December 21, 2006

Book 2.0
Episode 16: Modernism, Analysed and Tamed

For earlier episodes, see my summary at the start of the last one. If you'd like to be notified (by e-mail) when new episodes appear, please subscribe to the book. Just type "subscribe to the book" in the subject line of the e-mail form that appears when you click here. And, if you would, tell me a little about yourself, and why the book interests you.

And now some highlights from the last episode:

Alfredo Casella, an Italian neoclassical composer, tells what happened when Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was first performed in concert:

I was sitting in a box with some friends as the performance was about to begin. The door opened, and with surprise I saw the venerable Saint-Saëns enter. He refused to sit in front of us and, hermetically wrapped in furs, curled himself up at the back of the box, looking for all the world like the patient who waits in the dentist's antechamber, to have a tooth pulled. The prelude began, and when Saint-Saëns heard the first note of that solo whose quality is so strange and primitive, he asked me, terrified: "What is that instrument?" When I answered calmly, "Master, it's a bassoon," he made the dry rebuttal in his nasal and unpleasant voice, "That's not true!" and went out banging the door, cursing those crazy modernists who succeeded even in making unrecognizable such a peaceful instrument...

***

In our time, [The Rite of Spring] has been domesticated. One sign of this was an exercise the members of an orchestra (not one of our country's largest, but not one of our smallest, either) did, in an attempt to find ways to introduce more people to [the piece]. Of course they weren't trying to get anyone to accept its modernity; they were simply trying to bring a new audience to all of classical music, and they used The Rite as their exercise, as easily as they might also have used Mozart. Suppose, they said, people made up their own rites of spring? Then they'd move one step closer to the piece. And what would those rites be? Well, let's see...people could press flowers in a scrapbook...

Forgotten, evidently, was the stark and shocking central point --the rite here is human sacrifice....This, of course, is yet another example of how classical masterworks lose their content. Because they're masterworks, we're expected to adore them as sacred objects. How could we do that if they shocked us?

***

But it's in New York in the 1920s that modernist noise came strongly into fashion. (Maybe elsewhere, too, but the New York explosion has been very well documented.) Not many people then would talk about dissonance -- notes piled up on top of each other, without regard for the normal sound of chords and melodies -- as simply a new form of harmony. It was savored for its own sake, and "modern music" (which was full of dissonance) was something trendy people knew about.

Composers started writing noisy music about machines, and it started showing up on New York concert programs. Honneger's Pacific 231 -- about a steam locomotive -- is the most famous, and showed up in New York in 1924 (played by the Boston Symphony), in 1927, in 1928 (conducted by Toscanini), and in 1929 (at the New York Philharmonic). The Cleveland Orchestra played The Foundry, a piece meant to sound like a steel mill going full blast, by the Russian Alexander Mosolov. There was even a recording of the work, probably made in the early 1930s...my parents had it, left over, maybe, from their Bohemian days in New York in the '20s and '30s. And, amazingly, you can hear it -- yes, this original old 78 rpm recording -- on the web, thanks to the fine Webrarian website, maintained in Britain. But I'll also give you a direct link to the record, which -- just as I remembered it, from my childhood -- is a feast of bracing noise.

***

But the king of noise in New York was George Antheil, a composer who titled his autobiography Bad Boy of Music, who'd written three machine-age piano sonatas -- The Airplane, Sonata Sauvage [Savage Sonata], and Death of Machines --and in 1927 brought his tumultuous Ballet Mécanique [Mechanical Ballet] to Carnegie Hall.

The piece was scored for three xylophones, some electric bells, three airplane propellers (two wood, one metal), a lot of percussion, four bass drums, a big gong, a siren, two pianos, and a player piano. For the Carnegie Hall performance, Carol Oja writes, "he expanded the scoring to six xylophones and ten pianos [!], reportedly also adding whistles, rattles, sewing machine motors, and two large pieces of tin."

But the performance had some problems:

The first few minutes...went off smoothly [the man who promoted the event later wrote], and the audience listened to it carefully. And then came the moment for the wind machine [he means the airplane propellers] to be turned on--and all hell, in a minor way, broke loose.

People clutched their programs, and women held onto their hats with both hands. [This is the promoter, once again.] Someone in the direct line of the wind tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender.

***

In past episodes, I've talked about the delight -- even the glee, sometimes the barely suppressed violence, and sometimes the sense of something transcendent on the edge of happening -- that came with the rise of "modern music" in the first decades of the last century. Here's Schoenberg, for instance, the poster demon of musical modernism, the composer classical audiences so much now hate, a few years after he breathed the air of other planets in his second string quartet. (Those interplanetary words of course come from the poem he set to music in the quartet's final movement.)

...it is impossible for a person to have only one sensation at a time.

     One has thousands simultaneously. And these thousands can no more readily be added together than an apple and a pear. They go their own ways.

     And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the senses or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music.

Continue reading "Book 2.0
Episode 16: Modernism, Analysed and Tamed"

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