The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The plot may be nuts, but grand sounds crop up all over Licht—the pealing, quasi-tonal theme of Michael that resounds through Thursday; Lucifer’s sneering glissandos in Saturday; the phantasmagoric ending of that opera, with boomings of the tam-tam, alternating chords of organ and trombones, ecstatic shouts and murmurs, and endless ringing bells. Stockhausen is going out in style.

  When Terry Riley’s In C was played at Darmstadt in 1969, it elicited lusty boos from the rank and file of the avant-garde. Only a few European composers understood that something revolutionary was happening in American music. One close listener was György Ligeti, who included in his 1976 piece Three Pieces for Two Pianos a playfully repetitive movement titled “Self-Portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin Is Also There).” Another was the radical-anarchist Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who, after hearing In C in 1970, began working out his own emphatically pulsing, pop-inflected language, which, in the eighties, had a considerable impact on the composers of Bang on a Can.

  Andriessen went on to become the only major European minimalist. In 1976, the year of Music for 18 Musicians and Einstein on the Beach, he finished a large-scale work for voices and ensemble titled De Staat, or The Republic, after Plato. The choice of texts gives ironic prominence to Plato’s warnings about the dangers of free musical expression (“Any alteration in the modes of music is always followed by alteration in the most fundamental laws of the state”). The score itself embodies the loudness and lewdness that Plato feared: a swing-band wall of brass, a trio of electric guitars, riff-like themes, funky rhythms. All the same, Andriessen remains a recognizably European composer. The harmonies are thicker and more changeable than Reich’s or Glass’s, the off-kilter motor rhythms of Stravinsky lurk behind almost every bar. The music is nervous rather than mellow, not the kind of thing you can bliss out to.

  If minimalism made hardly a dent on mainstream European music—its reliance on consonances and steady pulses broke all the modernist taboos at once—the younger generation of composers, those who came of age in the era of the student revolutions of May 1968, did find their own direction, distinct from that of Boulez. In the seventies, three composers working at IRCAM—Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, and Hugues Dufourt—used advanced computer software to analyze the spectra of overtones that accompany any resonating tone, and from the complex patterns that they found they extrapolated a new kind of music. Their common effort, which came to be called Spectralism, had an antiestablishment, back-to-nature aspect. It was, in a way, an oblique response to minimalism and to the predecessor movements of the West Coast American avant-garde, notably the work of Harry Partch and La Monte Young. If you are faithful to the material of the natural harmonic series, you will not neglect the intervals at the lower end of the spectrum of tone—the octave, the fifth, and the major third, whence comes major-and minor-key tonality. Grisey later said in an interview: “I have to acknowledge the differences [between consonance and dissonance] and avoid flattening everything. Making everything flat and equal. It’s a way of recovering the hierarchy.”

  The exemplary Spectralist work is Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques, a ninety-minute instrumental cycle whose material stems from a single low E on the trombone. This music is by no means easy on the ears; the overtone-derived material converges in forbiddingly thick, ultradissonant textures or goes spinning through hectic patterns dictated by ring-modulator technology. Yet there are arresting moments of simplification, as quasi-tonal harmonies rush to the fore. Spectralism is often just a step or two removed from the singing and shimmering textures of Debussy and Ravel. Floating through Murail’s orchestral soundscape Gondwana is a citation of Sibelius, his time come around at last.

  The Spectralists’ cautious rapprochement with consonance—call it détente—stopped short at the German border. The reunification of East and West and the emergence of the new Germany as the dominant player in the European Union failed to distract the country’s composers from their wary brooding over the past; indeed, Germans and Austrians seemed more conscious than ever before of the “danger of resembling tonality,” as Schoenberg once put it. Sixty years after the Wagner-loving Hitler killed himself in Berlin, pundits could still be heard declaring that clear-cut repetition of material or a nonironic use of triads betrayed a fascist mentality. With Stockhausen no longer taken as seriously as before, the mantle of greatness fell on Helmut Lachenmann, who has said, “My music has been concerned with rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations preformed by society.” One analyst approvingly notes that Lachenmann’s work is “uncontaminated” by the world around it. Familiar instruments are pushed to make unfamiliar sounds—flutes are blown without mouthpieces, cellos are bowed on the body or the tailpiece, piano pedals become instruments in themselves. Fragments of the musical past float by in mangled, scorched form; childish melodies sputter into futility. Frenzied blasts of flutter-tonguing brass alternate with passages of stasis and near-silence.

  Lachenmann’s fractured aesthetic is allied to political convictions of a far-leftist, insurrectionary character. The libretto of his opera The Little Match Girl (1990–96) augments the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale with a quotation from Gudrun Ensslin, a leader of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang: “Criminal, madman, and suicide…Their criminality, their madness, their death express the revolt of the destroyed against his destruction.”

  We have heard this kind of talk before. The imagery of contamination recalls Schoenberg’s theory of degeneration in Harmonielehre, while the citation of Ensslin smacks of the terrorist chic of Eisler’s The Measures Taken. As usual in the German case, the music must be separated from the rhetoric: for all his head-banging verbiage, Lachenmann is a sensitive composer who places his cries and whispers with extraordinary care and keeps the listener in a tensely riveted state. After a century of noise, he still succeeds in delivering authentic, bracing shocks. In the most alarming section of The Little Match Girl, fragments of Mahler, Berg, Stravinsky, and Boulez flare out briefly from the orchestra, as if someone were flipping the dial of an all-twentieth-century radio station. Crashing in their midst is the A-minor chord that ends Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

  Thrilling as the latest voyages in “novel spheres” may be, much contemporary music in Austria and Germany seems constricted in emotional range—trapped behind the modernist plate-glass window of Adorno’s “Grand Hotel Abyss.” The great German tradition, with all its grandeurs and sorrows, is cordoned off, like a crime scene under investigation.

  After the Soviets

  East of Berlin and Vienna, the landscape ages. In the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, cities and towns all over Russia and Eastern Europe looked frozen in time. In Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, you could sit outside a church in the Old Town on a Sunday morning and see little evidence that the nineteenth century had ended. On the backstreets of East Berlin, faded lettering on storefronts in the old Jewish neighborhoods spoke of an annihilated world. And, backstage at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, the ghost of Chaliapin could be sensed lurking among the piles of decaying scenery. Valery Gergiev, the Mariinsky conductor, studied with the Soviet-era pedagogue Ilya Musin, who continued teaching five classes a week at the Petersburg Conservatory until a few days before his death in 1999, at the age of ninety-five. On the day that Musin first enrolled as a student at the conservatory, Shostakovich was standing behind him in line.

  The Soviet era, for all its ravaging effects on the spirit, preserved prewar musical culture as if in amber. As late as the 1980s, composers were still lionized, opera houses and orchestras were generously funded, and an imposing music-education system funneled major talents from the provinces to the center. All that changed, of course, when the Communist Party fell from power. In the new plutocratic Russian state, institutions such as the Mariinsky are maintained as elite showplaces, but sponsorship of new music has all but disappeared. Composers who were long accustomed to dachas and h
onoraria now flounder in the open market. Others, mostly the younger ones, have embraced the creative freedom that comes along with relative poverty. American minimalism, pop and rock influences, and the ghosts of Russian tradition are colliding and combining to sometimes scandalous effect—as in Leonid Desyatnikov’s opera Rosenthal’s Children, in which an émigré German-Jewish geneticist establishes a secret biological laboratory at Stalin’s behest and succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky.

  The death of Shostakovich, in 1975, left a temporary void at the heart of Russian music, but a new cohort of composers quickly filled it. Born around the same time as the American minimalists and the French Spectralists, the last major Soviet generation radiated a disruptive, nonconformist energy, openly defiant of official direction where their predecessors had been accommodating or ambivalent. Alfred Schnittke spiked his orchestra with electric guitars. Sofia Gubaidulina wrote a Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings in which the soloist issues a bloodcurdling yell in the middle. Arvo Pärt, of Estonia, participated in a Cagean happening at which a violin caught fire. In later years provocation gave way to meditation: the long twilight of the Brezhnev regime brought a midnight harvest of religious music.

  Schnittke, a man of haunted, sallow visage, Russian-Jewish and Volga German in origin, was Shostakovich’s heir apparent. A master ironist, he developed a language that he called “polystylistics,” gathering up in a troubled stream of consciousness the detritus of a millennium of music: medieval chant, Renaissance mass, Baroque figuration, Classical sonata principle, Viennese waltz, Mahlerian orchestration, twelve-tone writing, aleatory chaos, and touches of modern pop. Schnittke told a friend: “I set down a beautiful chord on paper—and suddenly it rusts.” In his First Symphony of 1972, the opening theme of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto fights like a wounded animal against a fusillade of sound.

  Wandering deeper into the labyrinth of the past, Schnittke ceased to be an ironic commentator on Romantic style and instead became a phantom Romantic himself. He fell under the spell of the ultimate Romantic myth, the life and death of Faust, and, like so many postwar composers, he read Thomas Mann’s novel, which, he said, “had an incredible influence on me.” His unfinished magnum opus was the opera Historia von D. Johann Fausten, which, like Adrian Leverkühn’s fictional Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, employed the original Faust text of 1587. In a late-twentieth-century twist, Schnittke’s hero goes down to hell to the accompaniment of a satanic tango, with an amplified mezzo-soprano presiding like an Ethel Merman of the apocalypse.

  Shostakovich looked askance at Schnittke, perhaps because the two composers were close in temperament. Toward Gubaidulina he extended a warmer hand. “I want you to continue along on your mistaken path,” Shostakovich told her, presumably with an enigmatic smile. In a career that has gone from strength to strength, Gubaidulina has aimed at nothing less than “spiritual renewal” in the act of composing. An admirer of Cage among others, she fills her scores with far-out sounds—buzzing, throbbing textures, caterwauling glissandos in the wind and brass, scrapings and whisperings of strings, spells of improvisation (sometimes with Russian, Caucasian, Central Asian, and East Asian folk instruments). Episodes of extreme quiet, in which serpentine chromatic figures curl through small groups of instruments, give way to roarings of tam-tams, tubas, and electric guitars. These free, wild, organic narratives often culminate in what Gubaidulina calls, in a Messiaen-like turn of phrase, “transfigurations,” moments of radiant clarity. Her 1980 work Offertorium, for violin and orchestra, deconstructs the “royal theme” from Bach’s Musical Offering, distributing the notes among different instruments in Second Viennese School style. By the end, Bach’s theme has somehow mutated into an ancient-sounding liturgical melody, passing through a murmuring orchestra like an icon in a procession.

  In the music of Pärt, the icon is all. The Estonian turned to religious subjects at the end of the sixties, defying the official atheism of the Soviet Union. In his 1968 cantata Credo, the words “Credo in Jesum Christum” are set to the tune of Bach’s Prelude in C Major and beset with aleatory bedlam. After that, for a period of eight years, Pärt composed little, immersing himself in a study of medieval and Renaissance polyphony. Then, in 1976, the year of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Pärt reemerged with a stunningly simple piano piece titled For Alina, which consists of just two voices, one moving by melodic steps and the other rotating through the pitches of a B-minor triad. The following year he wrote a Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten, whose music haunted him in ways he could not quite put into words. The technique of Cantus is like that of Reich’s phase-shifting music, with downward A-minor scales unfurling in different voices and at different speeds. In the two-violin concerto Tabula Rasa, also from 1977, Pärt goes from strict process to free expression; at the beginning of the second movement, “Silentium,” a rustling arpeggio on a prepared piano, like the rustling of wings, ushers in icily beautiful chords of D minor. Both the invocation of silence and the use of a prepared piano acknowledge John Cage, who opened so many doors in colleagues’ minds.

  The quietude of Pärt’s music did not mean that he had become a quietist. References to him as “monkish” miss the mark; behind his sad eyes and long beard is a steely will. In 1979 he performed the un-Shostakovich-like gesture of donning a long-haired wig and haranguing the Estonian Composers’ Union on the subject of official restrictions. He defected to the West the following year; Schnittke, who had played the prepared-piano part in the first Western performances of Tabula Rasa, arranged for Pärt and his wife to stay in Vienna, and the couple ended up settling in Berlin.

  A lonely exile might have awaited him; the German music establishment opposed minimalism in any form. But when the German label ECM began issuing recordings of Pärt’s music in the eighties, they sold copies into the millions, unheard-of quantities for new music. It is not hard to guess why Pärt and several like-minded composers—notably Henryk Górecki and John Tavener—achieved a degree of mass appeal during the global economic booms of the eighties and nineties; they provided oases of repose in a technologically oversaturated culture. For some, Pärt’s strange spiritual purity filled a more desperate need; a nurse in a hospital ward in New York regularly played Tabula Rasa for young men who were dying of AIDS, and in their last days they asked to hear it again and again.

  When the Berlin Wall was broached on November 9, 1989, seventy-one years to the day after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic and fifty-one years after Kristallnacht, Leonard Bernstein rushed to the scene to conduct performances of Beethoven’s Ninth on both sides of the crumbling wall. The grand old man of American music had less than a year to live, but he seized the world’s attention one last time with a typically gaudy and soulful act; Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” was rewritten as an “Ode to Freedom.” Thomas Mann would have smiled at the gesture: the Ninth had been “taken back” again. All over Eastern Europe that fall, and in Russia in the years to come, peoples who had lived under the fear of the Soviet regime glimpsed freedom, and Bernstein’s revision of the Ninth symbolized burgeoning hopes for the future. Freedom arrived quickly in some places, more slowly in others, and in more than a few former Soviet republics it never showed up at all.

  As it happens, allusions to Beethoven crop up in several major late-period works by celebrated composers from Eastern European countries, although none delivered anything like an ode to joy. In 1981, just as the Polish Communist leadership was trying to shut down the Solidarity movement, Witold Lutosławski began writing his Third Symphony, and his point of departure was four sharp iterations of the note E—a martial signal that recalls the attention-grabbing opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. For most of the symphony’s half-hour duration, the orchestra seems to be trying to figure out how to respond to that initial blast of energy, testing pathways that in one way or another appear to be blocked. Only in the last few minutes does it find a resolution—a kind of magnificence
without triumph. Cellos and basses intone a low E, and then match it with a B, forming a rock-solid perfect fifth. Arcs of melody extend from that foundation, intersecting into a convulsive twelve-note dissonance. Gleaming atop the tower of sound is the note B-flat, a tritone away from the original E. Then the music wheels back to the fundamental tone, which is blasted out four times to close. Lutosławski was in his late sixties when he wrote this music, but it has the dynamism of raging, blissful youth.

  György Ligeti, in his last years, adopted an idiosyncratic language that he called “non-atonality”—a kind of harmonic kaleidoscope in which tonal chords, quasi-folkish melodies, natural tuning, and other relics of the past swirled around one another in fractured counterpoint. Ligeti’s Horn Trio of 1982 begins with a distorted variation of the “farewell” motif from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 81a. It ends with a Lamento, a ravaged landscape full of dying cries, in which the composer seems to gaze back on a century that killed off most of his family and his faith in humanity. But the harmony never turns as grim as it might. Faint triads, stretched over many octaves, provide a tremor of hope. At the end, three tones glow in the night: a G, low on the horn; a C, high on the violin; and an A, sounding weakly in the middle range of the piano. These same notes appear in reverse order at the start of the last movement of Beethoven’s final string quartet, in F major—the music to which the composer attached the words “It must be!”

  Ligeti’s fellow Hungarian György Kurtág chose to remain in Budapest through the worst years of the Cold War. Kurtág, too, was a master of the art of neither-nor—a composer neither traditional nor avant-garde, neither nationalist nor cosmopolitan, neither tonal nor atonal. Every attempt at a description of Kurtág’s music has to be qualified: it is compressed but not dense, lyrical but not sweet, dark but not dismal, quiet but not calm. In 1994, for the Berlin Philharmonic, Kurtág composed a piece titled Stele (Greek for “memorial slab”), in which Beethoven’s ghost walks again. At the beginning, octave Gs make an unmistakable reference to the opening of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3—a representation of the topmost step of the staircase that goes down to Florestan’s dungeon. Kurtág, too, leads us into a subterranean space, but we never get out. The final movement, muted and maximally eerie, fixates on a spread-out chord that repeatedly quivers forth in quintuplet rhythm. At the very end the harmony shifts to the white-key notes of the C-major scale, all seven of them sounding in a luminous smear.