The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Feldman’s early works take off from Schoenberg and Bartók, but they move at an unpredictable, fitful pace; in accordance with Varèse’s instruction, Feldman periodically stops to let his sonorities reverberate for a while in the listener’s mind. Then came the galvanizing meeting with Cage, which led Feldman to invent graphic notation and thereby to inaugurate the age of chance, indeterminacy, and improvisation. More important for his own future development, he launched a parallel series of conventionally notated pieces called Intermissions and Extensions, which, in the spirit of works such as Webern’s Symphony, find a world of meaning in a rigorously limited smattering of notes. In Europe at this time, twelve-tone writing was being used as the blueprint for a congested new serialist order. Feldman, like Cage, understood music of the Second Viennese School as an invitingly strange, quasi-sacred space from which everything extraneous has been scrubbed away. His music is inconceivable without the precedent of the “Colors” movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, with its rotating transpositions of one muted chord, or the funeral march of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, with its misty layers of winds and brass over drumrolls.

  What Feldman did was to slow the pace of events in the Viennese universe. Schoenberg was, above all, an impatient man, who had to keep scurrying on to the next combination of sounds. Feldman was patient. He let each chord say what it had to say. He breathed. Then he moved on to the next. The textures are daringly sparse. One page of Extensions 3 has a mere fifty-seven notes in forty bars. In confining himself to so little material, Feldman releases the expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the surrounding silence. Rhythms are irregular and overlapping, so that the music floats above the beat. Harmonies dwell in a no-man’s-land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion.

  Feldman also emulated the New York painters of the forties and fifties, most of whom he knew personally. His scores are close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and Rothko’s glowing fogbanks of color. Feldman said that New York painting led him to attempt a music “more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.” Just as the Abstract Expressionists wanted viewers to focus on paint itself, on its texture and pigment, Feldman wanted listeners to absorb the basic facts of resonant sound. Wilfrid Mellers, in his classic book Music in a New Found Land, eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style: “Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.”

  Yet the unearthly sphere of Feldman’s music was not entirely free of fears and memories. The Holocaust had a dominating effect on his consciousness. He once explained that the title of his percussion piece The King of Denmark was inspired by King Christian X, who occupied the Danish throne when the Germans invaded his country in 1940. Feldman proceeded to tell the story, now considered apocryphal, of King Christian responding to German anti-Semitism by walking the streets with a yellow star pinned to his chest. It was a “silent protest,” Feldman said. All of his music was a silent protest, cutting loose from the ghost-ridden European world. Once, during a visit to Berlin, the American composer Alvin Curran asked him why he didn’t move to Germany, since audiences there responded so avidly to his music. Feldman stopped in the middle of the street, pointed down, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!”

  Another time, when a German new-music expert asked Feldman whether his music was in mourning for the Holocaust, he said that it wasn’t, but then he added, in sentences punctuated by long pauses, “There’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning. Say, for example, the death of art…something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.”

  Feldman made his mourning palpable in the 1971 piece Rothko Chapel. The title comes from an octagonal array of Rothko paintings that had been installed in a nondenominational religious space in Houston. Rothko had committed suicide the previous year, and Feldman, a close friend, responded with the most personal, affecting work of his life. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices but no words. Chords and melodic fragments float along like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distantly dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles. That passage was written on the day of Stravinsky’s funeral, April 15, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern. But the emotional sphere of Rothko Chapel is too large to be considered a memorial for any individual.

  Shortly before the end comes an astonishing shift. The viola begins to play a keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. It is a gesture comparable to the moment in Wozzeck when Berg relies on his old student piece in D minor to provide the climax of the drama. Underneath the melody, celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which suggests Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. The song is heard twice, and both times the chorus answers with the Schoenbergian chords of God.

  These allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to the somber spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera and the gentle, iconic presence of Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman once heard crying beneath the cobblestones. It might be the chant of millions in a single voice.

  No less than Messiaen, Feldman was in the business of creating places of spiritual otherness, which in his case may have had some connection to medieval kabbalistic thought. In his last years, from 1979 to 1987, he wrote a series of works that went on for an hour or two hours or even longer, straining the capabilities of performers to play them and audiences to hear them. Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his supreme goal of making music a life-changing force, a transcendent art form that, as he once said, “wipes everything out” and “cleans everything away.” To sit through performances of the two longest pieces—String Quartet (II) of 1983 and For Philip Guston of 1984, six and five hours long respectively—is to enter into a new consciousness. Some passages test the listener’s patience—how long can a repeated note or a semitone dissonance be endured? Then, out of nowhere, some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section of For Philip Guston is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing tenderness, even if it inhabits a far-off place that few travelers will chance upon.

  Feldman’s music can be called “minimalist” if the word is understood to mean a minimum of notes on the page. He was not unlike Partch in his refusal to identify with what he called “Western civilization music.” And his feeling for the positioning of music in space puts him in the company of West Coast composers from both early and late in the twentieth century. But, ultimately, he stands apart from his time. No twentieth-century composer, with the possible exception of Sibelius in his last years, achieved such imperturbable separateness; and no wonder Feldman fell in love with Sibelius’s Fourth and Fifth symphonies.

  Uptown, Downtown

  Feldman once delivered a merciless sketch of the prospects of the American composer. He starts out as a romantic, Feldman said, a budding genius overflowing with original ideas, or at least with ideas about originality. Then he goes of
f to university and discovers that romanticism is defunct. He studies for six years at Princeton or Yale, learning about twelve-tone writing, total serialism, indeterminacy, and the rest. He goes to Darmstadt and samples the latest wares of the European avant-garde. “He writes a piece occasionally,” Feldman wrote. “It is played occasionally. There is always the possibility of a performance on the Gunther Schuller series. His pieces are well made. He is not without talent. The reviews aren’t bad. A few awards—a Guggenheim, an Arts and Letters, a Fulbright—this is the official musical life of America.”

  Essentially, Feldman pictured the life of an academic composer as a kind of living death. Since he himself taught for the latter part of his life at the State University of New York at Buffalo, his stance might be deemed hypocritical. But he insisted that composition could not actually be taught, and in his classes he meandered all over the map—one eccentric assignment being to analyze Sibelius’s Fifth.

  In the late sixties and early seventies, twelve-tone composers were reaching the height of their influence. By some accounts, they effectively took control of university composition departments across the country. Milton Babbitt, who was usually named as the mastermind of this conspiracy, later protested that reports of his omnipotence were exaggerated. “Would that I had known,” Babbitt wrote, “over whom or what I held sway, for I surely couldn’t infer it from the number or venues of my performances, publications, or recordings, or my inability to secure a mere Guggenheim fellowship.”

  No matter who was running the show, young composers with tonal yearnings found little happiness in academia, as colorful testimonials from composers and musicians in Michael Broyles’s book Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music suggest. George Rochberg said: “[Twelve-tone composers] have proclaimed an orthodox cultural church, with its hierarchy, gospels, beliefs, and anathemas.” Michael Beckerman said: “Trying to write tonal music at a place like Columbia University in the 1960s and ’70s was like being a dissident in Prague in the same period, with similar professional consequences.” William Mayer used a homelier high-school metaphor: “To be a tonal composer in the ’60s and ’70s was a deeply dispiriting experience. One was shunned as the last teen-aged virgin.”

  By the end of the sixties, the youth were rebelling against what Babbitt called “complex, advanced, and ‘problematical’ activities.” Rochberg, who had made his name with toughly argued abstract pieces, reverted to the harmonic vocabulary of late-period Beethoven in his Third String Quartet. David Del Tredici, another twelve-tone prodigy, indulged his Romantic inner self in a series of pieces inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stories, the later installments orchestrated somewhat in the manner of Strauss’s Symphonia domestica. Others returned to tonality along the more roundabout path of collage. Lukas Foss, in his 1967 Baroque Variations, distorted Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach; George Crumb injected his sumptuously layered, timbre-driven pieces with quotations from Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and Ravel, not to mention all-American twangs of banjo and guitar. The boldest of neotonalists was William Bolcom, a devoted student of Milhaud, whose evening-length William Blake oratorio, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1956–81), devoured everything from Shaker hymns to reggae.

  These new American Romantics found common ground with surviving members of the old populist generation, who enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling of being au courant. Bolcom’s wild eclecticism resembled Leonard Bernstein’s in Candide and Mass, while his veneration for the French lyric tradition matched that of Ned Rorem, who had long been writing plainspoken, pensive music in uncompromising loyalty to his core principles.

  For composers steeped in the experimental tradition of Cowell and Cage, this squabble between neo-Romantic and die-hard atonal composers meant nothing. From their vantage point, it was essentially a dispute over which aspect of the European inheritance—the late Romantic or the high modern—should hold sway. Such is the analysis set forward by the composer Kyle Gann in some trenchant commentaries on late-twentieth-century music. Gann lumps both “modernists” and “New Romantics” together in the “uptown” category, named for the Upper West Side of New York City, home of Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, and other richly endowed institutions. Downtown composers are those who, in Harry Partch’s words, look for “a way outside”—anti-European, anti-symphonic, anti-operatic. They descend from the free spirits who had long gone their own way on the West Coast. In New York such composers have tended to congregate in loft spaces, art galleries, and rock clubs below Fourteenth Street.

  “Downtown” as a musical construct dates back to the pioneer days of Edgard Varèse, who took up residence in Greenwich Village and wandered the lower end of Manhattan in search of musical noise. But it really got going after the Second World War, when Cage and Feldman unleashed chance in a tenement by the East River. By the late fifties, young Cageans were converging on New York from around the country. One of them, James Tenney of Silver City, New Mexico, moved to New York in 1961, and paid tribute to the city in the pathbreaking computer piece Analog #1, an oceanic surge of sound inspired by the noise of traffic in the Holland Tunnel. When Cage taught a class in experimental composition at the New School, the likes of Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, all conceptual troublemakers who went on to co-found the neo-Dada movement Fluxus, were taking notes. In the name of Fluxus, violins were smashed (Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo, 1962), pianos were dismantled (Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, 1962), and Stockhausen concerts were picketed (Henry Flynt employed the slogan “STOCKHAUSEN—PATRICIAN ‘THEORIST’ OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL!” in 1964).

  The spirit of “downtown” also crossed the flat spaces of the Midwest, touching down in the university towns of Oberlin, Ann Arbor, Champaign-Urbana, and Iowa City. Gann calls experimentalists in these places the “I-80 avant-garde,” after the interstate highway that cuts across the upper Midwest. Their chief gathering place was the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, which ran from 1961 to 1965. Composers “took matters into their own hands,” as ONCE’s co-founder Gordon Mumma said, by creating a new-music center that relied on no single institution for support. The music tended from the difficult toward the freakish: Robert Ashley, Mumma’s chief collaborator, made a virtue of howling feedback in his voice-and-tape piece The Wolfman. Media were mixed in inventive ways; ONCE pioneered an early version of the psychedelic light show.

  The Interstate 80 composers later conspired with the Boston-based ex–neoclassical composer Alvin Lucier, who had fastened on to Cage and gone off the deep end while teaching on the relatively demure campus of Brandeis University. In Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier made himself a kind of mind-control test subject by attaching electrodes to his head and broadcasting his brain’s alpha waves to loudspeakers around the room, the low-frequency tones causing nearby percussion instruments to vibrate. For I am sitting in a room (1969), Lucier recorded himself reciting the following text: “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.” The piece simply enacts that process. Lucier had a pronounced stutter, and one result of the rerecording process was to systematically erase his vocal tic, leaving only wordless tones behind. Partch’s idea of corporeal music, music rooted in the voice and the body, was going strong.

  Out on the West Coast, the “downtown” aesthetic was headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cowell had launched the experimental tradition decades before. The San Francisco Tape Music Center started up in 1961 under the aegis of the San Francisco Conservatory, but was thrown off the premises after a concert in which, as Gann writes, “dancers went around spraying the audience with perfume as a found tape was played of a woman talking to her minister about her out-of-wedlock baby.” In 1966 the
center found a home at Mills College. Its principal personalities were Pauline Oliveros, a Texas-born composer-accordionist who blended cool soundscapes with raw human voices, and Morton Subotnick, an Angeleno whose all-electronic works made products of the previous decade sound quaint. Subotnick’s 1967 synthesizer rhapsody Silver Apples of the Moon became a surprise bestseller on the Nonesuch label, its alternately abstract and propulsive swirls of synthesized sound entrancing college kids of the Beatles generation. But perhaps the most significant of the Tape Center’s activities was a performance that it hosted in 1964: the premiere of Terry Riley’s In C.

  West Coast Minimalism

  Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s “sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.”

  It took a while for Young to bring that spaciousness to his music. Early on he adhered to bebop jazz and twelve-tone music, which, as Gunther Schuller liked to say, often sounded like the same thing. Young’s teacher at Los Angeles City College was Leonard Stein, who had long served as Schoenberg’s personal assistant. Later, at UCLA and Berkeley, Young joined the international cult of Webern. But he interpreted Webern’s twelve-tone pieces in a fresh, unexpected way. He noticed, for example, that any one note in a Webern row tended to come back in the same register (high, low, middle) and that those recurring notes created hidden through-lines in the music. He made it his mission to bring those continuities to light. Like Feldman, he slowed the pace of events in the twelve-tone cosmos, only in his case each note in the series became an extended tone, or “long tone,” as he called it. Twelve-tone writing became something like Tai Chi, combat in slow motion.