Today’s practitioners of what we once named “contemporary” music are discovering themselves to be abruptly alone. online mixing is set against any music producing that needs the disciplines and tools of research for its genesis. Stories now circulate that amplify and magnify this troublesome trend. It after was that 1 could not even method a big music college in the US unless properly ready to bear the commandments and tenets of serialism. When 1 hears now of professors shamelessly studying scores of Respighi in order to extract the magic of their mass audience appeal, we know there’s a crisis. This crisis exists in the perceptions of even the most educated musicians. Composers today appear to be hiding from specific challenging truths regarding the inventive approach. They have abandoned their search for the tools that will support them build actually striking and difficult listening experiences. I believe that is mainly because they are confused about quite a few notions in contemporary music generating!
Very first, let’s examine the attitudes that are needed, but that have been abandoned, for the development of special disciplines in the creation of a lasting modern day music. This music that we can and have to make gives a crucible in which the magic inside our souls is brewed, and it is this that frames the templates that guide our really evolution in inventive thought. It is this generative process that had its flowering in the early 1950s. By the 1960s, a lot of emerging musicians had come to be enamored of the wonders of the fresh and fascinating new planet of Stockhausen’s integral serialism that was then the rage. There seemed limitless excitement, then. It seemed there would be no bounds to the inventive impulse composers could do anything, or so it seemed. At the time, most composers hadn’t genuinely examined serialism cautiously for its inherent limitations. But it seemed so fresh. Nonetheless, it soon became apparent that it was Stockhausen’s thrilling musical method that was fresh, and not so a great deal the serialism itself, to which he was then married. It became clear, later, that the solutions he utilized have been born of two special considerations that in the end transcend serial devices: crossing tempi and metrical patterns and, specifically, the notion that treats pitch and timbre as specific situations of rhythm. (Stockhausen referred to the crossovers as “contacts”, and he even entitled a single of his compositions that explored this realm Kontakte.) These gestures, it turns out, are truly independent from serialism in that they can be explored from diverse approaches.
The most spectacular approach at that time was serialism, though, and not so considerably these (then-seeming) sidelights. It is this very method — serialism — even so, that just after obtaining seemingly opened so many new doors, germinated the very seeds of contemporary music’s own demise. The method is extremely prone to mechanical divinations. Consequently, it tends to make composition simple, like following a recipe. In serial composition, the less thoughtful composer seemingly can divert his/her soul away from the compositional course of action. Inspiration can be buried, as system reigns supreme. The messy intricacies of note shaping, and the epiphanies 1 experiences from required partnership with one’s essences (inside the mind and the soul — in a sense, our familiars) can be discarded conveniently. All is rote. All is compartmentalized. For a long time this was the honored process, long hallowed by classroom teachers and young composers-to-be, alike, at least in the US. Quickly, a sense of sterility emerged in the musical atmosphere several composers began to examine what was taking place.
The replacement of sentimental romanticism with atonal music had been a critical step in the extrication of music from a torpid cul-de-sac. A music that would closet itself in banal self-indulgence, such as what seemed to be occurring with romanticism, would decay. Right here came a time for exploration. The new option –atonality — arrived. It was the fresh, if seemingly harsh, antidote. Arnold Schonberg had saved music, for the time being. However, shortly thereafter, Schonberg produced a serious tactical faux pas. The ‘rescue’ was truncated by the introduction of a technique by which the newly freed process could be subjected to handle and order! I have to express some sympathy here for Schönberg, who felt adrift in the sea of freedom offered by the disconnexity of atonality. Substantial types depend upon some sense of sequence. For him a process of ordering was necessary. Was serialism a very good answer? I’m not so particular it was. Its introduction offered a magnet that would attract all these who felt they necessary explicit maps from which they could develop patterns. By the time Stockhausen and Boulez arrived on the scene, serialism was touted as the cure for all musical troubles, even for lack of inspiration!
Pause for a minute and feel of two pieces of Schonberg that bring the dilemma to light: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912 – pre-serial atonality) and the Suite, Op. 29 (1924 serial atonality). Pierrot… appears so important, unchained, pretty much lunatic in its specific frenzy, though the Suite sounds sterile, dry, forced. In the latter piece the excitement got lost. This is what serialism seems to have completed to music. Yet the consideration it received was all out of proportion to its generative energy. Boulez when even proclaimed all other composition to be “useless”! If the ‘disease’ –serialism –was bad, 1 of its ‘cures’ –cost-free chance –was worse. In a series of lectures in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1958, John Cage managed to prove that the outcome of music written by possibility signifies differs pretty tiny from that written applying serialism. Even so, opportunity seemed to leave the public bewildered and angry. Opportunity is likelihood. There is nothing on which to hold, absolutely nothing to guide the mind. Even potent musical personalities, such as Cage’s, often have trouble reining in the raging dispersions and diffusions that chance scatters, seemingly aimlessly. But, once again, lots of schools, notably in the US, detected a sensation in the generating with the entry of cost-free chance into the music scene, and indeterminacy became a new mantra for everyone interested in creating one thing, anything, so long as it was new.
I believe parenthetically that a single can concede Cage some quarter that one particular may possibly be reluctant to cede to other folks. Generally chance has become a citadel of lack of discipline in music. Too typically I’ve seen this outcome in university classes in the US that ‘teach ‘found (!)’ music. The rigor of discipline in music generating should really by no means be shunted away in search of a music that is ‘found’, rather than composed. However, in a most peculiar way, the power of Cage’s personality, and his surprising sense of rigor and discipline look to rescue his ‘chance’ art, where other composers just flounder in the sea of uncertainty.
Nonetheless, as a answer to the rigor mortis so cosmically bequeathed to music by serial controls, likelihood is a extremely poor stepsister. The Cageian composer who can make opportunity music speak to the soul is a uncommon bird certainly. What seemed missing to numerous was the perfume that tends to make music so wonderfully evocative. The ambiance that a Debussy could evoke, or the fright that a Schonberg could invoke (or provoke), seemed to evaporate with the modern technocratic or cost-free-spirited techniques of the new musicians. Iannis Xenakis jolted the music world with the potent solution in the guise of a ‘stochastic’ music. As Xenakis’ function would evolve later into excursions into connexity and disconnexity, supplying a template for Julio Estrada’s Continuum, the path toward re-introducing energy, beauty and fragrance into sound became clear. All this in a ‘modernist’ conceptual strategy!