketing device of the state—new classical music was once again required to respond and lead. The goal was music that represented a united, intellectual, freedom-loving—and dispassionately organized—Europe.
As happened throughout the post–World War II period, a dynamic alliance was forged within the community of composers, this time among the Austro-German non-tonal composers, led by Karlheinz Stockhausen; the French avant-garde, led by Pierre Boulez; and the Italian Communist intellectuals, led by Luigi Nono. The life of Nono’s older colleague Luigi Dallapiccola demonstrates the challenges facing any serious composer who lived through the war years, starting as it does with his pro-Fascist youth, his anti-Fascist response to Italy’s 1938 racial laws, and his post-war music composed in the free democratic Italian Republic. That Dallapiccola’s musical style moved from the profound influences of Wagner and Debussy with Volo di notte (Night Flight; 1938) to the chromatic expressionistic styles of the pre-war Vienna avant-garde, the 1944 Il Prigioniero (The Prisoner), and finally, his twelve-tone opera Ulisse (Ulysses; 1968)—critically acclaimed and almost never produced—can almost be seen as an emblematic journey of classical music in the free West of the last century.
As stated earlier, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci had said that once the Fascists were defeated, Italian Communists should focus on three elements to gain power: education, jurisprudence (which interprets laws, rather than makes them), and the arts. This is precisely what they did. The language of the Italian avant-garde, rejected by Mussolini, became the official language of post-war Italian classical music.
Completing this Italian group were Bruno Maderna, who had joined the anti-Fascist partisans near the end of the war—and subsequently became a Communist in 1952—and his fellow Communist Luciano Berio, who studied with Dallapiccola in the United States and who was the most experimental, composing with electronic sound generators and manipulating acoustic sounds electronically.
New Italian music would break with the past and only look forward. A difficult period—one that arguably saw the last flowering of Italian opera—was, as previously noted, erased. No serious young Italian composer could easily find a teacher or a conservatory in Italy that would support picking up the artistic pieces. Some Italian composers, such as Gian Francesco Malipiero, even dared to excoriate those Italians who had left the country during the war, seeing himself and the others who stayed as the true martyrs. (“Homesickness for one’s country is certainly a serious form of suffering for those in exile, but bombings, revolutions, hunger, etc., etc., don’t make life very pleasant.”) He then pointed a finger at America for not welcoming him and his music. “What has happened to hospitality these days?”
Any contemporary work that attempted to present (in musical terms) continuity with Italy’s operatic legacy was seen as crypto-Fascist and condemned, especially if it was presented in Italian opera houses, which were—and still are—given massive (though shrinking) subsidies by their government. Critics, who support the intellectual and complex musical style that proliferated after the war, would only write scathing reviews if any of these works was given a major new production. As a result, hundreds of scores sit in the archives of Italian publishing houses, awaiting some future time when they can be heard without prejudice. Perhaps we are about to enter that period. Perhaps it is too late.
Only Nino Rota, who, like just about every Italian composer of the twentieth century, made a living teaching within the Italian conservatory system, broke through Italy’s officially approved “new” musical world. In his two years at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute in the early 1930s, he studied with two traditionalist immigrants: Fritz Reiner (conducting) and Rosario Scalero (composition). (Scalero’s other composition students included Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, and Marc Blitzstein.) Rota composed operas, oratorios, and many works that languish outside of the classical canon, due, in part, to his unwillingness to conform to the twelve-tone and serial procedures used by his colleagues. However, the filmmakers Federico Fellini, Franco Zeffirelli, and Francis Ford Coppola encouraged his Italian music to live unimpaired by political aesthetics. Public policy be damned! The private citizen who had begun to abandon the opera houses before World War II spoke with a loud democratic voice. In search of beauty, the private citizen went to the movies and responded to Italy’s post-war musical modernity with a hearty “Basta!”
If one looks for a continuous line of Italian melody in the post-war years, it sang in the popular songs and the film scores heard throughout the world—having escaped the watchful eye of those who wrote about serious music in the “free” West. Since it was popular, the theory went, it must be easy to write, making it of no intellectual interest. But in spite of the Cold War’s requirements for Italian classical music, there were beloved orchestral film scores by Rota and Ennio Morricone, alongside the latter’s stylistically opposite and unloved concert works, and, in New York and Spoleto, Italy, there was Gian Carlo Menotti, increasingly condemned with each successive work by those who rejected his “old-fashioned” musical language.
Ultimately, Menotti could not bear to read the New York Times every morning expressing what it deemed to be good and what it damned with negativity or worse—silence. He escaped to a castle in Scotland appropriately called “Yester House,” where he died at the age of ninety-six, in the seventh year of the twenty-first century.
AMERICA JOINS THE NEW-MUSIC WAR
For America, which had a brief period of government-supported art (the Works Progress Administration from 1939 to 1943), determining and supporting new music for a hoped-for democratic Europe was a bit more complicated. In the 1930s, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and others were determined to “solve the problem” of finding a uniquely American classical musical voice—one that was, curiously enough, distinct from, and perhaps an overt rejection of, Gershwin’s African-American–inspired ragtime/jazz adaptations in his symphonic works and his one opera, Porgy and Bess. This new American classical voice could not sound like echoes of Brahms and Dvořák. And for Copland, it also erased any sense of his immediate heritage, that of being born in America’s quintessential melting pot, Brooklyn, the son of two conservative Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.
Copland and his colleagues succeeded brilliantly. The world soon came to embrace the classical American sound of Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, and an entire American school emerged. The dilemma in the post–World War II era was how to take a leadership role vis-à-vis young Europeans who distinctly did not want music to represent a country or an ethnicity, even as America had just found its classical voice.1
Larger goals took precedence, and the DNA of the U.S. government is everywhere to be found in the sub rosa support for certain kinds of music, art, and literature in the post-war era. This makes perfect sense, considering the perceived and probably real stakes. America was fighting for freedom everywhere, but the looming shadow of a Soviet takeover of Europe, especially West Germany and Italy, was, in the words of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “not only the gravest threat ever faced by the United States, but the gravest threat that has ever faced what we call Western civilization, or indeed any civilization which was dominated by a spiritual faith.”
The Communists were avowed atheists—something that both horrified and challenged America to its core. On February 1, 1953, after his inauguration as president, Dwight Eisenhower was baptized into the Presbyterian Church. It would be during his administration that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and a brand new and official motto of the United States of America, which had prided itself on a separation of church and state, “In God We Trust”—replacing “E pluribus unum,” first used in 1776—was engraved on the dollar bill, without a single member of Congress voting against its adoption in 1956.
Like all musicians, classical composers always needed to look for work or a steady job. Sometimes this was composing to the specifications of the king or the church. Sometimes it was writing a concerto for oneself, performing it, and collecting receipts at the door—and therefore depending on commercial public support. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was European governments and their support for its arts that were doing the hiring, the commissioning, and the performing of new classical music—underwritten by the United States, with a mixture of overt and covert financing: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and the U.S. Information Agency were openly known as arms of the United States government, but there was also the secretive CIA, large private foundations such as the Ford and Fairfield Foundations, and the “privately supported” Congress for Cultural Freedom—which had offices in thirty-five countries funneling CIA monies into this new war.
It was a war that did not make use of armies. President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Dulles’s brother Allen, who headed the CIA, knew that America could support and topple governments without sending in troops. This was an era in which secret infiltration was essential in winning over skeptical intellectual Europeans—including the recent enemies, now essential allies—all without the American public’s knowledge.
Along with good and generous people in America who saw it as their patriotic duty to fight censorship and repression in a world that seemed to be closing in on all sides, there were inevitably those who saw a way to profit from the situation and adjusted their aesthetics accordingly. And in both camps there was enough gray area to embrace this new, intellectually challenging music coming from a young generation of articulate composers in western Europe.
It goes without saying that many of the European Jews who had fled to the United States before the war were leftists. Many were indeed Communists because they believed in communism’s philosophy of protecting the rights of workers and sharing profits from their collective labor. And many stopped being Communists once Stalin emerged as the monster he was. That still left the former Communists and left-leaning naturalized citizens suspect after the war was over. The Soviet Communists had been our ally during much of World War II and now were our enemy. It was a good cover for anti-Semites never to say anything about America’s internal enemies as being Jewish. Rather, Americans would be taught to support all activities that would root out subversive artists and writers who might be, or had been, Communists or Communist sympathizers.
It also meant that certain ex-Nazis who were rabidly anti-Communist needed to be hired to fight the global threat to the West. Thus the tables were turning fast as to who was a desirable American citizen and who was not. The old question of whether a glass is half empty or half full became “How shall we describe this person: a Nazi (who is passionately anti-Communist) or a passionate anti-Communist (who was once a Nazi)?”
When America was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing on July 16, 2019, very few people noted that much of the underlying technology—indeed, the scientists who brought that technology to America and led the “space race” against the Soviets—emerged from the Nazis’ secret military rocket program, built on the backs of an estimated 20,000 Soviet, Polish, Italian, and French prisoners who died at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp (“the highest death rate in the entire concentration camp system”), working as slaves to build and test the V-2 rocket (Vergeltungswaffe 2—“Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2”) that killed 4,000 civilians in London, Antwerp, Paris, and other European cities. Political comedians in America during the Cold War, such as Tom Lehrer and Mort Sahl, famously parodied the émigré space engineer Wernher von Braun’s claim that he was only interested in space travel (“I aim at the stars but sometimes I hit London”), but the world in 2019 did not seem to care. Untersturmführer von Braun and 1,600 other former Nazi engineers and scientists—all American citizens—had aided America in its “giant leap for mankind.”
And so another perfectly understandable, ironic, and odious bond was implicitly created between former Nazis and freedom-loving Americans, with both sharing a hatred for the Soviets who were encroaching westward into Europe and into the Americas, while the Chinese Communists were supporting North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, creating a very real war—and less than five years after World War II had theoretically ended.
In April 1966, the New York Times began a series of articles on the CIA that shocked many. It told the story of how the agency had been acting throughout the world as a covert sponsor of U.S. “citizen groups” engaged in Cold War propaganda, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The CCF had presented itself as a private organization that was supported principally by the Fairfield Foundation, a philanthropic organization (incorporated in 1952) that was funded by the very rich Julius Fleischmann, who acted as its president. Fleischmann was a well-known patron of the arts who served on the board of the Metropolitan Opera and who had ties to arts organizations in London and Monte Carlo. He was also a CIA operative.
America had hurled invective upon the Soviets for having its cultural commissars and a blatantly obvious factory of lies—the Communist Party newspaper was called Pravda, or “Truth.” Propaganda was something the Nazis and the Soviets did. The United States was free and would never stoop so low. Within six months, however, that fiction had been irretrievably blown with more articles in the Times and other publications, culminating in the revelation that the programs of the U.S. National Students’ Association were financed covertly by the CIA. The scandal that ensued, which has fueled much-needed studies on the cultural side of the Cold War, cast a pall on all the many astounding things achieved not only in cultural understanding but also in the proliferation and establishment of a truly international vision of a post-war style of music, art, and intellectual discourse.
For fifteen years the Congress for Cultural Freedom, under the tireless leadership of the Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov, had fought a cultural cold war to win over the intelligentsia of Europe and Asia. Nabokov, a White Russian with a political score to settle with his native country, developed the idea of creating spectacular festivals of new music and art in Paris, Berlin, Milan, Brussels, Tokyo, Venice, and Rome that brought American performers and creators, along with their European and Asian counterparts, into the very heart of the war’s wreckage, confronting and confounding the skeptics who were suspicious of America and dismissive of its cultural bona fides. His first festival, called “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century,” took place in Paris in 1952. Nabokov brought the Boston Symphony to play great works that remained outlawed in the Soviet Union.
He achieved two goals. One was to show the unquestioned excellence of American musicians and the grand, vital tradition of the performing arts in the United States. (It was easy for Europeans to forget that the New York Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic had been founded in the same year, 1842.) The other was to demonstrate the fundamental importance of universal freedom of expression, which Nabokov achieved by including artists and music from all over the world, even by the USSR’s Shostakovich and Prokofiev.2 That Pierre Monteux conducted Le Sacre du printemps thirty-nine years after having led its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913—and with Stravinsky in the audience—was just one of Nabokov’s triumphant ideas, ideas that helped overcome the anti-Americanism of the cynical, condescending French intellectuals, many of whom were Communists or Communist sympathizers. George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, brought to Paris by the festival, accomplished much the same thing. An all-Black opera troupe performed Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein. There were productions of Benjamin Britten’s newly composed opera Billy Budd, conducted by the composer, and Alban Berg’s 1925 Wozzeck, conducted by Karl Böhm—both operas seen for the first time in Paris. Schoenberg’s expressionist monodrama Erwartung and Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex were two more brilliant elements of this first festival under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. There would be many more, including a “Black and White” festival in Berlin that explored the influence of African art on Western art. When one thinks of the Nazi position on “Negro elements” in art and music, this was a direct rebuttal to the official racism in the former capital of National Socialism.
Even the touring of great African-American musicians to Europe and, later, to the USSR was a counteroffensive to the Russian claim—a correct one, mind you—that in America our Black population was treated badly. We sent Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and a tour of Porgy and Bess with Leontyne Price and William Warfield (which Pravda predictably excoriated) to every major European city.
What makes all of this so extraordinary is that without the CIA funding, none of these initiatives could have taken place. Nabokov insisted to his dying day that he was never required to follow a covert party line. In fact, many members of the U.S. Congress had little belief that a cultural cold war would have any impact at all on the serious political situation confronting America and Western civilization in the face of Soviet aggression. Some were enraged that Nabokov had hijacked the original propaganda purpose of the CCF. However, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and historian George Kennan said in the aftermath of the discovery of the U.S. government’s secret activities and the scandal that followed, “[The United States] has no ministry of culture, and the C.I.A. was obliged to do what it could to try to fill the gap. It should be praised for having done so, and not criticized.”3
What is certainly true is that Nabokov hated what had become of his native Russia and what was being done to artists there. The CIA did not have to coach him on that. What is also true, and can be found in his writing, is that Nabokov was a strong proponent of the “new.” While he was hardly an unquestioning supporter of the avant-garde, he wrote and spoke frequently and passionately against music that sounded old-fashioned to him. He likened any new Western music that did not embrace modernism as somehow similar to the music that Soviet composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich were being pressured to write. In other words, he was feeding the very perceptions that we are meant to accept today regarding the value of dissonance and rhythmic complexity as appropriate in the second half of the twentieth century.
The avant-garde also represented political freedom. Nabokov saw the simplification of Russian classical music as a sad reminder of the negative effects of totalitarianism, calling Prokofiev’s beloved Romeo and Juliet “full of trivial and obvious themes, conventional harmonies, and a general artificial simplicity,” and Shostakovich’s most enduring work, his Fifth Symphony, as “reminiscent of nineteenth-century music.”4
What lurks in Nabokov’s passionate defense of freedom is his belief in an elite class that not only leads the arts but is essential to understanding and evaluating it. That the Russians, who had initiated a brilliant avant-garde, had settled into something quite tame, in Nabokov’s view, was the result of emigration and the destruction of the Russian intelligentsia after the Great Revolution and Stalin’s murderous purges. The now defunct Russian upper class, he wrote, had “set the tone of cultural life of the nation, because it alone could understand and encourage the work of the pioneers in the arts.” Thus, complex modernity was not only an expression of freedom, it could only be understood by a highly educated aristocracy, and not the common man.
Since the New York Times series on the CIA’s covert activities in sponsoring a network of “[money] passing foundations” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there have been hundreds of books—spy thrillers, plays, movies, and so on—about this period, officially named “the Cold War” by Bernard Baruch in 1947 and said to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In the twenty-first century, as more and more files continue to be declassified and the seemingly insatiable interest in World War II has expanded, we have learned of the complexities of post-war politics and how, among other things, the United States was in fact a haven for thousands of Nazis—scientists, doctors, and less famous citizens formerly active in the Third Reich’s enormous apparatus—in order, as already noted, to build defenses against the one area where Nazis and Americans could find common ground—a shared hatred of communism.
Is it too much to consider how that hatred relates to music and the officially supported aesthetics of its—and our—time?
A MUSICAL AESTHETIC FOR A FREE WEST
Music had once again become the plaything of politicians, intellectuals—some of whom needed to distance themselves from their previous writings on music during the Nazi and Fascist eras—and those who saw an opening for advancement. From the start, an important question remained in the de-Nazification process: Was there such a thing as a Nazi music?5 In fact, while there may not have been Nazi music, there were definitely Nazi composers and apparently, from a stylistic point of view, there was definitely anti-Nazi music, at least for the American military. Those knowledgeable in music and with a vague idea of what constituted “degenerate” drew up their list of criteria for judging the culpability of European musicians after the war. It is worth stating once again that if a German composer could prove that he was writing modern-sounding (especially serial) music during the war, it was corroborating evidence that he was anti-Nazi and a part of the resistance movement.
The French, it could be added, had picked up the remnants of the “noise” music of the futurists and, using a new device that the Nazis had invented—the tape recorder—created the avant-garde electronic music known as musique concrète that made use of sounds recorded and edited together at the National Radio Station (Radiodiffusion Nationale), which, during the war, had functioned as a center for the French Resistance movement against the Nazis, and thus linked the modernist movement in music with the Resistance.
Italian Communists, unlike Soviet Communists, uniformly supported non-tonal music as anti-Fascist. In the months after the Allied liberation, Italian opera houses reopened and performed new but traditional works by Pizzetti and Malipiero, but that all came to a screeching halt as a new government and a democratic constitution were enacted. West Germans took the same path, whereas East Germans, who were Communists, absolutely did not.
Of course, as we have said, everyone knew what constituted Soviet Communist music because it was officially judged and promoted as early as 1932 by the Soviet government. Could we now listen to Shostakovich as music, or had it always been propaganda—or a secret demonstration against Soviet authority, while pretending to be pro-Soviet? (Indeed, how do we listen to it today?) The American premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), which was said to represent the Russian resistance to the German invasion, was conducted by the openly anti-Fascist Arturo Toscanini and broadcast live from New York City on national American radio on July 19, 1942. And, as a head-spinning reminder, 1942 was soon after Russia, which had started out in 1939 signing a nonaggression pact with Germany, had become America’s ally—and before it became the enemy of the West in 1947.
How did the West pit “our” Russians (Stravinsky, Balanchine and his New York City Ballet, and all those ballet stars who would come to our shores, including Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, not to mention superstar cellist Mstislav Rostropovich) against “their” Russians (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, the Bolshoi Ballet)? It did not help the Soviets that no major Western artist left America to live in the Soviet Union, and the German Communist state—ironically known as the German Democratic Republic—had to build a wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing into the West. According to Frederick Kempe, in his book Berlin 1961, in the first four months of 1953, 122,000 East Germans fled Communist East Berlin into West Berlin—twice the rate of the previous year. With East Germany about to lose its population and implode, and America fighting for Christian values and Western civilization, both sides of the Iron Curtain were on the brink of another hot war by 1961.
All of the above once again required music to act as an official marketing device, a meta-metaphor of political ideologies. In other words, a certain style of music was the state.
The answer—the only answer—for the West was to resurrect the avant-garde experiments that had petered out decades before but still had their adherents. The old processes that attempted to control the chaos of non-tonal music, developed just after World War I, came roaring back, and this time they were not for members of a private society. They became officially supported by governments, private funding, and opinion makers. It was as if the West skipped from 1923 in Vienna to 1945 without missing a beat.
The newly minted new music erased an awkward and contentious phase (World War II), and it pleased the intellectuals because it was very intellectual. Every article about this music, usually written by the composers themselves, was full of technical terminology and mathematical references that were dazzling and intimidating, using what Ernest Hemingway derisively called “ten-dollar words.”6 It pleased the politicians because it sounded like the music Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin hated. It pleased many of the young, discontented, and smart musician-children of the ruins because they could express what they believed to be an appropriate response distilled from the iconoclastic pre–World War I artistic movements while taming the beast with new mathematical controls and justifications. It was non-ethnic, refuting the nationalistic music that had been developing since the nineteenth century. Its only problem was that audiences did not particularly want to hear it.
There were two answers to that complaint: First, that all the great composers of the past wrote “ahead” of their time (this is certainly not true; otherwise Bach, Handel, Mozart, and most composers you have heard of would have made a living as waiters and bell boys, while composing on their days off); and second (which was quite pleasing to the intellectuals), that the public is just not smart enough to understand the new music because they, unlike us, don’t know anything about music.
This might help explain the greatest mystery of all: Why wasn’t all the music banned by Hitler not instantly embraced, indeed officially supported, after the war? Germany had lost the war and America was busy winning the hearts and minds of Europeans by supporting its arts, which included subsidies to restore concert halls, opera houses, and radio stations. And even if we find a measure of understanding as to why the Italians needed to prove they were no longer Fascists and therefore simply erased an entire generation of successful composers of operas, why were those Italians who emigrated and/or were successful in America treated with the same disdain? Were there “gentlemen’s agreements” made with the state-run theaters and opera houses, not to mention the academies and conservatories of Europe, in the post-war period? Was this merely the zeitgeist and had European classical music, like some long-awaited affirmation of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, collapsed in 1945, its course finally run?
In a way, this is the conclusion one has to arrive at if we accept current aesthetic pronouncements that the vast majority of classical music composed by the survivors of the war—tonal and uniquely personal—was simply old and irrelevant. The music of a wounded and complex world that was picking up the pieces from decades of European wars had to look forward and sound fresh and, well, new. There is also the argument that every art form and art movement has its ending built into its creation, like all carbon-based life forms. All the public funding in the world cannot bring back Dutch and Flemish painting, Broadway’s Golden Age, or the Russian novel. Perhaps, then, even though the war accelerated the demise of epic, tonal music, it was, after 1945, once and for all irretrievably dead.
If that is the case, an equally important question in reviewing the second half of the twentieth century is, what music replaced the condemned repertory—once it was determined that the music classified as degenerate would not be welcomed back and all the Italian operas of the post-Puccini period (1924–45) would be equally jettisoned?
We know the answer—none. No repertory replaced the irreplaceable ones in the concert hall. Instead, a few composers, such as Mahler, Rachmaninoff, and Gershwin—who had been marginalized or dismissed by classical music experts—were gradually welcomed into the canon of classical music. Although there are exceptions (the operas of Benjamin Britten, for example), there is a general void that skips from the 1920s to the latest world premiere. In 2001, film director Baz Luhrmann “had the inspired notion that [popular music] is to our age what the arias of grand opera were to an earlier age.”7 That “earlier age” was the pre-modernist age. Indeed, classical music lovers might be hard pressed to name their favorite beloved works from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The music that remains in our collective consciousness comes from what we have been led to believe was the disposable (popular) music of a half-century. It is a Broadway show, West Side Story, that represents 1957 to the world and not Xenakis’s Pithoprakta, Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, or Nono’s Varianti.
The state-supported Italian opera houses temporarily found new repertory in a series of operas that sang in the new voice, such as Stockhausen’s Samstag aus Licht (Saturday from Light), produced by La Scala in 1984. If one looks up that great theater’s officially published online history, it jumps from the world premieres of Verdi’s Falstaff (1893) and Turandot (1926) to its major renovation in 2004 and its recent music directors, Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti, as if nothing happened in between. The new operas in the Italian opera houses have been few and have not, as of yet, demonstrated any viability whatsoever. However, new productions of old operas have become the lifeblood of these lyric theaters, and new productions of little-known operas from Italy’s past, such as Gaspare Spontini’s 1805 La Vestale (The Vestal Virgin), act as ersatz new operas since no living member of the audience has ever heard them before.
In the case of Germany, the story is all the more confounding because there were two Germanys from 1949 until 1989. Is there any German commonality between the official tonal music of Communist East Germany and the official non-tonal and serial music of democratic West Germany? Or is it just easier to erase the whole complicated corpus of Germany’s Cold War music? And since so many of Europe’s greatest composers were American citizens at the time, what actually constitutes post-war German music anyway? Is it “American” Schoenberg or just “Schoenberg”? Is it “American Hindemith” or just “Hindemith”? As for Weill, there was absolutely a conclusion that there was a German Weill and an American Weill, not only because of a development in his style, but because his later texts were in English, which exaggerated the difference from his German-texted musical theater. Do we feel the same way about Handel (1685–1759), a German who wrote Italian operas in London and then switched to English texts for his oratorios? Did he write German music, Italian music, and, finally, English music?
In Los Angeles, the controversy over the Schoenberg family’s sending all their father’s manuscripts, scores, photos, and memorabilia back to Vienna in 1996 is an important and telling story in that they felt that more would be done for his music in Vienna than in his adopted home, and they were correct. The spelling of his name reverted from its American version—Schoenberg—to its original version—Schönberg. Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center is a model institution that preserves the music and encourages performances, for which all musicians are grateful. However, the opening concert in March 1998 with the Vienna Philharmonic and Giuseppe Sinopoli included only works composed before the composer came to America.8 And when it comes to the émigré composers who succeeded in Hollywood, the so-called aesthetic assessments became truly poisonous. They are, without exception, men without countries.
The decade after the end of World War II was a crucial period in setting the course for classical music and its institutions. Neutered of its overt emotionality and expanded through the advanced control theories of a brilliant and idiosyncratic Austrian student of Schoenberg, Anton Webern, the avant-garde was alive and well supported. Rarely performed in his day and ours, Webern’s highly condensed and minutely controlled musical utterances became the eye of the needle through which all post–World War II contemporary music had to pass in order to be accepted. Like so many official composers of the non-tonal twentieth century, Webern’s name has all but dropped from public consciousness.
Born in Vienna in 1883, Anton Webern was shot and killed in Mittersill, Austria, by an American soldier when, it was claimed, he stepped off his porch after curfew to put out a cigar on September 15, 1945. His death was tragic, but the event also had an air of martyrdom that elicited suppressed rage at the ignorance of the occupying Americans. How dare Private First Class Norwood Bell murder the great Austrian composer after the war ended? Consumed with guilt, Bell would die an alcoholic ten years later in North Carolina.
Some returning American GIs who were classical musicians showed a fascination with this new music. With the increased governmental support of the sciences in the aftermath of the Soviets’ successful launching of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, American universities were awash in grants that supported computer centers and electronics. Savvy universities opened electronic music centers and taught courses in computer music. It was all the rage in the 1960s. It also employed a lot of people who taught composition and music theory and who lived off the largesse of a closed and protected system for composition, unprecedented even for the Greeks of ancient Athens. You might think this was the most enlightened period in music history, one that would endow the world with generations of sublime new music.
The new post-war serial music contained the DNA of the old avant-garde, but it had been genetically re-engineered. Its pictorial and poetic lineage, derived from the nightmares of expressionism—murder, rape, and mental and emotional illness that were the texts of the experimental music of the 1920s and 1930s—was generally removed from the new “new” music. No more wandering in a dark forest looking for lost lovers under a blood-red moon. The music was intellectualized and demonstrably free of any associations outside of the process of notes moving through time. The titles alone indicate the new aesthetic: Kontakte (Contacts), Pli selon pli (Fold by Fold), Stabiles for Orchestra, Gruppen (Groups), and the aforementioned Helicopter String Quartet.
What ultimately emerged was something truly new: an institutionally supported avant-garde. Pierre Boulez, its eternal firebrand, probably led or advised more classical music institutions than anyone in history.9 On Boulez’s ninetieth birthday (March 26, 2015), American radio host John Schaefer broadcast and subsequently posted an interview on his Soundcheck with the composer-conductor about the maestro’s top ten classical works from the twentieth century. In an aside, here’s what Boulez significantly said:
Our century is supposed to be the fastest, the quickest, the one which reacts instantly and likes progress—and sometimes in music, you find it’s the slowest of all centuries. If you compare with Wagner, take Tristan und Isolde for instance, around 1860—ninety years later, that’s 1950, Wagner is no longer a problem. I don’t want to criticize my century, but the process of absorbing what is composed during this century is a very slow process, much too slow for me.
Perhaps there is an underlying truth here: maybe “his” century was a meticulously constructed solar system, while the actual century was a gloriously messy universe. However, the very concept of a never-ending iconoclastic movement should be a discussion point not just among philosophers and art historians but also among the public. Everyone wants to see and hear new things. But while people in the nineteenth century looked forward to the next score by Wagner or the next symphony by Brahms, today the excitement of new music generally comes from places other than an opera house or a concert hall. Those who support an eternal avant-garde will understandably try to encourage enthusiasm for the new music they like. While that is fair enough, it has not managed to convince a wider public—as noted by Boulez himself—even as it sustains those composers blessed with the approbation of the trinity of contemporary classical music: The Donor—The Critic—The Institution. When the donor is the government, politics and power once again enter the equation. This trinity leaves out something quite significant: the audience.
We can find profound interest in the early twentieth century’s experiments, like Alexander Scriabin’s color keyboard or Charles Ives’s cosmic haze (created by overlapping multiple folk tunes, hymns, and band music). However, it seems that nothing has changed in many decades when one reads a review (with a photograph) in the New York Times of a festival of new music in New York City in 2015 by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, which contains the following:
In Megan Grace Breuger’s “Liaison,” a dancer—the darkly expressive Melanie Aceto, who also choreographed the piece—is tethered to a grand piano, with fishing lines attached to her wrists and ankles looped, via a pulley system, around the instrument’s strings. By straining, arching and jumping against her restraints Ms. Aceto created metallic shimmers and rumbles inside the piano. Several times, she approached the keys raising her hands as if to strike them, but a force seemed to forbid it, leaving her twisting and writhing—a human marionette at the mercy of an inanimate instrument.10
Reading this, one cannot but marvel at how similar this description is to an untitled work composed by a student at Yale a half-century earlier for a highly resilient rubber ball and a grand piano, for which this writer received an A. It is also reminiscent of Luigi Russolo’s 1913 noise orchestra in pre–World War I Italy.
John Cage taught us that nothing is a justifiable choice in music. Sometimes the best music is silence. Knowing when to underscore a scene in a film is as important as when not to provide any music at all. (See, for example, Ben-Hur, in which the chariot race—ten minutes long—is presented without a note but is bookended with huge military marches.) And silence is the single most powerful tool in live performance of classical music. It has the effect of “collecting” the public and getting its attention. It makes loud have meaning. And as one approaches total silence, one realizes that it can never be achieved because the background simply becomes the foreground.
At a recent performance of Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera, the dynamic palette was so great that the quiet passages exposed the outdated heating and air conditioning equipment. Every now and then Wagner’s music became the accompaniment to the ventilation system of the fifty-year-old auditorium. Music must be louder than the ambient noise that fills our lives—even noise that calls itself music must be louder than ambient noise in the room in order to register.
The problem with music that is perceived as noise is that we humans navigate our lives by filtering it out. Our brains can only process about 110 bits of information per second, according to the distinguished professor of psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It takes sixty of those bits to decode speech alone, so we survive by ignoring noise in order to perceive important information. We are social animals and we actually need to send and receive information in order to live. Removing the ability to communicate with other humans is a torture reserved for the most heinous of criminals in prisons. For this reason, solitary confinement is considered the “most inhumane” of tortures. Sirens, alarms, and the dissonant “bonk” that sounds when we attempt an action on our computer that does not work, all tell us something is wrong. It is a sound we flee. It warns us. It is not neutral.
Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek has written that scientists define noise as describing “any kind of fluctuation that has an element of randomness. Noise contrasts with signal, which is valuable because it conveys sought-after information. Separating interesting signals from obscuring noise is a big part of the art of experimental science and statistics. Sometimes, however, the noise is the signal.”11 Indeed, it is this very randomness within our bodies—a “jumbled activation of injured nerves”—that is involved in what we experience as pain from wounds and inflammation.
The same definition is applicable to music. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a positive review of contemporary music that is described by a sympathetic critic in terms of noise:
When the guitarists Fred Frith and Les Cline played their first public duet on Saturday night at Subculture, it didn’t always sound like guitar music. It sounded at times like a sanitation truck’s trash compactor, like an orchestra tuning up, like a brawl between flocks of geese, like a creaky water pump, like a collapsing carillon and like a slowed-down train wreck. That’s the beauty of the Alternative Guitar Summit, which is now a regular part of the New York Guitar Festival.12
Creating this kind of music is not only confrontational, it also runs counter to the way we communicate—otherwise we could not ride in a train and successfully read a book or have a conversation in a noisy restaurant. In 1863, the German physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz published his On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, in which he attempted a scientific explanation for our human sense of consonance and dissonance based on the clashing of the overtones of the various pitches in a chord. It was not a matter of aesthetics, but rather of what he called “psycho-physiology.” In other words, it is how we humans are built.
Not all contemporary classical music of the second half of the twentieth century was what most people would call noisy, though they might call it incoherent. Because its general aesthetic was an anti-aesthetic—that is, not tonal and not sounding like a continuity of the past—much of this music registers as being goalless, even when it is light and translucent, like works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and others. The dramatic/musical process appears random—or non-existent—to the listener because there is no perceivable harmonic or melodic direction. A recent headline about visual art inspired by science fiction proclaimed, “In Space, Everyone’s an Alien.” It is not surprising that Ligeti’s Atmosphères seemed so apt in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was not ironic or amusing, as was the filmmaker’s use of “The Blue Danube Waltz” for an elegant space docking. The Ligeti work, which has no melody, no pulse, and is based mostly on very quiet simultaneous events (what used to be called “chords”) in which every note within the spectrum of instrumental music is being played at the same time, fully expressed what being in outer space might “feel” like.
Creating art that abjures comprehensibility is not only unsociable, it runs counter to the way humans hear and process sounds. Perhaps therein lies its fascination and its eternal otherness—which is different from calling it “new” or “contemporary.” It is neither.
MUSIC OF THE FUTURE?
As listeners, we are always hoping to discover and experience a new voice. Without any preconceived notions of how the next great opera, string quartet, or symphonic work will sound, we long for something great. It will be new and it will be old, but which aspect of it is the one thing or the other cannot be predicted, and only when greatness is perceived can we “place” it. No one could have predicted, for example, that Lin-Manuel Miranda would create the epoch-defining work of musical theater of the second decade of the twenty-first century that is Hamilton, but he did. And it will last.
Popularly supported music is not an American plot to make lots of meaningless music on Henry Ford’s assembly line, no matter what the enraged and influential German, Theodor Adorno, expressed in the middle of the last century: that music of value is the music that is fundamentally not popular. The reason there was so much music coming out of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, Hollywood, and the urban centers of the world was that millions of people wanted to hear it, in spite of all the wars, the politics, and the philosophies. It is the music that has remained while the experimental works have not. As the Austrian-American refugee composer Ernst Toch wrote, “The true nature of art, which comes from religious depth and naiveté, is both un-teachable and un-learnable. This is what makes great art neither modern nor old-fashioned but timeless. . . . The continued rejection of modern music comes not from our unquestioned lack of respect for it, but from our inability to love it.”13
People resemble plants: we express positive phototropism. We want light. Our feet are pulled downward toward the center of the earth by gravity and our dreams lift us skyward. Surrealism, dadaism, expressionism, futurism, brutalism—they all take us to strange and interesting places, usually in the form of a work of visual art delimited by a frame and hanging on a real wall or standing in the middle of a museum gallery. You can step away from it whenever you choose.
Music, the invisible art, makes that far more difficult. Under its influence and in its presence, we become not unlike Dorothy Gale, Alice Liddell, Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, and the alien botanist who calls himself “E.T.”: explorers, wanderers, and imaginary children. We want to go on our adventures, but no matter how circuitous the journey, how bizarre the environments, how fantastic the sounds, we all need to return home at the end. Acknowledging this need is a central component of classical music.