Music history4.docx

Lauren BuscemiProfessor Lyndon-GeeMusic History 4March 25, 12

Systematic Approaches to Composition; Post WWII

Along with the end of World War II, caused by the atomic bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States armed forces in 1945, came a wealth

of new concentrations in contemporary classical music. Some of these new

developments were called seriamlism, minimalism, hard romanticism, electronic

and indeterminacy. The composers of this generation would not only pick up where

their forefathers had left off but also head in a whole new direction. Much of their

music would still bear heavy influence of the composers who had come before them

such as Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Claude Debussy (1862-1918), Bela Bartok

(1881-1945), Arnold Schoenberg (1874- 1951), and Anton Webern (1883-1945).

But as the millennium drew closer their influence became progressively less

apparent.

Serialialism would become one of the newest and most progressive

contemporary styles to come out of this period. The first completely serialized work

was a product of The International Summer Courses set in Darmstadt Germany. The

piece was called Mode de valeurs et d’intensities composed by an instructor named

Oliver Messiaen in the summer of 1949. The piece was published the next year as

part of a 4 piece set entitled Etudes de rhythme. The 4 pieces are all studies in

“hypostatization” meaning that various elements of the work were determined prior

to the act of composition. “This idea had a direct precedent in Webern, who in his

Symphony, his String Quartet and his Piano Variations had experimented with the

fixed assignment of particular pitches to particular registers.”1 Messiaen took

Webern’s idea and applied it to duration, attack and dynamic value. The

predetermined factors of the piece consisting “of 36 pitches, 24 note values, 12

attacks, and 7 dynamic levels” were placed in a table compiled by Messiaen; seen

below in example 1.2 At the bottom of the

table the 36 different notes are placed into

three divisions showing their fixed pitch,

duration, dynamic level, and attack, as they

will be used in the piece. To form the piece

Messiaen took his pre-compositional work

and arranged the pitch material from all

three divisions in a manner he found

musically appealing.

The three divisions of which the 36

pitches are broken down into help to make

much of the musicality of the piece more evident. These three divisions make

particularly clear the differences in register and duration. By looking at these

divisions one can clearly see that each of the 12 pitches occurs only once in each

division. And the register in which a particular note is placed will not be used in

either of the other two divisions when the note reoccurs. One can also see that the

1 Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Vol. 5, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).2 Oliver Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d'intensites, Darmstaddt. Oliver Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d'intensites, Darmstaddt.

Example 12

first division explores the upper register of the piano while the second division

serves the middle register and the final division the lower register. Therefore the

highest pitch is placed in the first division and the lowest pitch placed in the third

and final division.

Upon studying these divisions one can also reveal the way in which Messiaen

generated the durations for each pitch. The first division starts out with a single

thirty-second-note and all the durations that follow are derived by the addition of a

thirty-second-note to the preceding duration. The durations found in division two

and three were devised by simply doubling those of the previous division. For

example one can see that the first duration found in division one is a thirty-second-

note therefore the first duration found in division two will be a sixteenth-note and

the first duration of division three an eighth-note.

Being that this was a composition like none other preceding it perhaps

Messiaen felt an obligation to explain his method. That being the motivation for

such an explanatory table placed before the actual score. In terms of maximizing

visibility of his method he even goes so far as to use three staves in the actual score.

Keeping materials derived from each of the three divisions on their own stave.

Messiaen may have gone to such extents to keep his methods visible, possibly to

gain approval of his method and encourage other composers to explore the new

musical possibilities opened up by the world of serialism.

Just as Messiaen had set off a spark in Darmstadt with his new compositional

method known as serialism, John Cage was front lining the exploration of

indeterminacy in America. Cage was known for being a musical rebel of sorts for his

renunciation of the European Avant-garde music scene and his beliefs on the use of

“duration rather than pitch as the fundamental organizing principal”.1 John Cage

even went so far as to suggest that the word “music” be abolished and replaced with

the term “organized sound”. Cage had first received major praise attributed to his

Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, a revolutionary work in which he turned

the piano into a percussion ensemble, composed from 1946-1948. Three years later

in May of 1951 Cage began his first work involving the use of indeterminacy, Music

of Changes. The inspiration behind the work came from the I Ching or Book of

Changes first introduced to him by Christian Wolff a composition student of his at

the time. The I Ching was a Chinese manual of oracle nature, which explains “the art

of reading portents to gain knowledge unavailable to reason”.1 The user of I Ching

would toss 3 coins or sticks six times to determine which of the sixty-four possible

hexagrams to consult in answer to a question about the future or some other

unobservable thing. Cage used the concept to develop a compositional technique

that he found helped to eliminate the influence of his own musical likings and the

“traditions of past music” in order to allow a more automated approach to musical

composition.1

Music of Changes was composed in four sections labeled as books. One of the

first elements Cage composed was the form, which was predetermined based on

duration. John Cage used what was called square root form which takes large

divisions of the work and reflects them elsewhere in the piece. All durations were

“based on a total of 29 5/8 durational units, each 29 5/8 measure long. Both the piece

as a whole and each unit are divided into segments defined by the ratios

3-5-6 ¾- 6 ¾- 5- 3 1/8”.3 These divisions can be seen in the score via “tempo

indications, changes of musical material and density”.3 Example 2 shown below

illustrates how the last measure is 5/8 as long as the others

Example 23

to create the total of 29 5/8 measures present in each of the movements of the piece.

Once the predetermined form was set Cage then used his chance operations to fill in

the durational structure. In order to do so he created a series of charts each

containing sixty four elements that were chosen using the same system. Charts

determined how many events would take place during a certain section. A chart

was also created to determined tempo in which 32 tempos and 32 blanks where

3 Palisca Burkholder, Nortan Anthology of Western Music- Twentieth Century, Vol. 3, in Music of Changes (NY, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010).

chosen. If a blank was selected the previous tempo remained. Another eight charts

were created each for sound, dynamics, and durations. Charts for sound contained

an equal ratio of sounds to silences. The contents of the sound charts ranged from a

single note to a group of rapid successive notes known as constellations, to noises

such as psychically striking the keyboard lid.

All chance operations were applied in the composition of the piece, carefully

determining exactly what the performer will play. The notation in example 2

illustrates the specificity of the score. The notation is proportional meaning that a

notes placement in a measure reflects its placement in time. The diamond shaped

notes seen in measure 85 of example 3 indicate keys that are depressed silently to

Example 33

raise the dampers that are then kept off the keys with the sostenuto pedal so the

strings un-muted by the dampers resonate when other keys are struck and create

harmonics.

Although serialism and indeterminacy may seem to be completely different

approaches to musical composition they have much in common. Composers of both 33 Palisca Burkholder, Nortan Anthology of Western Music- Twentieth Century, Vol. 3, in Music of Changes (NY, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010).

genres choose to use either chance or strict serial operations to arrive at what they

thought to be a more systematic result. This major similarity was also what made

both styles representative of the international events of the time. Through the

examination of post war tensions it is easy to see how both indeterminacy and

serialism came about. “At the end of the war, millions of people were homeless, the

European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial

infrastructure had been destroyed”.4 Although the postwar tension in Europe was

much more immediate than it was in America, the states were soon to be faced with

the stress of the Cold War.

The new systematic approach to composition was a reflection of the

composers desire for more structure in other aspects of life; this direct correlation

between current events and the new music being composed was not as apparent to

the lay audience. Music composed by means of serialism or indeterminacy was

often perceived as being improvised or poorly written. Both methods use non-

traditional means to arrange pitch, harmony, and rhythm in new ways that are often

obscure to the untrained ear. Within most of the professional music community

both serialism and indeterminacy have proven themselves to be valid methods of

musical composition. Although, it may take much more time before a

nonprofessional audience will invite these compositions into their everyday

listening.

4 World War II, April 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/world_war_II.

BibliographyBurkholder, Palisca. Nortan Anthology of Western Music- Twentieth Century. Vol. 3, in Music of Changes, by John Cage. NY, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010.

Messiaen, Oliver. Mode de valeurs et d'intensites. Darmstaddt.

Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Late Twentieth Century. Vol. 5. 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

World War II. April 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/world_war_II.