The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  In early 1968, a few months after Lontano’s premiere, an American friend wrote to Ligeti with the news that the film director Stanley Kubrick had released a science-fiction epic titled 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which no fewer than four Ligeti scores—Requiem, Lux aeterna, Atmosphères, and Aventures—were heard. Although the director had not asked permission, and paid a fee only after a protracted legal squabble, Ligeti expressed admiration for Kubrick’s achievement. The Requiem accompanies the various apparitions of an inscrutable black monolith, which represents the invasion of a superior alien intelligence. When the astronaut played by Keir Dullea undertakes his final journey into the beyond, Ligeti’s micropolyphony merges hypnotically with Kubrick’s abstract light patterns and negative-exposure images of natural landscapes. Among other things, the film neatly brackets the entire arc of twentieth-century musical history. It begins with Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the music of nature’s original majesty. In the final section, the movie is subsumed into Ligeti’s alternate universe, spiraling through the outer limits of expression before returning to the point of origin. As the august Zarathustra chords sound again at the end, the cycle is ready to begin anew.

  Saint Francis

  Kubrick’s 2001 exhilarated sixties-era audiences because Western culture was starved for sacred images. In Europe, churchgoing was in decline, and churches had lost their community-forming function and their ability to generate awe. In America, the theologian Harvey Cox made an improbable appearance on the bestseller lists with the book The Secular City, analyzing the rituals of desacralized man, and Time magazine ran a cover story asking, “Is God dead?” Temples of culture doubled as sites of spiritual transport—rock arenas no less than classical concert halls. This transference of roles goes back to the late nineteenth century, when Wagner’s Parsifal created a new kind of sacred space in an industrial world. The bourgeois nineteenth century brought forth relatively few major works of a strictly religious nature; the requiems of Berlioz and Verdi, to name two obvious exceptions, are really Romantic concert spectacles with a Latin text. The godless twentieth century, by contrast, generated devotional masterpieces by the dozen. It seems no accident that both Stravinsky and Schoenberg responded to the decade of the twenties—the century’s first extended bout of mass consumption, youth rebellion, and sexual liberation—with, respectively, the Symphony of Psalms and Moses und Aron.

  French-speaking composers seemed particularly susceptible to religious reawakenings. Francis Poulenc, the former prodigy of Les Six, reverted in the thirties to the Catholicism of his childhood and made it his mission to bring “peasant devotion” into his music. First in Litanies to the Black Virgin, then in the Mass in G, the Stabat Mater, the Gloria, and the faith-based drama Dialogues of the Carmelites, Poulenc deftly converted his lighter-than-air twenties style into a medium of meditative simplicity, using the Symphony of Psalms as a model. (Poulenc’s “peasant devotion” could be mistaken for Copland’s “open prairie.”) Arthur Honegger, Poulenc’s comrade in Les Six, broke away from twenties frivolity even as the decade was still getting under way; in his 1921 oratorio King David, he told the biblical story ardently and gravely, without a trace of Cocteau-like irony. The French Swiss composer Frank Martin, the son of a Calvinist minister, saw faith as a path not of imminent revelation but of unending struggle. If Messiaen’s consonances shine in triumph, Martin’s waft enigmatically out of the fog, as in the final measures of each movement of his Maria-Triptychon (1968).

  The European avant-garde was generally secular in orientation, but it had a few mystics in its midst. Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge is the book of Daniel gone high-tech: the electronic fabric approximates the flames that surrounded the three boys in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Cage based his aesthetic partly on the precepts of Zen Buddhism. And the unswervingly eccentric Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi emerged from a long immersion in Eastern philosophy with the conviction that he could approximate in instrumental forms the sound of chanting Tibetan monks.

  Tibetan chant generally consists of deviations around a fundamental tone, with droning pipes and ringing bells as an accompaniment. Scelsi tried to enact similar rituals on the piano, then made use of the ondiola, an electronic keyboard whose dials allowed him to vary pitch and tone quality. He hired a fellow composer, Vieri Tosatti, to help him shape his ondiola sketches and improvisations into full-fledged orchestral, chamber, and vocal scores, which began appearing in the late 1950s. They generally commence with a generative monotone, and as the central pitch shifts, splits apart, and spreads, novel landscapes open up before the ears. Orchestral works such as the Four Pieces, Aion, and Anahit build to crypto-Romantic climaxes worthy of Bruckner: horns leap up an octave, winds trill on high, timpani bang out thirds, and the heavens open. In Konx-Om-Pax, a chorus is added to the mix, chanting an apocalyptic “OM.”

  It was left to Messiaen to write a religious work on a scale that no composer had attempted since Parsifal. The five-hour sacred opera Saint Francis of Assisi, which he began sketching in 1975 and finished in 1983, served not merely as a pageant in honor of the humble friar but as a kind of live-action reenactment of the very process of sanctification. Parsifal enclosed sacred ritual within a theatrical frame; Messiaen, by contrast, was enclosing theater within religion, creating a new genre of operatic meditation. In the process, he made extraordinary demands on his audience. Act II stretches on for two hours and ends with a forty-five-minute version of Francis’s sermon to the birds. Saint Francis harks back to those archaic liturgies in which spells of boredom give way to precisely staged epiphanies—as when, in the Greek Orthodox Easter service, the church goes dark and the light of a single candle remains.

  Messiaen wrote the libretto himself, elaborating the standard legends of Francis with theology out of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Almost nothing in the text would have come as a shock to an audience of thirteenth-century Loire Valley villagers. There are eight tableaux, each recording a stage in the life of the saint. Francis kisses a leper, encounters a musician angel, speaks to the birds, receives the stigmata, and dies in a state of suffering joy. He is sung by a dramatic baritone voice and comes across as a flesh-and-blood figure. He might be the haggard Francis as depicted in paintings by Caravaggio and Zurbarán—a youngish man gazing ravenously toward the heavens, his mouth hanging open, his hands wrapped around a skull.

  The central epiphany of the opera takes place in the fifth tableau, in which Francis meets the musician angel on the road. The episode is taken from Franciscan hagiography, according to which the friar once fainted after hearing an angel play a viol. He told his brethren, “If the Angel had played one more note—if, after down-bowing, it had made an up-bow—from unbearable sweetness my soul would have left my body.” In Messiaen’s version, the angel prefaces his concert with lines adapted from Aquinas: “God dazzles us by an excess of truth. Music carries us to God in default of truth.” (Human reason, Aquinas wrote, is confounded equally by the elusiveness of poetic expression and by the superabundance of the Word of God.) The strings play a soft, unceasing C-major chord; over it, three ondes Martenot unwind a scarlet thread of melody that touches on ten of the twelve chromatic notes. The ears are teased by two textures—warm strings spreading out from the center, electronic tones pinging everywhere. In the space between them listeners can catch a glimpse of whatever they consider divine.

  “Certain people are annoyed that I believe in God,” Messiaen said in January 1992, three months before his death. “But I want people to know that God is present in everything, in the concert hall, in the ocean, on a mountain, even on the underground.” In the end, Saint Francis is not as monumental as it appears; it is really a village mystery play on a Wagnerian scale. Anthony Pople got to the heart of the matter when he wrote of Messiaen’s refusal to “play God.” These reverberating triads exercise such power because they don’t sound like the calculated gestures of a master plan; they crash in from a more elemental sphere. Saint Francis, true to form, ends in twelve
bars of hyperbright C major, replete with rapidly gesticulating brass, trilling and groaning ondes Martenot, madly glissandoing mallet instruments, and a shimmering cascade of bells and gongs. It is the negation of the negation, the death of death.

  14

  BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG

  Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

  One night in 1967, György Ligeti was sitting with several colleagues at the Darmstadt Schlosskeller, the favorite late-night hangout of teachers and students at the Summer Courses for New Music, when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a new album by the Beatles, started playing over the loudspeakers. Some of the sounds on the record bore a surprising resemblance to the Darmstadters’ latest and most advanced experiments. The song “A Day in the Life” included two spells of ad libitum playing, the second of them leading into a gorgeously strange E-major chord played by three pianos and a harmonium. Players were given a score indicating what register they should have reached in any given bar. The last chord was executed in musique concrète fashion, the attack cut off and the decay amplified over a long duration.

  The Beatles had first dipped into the Darmstadt sound in March of the previous year, while working on the album Revolver. Paul McCartney had been checking out Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, with its electronic layering of voices, and Kontakte, with its swirling tape-loop patterns. At his request, engineers at Abbey Road Studios inserted similar effects into the song “Tomorrow Never Knows.” By way of thanks, the Beatles put Stockhausen’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in and among cutout pictures of other mavericks and countercultural heroes. The following year, for the White Album, John Lennon and Yoko Ono created the tape collage “Revolution 9,” where, for a split second, the final chords of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony can be heard. Adventurous rock bands on the West Coast also paid heed to the classical avant-garde. Members of both the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane attended Stockhausen’s lectures in Los Angeles in 1966 and 1967, while the maverick rock star Frank Zappa spoke of his teenage love for the music of Edgard Varèse, whom he once looked up in the phone book and called out of the blue.

  Even the most jaded veteran of twentieth-century musical upheaval must have been startled to find that the postwar avant-garde was now serving as mood music for the psychedelic generation. The wall separating classical music from neighboring genres appeared ready to crumble, as it had momentarily in the twenties and thirties, when Copland, Gershwin, and Ellington crossed paths at Carnegie Hall. Classical record labels made amusing attempts to capitalize on the phenomenon by marketing abstruse modern repertory to kids on LSD. An LP of Bengt Hambraeus’s Constellations II and Interferences on the Limelight label carried this text on the jacket: “Listening to Bengt Hambraeus’s fantastic sound—it’s [sic] magnificent electronic and organ-organized electronic total sound experience should involve you as much as any music that you are capable of loving…be it the sound of The Beatles, Bach, Beethoven, Boulez, Beach Boys, or Belefonte [sic], Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey, Blue Cheer, or whatever. Hambraeus is really tuned in. Smashing!”

  Even as Stockhausen and Ligeti brushed against the counterculture, several younger Americans—Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—made a different kind of breakthrough. They simplified their harmonic language and rediscovered the pleasure of a steady pulse, devising a modern tonality that had nothing nostalgic about it. What Weill said in the twenties held true again: “Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch.”

  Riley, Reich, and Glass came to be called minimalists, although they are better understood as the continuation of a circuitous, difficult-to-name development in American music that dated back to the early years of the century, and more often than not took root on the West Coast. This alternative canon includes Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, who drew on non-Western traditions and built up a hypnotic atmosphere through insistent repetition; Morton Feldman, who distributed minimal parcels of sound over long durations; and La Monte Young, who made music from long, buzzing drones. All of them in one way or another set aside a premise that had governed classical composition for centuries—the conception of a musical work as a self-contained linguistic activity that develops relationships among discrete thematic characters over a well-marked period of time. This music was, by contrast, open-ended, potentially limitless.

  It was a purely American art, free of modernist angst and inflected with pop optimism. Reich said: “Schoenberg gives a very honest musical portrayal of his times. I salute him—but I don’t want to write like him. Stockhausen, Berio, and Boulez were portraying in very honest terms what it was like to pick up the pieces of a bombed-out continent after World War II. But for some American in 1948 or 1958 or 1968—in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry, and millions of burgers sold—to pretend that instead we’re really going to have the dark-brown Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie…” Reich and his colleagues borrowed from popular music, especially from bebop and modern jazz, and they affected pop music in turn. The Velvet Underground adopted Young’s drone aesthetic. Art rockers such as David Bowie and Brian Eno showed up at Reich’s and Glass’s shows. Minimalist influence radiated outward in the eighties and nineties, to the point where you could walk into any hip boutique or hotel lounge and sooner or later hear some distant, burbling cousin of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

  Eno once summarized minimalism as “a drift away from narrative and towards landscape, from performed event to sonic space.” Riley, Reich, and Glass spent their formative years in the urban wilds of New York and San Francisco, but their works have spiritual links to the capacious West. Unlike Copland’s sepia-toned prairie, minimalist vistas are filtered through new ways of seeing and hearing that relate to the technology of speed. They evoke the experience of driving in a car across empty desert, the layered repetitions in the music mirroring the changes that the eye perceives—road signs flashing by, a mountain range shifting on the horizon, a pedal point of asphalt underneath.

  Bebop

  During the two-decade stretch from 1945 to 1965, when the minimalist composers were growing from childhood to maturity, American popular music exploded with creative energy. Jazz, blues, country, and gospel evolved into rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll, soul, and funk. Hank Williams, a white singer with an ear for the blues, crafted country songs of gem-like beauty; Ray Charles and James Brown fused gospel elation with blues sensuality; Chuck Berry let loose the stripped-down anarchy of rock ’n’ roll; Elvis Presley and the Beatles repackaged rock for a huge youth public.

  For young American composers with open ears, the Cold War decades were, above all, the age of bebop and modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus burst through the formal confines of swing and made music of ricocheting freedom and imperturbable cool. At the height of bop, electric strings of notes lashed around like downed power lines on wet pavement. Two sounds caught the ear of the fourteen-year-old Steve Reich: the punch-drunk rhythm of The Rite of Spring and the blindsiding beat of Kenny Clarke. Terry Riley was a bebop kid who later mastered ragtime piano. La Monte Young played excellent alto sax in his youth and probably could have had a major jazz career if he had wanted one. (When Young auditioned for a place in the top-notch Los Angeles City College jazz band, he beat out Eric Dolphy.) Philip Glass never played jazz, but listened avidly. The history of minimalism can’t be written without a cursory look at postwar jazz.

  It was at the end of the Second World War that many young jazz players began to think of themselves as “serious musicians,” to quote Amiri Baraka’s classic book Blues People. Bebop, the poet said, articulated the self-esteem felt by hundreds of thousands of black soldiers as they returned home from the Second World War. When Parker inserted the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into “Salt Peanuts,” he was paying his respects while also declaring his freedom with a somewhat impudent air. You couldn’
t dance to “Koko”; you had to sit back and listen as Parker scribbled lightning in the air. Monk threw in angular lines and dissonant chords, softening them with the elegance of his touch. Coltrane relished Bartók’s chords of fourths in the Concerto for Orchestra. “We had some fundamental background training in European harmony and music theory superimposed on our own knowledge from Afro-American musical tradition,” Gillespie wrote. “We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next.”

  Ellington, in the twenties, had capitalized on the timbral possibilities of electrical recording. Bebop players took advantage of the next big advance, the long-playing record. The LP side allowed for the creation of half-composed, half-improvised works of mesmerizing breadth, the logical descendants of Black, Brown, and Beige. In March 1959, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, which put the brakes on bop’s forward drive. “So What,” the nine-minute opening track, is a proto-minimalist piece, defined by the dreamlike slowness of the harmonic rhythm. As the melodies drift by and change color, the underlying harmony stays fixed on a D-minor seventh chord, with periodic sidesteps into E-flat minor. Mingus, Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman also abandoned standard progressions in favor of a more open-ended tonal language. Their writing had much in common with the expanded tonality of Debussy, Stravinsky, and Messiaen. When Mingus explicated his “pedal point” style in the notes to his 1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, he could have been paraphrasing Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language, with its schemes of multiple modes.