A Guide to the Isms
If the 20th century in music was
anything--so goes the master narrative--it was wildly
diverse, even chaotic. One gets the impression that many
musicologists wish this were not so, and long for the
good old days when one or two dominant styles got most
of the attention, and made musical developments easier
to trace. Still, ever on the lookout for ways to
categorize diverse phenomena, musicologists have done
their job on this century as well. Only a decade since
its passing, the 20th century has already been packed
away in little boxes in the musicological shoe closet,
right along with its predecessors, even if it takes a
few extra boxes this time.
If you are a member of John Q. Public,
you may be under the impression that the 20th century
was a particularly unfriendly time for music lovers,
that composers heedlessly disregarded the things that
once made music enjoyable, went their own way, making
noises that were particularly odiferous. That part of
the story is partly true, but, like most stereotypical
ideas, it is far from fully accurate. If you think you
don't like some musical styles from the 20th century,
you are bound to like others--the menu is broad and
varied. The following is just a quick startup guide
following some of those musicological shoe boxes in
which all of those musical developments are often
placed:
Impressionism
Right out of the gate, the 20th century
looked promising. Not necessarily for composers, who
were getting a little tired of writing the same chords
all the time, and trying to get out from the shadow of
Wagner. However, the public didn't mind them using the
same musical vocabulary and communicating the same
musical ideas--even today the 19th century is the most
widely represented period in the concert hall. But
composers often tend to be innovators, and are less
content than their listeners to keep to the same
thing. An overarching system of 'tonality' had
been developed by the end of the 16th century, and
throughout the 19th century, composers kept increasing
its vocabulary, stretching its syntax, and seeing what
else it could do. By century's end, many were wondering
whether it could hold up anymore; whether it had said
everything it had left to say. Was there a new system?
Or could the old one, like a musical Gladbag, just keep
getting stretched and stretched forever?
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel came
up with a solution that has held up well in the
estimation of lots of average music lovers. It is a
system that subtly challenges the very heart of the old
harmonic system, but doesn't throw it out completely.
Much of what gives their music its
unique sound is a phenomenon called the whole-tone scale. What the
whole-tone scale is missing is the traditional 5th note
of the scale--the 'dominant'--which had, in fact, been
dominating musical thinking for the last millennium.
With it, you could build an entire musical essay around
of the idea of sailing to the dominant and back, and
little, moment-to-moment musical progressions like this one were the bread and
butter of music. Composers as far back as Beethoven had
been challenging this idea, but never abandoned it
completely. Now, armed with a scale which left that
pivotal note out, these Frenchmen were able to make
their music go anywhere with complete freedom. It is as
if they had discovered zero gravity in music.
Not that their music sounds
anti-tonality; this is why they are so popular today. In
practice, Debussy and Ravel still pivot their music
around a central pitch, usually through repetition and
rhythmic accent. A whole-tone scale can be centered on
any pitch which receives the proper emphasis--Debussy
and Ravel made sure that our ears were still directed
toward a point of focus. And they did not use the
whole-tone scale, or any other system of notes,
exclusively. Some of the ancient Greek modes made their
way back into their music, which meant that the dominant
might still govern a large portion of a piece of music,
since all of those modes (save one) contain the dominant
note.
It was a cleverly-devised non-system of
mix and match (Debussy once complained that all the
modes really should be treated as one single mode with
diverse manifestations rather than being chopped up and
thought of separately). The music of both men also
included sensuous harmonies and exciting florid passages
(sweeping runs of notes) which delight the ear (and look
great on the page, too, by the way)--all ingredients
perfect for making them crowd favorites.
This is music, then, that blurs the
traditional picture of note-relations that govern
musical structure, but does not attack that framework in
an overt or unfriendly way. It was compared with a style
of painting which was then enjoying popularity in art
circles, "impressionism." Here is a kind of painting
which does not seek to replicate its subject (cameras
were doing that, and artists were now searching for ways
to distinguish themselves) but, unlike more abstract
forms of painting, still does represent something
recognizable of the world--a landscape is still a
landscape, a person a person. Now, however, the painter
is less concerned with meticulous detail, and presents
the grand sweep with various dabs of paint which
intentionally present the scene out of focus.
Debussy, like most creators, hated the
category into which he was placed, protesting all the
while; Ravel hated the fact that he'd gotten to some of
these innovations first and that Debussy had 'stolen'
them. The music of both of them not only sounds unique
to the individual, but unlike anything else in music.
You need only hear a measure to know it.
Serialism
Serialism is probably the most
generally hated kind of 20th century music. If
impressionism found a way to breathe new life into an
old system without seeming to fundamentally challenge
it, Serialism brooked no such compromise. It represents
an outright rejection of everything that came before it.
Even the idea of having a central note that all the
other notes clustered around was rejected. In fact, all
notes would be treated equally from then on.
In order to erase any idea that some
notes are getting more attention than others, a tone row
became the tool of choice. In a tone row, each of the 12
notes of the octave are played exactly once. They cannot
be repeated until all the other notes have a chance to
sound. Then they all get exactly one turn the second
time through, and so on. Think of it like musical
communism. There is no central authority--everybody is
exactly the same. Everyone shares what they have and we
all get along great because nobody is envious of anybody
else's brilliance.
And it worked about as well as
communism, too. In order to create a piece out of such a
rigid technique, a whole raft of new mathematical
procedures were invented (bureaucracy?). The tone row
could be varied by transposing everything up a step or
two, by turning it upside down, playing it backward, and
so on (backward, upside down and starting 3 half-steps
higher, for instance!). At first, while its creators
were slowly figuring all this out, serial pieces tended
to be very short. Eventually, though, they too became
long and complex.
Serialism's proponents had a long and
uphill climb because the music they were writing didn't
even vaguely resemble anything that had come before.
There was nothing melodious, rhythmically catchy, or
harmonically beautiful about it. Serialism's first
author, Arnold Schoenberg, gave us the twelve-tone
technique described above but did not see fit to
radically alter concepts of rhythm. Later composers,
however, decided that rhythm, too, should be treated as
a non-repetitive element. Eventually, dynamics, too, and
the choice of instruments, articulation (staccato or
legato) and pretty much every other musical element one
could think of, became subject to the same rigorous
principle. Did you use a sixteenth note already? Then it
is off-limits until all the rest of the note values have
been used. Pianissimo (very soft) is only available for
one single note in each series.
Serialism developed into a highly
controlled series of mathematically informed choices.
Notes were put on the page, not because they sounded
good in the composer's ear, but because the mathematical
manipulations the composer was using demanded they be
put there. Almost nobody could recognize those
manipulations, unlike those of past centuries, when a
tune, turned upside down or played backward, might have
been noticeably related to its progenitor. It was even
hard to distinguish this highly controlled music from
its complete opposite, music which was written with no
controls at all, and was generated entirely randomly,
divorced from the will of the composer ('aleotoric,' or
'chance' music). By the time composers like Anton Webern
and Alban Berg had given way to Pierre Boulez, in the
middle of the century, the irony of this completely
controlled music sounding indistinguishable from its
opposite was evident even to Boulez.
Neo-Classicism
The history of ideas sometimes seems as
if the humans who contributed to it were a bunch of
inexperienced canoeists; first we over steer in one
direction, then, sheer panic overtakes us and we steer
wildly in the other. And so on. In art, ideas about
strict control often give way to indulgences in wild
artistic freedom, form and balance seem to cancel out
expression and inspiration, and then in turn be
threatened by those very things. If this is a grave
oversimplification (and it is) there are always
commentators who make sure we will interpret the vast,
complex movements of art history in this competitive
way.
Those whose music is fed on ideas
(rather than on whether it sells a lot of records) have
always fought musical duels on the grounds of those
ideas--the 20th century has nothing new to contribute to
the world of musical vituperation. But if 'the system'
was worn out, and practically everyone agreed that
things couldn't go on the way they had before, what was
the answer? Throw it out? Or start over? Or find a way
to breathe new life into it? We have already met with
one answer for each alternative. Now we will engage two
more.
The term neo- suggests that we are
going to revisit the past. But an artist never
visits the past without comment. Igor Stravinsky
certainly didn't; he was used to provoking plenty of
comment from the musical community as well. And as he
entered his middle years he had grown tired of the vast
musical canvas on which he was painting challenges to
tonality. The ballets of those early years, "The Rite of
Spring," "Petrouchka," "The Firebird," had all
given scandal-loving Parisians something to talk about
besides trying to get a grip on the music itself. But
Stravinsky now looked for more discipline in his
writing, and he found it in a classical sense of
proportion and form.
Although the kind of clear phrasing and
relatively spare textures that classicism promotes had
been part of the European musical fabric as recently as
about 1800, a lot had changed in the meantime. Harmony
in particular had travelled far from the closed system
of Mozart's era. By refusing to ignore the progress of
harmony over the last century and a half, Stravinsky
created music that might, on first blush, strike one as
Mozart with a lot of wrong notes. There is certainly
more going on here than that.
One thing that is going on is that
Stravinsky is still battling with Classicism's opposite
tendency in art, Romanticism. In the middle of the
twentieth century the works of Wagner and Brahms were
already established as the unchallenged masterworks of
the musical canon. And Romanticism in musical art had
had such a long and dominant ride that musicians were
still trying to shake off its influence throughout much
of the 20th century. Stravinsky's personal character, in
particular, did not side with the lush lyricism of a
vast army of violins, music which exults the individual
but requires an increasing number of "musical servants'
to bring it about; instead, he wrote pieces for small
and unusual groupings of instruments, shorter in length,
more contained in scope, and resistant, he thought, to
interpretive flights of individual expression. "Why
can't you just follow the marks on the page?" he
complained of musicians who didn't play his works the
way he himself had performed them. This new objectivism,
perhaps a new musical conservatism, has never found a
home in the hearts of a public enamored with Tchaikovsky
and Rachmaninoff.
Neo-Romanticism
In a century in which technology
combined with new attitudes and tools of scholarship
made looking back at the past more prevalent,
re-interpretations of the music of old was inevitable.
And if Classicism could go under the knife, why not
Romanticism itself?
It was hard, in an era in which
humankind experienced two world wars and a depression,
to celebrate unabashed the same kind of unbridled
songfulness of the century that led up to it; optimism
was hardly in the artistic air in the first half of the
20th century. It was easier to be a cynic, to lay over
these soaring melodies with a varnish of sarcasm-- and
classicism, with its curt cadences and wry rhythms, was
a better match for those 'sentiments.' Perfect,
perhaps, for Sergei Prokoffiev, who listed, among his
compositional characteristics, the tendency to 'step on
the throat of [his] own song'--one moment we are
rhapsodically soaring through the high register of our
very souls, the next we have been dashed to harsh earth
by a brutal chord progression in the wrong key. The
militancy of the march drowns out the joy of the waltz.
But in order to comment wryly on such
Romantic excess, the naivet� of a soul that did not know
the depths of which we are capable, one first has to
write an expressive melody, and clothe it in splendor.
And so, in Prokoffiev, we have the unification of two
opposites: a tightly controlled playground for his
acerbic wit and wiry athleticism, and the vast expanse
of his soul's longing, which is no longer given the free
reign of the artistically unaware nineteenth century. We
have entered the machine age, and Prokoffiev's music
abounds in machinelike effects, but it is altogether
human as well.
The melodious expressions of a reborn
Romanticism soon caught on with a vast panoply of
composers. Once a new vocabulary of modes, harmonies,
metric practices, and instrumental resources proved that
you could be a Romantic again without sounding like
warmed over Tchaikovsky, composers throughout the latter
20th century flocked to it; a few, their biographers
love to point out, never left. The banner movement for a
new dominance of tonality, the movement at first did
battle directly with Serialism and various forms of
Atonality; later, it gained the upper hand, as, by the
1980s, scores of composers who had once made their
artistic signature of non-tonal works did a one-eighty
and returned to the fold, and as exultant Christian
bumper stickers like to proclaim that "Nietzsche is
dead" according to God (a reversal of Nietzsche's
proclamation of well over a century ago), these
'tonalists' have us convinced that atonality in its
various forms has proven to be, after all, a
musical-historical dead end, despite the surety of its
early practitioners that it was to be the salvation of
music, and its very future.
That is how it appears for the present.
Today neo-Romanticism is so prevalent that it is most
likely the dominant language of new musical composition,
though, in place of the term, composers and their
publicists will tell you that their music is
'accessible', meaning it is ear-friendly, and should not
fill you with the fear that modern music has on a wary
public, or at the very least that they are 'eclectic',
meaning that they are capable of writing in many styles,
and you are bound to like some of them!
Minimalism
The suffix -ism seems, in its 20th
century musical context, to imply an exaggerated
emphasis on something. Among its several meanings
according to
this online dictionary it
denotes "a principle, belief or movement" which sums up
the often propogandistic attitude of its creators or
their disciples, "a form of prejudice or discrimination"
which also describes the attitudes of those who fought
duels in words over the validity of each approach and
its eventual importance to music history, and the
"defining attribute of a person or thing" which probably
comes closest to what the creators of these terms were
trying to get our ears around, even if it sometimes
seems in the process that the 20th century suffered from
"labelism."
Perhaps wearied of all the noise and
the excess, a few composers decided it wasn't necessary
to exult in that kind of musical cerebralism. Things had
indeed gotten very complicated. As a reaction to all the
sonic clutter, the strained originality, and the sheer
busyness of some styles, a few composers decided that
the wisest thing music could say was very little. They
sought to combine the influences of Eastern, meditative
practices with simple tonal progressions, and in the
process bridge the by now gargantuan gulf between high
art and what the man on the street could understand.
This music proceeded in no great
hurry--it might take half-an-hour to say what could have
been said in a few measures. There are huge amounts of
repetition in this style. An idea, once stated, might be
played unaltered dozens of times before any change
occurs in the music at all, and then it might only be
the addition of a single note; this signal event then
starts a new cycle of repetition.
Like all of the isms, minimalism has
now had a long history and many practitioners. The early
trio of Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams have
all had commercially successful ventures into areas that
traditionally do not bless composers with piles of cash,
probably because their music is very easy to listen
to--or have on in the background while you are doing
something else. It often evokes for the hearer a calm
mental state, which is at a premium in much of Western,
industrialized society these days.
Unlike other approaches which involved
a philosophy of 'letting go' of our need to control
life, such as John Cage's 'chance music' which sometimes
involved composing music by flipping coins or other
methods designed to divorce the will from the act of
creation, Minimalism is usually tonal, which is to say
it keeps to the same harmonic, melodic, and usually
rhythmic vocabulary of the past. Although today it is
often influenced by other less simple ideas and styles,
it has been, and sometimes still is, music that a four
year old could digest (except that your four-year old
probably bores easily). Unlike its equivalent in other
arts--say, a giant square on a canvas--Minimalism does
not typically generate complaints from the average
musical consumer the way simple (and large) examples of
the visual arts do. You will, however, sometimes hear
musicians complaining about playing it.
Aleotoric Music
Technically not an -ism, aleatoric, or
chance music, was a musical phenomenon that belongs to
the 20th century, thus it belongs on this page. If the
master narrative was one of crises, then, typically, the
humans who reacted to this state of emergency did so
with a number of solutions. All of them involved some
form of rejection of what had come before, the question
was what, or how much, do you reject? Like
minimalism, the chance composer wanted to radically
revise the idea that it was necessary to visit some kind
of logical coherence on musical discourse. Where was
music always going in such a hurry? Did it have to have
a goal? A structure of high points and low points?
Couldn't it just simply be? In other words, who needs
form, and, for that matter, who needs grammar? Let us go
a step further, and suggest that the very determination
to control noise, perhaps the postulate at the very
heart of music from its earliest days, needs to be
eliminated. Rather than creating music by intentionally
joining predetermined sounds together, why not flip
coins, draw straws, or simply allow whatever sounds
happen to be in the environment while the piece is being
'performed' to constitute the composition?
John Cage's name must inevitably come
up at this point; he was the most visible of the this
school, which seemed a reaction against everything else
the 20th century had offered--indeed, everything else
that music had ever had to offer.
Perhaps Cage's most famous piece involves a pianist
seated at the piano for over four minutes, playing
absolutely nothing and allowing the random sounds in the
room and those audible from outside to be the 'music.'
Some of his others involve radios being randomly tuned
to various stations--
Cage began his flight away from
predetermined sounds in the 1950s by introducing the
'prepared piano', in which various items are place on
the piano's strings to alter the sound. An early
'sonata' seems to be played by a completely different
instrument! As his thinking progressed, he seemed more
determined to completely divorce his will from the
composition process, despite the inherent problems this
stance presents. And he wrote several books which
communicate his desires not to communicate anything, for
example "I have nothing to say and I am Saying it" or
"Don't try to improve the world, you will only make
things worse." One of them contains an anecdote in which
he had read an annoyed quote from Leonardo da Vinci, who
had complained about people who didn't work hard to
achieve anything but basically sat on their butts and
did nothing ('mere producers of dung' was, I believe,
his phrase). Cage's friend comments "Maybe they were
just good Buddhists!"--A story which may illustrate the
difference in attitude between the stereotypical West
and the stereotypical East. Throughout the 60s and 70s,
when young Americans had grown very disillusioned with
'the system' in general, and could find no solution to
their universal disgust than to drop out, this
philosophy of letting go of everything had resonance. It
is also connected, in the visual arts, with the
'performance art' phenomenon, which gets about as little
respect from the man on the street as the music of
chance. Challenging the most fundamental assumptions
about anything is never an easy road, and, even among
its most passionate disciples, it begs the question,
where do you go from here? If music is now anything, has
it reached its apotheosis? Will there ever be another
composer?
|