The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Iannis Xenakis was the other unclassifiable radical in the European avant-garde. In 1947 he fled from his native Greece, where the British and the Americans were propping up a right-wing, anti-Communist government, and sought asylum in Paris. There he sat in on Messiaen’s classes at the conservatory and worked in Schaeffer’s electronic studio. With Messiaen’s encouragement, he began thinking about how instrumental sound could be “built” as a structure is built, without breaks or seams in the construction. He pursued a parallel interest in architecture and worked for a number of years as an engineer and later as a designer in the studio of Le Corbusier, specializing in complex architectural models with undulating convex and concave shapes.

  Xenakis’s masterstroke as a composer was to apply those models to musical space, writing out waveforms on graph paper and then translating them into conventional notation. As the fifties went on, he introduced an even more elaborate method known as “stochastic music,” referring to the branch of mathematics that studies the random or irregular activity of particles. In other words, he began looking at the orchestra as a scientist looks at a gas cloud.

  Yet Xenakis never quite fit the profile of the laboratory composer. He gave considerable thought to how his music would be perceived by the novice listener and wished to seize the attention with gestures of high impact. “The listener must be gripped,” he once said, “and—whether he likes it or not—drawn into the flight path of the sounds, without a special training being necessary. The sensual shock must be just as forceful as when one hears a clap of thunder or looks into a bottomless abyss.”

  The title of Xenakis’s first waveform composition, Metastaseis (1953–54), sets forth his intention of overcoming the stasis of total serialism: the Greek word translates as “beyond immobilities.” It begins with a stupefying sound: forty-six string instruments playing the note G in unison, then sliding away from it in upward or downward glissandos, each glissando moving at a different rate. By the end of the process, the strings have become a buzzing mass of forty-six separate notes. The string clusters are soon infiltrated by sneering trombone glissandos and other razzing brass sounds. At the height of this meticulously planned bedlam, the listener is incapable of perceiving what any one instrument is doing; only the sum of the actions is apparent. Xenakis likened the effect to the sound of hail drumming on a hard surface or millions of cicadas singing in a field on a summer night.

  In a rather more pointed metaphor, Xenakis cited memories of an anti-Nazi demonstration in Athens: a slogan is chanted by a crowd, another slogan comes forward to replace it, “the perfect rhythm of the last slogan breaks up in a huge cluster of chaotic shouts,” machine guns are fired, and a “detonating calm, full of despair, dust, and death,” settles. But the unison note at the end—one half step higher than at the beginning—suggests that some kind of battle has been won.

  The collegiality of Darmstadt broke down as the fifties gave way to the sixties. Nono criticized Stockhausen and Cage for what he considered to be an excess of self-referential, hermetic activity. “Their freedom is spiritual suicide,” Nono wrote. Xenakis faulted Stockhausen and Boulez on similar grounds. Boulez, the original agitator of the postwar era, sniped at almost all of his contemporaries for one reason or another.

  There was a period when Boulez flirted in his fastidious way with Cagean ideas about “open form”; the score of his Third Piano Sonata (1955–57) gives the performers various options for how to proceed through the notated material. But the bigger story was his return to French roots, especially to the luminous language of Debussy and Ravel. His main work of the fifties was Le Marteau sans maître, or Hammer Without a Master, a seductive and menacing setting of René Char poems for soprano and ensemble. The voice appears in only four of the nine movements of the cycle; woven all around it is a glistening spiderweb of alto flute, viola, guitar, mallet percussion, bongos, maracas, claves, and other percussion. In the exotic instrumentation there are hints of Balinese, African, and Japanese music, but nothing so vulgar as a melody or a steady beat. This is ultramodern Orientalism that exploits world music at the highest remove and with the utmost refinement. A fabulous bit of instrumental theater enlivens the final pages of the score: as the flute traces deliquescing, faintly desperate-sounding patterns in the upper air, a trio of tam-tams and gong deliver booming tones in a descending pattern. It gives the impression of doors opening to the void—some immaculate Boulezian apocalypse.

  Le Marteau remains a total-serialist composition, its title suggestive of a system operating under its own power. Yet Boulez was reclaiming control of his material, what he called “indiscipline—a freedom to choose, to decide, and to reject.” Years later, in conversation with Joan Peyser, he casually dismissed his early ventures in total serialism, saying that Structures 1a had been not “Total but Totalitarian.” He also brushed away the formerly dire necessity of the twelve-note composition. “I’ve often found the obligation to use all twelve tones to be unbearable,” he said in 1999. In the end, the notion of musical progress proved to be contingent and subjective, its definition changing with the seasons. The philosophy of modern music was unmasked as the rhetoric of taste. All the same, Boulez adroitly maintained the illusion of being out in front—the signature of a master politician.

  Kennedy’s America: Twelve Tones and Show Tunes

  President John F. Kennedy, the iconic Cold War leader, took office in January 1961, and from the start he endowed the White House with an unprecedented air of cosmopolitan sophistication. At Eisenhower’s inaugural festivities, Copland’s Lincoln Portrait had been canceled on account of the composer’s Communist associations. At Kennedy’s inauguration, Leonard Bernstein, even more vocally leftist, was commissioned to write a fanfare for a fund-raising gala. The Kennedys made it their mission to provide leadership in the arts in a way that had not been attempted since the early years of the Roosevelt administration. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy or a speechwriter took the trouble to write a letter to the magazine Musical America, declaring his intention to disclose a “New Frontier for American art” and to show “an openness toward what is new that will banish the suspicion and misgiving that have tarnished our prestige abroad.”

  In music, as in other cultural fields, Kennedy left the decision making to his wife—“The only music he likes is ‘Hail to the Chief,’” Jacqueline Kennedy quipped—and it was she who created the illusion of the White House as a kind of endless Parisian salon. One evening, the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals came to play, and the First Lady invited more or less the entire pantheon of American composers: Copland, Bernstein, Barber, Thomson, Piston, Harris, Hanson, Sessions, William Schuman, Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, Elliott Carter, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Another time, she arranged an intimate dinner for Igor and Vera Stravinsky, with Bernstein and Nicolas Nabokov in attendance. Stravinsky drank too much and went home early. “Nice kids,” he said on the way out.

  Americans were pouring millions of dollars of private and public resources into culture. Kennedy pushed for the creation of a national arts council, which in 1965 became the National Endowment for the Arts, and planned a major new cultural center in Washington, which became, after his assassination, the Kennedy Center. Lincoln Center began operations in 1962, with the opening of Philharmonic Hall, and grew to include the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and the Juilliard School, the final bill coming to $185 million. Across the country, the Ford Foundation was funding performing-arts centers, symphony orchestras, and cultural programs on television.

  Anyone nostalgic for the vanished arts programs of the New Deal might have thought that the spirit of “music for all” was reawakening. But politics circumscribed this cultural largesse. Deteriorating relations between the superpowers, from the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, created rivalries on every front; the arms race expanded into a science race and fina
lly into a culture race. Each superpower had its agenda; the Soviets wished to demonstrate that they could tolerate a degree of freedom of expression—hence the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalinist novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962—while America wished to prove that, contrary to Soviet propaganda, capitalism and high culture were not mutually exclusive. This would explain the ticker-tape parade that greeted the Texan pianist Van Cliburn when he returned home after winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. This would also explain why President Kennedy would consent to spend an evening with twelve-tone composers when the Rat Pack was more his style.

  New music played a very limited role in the Cold War arts bonanza. All the same, many American composers found themselves in a relatively happy situation. Money was plentiful, whether in the form of grants, prizes, commissions, or faculty salaries. American universities were growing at a rapid rate, their endowments fleshed out by wealthy contributors who feared that American education was falling behind the Russian. Colleges that once had only one or two composers on their faculty now had four or five. Dedicated ensembles such as Columbia University’s Group for Contemporary Music were created to play their works and those of accredited predecessors. The institution of tenure gave the American composer unaccustomed feelings of financial and psychological security.

  Of the multifarious strands of American music, one in particular began to prosper in the university environment: composition informed by twelve-tone technique. “Everyone started writing fat, Teutonic music again,” Ned Rorem scornfully observed. “It was as though our country, while smug in its sense of military superiority, was still too green to imagine itself as culturally autonomous.”

  The conviction that political virtue resided in atonal and twelve-tone composition spread more slowly in America than in Europe, but it made headway all the same. In 1948 the anti-Communist journal Partisan Review invited René Leibowitz to air his views on the moral corruption of tonality and the righteousness of the twelve-tone method. In the same periodical, and in the same year, the critic Kurt List praised the dissonances of Charles Ives and Roger Sessions, saying, “This is the best that American music has to offer. The composer will finally have to shoulder the burden of the less popular, aesthetically more honest, style of atonal polyphony. He may, or may not, arrive at a solution. But if music is to exist as an artistic expression of modern America, atonal polyphony is really the only valid guide.” Such rhetoric duplicated that of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, not to mention Clement Greenberg’s essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Some years later Adorno would write, “No art at all is better than socialist realism.” Or, as cold warriors liked to say, “Better dead than red.”

  Milton Babbitt, the emblematic Cold War composer, produced music so byzantine in construction that one practically needed a security clearance to understand it. Like Boulez and Xenakis, Babbitt was trained in mathematics as well as music, and during the war he performed secret intelligence work, the nature of which he demurely refused to disclose. He also taught math to operators of new radar and sonar technologies. Early on he was associated with Dwight Macdonald’s magazine politics, another journal with an anti-Communist slant, although more radical and anarchist in orientation than the Partisan Review. In November 1945 politics published a defiant little poem by Babbitt that sounded like a rallying cry for the propaganda war:

  A lie for a lie,

  Untruth for untruth:

  this can be read

  in the book of the dead;

  make it your maxim

  and load it with lead.

  Macdonald, in the following years, would inveigh repeatedly against middlebrow populism, or “Midcult,” as he called it.

  Babbitt first encountered Schoenberg’s music in 1926, when a teacher showed him the Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11. He was only ten, but immediately fell in love with this “absolutely different world.” Around the same time, he became bewitched by jazz and, as a high schooler, played in bands around Mississippi. His knowledge of early-twentieth-century American popular music was as encyclopedic as his knowledge of everything else, and at one point he tried his hand at writing a Broadway musical, called Fabulous Voyage. Had it reached the stage and found an audience, Babbitt’s career might have taken a quite different course.

  Instead, Babbitt committed himself single-mindedly to the Schoenberg legacy. In the late thirties, he studied composition at Princeton with Sessions, who by this time had turned against Copland-style populism. Babbitt inherited Sessions’s belief that American composers had to “abandon resolutely chimerical hopes of success in a world dominated overwhelmingly by ‘stars,’ by mechanized popular music, and by the box-office standard, and set themselves to discovering what they truly have to say, and to saying it in the manner of the adult artist delivering his message to those who have ears to hear it. All else is childishness and futility.”

  Sessions was not at that time a twelve-tone composer, so Babbitt studied the method on his own. Independent of Boulez and Stockhausen, he came up with his own version of the total-serialist method. In 1948, a year before Messiaen’s Scale of Durations and Dynamics, he created ordered sets of durations, applying them in Composition for Four Instruments and Composition for Twelve Instruments. Subsequently, he serialized all the parameters: pitch, dynamic level, register, duration, and timbre.

  In the fifties, Babbitt laid claim to the electronic studio and early-model supercomputers, seizing the opportunity to engage in “complex, advanced, and ‘problematical’ activities,” in his own words, without resorting to the “inapposite milieu of the public concert hall.” The first American electronic pieces were made by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, two composers based at Columbia University; they used a magnetic-tape recorder to create dreamlike echo-chamber effects around voices and instruments. These efforts were primitive compared with what Stockhausen and company were accomplishing overseas, but leaps in Cold War technology soon allowed the Americans to catch up. In 1955, David Sarnoff, the chairman of NBC and RCA, unveiled the Electronic Music Synthesizer, which was intended to mimic the sounds of all extant musical instruments. Two years later, RCA’s Mark II synthesizer was installed at Columbia, now equipped with a binary sequencer to program the sounds. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center grew around the Mark II apparatus, with Babbitt taking a leadership role.

  Babbitt was not quite as difficult as he seemed. He may have been dealing in abstruse relationships among myriad elements, but his listeners didn’t have to digest too many at once. From Webern, Babbitt learned the art of deriving a set from successive transformations of a group of just three notes (“trichord”), which becomes a microcosm of the series. With these tiny motives in play, the texture tends to be less complicated than in the average post-Schoenbergian work. Composition for Four Instruments gives the impression of economy, delicacy, and extreme clarity; flute, clarinet, violin, and cello play solos, duets, and trios, coming together as a quartet only in the final section, and even there the ensemble dissolves into softly questing solo voices at the end. Thick dissonances are rare; like Japanese drawings, Babbitt’s scores are full of empty space. What’s more, the harmonies are in many places surprisingly simple and sweet. Six bars into the second of the Three Compositions for Piano there is, out of nowhere, a loud B-flat-major triad. Before you can come to terms with the psychological effects of such “tonal puns,” they disappear, like half-familiar faces in a crowd. This rigorously organized music ends up feeling mysteriously prankish, antic, loosey-goosey; it shuffles and shimmies like jazz from another planet.

  The other giant of American modernism in the fifties and sixties was Elliott Carter, who made his name before the war as an expert if not exceptional practitioner of neoclassical styles. In the late forties, at around the same time that Babbitt was theorizing his version of total serialism, Carter renounced Copland-style populism and embraced the aesthetic of density and difficulty. At the beginning of the fifti
es, in a symbolic act of self-isolation, he spent a year in the lower Sonoran Desert in Arizona, writing a fully atonal First String Quartet that sounded something like Ives’s Second Quartet with its hymns and popular melodies excised. “I decided for once to write a work very interesting to myself,” Carter said, “and so say to hell with the public and with the performers too.”

  Carter’s favorite strategy was to juxtapose independent streams of activity in overlapping, intersecting layers, each going at its own rate, each accelerating or decelerating like multiple lanes of traffic. Such effects were commonplace in jazz—the author Michael Hall compares Carter’s rhythmic layering to the disjuncture between Art Tatum’s left and right hands—and also in the most complex works of Ives. As it happens, Carter got to know Ives in his teens, and received from him a letter of recommendation to Harvard.

  Carter worked slowly and meticulously, producing only seven major works between 1950 and 1970, his anticommercial, “uncompromising” stance made easier by the fact that he was independently wealthy. A lifelong New Yorker, he paid conscious homage to the disorganized intensities of urban life, and at times made oblique reference to the tensions of the Cold War era. The climax of his Double Concerto (1961)—a mad, jazzy piano cadenza, spastic harpsichord, shrill brass, and furious drums—gives way to a disintegrating fade-out; according to the composer’s later commentary, the passage was inspired by the final lines of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad: “Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; / And Universal Darkness buries All.”