CHAPTER 8
After the cessation of hostilities in 1945, European and American classical music leaders and curators, those expressing and determining what should be commissioned and presented, and what the public should be listening to, faced a recurring twentieth-century question: “Where do we go from here?” To that question was implicitly added, “Where have we just been?”
After a generation of political upheavals in which music was employed as a symbolic representation of political ideology, these questions became uniquely problematic. This time, the question did pertain to the general public because it related to everyone’s behavior and identity, both during the war and now, in its aftermath. This was true whether or not the politicians or the captains of industry or the “average” person attended concerts and operas. It was not a trivial question. Governments in the newly liberated countries, using public funds, would re-establish their orchestras, opera houses, and radio stations. It was, therefore, a matter of who we are now, not who we were or who we once wanted to be. What music do Germans give themselves permission to listen to in Berlin in 1946? What opera can La Scala present to its public in Milan while a defeated Italy is creating a new constitution in Rome?
The previously expounded polemics and directives of the World War I era as to what constituted art music up to that point in twentieth-century history—the various avant-garde movements—had not resulted in a generation of accepted new repertory. In addition, other kinds of classical music the general populace wanted to hear—the non-avant-garde Italian operas, the symphonies composed in exile—were, more than anything, painful reminders of things best forgotten. For European intellectuals, including but not limited to German and Italian music critics and professors, there was also a sense of panic to find justifications for what they had said and published in all those complicit and now compromising classes, speeches, and academic papers.
European university professors under the former Third Reich who retained their academic positions after the war found new ways to maintain a consistent position toward the “degenerate” composers. With the rejection of the American music of Hindemith, Korngold, Weill, and Schoenberg, the Germans, who led post-war intellectual criticism, effectively removed the still-beating heart of their musical legacy from the concert hall. It was the coup de grâce. An entire generation of music was eliminated by the passionate feelings of the vanquished—articulated in the most authoritative voices of “experts” and subsequently by the victors who respected their opinions and needed their support in the new war with a new enemy—Soviet communism.
A simple solution was found that involved a tacit agreement between the masses and the masters: Do not play any of it. The “Nazi” music and the entartete Musik the Nazis banned fell into the same convenient category of inconvenient music. This was especially awkward since Weill, Hindemith, Korngold, and Schoenberg had music to share with Europe. Would Europe listen? Italy’s now-compromised composers, as well as those who had “abandoned” their homeland and survived in America, were all thrown into the same dump: Pizzetti and Menotti; Mascagni and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Thus, the net trawled the musical waters and cleansed the world of the music it now preferred not to hear. How this was done, and continues to be done, is something worth exploring, as we shall see.
The audience, as always, chose what it wanted to hear. The democratizing of music had come with the radio, the phonograph, and the talking (and singing) pictures. The classical repertory that Europe liked before the war was the repertory it was grateful to hear again, even from compromised performers, who were generally given a pass. New interpreters soon emerged and new technologies made for new discoveries of old masterpieces, all of which made performing pre-war music safe from recent complications. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a new production of Verdi’s Aida could open the seasons in Berlin and Milan, and the CEOs of Krupp and Mercedes as well as the president of the Italian Republic and the mayor of Milan, alongside the glamorous movie stars and fashion models, the general populace, and the press, could show up without giving even a whiff of commentary about the recent war.
Wagner, however, was a particular challenge. In post-war Bayreuth, Wagner’s British-born—and defiantly unapologetic—daughter-in-law Winifred, who had welcomed Adolf Hitler and his financial support of the Wagner festival, made for a difficult legacy to erase. The composer’s two grandsons and one of his two granddaughters, along with the American governing overseers, had to figure out a way to cleanse recent history from the eyes and ears of a public that was still craving to see and hear the master’s operas performed in the opera house built to his specifications in 1876.
Granddaughter Friedelind Wagner and her brothers were given legal responsibility for the festival after the war, even though their pro-Nazi mother was still alive. Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner each had 33 percent, and Friedelind was granted 34 percent. The reason for her symbolic 1 percent advantage was that Friedelind had left Germany in 1940 and broadcast speeches in London against Hitler. (“If Hitler really understood my grandfather’s operas, he would ban them, too,” she said.) It was Arturo Toscanini who helped bring her to the United States, where she became an American citizen. At the “New Bayreuth,” which opened in 1951, Friedelind ran a school for young artists, many of whom were American. That helped mitigate some of the recent past.
What Wieland and Wolfgang did was probably more important, with Wolfgang taking responsibility for much of the administration and both directing and supervising its productions. All the old scenery from the Nazi era, which had maintained the traditions of the original nineteenth-century designs, had either been destroyed during the war or needed to be, since it carried too many recent memories. Instead, the brothers developed a new way of staging the Wagner operas that discarded more than the scenery. It discarded the staging, too. Wieland had studied architecture and was inspired by the futurist architects of pre-war Europe to create starkly timeless images that were projected on a gigantic, curved cyclorama. The stage area was a mysterious, raised platform in the shape of an ellipse that was slightly tilted toward the audience and appeared to float in space. Because the Wagners had little money for scenery, they put all their resources into state-of-the-art lighting and projection systems.
Then Wieland, an immensely talented director, stripped Wagner’s synchronizing gestures from his productions. Singers related to each other on the disk with little or no three-dimensional scenery or props. A scene from his 1965 production of Götterdämmerung between Brünnhilde and her sister Waltraute resembled something like a sumo wrestling match, with each countering the other’s moves. The famous “Ride of the Valkyries” presented the eight demi-goddesses standing in place while more than twenty projectors made the sky appear to be moving in surprising and vertigo-inducing cloud formations.
At first, the music was conducted by men who had performed for the Nazis—Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, and Herbert von Karajan—all of whom could trace their interpretations back to Wagner himself. The theater reopened on July 29, 1951, with something truly safe: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Hitler’s favorite maestro, the mesmeric Wilhelm Furtwängler. After that, Wieland presented his radical production of Parsifal, which was still in the repertory in 1966, the year he died. Unlike in 1951, when the work was conducted by Knappertsbusch, in 1966 it was under the musical direction of none other than Pierre Boulez, the leader of the post-war European avant-garde.
By 1966, Boulez had become the most articulate, influential, and one might say lethal musician to emerge from the rubble of World War II. Through his appearances at modern-music festivals, speeches, and occasional incendiary articles, Boulez, the composer and opinion maker, had already become the arch-modernist intellectual spokesman of Europe’s dogmatic serialists when he agreed to take on conducting the Romantic music of Wagner. A happy Wieland publicly announced that he had finally found an interpreter of his grandfather’s music who fit his vision for New Bayreuth.
Boulez erased the great roiling ebb and flow of the performance tradition that Wagner himself had invented, and instead gave a cool and meticulously prepared account of the scores. When asked in 1974 whether Bayreuth maintained the original markings in its set of orchestral materials, he looked surprised and disinterested. “No, the parts are simply replaced with new ones.” And so, Bayreuth was de-Nazified, tradition-bound Germans could occasionally boo with impunity (in the dark), and the radical modernists were given permission to cheer what they saw and heard. And while Wieland was alive, there was no more exciting place for a Wagnerian to be. Everyone, it seemed, was served.
Meanwhile, popular forms of music—in broadcasts, recorded performances, and live performances of big bands in dance halls and jazz clubs—once again satisfied Europe’s and America’s desire for new music that was tuneful, exciting, memorable, and fun. New symphonic scores were being composed by Americans who followed Wagner’s theories and composed them for the movies. That they were immigrants was mostly unknown to audiences, since Americans had many types of family names. Did anyone imagine that Franz Waxman was Franz Wachsmann when his music accompanied movies that starred Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn, and Cary Grant?
At war’s end, new repertory had been composed by the four previously mentioned titans of Austro-German music. In Los Angeles, Schoenberg continued to compose strictly twelve-tone works, but also ventured into writing intricate and beautiful tonal compositions, including a violin concerto, a piano concerto, orchestra variations, a chamber symphony, and a suite for string orchestra. In New Haven, Connecticut, Hindemith completed five symphonies, two operas, an epic requiem mass, and many chamber works and sonatas. In Los Angeles, Korngold composed more than a dozen enormous scores to Warner Bros. films—comprising more than thirty hours of symphonic music—and once Hitler was dead, he wrote for the concert hall, completing a violin concerto, a four-movement symphonic serenade, and a grand symphony. In New York City, Weill completed an epic-scaled Bible play, an opera, five musicals, a folk-opera for radio, a pageant, and art songs. His Broadway musicals explored important political and social conditions such as apartheid, mental illness, age discrimination, war, American racism, and sexual hypocrisy. German music, it would seem, was doing just fine in America.
The idea that “modernism” was the only path forward for post-war European and American classical music was not generally accepted by composers who kept on writing, and were not willing or able to change their styles to accommodate the pressures that were coalescing against them. Of course, their music changed and developed in extraordinary and unique ways in their adopted countries. They and many others let the public determine success or failure, much as Giuseppe Verdi did in the nineteenth century. He judged the value of his operas by their level of success with an audience, nothing more, never blaming the public for not understanding his latest opera. After Wagner had published his books and essays on opera, drama, art and revolution, and the future of music, Verdi was asked by a journalist if he, too, had a theory on theater. “Yes,” the maestro is reported to have said. “The theater should be full.”
The twentieth century proved to be a golden age of popular song, especially love songs, and the source of much of it was America. For a century frequently described as modern, to contrast it with the so-called Romantic nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw a passionate outpouring of love—and the other powerful emotions that come along with it.
The challenge persisted, however, in finding the style of music one could call “modern”—the predetermined prescription for the twentieth century that never seemed to go away. This concept had new relevance for those who wanted to represent the new democratic western Europe and its eager-to-please liberator, America, in high art music. As mentioned earlier, a solution, at least for the Americans, who had both the money and the political goal of establishing a democratic Europe, was for the music to demonstrate a strictly delineated concept of freedom of expression, and thereby distinguish itself from the Soviet’s official and unapologetically anti-avant-garde musical language. Freedom from sounding like the recently composed—and sweepingly attractive—music of Europe and America was also important to the young European survivors of their parents’ war, all of whom were innocent victims of its violence, its deprivation, and, perhaps more profoundly, the humiliating loss from a catastrophe they hardly understood in the first place.
What kind of new classical music should be officially supported by the West? What voice should fill America’s and Britain’s concert halls and opera houses, as well as those concert halls and opera houses in a brave new continental western Europe, where significant monies derived from the American government and private U.S. foundations were supporting new European art and music? The Allies, after all, had made a commitment to rebuild the decimated cultural infrastructure of Germany. What should all the German, French, Italian, Danish, British, etc. radio orchestras be playing in 1945? 1955? 1965? America, after all, was financing much of the reconstruction of Europe. In retrospect, of course, this was a totalitarian concept—a universally approved language for all new music—promoted by the very people who had been fighting totalitarianism.
As we have said, Stalin’s Soviet Union maintained its policy regarding contemporary music. Russia, too, had won the war. Italy, France, and the German-speaking countries, however, had a big—and complicated—job ahead of them.
A SOLUTION EMERGES: THE RETURN OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Avant-garde is a military term. It refers to a group of highly trained soldiers who advance ahead of the others (the main-guard and the rearguard) to seek out the enemy. But if you look up the word avant-garde in terms of art, you will find yourself in a forest of definitions, some of which directly contradict each other.
At its start in the early 1900s, the avant-garde movement that became codified and published as a call to action in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909 seems to have been fueled by a hatred of capitalism and mass markets. As a result, instead of rejoicing in the influence the movement was having on other artists and the public (the main-guard and the rearguard), the avant-garde artist was meant to reject influence altogether—as if such a thing were possible. In addition, the movement defined any art that it might have influenced as being derivative and therefore fake or kitsch.
The avant-garde also emerged out of a concept of futurism—in which new is better than old—and a general opposition to mainstream concepts of art and music was central to its beliefs. Thus, once the avant-garde’s external manifestation—its voice, as it were—was accepted, it was either abandoned or denigrated as no longer being truthful. In its hermetically sealed definition, it could only exist as a group of leaders of a club that no one can join because it no longer exists. Of course, the circular logic of this philosophy is exposed when one attempts to define newness and oldness.
The word obscene comes from the Latin obscena, meaning offstage. The holy altar of the theater, as determined by the Greeks and Romans, would never permit certain actions to be seen by an audience. To solve the dilemma of telling stories that involved objectionable acts, the Greeks had invented the role of the “Messenger”—the actor who reports that the queen has hanged herself, and so forth. The audience was required to imagine these things but never actually see them.
The avant-garde in art likes to tweak society’s ideas of what is art, as well as what is objectionable. In 2014, for example, a sale of four paintings made from pigeon droppings on white canvas (created by the artist Dan Colen) sold for $545,000 in New York City. In 2017, advertisements promoting a retrospective of erotically explicit images by the expressionist painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918) were banned from appearing on the sides of buses in Vienna and London.
With the embrace of the pre–World War I avant-garde within the artistic communities of western Europe and America in the 1960s, composers took its founding principles to their logical, and some might say absurd, conclusions. You could spend hours imagining new musical works that achieved most of what you read in the above paragraphs. Then, following this logic, you could decide it might be more appropriate to write a book about these works without ever actually composing or performing them. Then, once this book of recipes was planned, there was no need to publish a book of recipes for this musical/happening/installation/performance art because, after all, it had already been thought of and experienced in the artist’s brain.1
In short, what is generally understood by the term avant-garde has a few central characteristics:
—It challenges accepted judgments.
—It is revolutionary in that it wants to effect radical change.
—By its very existence, it forces us to rethink pre-existing conditions.
—It is perceived as lively, exciting, new, and linked to intelligence and youth.
All of the above continually seeped into the language of European and American musical thought throughout the twentieth century, mostly lying dormant after World War I and the Great Depression, only to be brought back after 1945. The dramatic and overt influence the avant-garde had, however, was on other people who attempted to join the club: smart, articulate, and sometimes pharmaceutically stimulated people who were determined to keep this concept of eternal newness and youthfulness alive—and separate. After all, how else does one define newness other than by its separateness? This would explain the appropriation of the phrase “contemporary music” to mean much less than “music of its time.” The phrase is only applied to music that is part of something viewed as a cutting-edge movement.
A concert of contemporary music therefore could not include tonal music of the twentieth century because it is music that was eliminated from the data pool. In 2019, André Previn recalled that Boulez told him that as long as he was music director of the New York Philharmonic (1971–77), he would “protect it from Shostakovich.” “You’re kidding, Pierre,” Previn said. He was not. One thing the avant-garde composers and supporters did not have was a sense of humor about their art, with its many militant-sounding manifestos. There is one exception—Humphrey Searle. The British Searle, who had studied composition with Schoenberg’s most ascetic Viennese student, Anton Webern, and who promoted serial composition on the BBC in the years after the war, served as president of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1947 to 1949.
When the post-war European avant-garde composers were being sponsored in concerts that excited many—and enraged many more—this rare voice of humor emerged at a 1958 concert masterminded by the Berlin-born satirist and cartoonist Gerard Hoffnung, and none of Searle’s compositions was funnier than his irreverent parody of twelve-tone music titled Punkt Contrapunkt.
Amid the laughter and satire at London’s Royal Festival Hall that evening, one can divine a certain British concern for this invasion from the continent a mere decade after the war had ended. The British had been extraordinarily forgiving and welcoming of German musicians after the war and took a profound interest in what was going on with the youthful non-tonal masters and the lessons they wished to teach their British colleagues. The imaginary composer whose music was receiving its “British premiere” was one Bruno Heinz Jaja—a mash-up on the names of Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, all living avant-garde composers.
The two very German-sounding “professors” (Hoffnung and scriptwriter John Amis) began their lecture as follows:
Musik began when Arnold Schoenberg has invented the tone row. [Laughter] Before twelve-tone, composing was chaos absolute! Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven—all has been superficial. Schlagers! Or as you like to say, “flagellated cream” . . .
Now to perform the music of Jaja in England brings a problem already, for here you are not ganz organisiert. You do not have the electronic Machinewerks.
In Germany, we make it other. In Germany every self-respecting young composer carries no more the pen, or the forking tune [applause] . . . but the mathematical slide rule and the spanner.
Musik paper is out of date. Graph paper is essential now, and every good German composer is ready to put his spanner in the works . . . [Huge laughter]
Each note is dependent on the next. Each note is like a little, polished diamond, as Igor Stravinsky has once said. Of course, Stravinsky has only said this after, Gott sei Dank, he has stopped writing his old tonal muck. [Laughter]
Kitsch! Ja, kitsch! Jaja, unlike Stravinsky, has never been guilty of composing harmony in all his life. [Laughter] Jaja is pure, absolute twelve-tone.
The fallacies of the ultra-modernists were right there to be seen in this lethal parody—especially their dependency on very conservative musical concepts such as thematic variation and climax (old German musical ideas, after all). In attempting to distance themselves from older music, however, the pseudo-professors explained that anything that functioned like tonal music must have the prefix “quasi” before it. It was not really acting like the dead tonal system. It was merely similar to it.
What Hoffnung and Amis called a “quasi-development” and “what seems like a quasi-recapitulation” were actual terms used in analyzing twelve-tone and serial composition during that period. In the case of this fake piece, the climax (“so ‘quasi-lyrical’ as to be ‘quasi-emotional’”) is three bars of silence. The central bar of silence, we are told, is in three-quarter time (waltz time) and gives the whole work a “quasi-Viennese flavour.” And, as if that wasn’t absurd enough, “the silence makes a crescendo.” Wonderful and funny, except for those who were not laughing and who were taking this very, very seriously indeed.
The United States also had its own musical avant-garde, and none of its members had more influence than John Cage, a student of Schoenberg. His unique puckish humor, coupled with his brilliance, made him a darling outsider. Indeed, he seemed to exist outside of the Outside. And, oddly enough, he became something of a household name. Like Charles Ives, who embraced the chance overlapping of music in our lives, finding joy in hearing marching bands playing different tunes as they pass you by at a parade, or replicating the amateur musician playing “mistakes” in his music, Cage opened Euro-American music to the influences of ancient non-European music and ideas. Ives was not played much during his lifetime, but Cage was very much present in intellectual circles.
Cage’s passionate embrace of Indian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, meant that his ideas, if not his music, filtered into the consciousness of composers and listeners at the highest echelons of classical music. That he collaborated with the great dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham meant there was a dramatic “face” to his music. More important, he encouraged people to listen to the sounds around them: traffic, a toy piano, or the fidgeting of an audience waiting for something to happen—as in his famous silent piece known as 4′ 33″. Indeed, within the universe of John Cage, there was no such thing as silence and there was no such thing as noise.
The March 15, 1943 issue of Life Magazine featured a story about Cage called “Percussion Concert—Band Bangs Things to Make Music.” It reported on a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that had taken place the previous February 7. It described Cage as “patient and humorous,” adding that “Cage believes that when people today get to understand and like his music, which is produced by banging one object with another, they will find new beauty in everyday modern life, which is full of noises made by objects banging against each other.”2
What is particularly fascinating about the article in this hugely popular magazine is its historical justification for Cage’s experimentation. “Percussion music goes back to man’s primitive days when untutored savages took aesthetic delight in hitting crude drums or hollow logs.” Significantly, it also described the audience at Cage’s concert as “very highbrow.”
As if that were not enough, Cage also proposed and created what is sometimes called “chance music” or aleatoric music. This flew directly in the face of the ganz organisiert faction, in which every element of a composition—its series of notes, its dynamics, its note-lengths, and the attack qualities of each note—was controlled by various formulae. What Cage was suggesting was the exact opposite. “Choose whatever note you want from this group and play it any way you want until you are asked to stop.”
Whereas Europe’s young avant-gardists Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, and Stockhausen had originally promoted this American maverick and enjoyed his “disorder” among so much of their music’s preoccupation with order, he ultimately went too far. Cage was expelled from school. As devout structuralists, chance music implicitly negated all they stood for. However, one could argue that Cage’s ideas of chance were truly new to classical music, whereas structure, whether tonal or non-tonal, was not.
Above all, one must ask if a listener can hear the difference between the resultant sounds from an “indeterminate” piece by Cage for a symphony orchestra and a totally determined piece for the same size ensemble by, say, the much-lauded Elliott Carter or Milton Babbitt. In his Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage took maps of the stars and printed the five-line staff one normally sees in printed music over small groups of them. Each player is instructed to use whatever clef is normal for his or her instrument and play the notes in a chosen area (or constellation), but only those notes, and in any order, loudness, or duration, until the conductor moves his or her hands, at which point the player moves to another constellation. The conductor’s gestures are like a clock, rather than the normal gestures one makes in conducting notated music—whether by Bach or Boulez. The conductor must move at least twice as slowly as a clock’s second hand.
The result, assuming the orchestra players take it seriously, is a kind of feathery sound, not unlike the music of other avant-garde compositions that are specifically notated to give individual orchestral players unique lines of music determined by complex arithmetical and sometimes mathematical calculations.
And therein lies an important point: total saturation of harmonic textures, imperceptible internal rhythms, a sense of stasis, and simultaneous complexity achieve much the same aural result no matter how they are created. Cage and his European colleagues arrived at a place where the sounds of chaotic chance music equaled the resultant sounds of totally controlled music of immense complexity. In later years this music would be called a “soundscape” or “spectral music.” It is still viewed as modern, even though its sounds were first heard in the 1940s and then almost without exception in the 1960s, with the music of Stockhausen, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki. It is the music many people find absolutely insufferable after two or three minutes. A significant number of music lovers have been taught—and believe—they just aren’t smart enough or trained enough to understand it.
One of the most enlightening and, for some, devastating musical experiments of the twentieth century took place during Leonard Bernstein’s very last televised Young People’s Concert on March 26, 1972. The program—the fifty-third in the series—was called “Holst: The Planets.” Since Gustav Holst never wrote a movement for Pluto (even though he was alive when it was discovered in 1930), Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic improvised a movement that he called “Pluto: The Unpredictable.” “We have no prearranged signals, and we here onstage are going to be just as surprised as you at the mysterious sounds we will be making. In other words, you are going to hear a piece that doesn’t exist yet and will never be performed again.” The children in the audience laugh.
For the next three minutes, Bernstein makes gestures to the orchestra, which, it should be said, had played many new works under Bernstein’s leadership since he became the orchestra’s music director in 1958. Therefore, the vocabulary of the serialists, the avant-garde, and the expressionists of the early twentieth century was well known to the players. Without a note written for anyone to read or an instruction as to what and how to play, the Philharmonic plays an absolutely authentic piece of new music—and it is new in every sense of that word. Except for its rather obvious ending, it is doubtful that anyone who did not know the conditions for the creation of this piece could tell how it was created, but would simply hear it as another work from the twentieth century in the international school of post–World War II modernism.
If you look at the score of Ligeti’s Atmosphères, which became famous because of its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, you will see that every player in the orchestra has a different part. Within the string section, players are asked to change notes in a series of slightly shifting moments of attack in which no one moves at precisely the same time.
John Williams achieved a similar sound world in his music to Close Encounters of the Third Kind by giving the string players instructions (in a John Cage way) to choose a note and change it (within certain parameters) as they will. The resultant sound is exactly the same as Ligeti’s. John Adams’s high-octane minimalism is given its dangerous energy when the composer changes beating patterns and bar lengths from measure to measure, whereas Williams’s score to AI: Artificial Intelligence achieves much the same result by using regular beating patterns and bar lengths in which the changes of harmonies fall on surprising beats within the bars. In other words, the bars are even in Williams and the music is syncopated against it. These are notational issues, not issues of how something sounds.
Cage also created a genre of performance art known as “happenings.” Today, we call it performance art, as if it were something new. He said things like “Consider everything an experiment,” and the Ives-like “Nothing you play is a mistake.” He just encouraged us to listen and provoked us to think about the world of sound that surrounds us. That, it would seem, is an eternal gift from a true avant-gardist.