Almost half a century ago, Arnold Schoenberg, the man who for so many epitomised the horror and ugliness of modern music, died in Los Angeles. He had brought to music previously unknown emotions of panic and terror, and had dissolved the comforting security of the old forms and harmonies into a disconcerting dream-like fluidity. During the 1920s he set out to order the new musical world with the so-called "12-note technique." But having launched a musical revolution, Schoenberg flunked it. That, at least, was the view of the 26-year- old Pierre Boulez, who greeted the news of Schoenberg's death with an obstreperously polemical article, "Schoenberg est mort." In it Boulez declared that, having invented the serial method of composing, which was indeed indispensable ("anyone who does not compose with it is useless"). Schoenberg made the cardinal error of using it to write sonata forms and waltzes. This hankering for the past had to be purged; a new age demanded a completely new music, and it fell to Boulez and his contemporaries to complete the Schoenbergian revolution.
Fifty years on, younger voices are whispering that it is Boulez, and the rest of the 1950s avant-gardistes, who are "mort." Odaline de la Martinez, conductor of the London new music group Lontano, has declared: "Old new music is dead-there is a new new music, which wants to communicate with the audience." It's not just that the modernists' aesthetic is alien, their stridency unattractive, their left-wing politics na?ve. They themselves are remote. Boulez may not be literally "mort," but he is the next best thing: an ?minence grise, who flies from one high-profile conducting appearance to the next, and dines with cultural power-brokers in Paris and New York. Karlheinz Stockhausen is holed up in his country retreat, acting out his fantasies of communicating with astral beings. Luciano Berio writes beautifully textured orchestral meditations, laden with references to German romanticism, while younger Italian composers experiment with techno. Luigi Nono and John Cage are dead. Henri Pousseur has been silent for years. For those who survive, the public's attention is more and more focused on birthday festivals and tributes-a sure sign that a composer is passing from living music into the history books.
The notoriety of these composers born in the 1920s is as much to do with their success as polemicists and manifesto writers as it is with their music. (This is especially true of Boulez, who has been much more prolific with words than notes). The manifestos were the public face of fierce debates which went on between a group of twenty-something composers at the now legendary summer music schools in the early 1950s at Darmstadt, the most notable of whom were Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Berio and Pousseur. With them in spirit, but not in person, were those modernists behind the Iron Curtain, above all the Hungarian Gy?rgy Ligeti and Witold Lutoslawski in Poland; and a lone voice in America, Elliot Carter. (There is another kind of American modernism represented by Cage and Morton Feldman, but so different is their aesthetic that they hardly belong here).
The debate began from a simple question: how do you treat music as a tabula rasa, where absolutely nothing is a given, where the most basic ideas of music such as harmony, rhythm and form have to be rethought from first principles? Even to pose such a question now seems quaint. But in those days, when Europe was rebuilding itself amid the hopeful rhetoric of a new world order, it must have seemed unavoidable. Before the rebuilding could start, the rubble of the recent past had to be cleared away. Given that the favoured artistic style of the Nazis and Stalin was a kind of bastardised triumphal classicism, it is hardly surprising that Boulez acquired a loathing for the neo-classicism of the 1930s and 1940s. Stockhausen grew up with a hatred for any kind of regular rhythm, because it reminded him of the marching music he heard on Nazi radio.
Suspicion of a tainted past was one thing that united these composers. Another was intoxication at being the pioneers in a whole new musical territory-electronic music, just then coming to birth in a few fledgling electronic studios in Cologne, Paris and Milan. These gave composers sounds that were literally unheard of. Traditional instruments weren't banished, but they had to be de-familiarised, so that the sounds they made seemed similarly new-minted. Everything came together at that fateful moment: an impatience with the past, a new universe of sounds and, lying to hand, the severely rational method of ordering sounds invented by Schoenberg.
But-and here's the rub-when musical material has been "de-natured," stripped of its inherited personality, it becomes an undifferentiated sea of possibilities, offering an infinity of choice. Faced with this chaotic sound-world, the composer can only ward off vertigo by imposing ever more rigid systems upon it. The result, in the early 1950s, was a sterile automatism in which the composer devised a number sequence (usually based around the number 12, revealing its Schoenbergian parentage), varied it by mechanical permutations, and then "applied" the results to musical notes. Boulez's Structures 1-as the composer later admitted-is a demonstration ad absurdam of the way in which a series of numbers can be used to govern every aspect of a piece-notes, rhythms, dynamics. The result is a mismatch of intention and effect. From the analyst's point of view the piece is totally ordered, in that every note can be "explained." From the listener's point of view it is a splintered array of notes flying from high to low, fortissimo to pianissimo, with no audible connection between them.
Hardly anyone plays these pieces now. But their baleful presence lives on in histories of 20th century music and in university courses, where they receive an attention beyond their worth. The result is that our image of the real musical achievement of these composers, and its potential value for today's musical culture, is skewed. That achievement came later, with the realisation that, in music as in everything, there is no "degree zero." At that point the work began of reconciling the radical programme of the avant-gardists with the perceptual and social realities of music.
But how could there be any such reconciliation? Either you begin from first principles, or you accept the inherited vocabulary of music-you cannot do both at once. Take three of the basic elements of music: rhythm, pitch and harmony. These are culturally loaded terms. To fit them for the brave new world of synthesisers and serially organised music, you have to redescribe them as duration, frequency and density. The problem is that we don't hear durations, or frequencies-we hear rhythm and notes. Density (the number of notes sounding at a given moment) as a perceptual quality seems more plausible: once we purge chords of harmonic implications, we do begin to attend to their thickness and thinness.
This quality of music as being "thick" or "thin" is just one of many perceptual qualities of music which lie outside the traditional, purely "musical" categories we use to describe music, such as "counterpoint" or "dissonance." We might describe these as metaphorical qualities; bright and dark, rough and smooth, tense and relaxed, serene and tragic. In talking about music we mix the two categories of description so naturally that we're hardly aware of where one ends and the next begins; so for example, we speak of "anguished dissonant counterpoint," or "serene major harmonies."
The perception that certain musical textures could be thick or thin certainly didn't have to wait on the avant-gardist's conception of "density"; in that sense we can all hear that Brahms is a "thick" composer and Stravinsky a "thin" one. But what is strikingly new about these composers is the way they inverted the normal hierarchy of these two sets of terms. In traditional western music, "counterpoint" and "harmony" are primary. They are what give music its grammatical sense; they lead the ear from one note or chord to the next. The metaphorical aspect of music rides piggyback on that grammatical aspect. But let's imagine that "density," instead of being a kind of add-on, was treated as the constructive principle of music, the thing that gives it its grammar. Could we not imagine a kind of music in which the varying of thickness and thinness over time would be the central idea, replacing things like melody and harmony? This was the question Gy?rgy Ligeti began to ask in the late 1950s. "My second string quartet was my attempt to answer the question, how can colour replace contours, how can contrasting volumes and weights create form?" The quartet, a tour de force of textural invention, gives the answer: by the use, at one moment, of the most extreme contrast, and at another, by a process of incremental change through which one kind of musical state alters almost imperceptibly into another. The fondness for extreme juxtapositions of glacial stillness and ferocious energy was peculiar to Ligeti; the fascination with process was common to all the avant-gardists. For Berio, the main lesson of the Darmstadt years was the discovery that music did not have to be a thing; it could be a process.
But then what becomes of musical form? Form in a tonal piece is to do with dividing a span of time into articulated units, characterised by melodic shapes and harmonic patterns, which relate to one another by contrast, or similarity. Having established a contrast between two blocks, there is a natural tendency to return to the first block to make a symmetry, just as the two wings of a large house establish a symmetry, with a contrasting element in the middle. ("Architecture is frozen music," Stravinsky once said.) These larger units are made of smaller ones, the musical equivalents of paragraphs, sentences and phrases. We listen out for these units, and orient ourselves by them. But in modernist music there are no stable identities such as tunes or chord-patterns; everything is in a perpetual whirl of coming-into-being and disappearing. To pour such a music into the jelly-mould of an architectural form would be foreign to its nature. And so we get the typical "one-movement" form of modern music-so bothersome to listeners used to the articulated movements of a Haydn symphony or Schumann song-cycle.
Stockhausen, dissatisfied with this formless form, conceived a new way of building music from a series of "moments"-a moment being a musical texture which, in broad terms, sounds the same throughout its length. A moment may be defined, say, by a limited palette of intervals, an emphasis on staccato rhythms, and a predominant colour of brass. The transition to the next moment could be abrupt, ? la Ligeti; or it might be a gradual change, where, as Stockhausen put it, "the kind and degree of change becomes something one composes, just as much as the thing itself."
As the rigidity of early 1950s modernism softened out, so its typical "pointilliste" sound-described by one critic as star-maps in sound-was quickly engulfed by a fantastic profusion of textures and colours. There were the "sculpted surfaces" of the architect-turned-composer Iannis Xenakis, made up of dozens of sliding musical lines-the aural equivalent of the curved surfaces of his modernist buildings. There was the micro-polyphony of Ligeti, in which a multitude of melodic lines are woven into what Ligeti calls a cobweb, where individual lines vanish into an undulating, vibrating texture. Glittering showers of grace notes in Boulez's music were laid over gigantic clanging resonances on gongs, vibraphones and pianos. Unlike the stark austerities of "pointilliste" pieces, which suggest only the rigour of the technique which made them, these new sounds were richly suggestive in ways previously unknown to music. It was that very strangeness which repelled audiences-but which for a composer like Elliot Carter (who came to a modernist stance only in his forties) makes post-war modernist music urgent and necessary. Beethoven's expressive world, his procession of neat rounded phrases, his regular rhythms, all poured into inherited forms such as the sonata, were fine for people who travelled by horse and cart. But the vastly increased speed and complexity of modern life demands a new kind of music.
Carter likened listening to his music to the experience of travelling by plane-close up, things change rapidly; further off, the cloudscape changes slowly. The view from the aeroplane window is of natural processes-clouds forming and parting, the heavens wheeling, starkly beautiful images denuded of culture. It is that aspect to which Carter and Xenakis attend. But imagine the train of thoughts and feelings within the imaginary traveller, which might link the scene with memories, fantasies, and all kinds of inherited cultural baggage. He might think of the first composer who set out to evoke, in music, the sight of clouds parting and reforming-Wagner, in the prelude to Parsifal. As soon as you think of the perceiver rather than the thing perceived, you realise that perception is always filtered through ideas, received images, cultural memories. This is why, once avant-garde music took the "perceptual" turn in the 1960s, it was inevitable that it would forswear its dogmatic rejection of the past and embrace music's history (although Boulez is still unable to face this unpalatable truth). Of all the generation of musicians born in the 1920s, Berio is the most alert to this fact, and the most comfortable with it. His works are shot through with references to other music, from Monteverdi to the Beatles to Sicilian folk-song. His most astonishing feat of sustained musical "recomposition" is the third movement of his Sinfonia, whose skeleton is the scherzo from Mahler's second symphony. Fragments of Bach, Brahms, Berlioz, Stravinsky and Boulez whirl by, crossing paths with the Mahler or melting into it.
From being rigidly exclusive and pure, modernist music showed that it could be inclusive (lurching between opposites is something music shares with the other contemporary arts). When asked just how many kinds of music he wanted to embrace in his music, Stockhausen replied: "Ultimately one wants to embrace everything." His electronic piece Telemusik is a pioneering attempt from 1966 to write a "global" music. Shinto priests, Italian folk-song and chanting monks are among the things we glimpse through the electronic haze. His next piece, Stimmung ("mood"), sounds just one chord throughout its 70-minute length. The singers have to colour their notes using a vocal technique found in Mongolian folk singing, and as this single harmony shimmers and pulsates, bits of erotic poetry and sacred Hindu names are thrown in.
It all sounds very 1960s-and indeed for one dizzy moment the avant-garde joined hands with flower-power. Stockhausen grew his hair long, meditated a lot, and began to pontificate about sounds being part of the great cosmic vibration. Berio was more distanced and self-aware, as befitted a long-time friend and colleague of Umberto Eco, but he joined anti-Vietnam marches while teaching in the US and included a threnody to Martin Luther King in his Sinfonia. But the meeting was skin deep. The avant-gardists were too intellectually rigourous merely to "tune in and turn on." While the 1960s were whirled away into history, the avant-gardists lived on, although it was increasingly a vicarious, shadowy kind of life. They were no longer the threadbare, obstreperous youths of the 1950s, eking out a living by writing theatre or film music and, in their spare time, writing combatively intellectual music. They were now part of the musical establishment: holding chairs of music at universities (Berio); directing radio studios (Stockhausen); directing-simultaneously-the New York Philharmonic and BBC Symphony Orchestra (Boulez). Each of them received a stream of prestigious commissions. Meanwhile, a new generation of modernists arose, who took the generation born in the 1920s as their mentors: Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies in Britain; G?rard Grisey and Tristan Murail in France; Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann in Germany.
The engine of all this activity was not the appetite of the public-for whom "new music" meant Britten and Shostakovich, but which in any case preferred Karajan conducting Beethoven-but subsidy. For the arbiters of musical funding in Europe, the "high seriousness" of the modernist project, its intellectual rigour, its rejection of the market place, more than warranted the subsidy needed to keep it going. And that subsidy was, after all, modest in comparison with the sums spent on classical music generally.
Now, that faith has disappeared. A wave of populism is sweeping Europe. The Arts Council of England no longer believes that classical music in general has any special claim on the public purse, let alone difficult modernist music. What should be supported is music that is "exciting, innovative" and "accessible." Now, there are many who say that this is no more than the belated recognition, by our cultural pay-masters, that the modernist project has failed. The arguments on the side of this bleak assertion are strong. To begin with, the cultural climate has turned against grands projets descended from Enlightenment ideals of progress. We are suspicious of composers who want to "transform our perceptions" of music, just as we are suspicious of architects who want us to love their "machines for living in." Modernist composers themselves have often shown scorn for audiences; Xenakis once said no one should attend one of his concerts who hadn't first grasped stochastic theory. More recently, Harrison Birtwistle, in the programme book to Boulez's 75th birthday celebrations at the South Bank in London, wrote: "I personally have much to thank you (Boulez) for and there are others who would if they could. But more than this, there is the vast musical deaf majority who would thank you if they could but hear." The tribute is handsome, but the implication that audiences' failure to love modernist music is their failure leaves a bad taste in the mouth. More than that, it seals off the modernist coterie from any outside criticism. We see the results of this in the hermetic language of books and journals on modernist music, which discuss the music in terms set by the composers themselves. This lack of a genuine public language of criticism isn't peculiar to modernist music -as anyone who has struggled with the hermetic and self-regarding language of exhibition catalogues at the Hayward or Serpentine galleries will know.
What is peculiar to music is the disappearance of a public which is potentially also a performer of what it hears. When audiences in 19th century Vienna heard a new sonata by Beethoven or a new Brahms intermezzo, they instinctively measured it by the music they had in their piano stools at home. The unpractised amateur and the travelling virtuoso were two extreme ends of one homogeneous public. This happy situation was over almost as soon as it was established; even by Beethoven's time, music was becoming the province of the professional. But it was only in our century, and particularly since the last war, that new music became, in terms of technical difficulty, totally out of reach of the amateur (who, in any case, had been intimidated into passive silence by the perfection of Beethoven and Mozart on record and CD). The performance of new music became confined to those strange creatures who really can play the seven-against-eleven rhythmic intricacies of Elliot Carter. Now new music had its own performers, its own critics, and its own peculiar, rather culty audience; and so the circle was complete.
And yet, against all the odds, modernist music has found a real public. Go to the Royal College of Music, and you will find twenty-somethings writing dense modernist music; go to the South Bank, and you will find them listening to Boulez. How come? Why have the works of Stockhausen, Berio, Nono et al, not been consigned to that sad lumber room of history alongside Ptolemaic astronomy, phrenology, and all those other purely cerebral constructs which fly in the face of reality? The answer is that, thanks to the musical gifts of these composers, their music-the best of it, at least-transcends the ideology which inspired it. On a visceral level of immediate sensuous appeal, it seduces, even when its gestures and language are unfamiliar. And it transcends its own exasperating critical language, to encompass-often in defiance of the composers' stated intentions-familiar human feelings of joy and tragedy, wit and delight.
But there is another reason why we should cherish this music. The story of post-war modernism is one of intellectual and spiritual adventure, unparalleled in the history of music. That kind of questing spirit is out of fashion; what is in the air now is an anxiety to be accessible. You can see the change in the programme of, say, the Society for the Promotion of New Music. Twenty or 30 years ago it offered courses to young composers on "new formal concepts" or "composing with microtones." Nowadays it offers advice on how to get on in the film business and how to publish your own music. But in this rush to commodify music, there is a danger that the very idea of classical music-music with a core of value which has nothing to do with its price or its function as a "social marker"-will fade away. Not that this music will literally fade away, as some people fear. The background hum of Vivaldi and Mozart which greets us in every restaurant and airport grows ever more insistent; the stacks of classical CDs in the stores rise ever higher. What might disappear, though, is the sense of why this music matters. The very things which make modernist music problematic-difficulty of perception and performance, lack of connection with music's received vocabulary-could be useful in keeping that sense alive. It projects, in blazing colours, the utopian, critical spirit which in Beethoven and Bach lies slumbering, hidden under a surface of pleasing, saleable melodies.
