Paul Griffiths modern music A concise history Revised edition 134 illustrations Thames and HudsonFor my father and in memory of my mother Ti pare The complete score of Kahin Stockusens Refi for pana cele and percussion (195) The ream is primed on 2 amsparent ssp which canbe soated to diferent posons for dierent performances, Any copy ofthis ook ied by he publisher aa paperback ssl Sntject to the condo dat sl ot by wy of ade or other be Teng resold hed oot or others ulated without the publibe’ prior “coment in ay form of binding or cover other ham hati which is Publshed and without 2 simile condition ncadng these word being Inpored om a subsequent puree © tor¥and 1994 Pal Gifs Fi poblshed in 978 8 Mod Mas Cone ito fom Deby Ba Revised edition 904 Reprinted 1996 Allright eure No pact ofthis publication maybe reproduced or ‘eaimited in ay form or by any mea, elecuone or mechani, Inchdng photocopy, econding or iny oder snormation storage and retrieval yom, thou por permsion in wating fom the publaher. Brith Library Catling in-Pblstion Data ‘A ctalogue second for this book svlble fom the British Libary rer ongno-searbek y Printed and bound in Singapore by C'S. Graphics Contents CHAPTER ONE HAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE cHarren sp (CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT (CHAPTER NINE (CHAPTER TEN (CHAPTER ELEVEN (CHAPTER TWELVE Prelude The late Romantic background New harmony New rhythm, new form Neoclassicism Serialism The modern world To the east Ser ism continued Electronics Chance 3 24 su 63 81 98 116 146 160(CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN The theatre and po! Minimalism and muti BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 170 187 206 CHAPTER ONE Prelude ifmodern music may be said to have had a definite beginning, then it started with this flute melody, the opening of the Prélude & 1 ‘midi dun faune’ by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Pethaps itis necessary to justify the description ‘modern’ for music created more than ninety years ago and in a different century, espe- cially if one considers that other new music of the period when the Prélude was composed, between 1892 and 1894, included Dvotik’s ‘New World’ Symphony and Tchaikovsky's “Pathétique’. But of course, in the context of the arts, ‘modern’ implies more about aesthetics and technique than about chronology. It is reasonable, therefore, that a ‘concise history of modern music’, itself a seeming contradiction, should cast back almost a century, and equally reason= able that it should ignore music more modern in date but less so in method and feeling. One of the principal characteristics of modem music, in the not strictly chronological sense, is its lack of dependence on the system of major and minor keys which had provided motivation and coherence for most westem art music since the seventeenth century. In this respect Debussy’s Prélude undoubtedly heralds the modern era. Gently itshakes loose ftom roots in diatonic (major-minor) tonality, which is not to say that its atonal, or keyless, but merely that the old harmonic relationships are no longer of binding significance. At times Debussy leaves the key in doubt, as he does in the first two bars of the flute melody quoted above, where he fills in the space between C sharp and G: all the notes are included, and not just the selection which would point to a particular major or minor key. Moreover, the out- 7Debussy in s Paris street a the tur of the century line interval, a critone, is that most inimical to the diatonic system, the ‘diabolus in’ musica’ as it was called by medieval theorists. Debussy does not go on in that way, for his third bar indicates an arrival in the key of B major. But diatonic harmony is now only one possibility among many, not necessarily the most important and not necessarily determinant of form and function. 8 With regard to form, the Prélude again sows the seeds of innova tion. Instead of choosing.a distinctive theme and developing it in con secutive fashion, Debussy takes an idea which is hesitant, tuning back on itself twice before opening out, unassertive and so unsuitable for “logical’ claboration in the orthodox manner. This flute theme is the subject almost throughout the Prélude, though it may be expanded by embellishment or split into independent fragments; there are repeated excursions from the theme and returns t0 it. Debussy does not, however, engage his principal idea in a long-term progressive development. The effect is rather that of an improvisation, The spontaneity of the Prélude is not ju ambiguity and formal freedom; it depends also on the fluctuating tempos and irregular rhythms, ‘and on the subtle colouring of the piece. Traditional thematic working had demanded a certain regu larity and homogeneity of rhythm in order that attention might be focused on matters of harmony and melodic shape, and the tempos had to be chosen to ensure the goal-directed force of the music Debussy’s music, wayward in harmony and form, is correspondingly Jess constrained in its measurement of time. As for colour, Debussy was a master of delicate orchestral shadings, and a pioneer in consistently making instrumentation an essential feature of composition. More than any earlier music (except perhaps that of Berlioz), Debussy’s works suffer loss when arranged for other media one has only to heara piano version of the Prélude, for instance, to be convinced of that. The flute theme of the piece is very definitely a theme for the flute, and it becomes something significantly different when heard on another instrument. Acknowledging this, Debussy in the Prdlude restricts his theme to the flute, except for brief appearances once each on clarinet and oboe, appearances which have structural importance: the clarinet sets the theme on its most far-reaching, development, and the oboe attempts to prolong movement when the stillness of the opening has returned. Thus the orchestration has its part in establishing both ideas and structure; itis more than an omament ora means for enhancing rhetoric Debussy could take a fresh approach to orchestration because his kind of musical formation was quite new. He had lite time for the thorough, continuous, symphonic manner of the Austro-German tradition, ‘the ‘logical’ development of ideas which gives music the effect of a narrative. For him, music was not the relayer of stories of personal emotion such as contemporary critics supposed for works of Beethoven, or such as contemporary composers, like Richard Strauss, matter of harmonic 9‘Costume design by Léon Bakst forthe Faun in Nijinsky’s ballet, to Debusy’s Pile. The ballet svas fist given by the Diaghilev ‘company in Paris in 1912, with Nijnsky a che Faun, made explicit in their symphonic poems. Debussy's music had aban~ doned the narrative mode, and with it the coherent linkage projected by the conscious mind; its evocative images and its elliptical move- ments suggest more the sphere of fee imagination, of dream. As Debussy himself wrote, ‘music alone has the power to evoke as it will the improbable places, the unquestionable and chimerical world which works secretly on the mysterious poetry of the night, on those thousand anonymous sounds made when leaves are caressed by the rays of the moon.’ The prose is typically enigmatic and replete with images, but the reference to dreaming is clear enough. ‘An analogy with dreams, or more generally with spontaneous associations of ideas in the mind, is more revealing than the Iong- established comparison of Debussy’s music with Impressionist paint- ing. [tis true that he sometimes chose subjects which appealed also to the Impressionists: ‘Reflets dans l'eau’, for instance, one of his Images for piano, has a title which might be affixed to many canvases by Monet. Yet music differs essentially from painting in that it is an art which takes place in time, Debussy’s formal and rhythmic techniques may have weakened the sense of ongoing time, but movement was of the utmost importance to him. Again, he was not concerned just with painting sound pictures: ‘I would like for music’, he once ‘wrote, ‘a freedom which it can achieve perhaps more than any other art can, not being limited to a more or less exact reproduction of nature, but to the mysterious correspondences between Nature and Imagination.” In the case of the Prélude, there is a strong suggestion of place, of woodland in the lazy afternoon heat, but Debussy’s main concern is with the ‘correspondences’ (Baudelairean word) between this environment and the thoughts of the faun in the eclogue by Stéphane Mallarmé on which the music is based, to which it forms a ‘prelude’ ‘The work is, in Debussy’s own words, asequence of successive décors which bring forward the desires and dreams of the faun’ Other works of Debussy, like the symphonic sketches La mer (1903-5), are probably based directly on nature, without the filtering of a poet's imagination; yet in these too nature is only a starting point, left behind in the eventual creation of ‘mysterious correspondences’ having more to do with the composer's interior world, Debussy suggested as much when writing about ‘the secret of musical compo- sition’: “The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry ofa bird leave manifold impressions in us. And suddenly, with- ‘out our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language.’ The stimulus is not the original natural phenomenon, the ‘impression’, but the secondary mental phenomenon, the ‘memory’. ‘I want’, Debussy wrote in the same essay, ‘to sing my interior landscape with che simple artlessness of a child” In Debussy’s view the established techniques stood in the way of such expression; they imposed cliché and artifice, and they had been developed for different purposes, chiefly to express and to stimulate emotional reactions. The freer flow which he achieved, in fecling as uch as in technique (the two being inseparable), had more chance of mirroring the mind's elusive and allusive internal workings. It also brought a seductive ambience to his music, and to some extent this clouded appreciation of its technical and’ aesthetic newnes. The Prélude met with immediate popularity, not the violent rejectionFront cover of the fist edition of ‘La me, for which Debussy chose Hokus print The Wave which greeted the first radical works of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others; scandal came only two decades after the first performance, when Nijinsky’s dancing exposed the erotic languor in the piece. Debussy had opened the paths of modern music ~ the abandonment of traditional tonality, the development of new thythmic complexity, the recognition of colour as an essential, the creation of a quite new form for each work, the exploration of deeper mental processes ~ but he had done so by stealth. CHAPTER TWO The late Roman background ‘The nature and the consequences of Debussy’s revolution were not to be recognized fally until after the second world war, and his immedi- ate influence was limited, if widespread: his evocative tiles, his harmonic practices and his orchestral innovations were abundantly imitated, but his freedom of movement, his lightness of touch and his. impalpable coherence could not be matched. And his near contem- poraries, particularly in Austria and Germany, were concerned to bol- ster and continue the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition rather than to explore fundamentally new directions. But there was a prob- em, Wagner and Liszt had greatly increased the scope of permissible harmony and the rate of harmonic change, and it was difficult to find ways of accommodating the new chromaticism within forms which depended for their life on coherent harmonic schemes. Debussy had answered thé difficulty by abandoning both harmonic and structural orthodoxy; but ifthe old models of continuous development were to be retained, then new binding elements were needed, if only to satisfy the composer's sense of form bequeathed by tradition. ‘Many composers found the template they required in a literary programme, as Liszt had in his virtual invention of the principal genre of literary instrumental music, the symphonic poem. Richard Strauss (1864-1949) composed a series of symphonic poems in the nineties, including Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben, which brought the genre to an extravagant culmination. Strauss was unrivalled in his ability to create musical ‘translations’ of narrative images, so that, with some knowledge of the subject, his symphonic poems can be ‘decoded’ as stories while they are being heard, There could be no more striking instances of how far music had become a medium for emotional or action narrative in the nineteenth century, nor could there be any continuation along this road: Strauss himself turned his skills to opera. However, programmes of a psychological kind can fairly be assumed to lie behind the symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), B[Richard Straus; oil portrait by ‘Mas Liebermann even where they are not made explicit by texts or titles: Mahler's correspondence indicates as much. If Strauss’s symphonic poems arc emotional histories related from outside, Mabler’s symphonies are confessions of feeling vouchsafed from within. His themes are made to carry an unprecedented expressive load, and his forms are motivated more by the exigencies of expression than by harmonic function, At root the musics still diatonic, and the symphony is stil for Mahler, as itwas for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, a drama of relation and con- trast. Now, however, the figures in the drama are not so much keys and themes as feelings and psychological characters. Mabler was thus able to incorporate the lyrical mode ~ music as an almost purely expressive art, ignorant of large-scale form ~ within the dramatic structure of the symphony. Some of his symphonic 4 a movements arc songs with orchestra; others use material which had appeared originally in independent songs. The Second and Third ‘Symphonies (1887-96) introduce solo and choral voices in their final movements to make clear the expressive intention after several move ments for orchestra alone. And in the Eighth Symphony (1906-7), sometimes known as ‘the symphony of a thousand’, Mahler ealls on an enormous array of soloists, choral voices and orchestral instruments all through. The use of very large forces, common to most composers of the period except Debussy, can be seen as another means of assuring direc tional force at a time when this could no longer be entrusted to harmonic methods. A massive close, such as appears for example in Schoenberg's Gunelieder (1900-11), would give a more decisive finality to a work than any retumn to a ‘home’ key, long forgotten if it had ever been clearly stated. Mahler and Strauss commonly called for an orchestra of treble the size of Beethoven's, so that it was possible for gigantic crescendos, outbursts of rhetoric and grand perorations to substantiate musical form in dynamic terms. For Mahler, in particular, the large orchestra also made available a variety of smaller formations which could be used to add new charac- ters or to emphasize contrasts. Mahler asked too for instruments not usually found in the orchestra and having references outside the world of traditional art music: cowbells for a sense of alpine pastures, or guitar and mandolin for a taste of popular dance. Even where these latter instruments are not included, Mahler's music now and then ‘descends’ towards caf music. It was part of his ideal that the sym- phony should be a complete picture of the artist's emotional universe, his sentimentality and his ironic humour being included as much as more noble feelings. When Debussy made his ventures into the music hall, ashe did in the piano piece 'Golliwog’s Cake-Walk’, it was with- in the context of a comic work. Mahler, on the other hand, strove to encompass a wide range of experience within a single composition; indeed, his symphonic structures depended on that, and it was demanded by his determination to expose his emotional self with the utmost truth, ‘There is, however, another aspect to Mahler's work: the religious and metaphysical. He was obsessed by the idea of death, particularly his own in his last years, and in many of his works human mortality is the occasion of profound sorrow, oppressed anguish or biter sarcasm, But it may also be accepted with acquiescence, as itis in the finale of his orchestral song-cycle Das Lied von der Erie (‘The song of the earth’,{Gusev Mahler in 1896, the year in which he completed his Third Symphony. Mahler conducting: fom a sheet of silhouettes by Oxto Bochler 1907-9), or with joy at the promise of new life, as in the Second and Eighth Symphonies Death and resurrection were the subject of a good deal of late Romantic music, including a symphonic poem by Straus. Schoenberg's Gurrelieder relate a tale of ghostly resurrection as a punishment for the hero's sin of cursing God, but more commonly the rebirth is one into hope, death to the world being followed by an awakening to what is beyond the physical. This concer with the beyond may be related to contemporary occult movements, such as theosophy, and also to developments in the understanding of the rind. Just as Freud was suggesting how our actions and judgments are guided by a mental life of which we are largely unaware, so composers {and, of course, artists in other fields) looked beyond the reality of consciousness in the hope of glimpsing essentially higher truths. Debussy seems to have entered the subconscious world with intuitivePELLEAS er Frontispiece by Rachegrose for the frst edition of Debusy's opera. This rather inappropriately comanticized scene shows Pelléas and CLAUDE DEBUSSY Nand’ hub Goud MAURICE MAET case: in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1892-1902), based on the play by Maurice Macterlinck, the most important things remain for long unspoken and the music reveals elusive currents which shape human destiny from below the level of the conscious mind. "Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was also a this time influenced by Maeterlinck’s mystical beliefs, as too by the metaphysical Strindberg and the German symbolists. He composed a symphonic poem Pelleas lund Melisande (1902-3) and another, unusually scored for string sextet, fon the subject of Richard Dehmel’s poem Verklirte Nacht (Transfigured night’, 1899), where love is seen as having the power to transfigure nature, the metaphysical world holding a greater signif icance than the physical. Such notions had one of their sources in Wagner, like the chromatic music used to embody them. But 8 Schoenberg, who held to the Austro-German tradition with uncom- promising tenacity, could only unwillingly allow metaphysics and chromaticism to lead him away from structural coherence. It was his ‘unique achievement. this time, in the two symphonic poems and the First Chamber Symphony (1906), to drive the new chords to function formally in a development as firmly directed as any in Brahms. Only in his songs and in the Gurrelieder did he rest on lyricism, though even here the music is fall of those contrapuntal manccuvres by which he maintained forward movement in a world of harmonic diversity. The renewal of counterpoint as a motive force can be seen also in the music of Max Reger (1873-1916), though in his case there is some stylistic dissonance between the busy Bachian polyphony and the weight of harmony its expected to bear. He shunned programmes or poetic sources for his instrumental works, and, though he wrote a great many songs, he was primarily a composer for the orchestra, for chamber groupings and for the organ. Often he contained his densely worked music within variation forms, but he also revived the fugue Amold Schoenberg in 1940, shorly before he completed the Guede 19Ferruccio Busoni; drawing by Edmond X. Kapp. The portrait was made during a Beethoven performance in London in 1920. and other Baroque models all in an effort to stem the tide of formal narchy impelled by chromaticism. The results, however, are more illustrations of the problem than, like Schoenberg's works, solutions. ‘Another musician who reached back to the Baroque for the means to order chromaticism was the Italo-German composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), whose wide horizons also stretched to Debussyan harmony, North’ American Indian music, Romantic thetoric and the spirited zest of the Italian Renaissance. He was in some ways the reverse of Mabler, the man who opened himself to all experience but saw it fiom without; his masterpiece, the opera Doktor Faust (1916-24) is more parable and mystery play than autobiography, though undoubtedly Busoni sympathized with Faust’s quest for uni- versal knowledge. He was an immensely various composer, but he was. never as daring in his music as he was in his Skew for a New Esthetic of ‘Music (1907, enlarged 1910), in which he speaks of the possbilities of radically new scales and even of electronic music, then hardly more than a vague dream, Strauss, Mahler, Schoenberg, Reger and Busoni all lived and worked in the German-speaking heartland of musical tradition, and it wis natal chat tix sespones to the crs of tol composition should have been as much restorative as exploratory. Schoenberg may have been the most aware ofa need to establish a fanctional basis or expanded tonal harmony so that thorough musical development might continue. Busoni may have been the most open-minded, certainly in his manifesto. Mahler was perhaps the most audacious in looking within himself for the answers, opening music to fall and intense expression of the personality. But all five, different though their aims and methods were, had to face the same problem of creating music in the absence of the old harmonic certaintis. The problem appears to have been felt less keenly by composers beyond Austria and Germany. Its significant, for instance, that since ‘Mahler the great symphonists have come from outside the area which Max Reger condicting,had been the home of the symphony since Haydn. And the works composed in the first decade of the ewentieth centiry by Edward Elgar {1857~1934) or Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) show much less harmonic Nain than do the works of their Austro-German contemporaries. There were ako composers, like Jean Sibelius (1865~1957) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (18721058), who were able to develop new symphonic styles within the diatonic system. Stbelius's long silence — he composed almost nothing in his last thirty yeats may suggest the difficulty of maintaining tonal composi- tion in the twentieth century, and yet such composers 2s William Walton (1902-83) and Samuel Barber (1910-81) found it possible to perpetuate late Romanticism into the century's ast quarter. Indeed, i Prene of the unusual features of music since 1900 that many compos fea have chosen to take a ‘conservative’ stance, working with materi~ SIs and methods which might have seemed exhausted and outmoded bby the curzent of advance in technique and sensibility. Ofcourse, there fave always been rifs and rivalries in the ars between ‘conservatives’ and ‘radicals’. The difference in twentieth-century music is that so qnany options have remained open that there is no single stream of development, no common language such as usually existed in earlier times, butan ever-spreading delta of aims and means. And the begin- hing of the divergence may be traced to the years 1890-1910, the high point of late Romanticism; for it was the emphasis placed by the FRomantics on individual temperament which prepared the break down of the agreed tonal boundaries. Jean Siti; ol portrait by Akl Gallen-Kals his friend and fellow Finn.(CHAPTER THREE New harmony Debussy’s description of Wagner's music as ‘a beautiful sunset which was mistaken for a dawn’ contains the Key to late Romanticism, Composers from all over Europe, including Debussy himself, had made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth and come away seduced by the powerful appeal of Wagner's chromatic harmony into supposing that it could stand as the comerstone of a new musical art. But often it had Ted them instead into imitation and mannerism, since harmony was by now not the basis of a common language buta matter of personal styl. Liszt had said that any new composition must contain at least one new chord, and this emphasis on harmonic innovation brought with it the weakening of the diatonic system, not least in Liszt's own late works. ‘The most successful of the composers who, unlike Debussy, followed in a more or less direct line after Wagner ~ Mahler, Strauss and the ‘young Schoenberg ~ found it necessary to go ever further from the simple triads on which diatonic harmony is based. And clearly that process could not continue without the foundations being under- mined and the sunsct succeeded by the new dawn of atonality The moment came in the summer of 1908, when Schoenberg was at work on various settings of poems by Stefan George: two for the final movernents of his Second String Quartet (1907-8) and others for an eventual cycle of fifteen songs from the poet's Das Buch der hhingenden Garten (‘The book of the Hanging Gardens’, 1908-9). Writing in 1912, Schoenberg recalled that he had composed his George songs ‘intoxicated by the first words in the text, ... without in the least caring for the further development of the poem, without even noticing tn the ecstasy of composing. Even so, seems bkely that George's images, images of still waiting, apartness from the every~ thy world and suspension tn erotic feeling, hada part in leading him into a musical universe no longer bound by the gravitational attrac tions of and between keys. This becomes explicit in the quartet, where, after two movements in the old expanded diatonic style, the four instruments begin an atonal slow movement and in the finale a 4 soprano voice enters on George's words ‘I feel the air of another planet’. Schoenberg's writings suggest strongly that the breaking of the tonal barrier ‘was undertaken not so much in the excitement of discovery as with difficulty and a sense of loss at what was being abandoned. For Schoenberg was no avant-garde experimenter: his venture into atonality he saw asan inevitable consequence of what had {gone before, and he felt himself forced to go onward, even ifit should ‘be against his conscious will. He would have liked to spend more time investigating the rich diatonic style of the recent First Chamber Symphony, but not until the 1930s did he find himself able to do so. Moreover, to lose diatonic harmony was to lose the principal frame- work supporting the music he most venerated, that of the Austro- German tradition from Bach to Brahms. Without an intense compulsion he would perhaps have found it impossible to enter the realms of atonality; and indeed, after the fist lush of atonal works he did fall almost silent for seven years. For the moment, however, the historical force was unavoidable, and deeply disturbing: ‘Personally 1 had the feeling’, Schoenberg remembered, ‘as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water. .. i bumed not only my skin, it burned also internally." ‘The same force was felt by other composers at the same time, though without their being led thereby to join Schoenberg. Richard Strauss, in his operas Salome (1903-5) and Elektra (1906-8), pressed towards the brink of atonality, but his reaction was a retreat into the comfortable pastiche of Der Rosenkavalier (1909-10). Sibelius’s Fourth ‘Symphony (1910-11) is almost a study on the tonally disruptive inter- val of the tritone, but he too made no farther advance into new ter~ ritory. Mahler, in the Adagio which was the only completed movement of his Tenth Symphony (1909-10), came suddenly to the atonal chasm with a ten-note chord which makes an awesome point Of punctuation, and it is impossible to imagine where he might have gone had he lived beyond the next year. Alexandr Skryabin (1872-1915) also died when his music was on the point of abandon- ing tonality, and before he could bring the physical world to an end in an ecstasy of religious fulfilment at a ceremony of music, poetry, light, perfume and dance which he planned for a temple in the Himalayas. Given what appears to have been a generally felt pressure, one ‘might ask why it should have been Schoenberg who took the first step into atonality. His own answer was typical, that it had to be somebody: asthe historical imperative was inescapable. But one may add other causes more directly concerned with Schoenberg himself. As his pre-atonal works show, he was acutely aware that the harmonic innovations of his time threatened the diatonic foundations of music, for his response had been to strengthen the formal, essentially the harmonic framework, forcing the new chords to fanct turally At a deep level, however, he appears to have acknowledged that this could be no more than a temporary solution, and that the imposition of diatonic propriety was becoming ever less justified by the chordal material being used: he once said that he had for some years been considering the step he took in Das Buch der hingenden Giien. Tt may ako be that Schoenberg's final loosening of tonal ties bore some relation to events in his personal life. In the summer of 1908, at the very time of his fist atonal compositions, his wife left him for a while to live with their friend, the painter Richard Gerstl. The expe- rience of disillusionment, dejection and regret is certainly reflected in the Second String Quartet, and it may have hastened Schoenberg's move into a style bereft of foundations. But, even in expressive terms, it cannot have been the sole cause. The breach of atonality came as a necessary step in Schoenberg's increasingly penetrating revelation of interior emotions, for the exposure of the deepest springs of person~ ality required musical means of an utterly personal kind,"not those learned from tradition. Atonality was the only possible medium for musical Expressionism, Schoenberg’ fist Expresionist works, the George stings of the Second Quartet and Das Buch der hingenden Girten, contrast sharply with most of his earlier scores, and not justin terms of harmony. The texture is light, the movement fleeting; and the tone is more lyrical than dramatic, for drama had depended on the harmonic tensions now dissolved. But things soon changed. In two works of 1909, the Three Piano Pieces and the Five Orchestral Pieces, Schoenberg was able both to re-introduce dramatic forms and for the first time to compose aton- ally without the stimulus and support of a text. The third of the Orchestral pieces was, however, based on a visual impression, that of ‘early morning sunlight on the waters of a lake, which it interprets in subtle shifts of colour and harmony within an enigmatic stillness. There is a quality here that recalls the wide-eyed gaze of the self portraits which Schoenberg painted during the same period. He was never more than an amateur painter, but he did produce a large number of canvases during these Expressionist years, and his paintings earned the respect of Kandinsky and others in the Blaue Reiter group. A Schoenberg sel-poreait in oils, one of many he painted in the years around 1910, when he was beginning his exploration of atonality.His sudden creative explosion in another medium may be understood in the light of a common feeling at the time that the artist_was possessed of a vision which demanded expression in whatever form; what mattered was not the form but the vision, not technique but truth, The most complex and universal visions might require several arts for their revelation, as Skryabin had intended in his projected cere- mony of spiritual cataclysm. Such a combination of the arts, again a legacy from Wagner, was adumbrated by Skryabin in his Prometheus (1910), which is scored for piano, orchestra, organ, wordless chorus and ‘clavier i humiéres’. This last, an imaginary instrument, has a part in standard musical notation, but the idea was that its keys should bring Alexande Skryabin, whose rystical nterions led him to the brink of atonal. Front cover by Jean Delile for the fint dition of Skryabin’s Prometheus, design which announces the apocalypeic 28 CKPABMHD | ASKRIABING IBOMESTEH 7:60.55 PROMETHEUS not sound but intense coloured light streaming into the concert hall, red for the note C, orange-pink for G, and so on. From Skryabin the chain of influence pasted through Kandins amalgam of music, movement and light in Der gelbe Klang ("The yellow sound’) to Schoenberg and his Die glicliche Hand ("The capa ble hand’, 1910-13). This stage piece was conceived by Schoenberg in all its parts, with original words, music, seenic designs, costumes and detailed instructions for lighting to be closely allied with the music The subject, treated in the symbolist manner of Kandinsky's work, is that ofthe creative artist who must renounce personal gratification in the world and instead devote himself to the expresion of higher truths. It was a theme to which Schoenberg would return again and again. Die glickliche Hand had been preceded by another short dramatic work of less personal significance yet of extraordinary psychological 29insight: Envartung Expectation’, 1909). Here the single character isa aaa encima fre forthe lover who hse het, and the musi Sensitive to every shift and surge of feeling, traces her fears, her jeal~ fous anger, her guilt and her tender memories. Schoenberg did the essential composition of this half-hour piece in seventeen days, and within another three weeks he had written out its complex and sub- tle orchestration. As often with him, the creative impulse must have been irresistible, forcing him to work ‘like a mesmerized somnambu- list who reveals secrets about things that he knows nothing about when he is awake’, to quote what he described as Schopenhauer’s ‘wonderful insight’ into the art of musical composition. ‘Not only Envartung but all of Schoenberg's music of this early atonal period gives the impression of having arisen unwilled from a deep level of his mind, of being the product of an introspective psychoanalysis So personal was this music, and so little filtered by the intellect, that xe << Costume designs by Schoenberg forthe Woman and the Man in his dramatic work Die glcliche Hana Design setches by ‘Schoenberg for the forest scene of his monodeana Envsrtug. he did not feel able to teach atonal composition: probably he himself had no conscious awareness of his methods. To the end of his life he taught, and taught brilliantly, from the great Austro-German classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and in 1910-11, when hi had just finished such atonal masterpieces as Envartung and the Fiv Orchestral Pieces, he wrote a treatise on harmony where atonalty appears only as a postscript. He had no time for student composers ‘who came to him to learn the rudiments of revolution, and he did not disparage others who felt unable to follow him into unknown ter~ ritory. Musical style was a matter for the individual, and the greatest lesson of his teaching was that the artist had a moral responsibility to be truthful to his own vision. Even so, Schoenberg's first and most gifted pupils, Alban Berg (4885-1935) and Anton Webern (1853-1945), did quickly follow him into atonal composition. Both were ciose to him at the time of his firstatonal pieces, and itis possible that their support, which approached reverence, was invaluable when he came t0 take a course which he Knew could meet only with hostility. Weber took up Schoenberg's lead exactly, approaching atonality through the poetry of George in fourteen songs of 1907-9, and Berg's frst atonal work, a set of songs to poems by Hebbel and Mombert, followed in 1909-10. Yet these ‘works are not just shadows of Schoenberg. Berg and Webern had felt the pressures towards atonality in their own earlier compositions, and the three proceeded in parallel, united but independent. ‘The early atonal songs of both pupils are fully characteristic, Webem’s concise and purely lyrical, Berg's looking with longing to the tonal past Moreover, Berg and Webern owed as much to Mahler 2s they did to Schoenberg. Naturally this is most evident in their orchestral works: in terms of instrumentation and gesture, Webern's Six Orchestral Pieces (1909-10) and Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces (1914-15) are closer to Mabler’s Sixth Symphony than to Schoenberg's set of 1909. Each work includes a Mablerian march, and both have a public thetoric which was very much a part of Mahler but quite foreign to Schoenberg in his profoundly self-searching form of Expressionism. Outside the ‘second Viennese schoo!’ of Schoenberg, Berg and “Webern there were few composers who took to atonality, and those who did stood at some remove from the Vienna circle. Edgard Vardse wwas deeply impressed by Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, but his first important works, which date from after he left France for New ‘York in 1916, depend as much on the experience of Debussy and Stravinsky. Other, native American composers, like Chatles Ives, Carl Roggles and Henry Cowell, appear to have reached atonality with Titel or no knowledge of what had been achieved in Europe and from a different point of view, ignoring tradition rather than developing from it. In Russa, in the years around the revolution of 1917, there were composers who came to atonality, not through Schoenberg, however, but under the influence of the late works of Skryabin. The Two Compositions for piano (1915) by Nikolay Roslavets (1880— 1044), for example, are atonal and even presage Schoenberg's inven- tion of serialism as a means for consciously controlling atonal form. But the rapidly growing political control of the arts in the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin soon put paid to progress along such lines, and the most adventurous Soviet composers were obliged to emigrate of, like Roslavets, to live in obscure neglect. There were several reasons why the atonal music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webem had only limited immediate influence. Though 2 1R ban eg oak by teacher Schoenberg. Berg's fia sespect for Schoenberg continued fom the time of is sraies (2904-10) wot is death and he dedicated four important weds to his master, including the Three Oxcheste rece and the opera LalSchoenberg's scores were usually published within two or three years of their composition, most of Berg's and Webern's works remained in manuscript until the twenties. Then again, performances were few find, in Schoenberg's experience, usually bad. Envartung was not put ‘on until 1924, and Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces were not heard complete until 1930. Commercial recordings barely existed until the fifties. And when people did have the opportunity to hear music by Schoenberg and his pupils, the reaction was violently aggressive. In 1913 Schoenberg conducted a concert in Vienna including two atonal works, Webem’s Six Orchesteal Pieces and Berg's recent settings of poems by Peter Altenberg for soprano and orchestra. Such was the Gutery that Berg’s songs could not be completed and the police had to be called in. Schoenberg came to understand this immoderate antipathy: ‘It right have been the desire to get rid of this nightmare, of this lunharmonious torture, of these uninteligible ideas, of this methodical madness ~ and I must admit: these were not bad men who felt this way, As a staunch guardian of tradition himself, he recognized how disquieting his music must appear to those for whom the diatonic conventions were absolute. But, as Schoenberg's use of the word ‘nightmare’ suggest, the objection was as much to what he was expressing as to how he was expressing it. Nor could it be other~ swise! atonality had arisen from the need to expose the most extreme and intense emotional states, and, so it seemed for a while, only the most disturbing feelings could be expressed through it. Schoenberg ‘wanted to show that its range was wider, and in 1912 he set about writ jing a work of ‘light, itonic, satirical tone’, That work was Pierrot lunaite. ‘Unlike Schoenberg's other atonal works, Pierrot soon received a fair number of performances, enjoyed a measure of popular. success and gained the interest of ‘composers outside his immediate circle Debusy, Stravinsky and Ravel each drew something from it. Pierot appealed partly because Schoenberg, had chosen a subject which was in the ait, that of the commedia dell'arte figure and his enigmatic fexistence as a creature whose thoughts and feelings are bigger than his Stock character would have one believe. Part dumb puppet, part feeling being, Pierrot presented an image for contemporary doubts about man's power over himself, an image which appealed as much to Stravinsky (in Petrushka) and Picasso as to Schoenberg Piero lunaire 1s an ambiguous work in many seme>. The soloist is required to use Sprechgesang, a mode of vocalization lying between Ty Schoenberg’ Pierrot, as interpreted by the Webh mezzo-soprano Mary Thomas atthe time ofthe compore’s wentesary in 1974 song and speech. The poems, German translations of verses by Albert Giraud, repeatedly switch between first-person narration and third, The piece belongs between the sage and the concert hl twas writ ten not for a singer but for an actress, who gave the first performance in costume, The manner is prt that of ‘serious’ musi, part that ofthe cabaret, the vocalist being accompanied by a small band of flute, clarinet, wo strings and piano (in 1901 Schoenberg had written some songs for a rather literary night club in Berlin). Above all, the ‘light, omic sata tone’ is fused with feslings of temfed isolation, murderous violence, macabre glee and hopeless nostalgia. In 1908 Schoenberg had exposed sich emotions open, new he eid 50 through the shield of irony, and inevitably this demanded a change in style. Though still freely atonal, Pierrot returns towards the contra puntal proprietiesand so prepares the way for that ordering of atonality ‘hich Schoenberg was to achieve in sna, hee tut that was not ro come for another eight years, and, lacking the method, Schoenberg fell almost silent. He at st completed Die 35liche Hand; he worked for three years on the set of Four Orchestral Songs, and he laboured at the oratorio Die Jakobsliter (‘Jacob's ladder’, 1917-22) without coming anywhere near finishing it. Die Jakobsliter was his first attempt to give explicit expression to the ‘moral and religious questions which he was to pursue in the works of his last two decades, particularly in the opera Moses und Aron. Here, however, the verbal and visual imagery comes more from Swedenborg, through Strindberg and Balzac, than from Judaism. The oratorio concerns the soul's achievement of perfection through struggle and prayer, and it begins with a vehement injunction from the Archangel Gabriel which might almost stand as Schoenberg's motto: "You must go on, without asking what lies before you.” At its close Die Jakobsleiter was to have called for enormous forces: “The choir and the soloists join in’, Schoenberg noted, ‘at first main- ly fom the platform, then more and more far off — ofBtage choirs located next to the offstage orchestras — so that, at the close, music is streaming into the great hall from all sides.’ Like Skryabin in his final project, Schoenberg must have intended an overwhelming effect on his audience, and the oratorio, even in its unfinished form, serves a8 a powerful reminder that Expressionist art, Strindberg's as much as Schoenberg's, was concerned with spiritual revelation as much as with erratic psychology. Webern's later atonat songs, those of 1921—4, are all on religious texts, and in 1913 Berg had planned a symphony with a Swedenborgian finale. Deterred from that idea, he instead composed the Three Orchestral Pieces, and these led not to a religious work but to the most complete display of the power of atonality as a means for delving into character: the opera Wozzeck (1917-22). Berg based -his opera on the fragmentary play by Georg Biichner, which shows an inadequate central character, a simple soldier, who is the victim oF ll around him: his irtatious mistress Marie, whose true affections are reserved for herself and her child; the cruelly mocking Captain; the crazed Doctor, who saps Wozzeck’s strength by using hhim as a dietary guinea-pig; the brutish Drum Major, who boasts scomfilly of his conquest of Marie. Each of these figures is drawn by Berg with extraordinary vividness, that vividness depending, as in Envartung, on the extended range of melodic and harmonic possibil- ity opened up by atonality. But Berg's opera differs from Schoenberg's monodrama in its direct references back to tonality, and these allow the events and attitudes, no matter how weird, to be suffused with the ‘composer's sympathy. Berg makes no obvious judgment: he shows the world as itis, and he shows it continuing that way. 36 design for the Doctor's laboratory forthe ft prodacton of Bers opera tgven at Bein in 1925 Wozzeck achieves coherence not only through this sympathy and its concomitant essential harmonic stability but aso through Berg's use of established forms as ground-plans for each scene of act, the forms of symphony, passacagha, invention on a theme and so on. The old forms had here retumed; the old counterpoint had been revived in Pierrot lunaire; the way was open for the formalization of atonality in serilism, In such works as Wozzeck and Pienot lunaire atonality had abun- dantly proved itselfthe most fruitful new direction to be pursued after the seeming exhaustion of the old diatonic system, but it was not the only one. The possibilities might be extended alternatively by com- bining more than one key at the same time (polytonality) or by using finer divisions of the octave than the conventional semitone. Polytonality was used by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) in his ballet eirushka, where the torn hopelessness of the main character is repre~ sented by the simultaneous sounding of C major and its opposite pole, F sharp major, and it became the principal distinguishing matk of the copious output of Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)\Z Microintervals (intervals smaller than a semitone) have similarly become asociated with the name of Alois Haba (1893-1972), who first used quarter-tones in his Suite for string orchestra (1917) and went on to write a variety of works, including complete operas, in quarter- tones and sixth-tones. Haba’s work had parallels in the music of others, such as the Mexican composer Juliin Carrillo (1875-1965), whose later works include cighth- and even sixteenth-tone compositions. Another independent pioneer was Ivan Vishnegradsky (b. 1893), whose fist quarter-tone pieces date from 1918; and quarter-tones were among the eccentric phenomena explored by Ives "A major problem with microinterval music was that of perfor mance, since musical instruments are built to play in semitones. Ives and Vishnegradsky overcame the difficulty by using two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, while Carrillo and Haba had special instruments built. String players and singers might manage to perform in micro- tones, but still the effect was often of something makeshift, even of ordinary music just out of tune. The flowering of microtone music ie only when all barriers had been broken by the arrival of electronic means. ATredtnied If polytonality and microtones offered limited extensions to musi- cal posibiiy,atonaty opened vast new reams. Indeed, Schoenberg's revolution may be suid to have affected all western art music since 1908, for even if a great deal of tonal music has been written since that date (not least by Schoenberg himself), the abjuring of such a funda- ‘mental change in music has to be seen as a creative decision of some significance. 38 (CHAPTER FOUR New rhythm, new form In May 1913, seven months after the first performance of Pierrot Iunaire, the Russian Ballet of Sergey Diaghilev was responsible for the world premieres in Paris of Debussy’s Jeux and Stravinsky's Rite of ‘Spring. With these works the foundations of modern music were com= plete, for the harmonic venturings of Schoenberg's atonal music were ‘equalled in audacity and influence by the new founts of rhythm tapped in The Rite and by the formal freedom of Jeux. Of course, it is only a crude analysis that would seck to separate the elements of harmony, thythin and form of pitch, time and structure — in any piece of music: allare mutually dependent, and inevitably Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Debussy each made innovations on every front. Nonetheless, it is Schoenberg's harmony, Stravinsky's rhythm and Debussy’s form which have excited most interest and proved most important to later composers The rhythmic newness of The Rite of Spring was recognized immediately; it could hardly be mistaken. On the opening night, as Stravinsky recalled, "the first bars of the prelude . . . at once evoked derisive laughter. I was disgusted. These demonstrations, at first iso- lated, soon became general, provoking counter-demonstrations and very quickly developing into a terrific uproar.’ Probably the audience was reacting as much to Nijinsky’s choreography, 'a very laboured and barren effort’ in Stravinsky's view, as to the score; but the musie itself ‘was soon the object of furious debate. Some condemned it as a barbaric annihilation of all that musical tradition stood for, and, this being Paris, others praised it on the same grounds. The truth was that Stravinsky had found for music 2 new dynamic force. Like Schoenberg, he had recognized that increasing chromaticism was loosening the power of diatonic harmony to sustain musical move- ‘ment, but his answer to the problem was very different. The Rite demonstrated with almost savage force that rhythm could be a new ‘motivating impetus. 39|A detail rom the exercise book which Stravinsky filled with mulicolouted sketches for The Rite of Spring In the great mass of music from the Renaissance onwards, rhythm had been subservient to melody and harmony, ot dictated by a text. This is not to deny its importance, its inescapable importance in such a work as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but merely to assert its lesser status: Beethoven's chythm supports and intensifies a fundamentally harmonic development. In The Rite of Spring, by contrast, particularly in the final ‘Sacrificial Dance’ it is thythm that drives the music, with harmony a matter of secondary importance. Most of the ‘Sacrificial Dance’ is constructed from ‘cells’ of from one to six or so notes, not from phrases in the conventional manner. Often the cells are heavily accented, and the music proceeds by their repetition, interposing and ‘atition, process which, given that che cells ate unequal in eng, requite ffequent changes of time signature. The measurement of time Faced fo be n terms of bars now iia marked bythe individual ‘durations of quaver and crotchet. “The Rite of Spring abounds in new approaches to chythm. Its very 40 22 art ofthe “Sacrificial Dance’ ftom the 1947 revised edition of The Rit of Sprit. "The las thece bars ofthis excerpt correspond withthe draft shown opposite. opening is a bassoon solo which destroys the regulation of the barline in another way, by ignoring it and continuing without perceptible metre; and other passages are syncopated against the metre indicated by the barring. What immediately attracted the notice of Stravinsky's contemporaries, however, was not the subtlety of his rhythm but its primitive force, the pounding energy of the score. Afterall, The Rite hhad been designed as music to accompany ‘scenes of earthly joy and celestial triumph as understood by the Slavs’, to quote Nicolas Roerich, the author of the scenario. Stravinsky did not set out to pro= duce a compendium of new rhythmic ideas; they came unbidden, and he found that he was inventing music which he did not at first know how to notate. He was, as he later wrote, ‘the vesel through which The Rite passed’ Stravinsky's earlier career had generated little to prepare for the onslaught of The Rite, however inevitable that work may seem in, retrospect. As a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov he had gained a mastery of 4nae colourful orchestration, which he had putto use in his frst ballet score for Diaghilev, The Firebird (1909-10). That had been a brilliant and exotic fairy tale in the manner of Rimsky, though it also shows an awareness of what Skryabin and Debussy were achieving, Much more individual in style s Stravinsky's second Diaghilev ballet, Peimshka, ‘where thythm is becoming the most important structural and expres- sive element, closely linked as it is with movements on stage: the bustle of a fair, or the awkward gestures of the humanized puppet hero, But Petnushka owes its rhythmic life more to ostinatos and irregularities of metre than tothe cell technique developed in The Rite. ‘The original idea for the new ballet had been Stravinsky's own and hhad come to him in a dream: ‘I saw in imagination’, he wrote, ‘a solemn pagan rite: wise elders, seated ina circle, watching a young git] dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.’ In contemplating that subject he had been able, as he put it, to tap some unconscious “folk” memory’. He came up with simple diatonic ideas of folk character and, more importantly, he invented those rhythms of a potency to match both the abandonment and the deliberateness of ritual dance. Fora while Stravinsky pursued the two interests which The Ritehad opened up: the music and imagery of folk culture, and the new possibilities of hythm. As far as the later is concerned, the ballet score found a significant successor in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920), which clearly show the structural implications of the new thythm, Stravinsky realized that his cell technique could not lead naturally to the freely flowing developmental forms of tradition, and in the Symphonies he abruptly abandoned any attempt to make the music follow a single line of argument. Instead the work is in a severe “block form’, switching repeatedly between quite different kinds of ‘music, coming finally to rest only when the most rhythmically stable fof the basic types, a chorale, takes over. The piece is, of course, nothing like a conventional symphony, the plural tite indicating the plurality of the music and otherwise no more than a ‘sounding together’ Stravinsky had composed his Symphonies in memory of Debussy, who had died in 1918 after composing a sequence of works that brought his own innovations to a high point of liberty. That was not immediately appreciated, however, for Stravinsky was now the darling of Paris: Jeux had passed almost unnoticed when the storm broke on ‘The Rife. Debussy seems to have been somewhat piqued by Stravinsky's success, and in 1915 he gave it as his opinion that ‘the 2 Sane design or The Rl of Spring by Nios Roesch, who wa ko responsible fr jvsing the work's seenano, ‘young Russian inclines dangerously towards Schoenberg’. Perhaps he was thinking of Stravinsky's recent Three Lyrics from Japanese Poetry, ‘where the instrumentation and the odd tinge of harmony reflect an admiration for Perot lunaire. Apart from that the work is not at all Schoenbergian; but for Debusy, at the height of the first world war, any respect for modern Austro-German music was reprehensible. “Musicien frangais he proudly signed himself at the head of each new manuscript, and he set his mind to the renewal of a French tradition of abstract music, something which had not existed since the mid- eighteenth century. In order to achieve this Debussy eliminated the visual and literary references which his music had previously contained so abundantly. Afier the Three Mallarmé Poems (1913) he composed no more vocal ‘music of any importance, and he progresed only slowly and fitally on his various dramatic projects. His creative energies were directed instead into works of pure music: the suite En blanc et noir for two pianos, the Twelve Scudies for piano and a set of six sonatas, of which he lived to complete only three. 48Title page ofthe int eition of the Sonaea for ute, viola and harp by “Claude Debusey, musicienfeangae’. The gn emphasizes Debussy’s intention to restore the French casicsm of Ramest, Debussy and Stavinky at the time of > ‘heir Diaghilev balls Jee and The Rite of 4 Spring Stravinsky dedicated to the old plage bm lenite ‘compote his mystical chorus The Star 2 Faced One (1911-13) and wrote his ‘Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) in Deb These works, together with Jeux, show how far Debussy had devel- ‘oped what had been foreshadowed in the Prélude & ‘L’aprés-midi d'un faune’. Jeux upsets the traditional norm of continuous evolution qui as much as do Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, but in another way. In place of a bald juxtaposition of diverse ideas it pre- sents music in continuous change, moving in unpredictable directions as various kinds of material are taken up, developed for a while and then dropped. Occasionally a theme is suddenly interrupted in its progress; more often the impression is ofa fluid musical substance in which different subjects rise to the surface of perception at different times. Debussy’s emancipation from consecutive development, presaged in the Prélude, is complete in this score, as it was also in the central section, ‘Jeux de vagues’, of La mer. There the stimulus had come from the attempt to capture the wave motion of the sca, always different yet always the same, whereas in Jeux Debussy achieved his ideal of impalpable form through creating a backcloth for the fleeting, emotions and capricious movements of a group of young people at a tennis party. There is now litle sign of descriptive ‘impressionism’. In the late sonatas, and even more in the piano studies, Debussy extended the freedom he had gained. Many years earlier, when aconservatory professor had asked him what rule of harmony he fol- Towel he bad replied: ‘My plese’, Now i seemed that uly there xvas no other restriction, and these last works remain elusive to analy- Ss Offen there isa sense of mercurial improvisation, and yet there is also the impression of a close control which was probably itself intu~ itive, Harmonic linkages are transitory and elastic; tempos and rhythms are rarely stable for more than a few seconds; thematic refer- ences are oblique, or else there is no discernible theme at all. Debussy hnad become entirely himself, though he could still take something from the young Russian’ in the abrupt chythm of his as piano study. The lack of clear formal relation in Debussy’s late music may be found also in Schoenberg’s atonal works of 1909-11, for in abandon- ingtonaity Schoenberg had ls the primary means he knew forasr~ ing development — and for a composer whose aim was ‘continuous dbclopmeat that loss must have Been as dconcerting as che lack of harmonic security. In some of the Five Orchestral Pieces there are the 46 outlines of established forms, but in others, the third and the last especially, the musical flow is as unbounded as it is in Jeux. But there is a difference. Jew maintains the appearance of movement on several planes at once, focusing now on one, now on another, whereas Schoenberg's third piece, his impression of a dawn-lit lake, is almost motionless, and his fifth follows a single line of perpetual change A greater resemblance between Jeux and the Five Orchestral Pieces exists in their diversity of rhythm and their extraordinarily subtle use of the orchestra. For both composers, orchestration was by this time a fully fledged part of musical invention, Debussy had set out towards that as early as the eighteen-nineties, in the Prélude d ‘L'aprés-midi dun _faune’to be sure, but more radically in a projected work, Tris scénes au aépuscule ("Three twilight scenes’), where a solo violin was to be accompanied in the first movement by strings, in the second by flutes, ‘brass and harps, and in the third by both groups. He never achieved such a fundamental rethinking of the orchestra, but Schoenberg did. Each of his Four Orchestral Songs of 1913-16 is scored fora different and unusual complement, the first requiring six clarinets, trumpet, three trombones, bass tuba, percussion and strings without violas. ‘And yet the aesthetic differences between Debussy and Schoenberg are more significant than these similarities. Debussy’s music, though it ‘often breaks with the formal expectations of diatonic harmony, is not atonal in detail. His chords usually apperain to some mode or scale, even if they are placed in a structure which is at root atonal: the unacceptable thought is, as in a dream, clothed in acceptable images Schoenberg, on the other hand, was concerned that his thought, no matter how difficult or disturbing, should be expressed without pre~ vatication or illusion; and it was his atonal music of 1908-11 that exposed most openly what Debussy had called ‘the naked flesh of For reasons as much psychological as technical, such a position could not be maintained for long. After the Five Orchestral Pieces Schoenberg found it impossible to compose at length without the guide of a text: his only subsequent atonal instrumental works wei miniatures, three posthumously published pieces for chamber orches- tra (1910) and the Six Little Piano Pieces (1911). He attributed the difficulty of abstract composition to the lack of means for coherent dlevelopment in atonality, but it is reasonable to suppose that he also found it arduous to continue baring his inner self so completely. The words of a poet could provide not only a formal foundation but also an expressive distancing,‘The last of Schoenberg’ Six Lite Plano Pieces, This very concise composition was ‘written on 17 June 1917 in memory of Mabler, who had died thir days ease. Weber also at this time experienced the impossibility of compos- ing atonal music of long duration. Never at all a prolix composer (his longest movement, the tonal Passacaglia for orchestra, plays for about ight minutes), he was incapable in 1911-14 of writing pieces lasting for much more than a minute. Of his Six Bagatelles for string quartet (1913) Schoenberg wrote that they express ‘a novel ina single gesture, a joy in a breath’. But this brevity was not easily come by. Later ‘Webern was to recall the anguish involved in achieving the one-page Bagatelles: ‘I had the fecling that once the twelve notes had run out 8 sol painting of Mahler’ ane, done soon after the event in t911Xo the piece was finished. ... Itsounds grotesque, incomprehensible, and it was immensely difficult” ‘These Bagatelles, together with Webern's Five Orchestral Pieces (1911-13) and Three Litde Pieces for cello and piano (1914), are as exploratory as they are concise. Their time-scale and their enigmatic stillness ~ so different from the dynamic movement present in almost all of Schoenberg's atonal works ~ are those of the haiku. In rhythm, too, Webem’s pieces have something of the oriental, for the regular puke of barred metre has been dissolved, giving place to tenuous breaths of sound or unemphatic ostinatos. The abandonment of a met- rical framework suggests the direction in which Debussy was moving. at the same time in Jeux, and it was a rhythmic revolution as radical as Stravinsky's, though utterly different in kind, Stravinsky was insisting, fon the individual duration, while Webern removed as far as possible the sense of time-measuring, His litle phrases make no promises about the future, and his ostinatos became timeless in immobility ‘Thus at the moment when the first world war was about to begin, composers from quite different backgrounds, with Debussy, ‘Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Webern at the head of them, had brought about the most rapid and far-reaching changes ever seen in_ western iusic, In the course of a few years the standard principles of tonality, formal direction and equilibrium, thematic continuity, rhythmic stability and orchestral homogeneity had all been questioned, some- times all at once, as in Webern's Five Orchestral Pieces. Ie might have seemed that music could never be the same again; and yet the greatest efforts of composers in the next thirty years were to be directed towards showing that it could s CHAPTER FIVE The genius of place Almost all the great strides in music before 1914 took place in two ‘ities, Paris and Vienna, It would be rash to offer any neat explanation for this: the simultaneous presence in Paris of Picasso and Stravinsky, for instance, is suggestive, yet the two men did not meet until 1917, some years after the revolutions of cubism and The Rite which have often been considered analogous. Schoenberg in Vienna was associated with such men as the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Adolf Loos, not to mention his pupils Berg and Webem. But just as important as the support ofthis sympathetic circle was the stim- tulus of more general opposition. ‘Maybe something has been achieved’, Schoenberg said towards the end of his life, ‘but it was not I who deserves the credit for that. The credit must be given to my ‘opponents. They were the ones who really helped me.” : In Europe there may have been the need for both the sustaining. ‘encouragement of a like-minded artistic community and the provoca- tion of public antipathy, but in America it was possible for a composer to break through the bonds of tradition entirely on his own. It was possible for Charles Ives (1874-1951) to ignore the conventions and go as far as any of his European contemporaries towards fresh musical horizons ~ indeed, in many ways further. Before he had heard a note of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, before he had heard mach music at all later than Brahms, Ives had explored atonality, free thychm, quarter~ tone harmony, superimposing different metres, different tonalities and even different kinds of music, employing unconventional combina- tions of instruments, placing musicians in different acoustic positions, leaving a large degree of freedom to the performer, and virtually all the other new techniques which have exercised composers in the ‘twentieth century. He did so undisturbed and litde known, working in the spare time he could take from the successful insurance business he had established. But Ives was no amateur. He had been trained at Yale, and in the last years of the old century he had composed symphonies, songs, stchamber pieces and church music in which he had made the effort to abide by the academic good manners most American musicians had leamed in Germany. Ives, however, did not make the journey to Leipzig, and soon he was setting out in new directions, following up what he had learned ftom his most important teacher, his father. George Ives, an ex-Civil War bandmaster, had given his son the conviction that there were no rules in music, that the whole world of sounds was open for experiment and use. ‘As for traditional music, it seems that Ives junior liked litde apart from his own and that ofa few similarly independent Americans with whom he came into contact only after he had virtually ceased com- posing, in 1918: Beethoven he considered ‘a great man — but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key’. For Ives, music had. ‘been emasculated by the need composers felt to please their audiences; how one must offer stronger meat for the ears and the mind: complex rhythms, involved textures and, above all, distonant chords. His reaction to sounds of hissing at a performance of a work by his friend Carl Ruggles was characteristic: "You god damn sissy,” he rose and shouted, ‘when you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man!” However, Ives’s exploratory cast of thought was also part of a deeper philosophy. Music was for him an expression of subjective emotion, but it also had the power of transcendental revelation; and it held the promise of utopia. “The instinctive and progressive interest of every man in art, he wrote, ‘will go on and on, ever fulfilling hopes, ever building new ones, ever opening new horizons, until the day will come when every man while digging his potatoes will breathe his own epics, his own symphonies (operas, ifhe likes it}; and as he sits of an «evening in his backyard and shirt sleeves smoking his pipe and watch~ ing his children in their fun of building their themes for their sonatas of theirlife, he will ook up over the mountains and see his visions in their reality, will hear the transcendental strains of the day's symphony resounding in their many choirs, and in all their perfection, through the west wind and the tree tops!” Here is expressed Ives's sympathy with the ordinary, hard-working man of the soil, his insistence on the integrity ofthe individual and his teanscendental vision, All these came from his New England heritage, and it was to his experience as a Yankee boy that he returned again and again in his music. His selfdependence and his lack of inhibition may be regarded as generally American characteristics, but his music ‘was most intimately linked with the history, landscape, philosophy and 2 LINCOLN THE GREAT COMMONER CHARLES IvES NEWMUSIC ORCHESTRA SERIES Front cover, designed by C: gals in 1032, forthe first of wes’ works to appear in Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition (see p. 14) Chases Ives in Banery Park, New York, about 3915, literature of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In the ‘Concord’ Sonata for piano (1909-15) he gave his responses to the work of the writers and thinkers associated with that town: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Aleotts and Thoreau. The orchestral Three Places in New England (1903-14) evoke personal memories of other parts of his native world, with ‘Putnam's Camp’, the central ‘place’, depicting a children’s out ing and a boy's vision of stirring events in the war of independence. In this picce Ives needed his taste for experiment in order to repre sent, for example, the arrival of a marching band while other things are going on. Some of his works appear to have been undertaken in a spint of pure speculation ~ the atonal Tone Roads for instance ~ but ‘more often his innovations came about in this way, summoned by a descriptive image ora text. Itisnot surprising, therefore, that his abun~ dant and eccentric genius is expressed most completely in his many songs, most of them to poems by American writers and the great.— . When Duty whipersow "Thou must” The youth an 1s us PJ 2 BP Te rr “‘Dusy’ (1921), am epigrammatic song by Ives to words of Emerson. The piano part, Which includes some physically unplayable chords, must be regatded as an ideal towards which the performer isto tive, English Romantics. In these he could reveal his sturdy self-reliance and his sentimentality, his imitation of nature and his ability to see beyond, his commitment to a plain man’s democracy and his rever- ence for God. Like Schoenberg, Ives was concerned less with what he called the ‘manner’ of music than with its ‘substance’: Schoenberg would have used the words ‘style’ and ‘idea’. But Ives was willing to go further than Schoenberg in abandoning traditional limitations in order to give proper expression to his substance, He was sometimes careless of what 4s feasible for performers or instruments: ‘Why can't music go out in St ‘The fit page from Ives autograph score-sketch of The Fount af uly for orchestra (1912-13). Among the comments and emendations is a note to the copyis inthe the same way it comes into a man’, he wrote, ‘without having to crawl top left comer: "Me Price: Please don't try to ashe thins nice! All the wrong notes over a fence of sounds, thoraxes, Catguts, wire, wood and brass? . Is ae mghe * it the composer's fault that man has only ten fingers? He was careless | s4too ofthe score as an ultimate statement; he went on revising and reat ranging his works long after his period of intense creativity had passed. Eventually finding only neglect, hostility or disbelief, he became care- Jess of performance. Not until the 1930s did his music begin to excite much interest in the American musical wodd, and not until the 1960s ‘was it at all widely played or recorded, And by then musical history hhad at last caughe up with him. Ives's memories of nineteenth-century New England, particularly in such orchestral works as the Three Places and the Holidays Symphony, depend for their evocative exactness on the quotation of marches, popular songs, dance music and hymns, all frankly interpolated. When ‘Dvotik had been in the United States in the 1890s he had suggested that American composers should look to their native music for stim- ulus, just as he had drawn on Czech folk song in forming his own melodic style; but he can hardly have expected that his advice would shortly be taken up in such riotous celebrations of America as The Fourth of July from Ives's Holidays Symphony. As far as Ives was con- cerned, the music ofthe American people was too diverse and too rich in reference for it to be used in Dvotk’s symphonic manner. Instead of secking to adjust his country’s music and himself to the European mainstream, he showed that a man might forget about tradition and make of music whatever he wanted. ; Several European contemporaries, though less radical than Ives in ignoring the conventions, were also determined to base their music in the art of the people, and to do so without Dvotik’s accommodation to the Austro-German norms. In this there was a certain political motivation: the Austrian hegemony of eastern Europe was under threat from nationalist movements in the years before the first world war, and it followed that composers should seek similarly to free their music from the yoke of Vienna and turn instead to the national source of folk song. In Hungary the way was led by Béla Bart6k (1881-1945), who devoted as much attention to collecting and classifying folk music as to composition, He became one of the foremost folk-song scholars of his time and by far the greatest nationalist composer of any country, bbutat the same time his view was wider. ‘My real idea’, he once wrote, ‘is the brotherhood of nations. ... [try to serve this idea in my music and that is why I do not shut myself from any influence, be the source Slovak, Rumanian, Arab, or any other.” Barték made his first notation of a Magyar folk song in 1904, and during the next fifteen years he travelled throughout Hungary and 56 Bea Bartdk; oil portrait by Robert Berény dating from the spring of 1913. Berény was a leading member ofa group of avant-garde artists in Budapest at the time of Bardk'sexty folk- song researches. Copyright GD. Hackett, NY. neighbouring countries, to North Africa and to Turkey, gathering folk music wherever he went; nor was he less assiduous in studying his own and other collections. AS a composer he was interested not simply in using folk themes but in penetrating to the roots of folk music and using what he found. “The study of this peasant music’, he wrote, was for me of decisive importance, for the reason that it revealed to me the possibility of a total emancipation from the hegemony of the major-minor system. For the largest and, indeed, the most valuable part of this treasure-house of melodies lie in the old church modes, in ancient Greek and still more primitive scales (notably the penta tonic), and also shows the most varied and free thythms and time- changes.” Barték thus took part in the general movement away from diatonic harmony and rhythmic stability, taking his lead from the ancient folk music of Hungary. From that source he also learned, as he acknowledged, ‘the art of expressing any musical idea with the highest perfection, in the shortest form, and using the simplest and ‘most direct means’, Furthermore, the mas of alterations to be found in folk songs, occurring as a result of repeated aural transmission, contributed to his acquiring an extraordinary skill in musical variation. At the time when Bartok began his collecting journeys he was most influenced by Richard Strauss and Debussy, but it was not long before his music was showing what he had learned in the villages of Hungary. 37His one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) owes its brilliant orchestration in part to Strauss and its manner of word setting to the example of Pelléas et Mélisande, but its melodies, its rhythms and its, ballad style are all thoroughly Hungarian. After the further experience of The Rite of Spring, to whose dynamism he responded in his own ballet The Miraculous Mandarin (1918-25), Bartk was ready to base his art completely in folk music, or rather in the ideas, principles and methods he had drawn from it “The next twelve years saw the composition of his finest works: the First and Second Piano Concertos, the Third, Fourth and Fifth String. Quartets, the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. All of these show how much hhe had assimilated from folk music in the use of various scales, in enlarging harmonic possibilities (almost to atonality on occasion), in creating ideas of sharp clarity, in finding new rhythms and in handling variation with supreme ingenuity. Folk music had here led him to works of high structural intricacy and emotional force, not the vague pastoralism of other folk-song composers. In Czechoslovakia the great nationalist composer of the early twentieth century was Leo Janiéek (1854-1928), who was influenced not only by folk music but also by the sounds and rhythms of speech in his native Moravia, as was natural in a musician who produced his igreatest work for the operatic stage. Though born before Mahler and Debussy, Janiéek was little known before the Prague opening in 1916 of his first important opera, Jendfa, and most of his best works date from after that premiére. His achievement in creating a distinctively national operatic style may be compared with Bart6k’s in Bluebeard, and his advance beyond the norms of western tradition was almost as radical; certainly his late works bear little relation to the Czech Romantic styles of Smetana and Dvoik. The variety and power of his concise melodic ideas, coupled with an elusive harmony, gave him the means both to intensify dramatic situations and to explore the ‘motivations of his character. (Outside eastern Europe nationalism was no less a force in the years around the first world war. Spain, often the source of colour for Russian and French composers in the nineteenth century, began to find musicians of her own, the greatest of them being Manuel de Falla (1876-1946). For several years before the war Falla lived in Paris, so that he came into contact with Debussy; and it was the Spanish pictori- alism of his French contemporaries that influenced such works as Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra (1909-15) 38 Bartbkwsing a gramophone to collect folk songs in the village of Darizs (now Drazovee, Czechodavakia) in 1908. Copyright G-D. Hackets, NY. Folk song notated by Barték. The arrow on the Fin the penultimate bar indicates that is pitch was lightly sharper than that weiten, geet testes deny Kite tl fe wil, Jebadj nell, majni £6,Manuel de Falla, the leading Spanish nationalist of the twentieth century Costume design by Picaso for the first production of Fall's bullet The The-Comered Het 60 Returning to Spain, however, he discovered his own way of treating local material and his own starker style, starting out in his Diaghilev ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (1917-16). Like Bartok, though in a less analytic fashion, he made abstractions ftom folk music without quot- ing it directly and went on to pare down his style in pieces like the Harpsichord Concerto (1923-6). But perhaps the main influence on him at this time was that of Stravinsky. Seravinsky's interest in the folk arts of his native country was great- cst during the first years of his self-imposed exile from Russia, that is, from 1914 to 1920, when he was living in Switzerland. He had used the occasional folk melody in Petrushkaand The Rite of Spring, but now he devoted himself much more thoroughly to evoking the spirit of old Rusia, its humour as well as its ceremony. In a series of songs and choral pieces he set litle folk verses, often with the pungent accompaniment of a small instrumental ensemble, and he used the same peasant literature in the two stage works which followed The Rite: Renard (1913), farmyard fable in the form of a‘burlesque in song and dance’, and Les noces (‘The wedding’, 1914-23), a set of Russian choreographic scenes’ on ancient wedding ceremonies. Renard, scored for four male voices and small orchestra, has the carthy gusto of the songs of the same period, but the choral Les naces is altogether more ritualized. Here the chythm of The Rite is devel- ‘oped so that the whole work is set on the carefully engineered work ings of tiny, insistent cells, the human participants being caught in the ‘orderings of formal ceremony and so exalted. Even the comedy of drunken wedding guests is subject to this ritual presentation. Perhaps because the music isso strict and stylized, Stravinsky had difficulty in finding the right medium for Les noes. At first he scored the accompaniment for the large orchestra of The Rite, but eventually he settled on a paring down to the constructivist sound of four pianos and ee song, but in neither is there a one-to-one relation between the dancing characters and the singing voices. The action is shown in dance while the singers, whom Stravinsky intended should be placed with the instrumentalists on stage, provide an oblique commentary. Again, the sense of ritual enactment is enhanced by having everything on display, the music becoming as much a part of the ceremony as the action on stage. Stravinsky pursued the idea of having all the forces in evidence in a third stage piece of this ‘Russian period’, Histoire du soldat (1918), which was designed for a travelling theatre in the straitened 6Front cover by Pieaso forthe frst edition (1919) of Stravinsky's piano arrangement lof his Ragtime, The central design of two musicians is drawn in single Line circumstances of war. This Faustian tale, again originating in Russian folk stories, isto be read, played and danced’ by a narrator, two actors, a female dancer and a small band, with short musical numbers fitted into the direct and narrated drama. ‘The music is, typically for the period, tart in harmony and instrumentation, and it includes sharp parodies of popular dance forms, including ragtime and tango, as well as an acerbic chorale, More such quirky interpretations of established styles occur in the contemporary Easy Pieces for piano duet, Rag-time for eleven instruments and Piano-Rag-Music, and these pointed the direction in which Stravinsky's music was to go. 6 CHAPTER SIX Neoclassicism In the years immediately preceding the first world war Romanticism had come to its zenith, The gigantic forces of Mahler's Eighth Symphony and Schoenberg's Gunelieder would never again be assem- bled, nor would the intense subjective expression of Schoenberg's first atonal works be equalled. Something else was needed for the postwar ‘era; a new spirit was urgently wished for. Romanticism, associated with the old order, now seemed to many irrelevant, even distasteful, its ambition seen as bombast, its emotionalism as sentimentality. The nineteenth century must be forgotten as an aberration. A new start must be made, so many composers decided, on the basis of earlier music: it was the adventure of Neoclassicism. ‘The lures of return to the eighteenth century were many. Baroque and Classical music offered models of lucid and concise forms, as opposed as could be to the complexity and Jength of Mahler or the intangibility of Debussy. Composers also found in the ‘old style’ a rhythmic alertness and a clarity of idea which they could emulate in writing music appropriate to the rapid pace and uncluttered emotions, of their own times, Moreover, the music of Bach in particular could be seen as a patter of objective construction, and objectiviey was now high among the aims of aris. Stravinsky made the classic statement on this in his Chroniques de ma vie of 1935: ‘I consider that music is, by its very nature,” he wrote, “essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. ‘The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and tine.” Even if every one of Stravinsky's [Neoclassical works belies his thesis that music is ‘powerless to express anything at all’, i is important to recognize that such anti-Romantic avttudes had a determining place in the genesis of Neoclassicism. ‘That yeuesis, as far as Stravinsky was concerned, took place in a rather curious way. In 1917 Diaghilev had won a great success with Le 6WM donne di buon umore (‘The good-humoured ladies’), a ballet for which Vincenzo Tommasini had orchestrated music by Domenico Scarlatti He proposed that Stravinsky, the star composer in his stable, should do something similar with pieces by Pergolesi (or rather, as now is known but then was not, attributed to him by contemporary publishers) Stravinsky set about the work with delight and accomplished it in 1919-20; but he did so with scant regard for the proprieties of period style. The balance of the music is upset by his alterations to rhythm. and harmony, and by his scoring for a chamber orchestra in which winds are prominent, Pulcnella, as che ballet was called, was put on with aptly pseudo-eighteenth-century Neapolitan designs by Picasso and was greeted immediately by protests from those who detected in the score an attitude of ridicule. Stravinsky, however, was unre~ pentant. ‘Respect alone’, he rejoindered, ‘remains barren, and can never serve asa productive or creative factor. In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?” As in his recent ragtime pieces, he had offered not only satirical wit but alo genial affection; and the two were to remain inseparable in his Neoclassical works. Afier the resuscitation of existing music in Pulcnell, Stravinsky began a gleeful examination of the past for models of form and gesture which might be used in original music. He decided to revive the opera buffa of Pergolesis time, finding in its delimited numbers a mode as opposed as possible to the through-composed music drama ‘of Wagner. This form also gave him the opportunity to announce his new affiliation to the Italianate Russian musical stream of Glinka and ‘Tchaikovsky, his removal from the nationalist school with which, as a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and the composer of The Firebird, he had been associated. At the same time, the new opera, Mavra, demon- strated his departure from his more recent past: his rhythmic subtleties are now contained within conventional barring and his harmony relates to diatonic tonality, if often teasingly. Through reference to the cighteenth century he had discovered rules ~ rules of form, of metre, of harmony — and it was against those rules that he played. In the practice of his lndic Neoclassicism Stravinsky turned next to pure instrumental music. He composed quasi-Baroque structures in his Octet for winds (1922-3), and there are reminiscences of Bach in the Concerto for piano and winds (1923-4). His neglect of the strings in these scores, as also in Mavra and Les noces (then being orchestrated for pianos and percussion), is probably to be explained by 2 feeling that string instruments were too easily associated with exactly the kind of 66 Erik Sati; caricature by Cocteau, his most enthusiastic promocet in the years immediatly afer che fist world war. nineteenth-century sentimentality he wanted to avoid. Only recently he had used woodwinds and brass alone in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments to create ‘an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between groups of homogeneous instruments’. Now he found that the same instruments could be brilliant and witty as wel. The ballet Apollo (1927-8), however, was composed entirely for strings, whose ‘multi-sonorous euphony’, as Stravinsky put it, could embody the classical sobriety of the French Baroque. ‘And how’, he asked, ‘could the unadomed design of the classical dance be better expresed than by the flow of melody as it expands in the sustained psalmody of strings?” As Apollo shows, and as other works confirm, Stravinsky's Neoclassicism was not always bitter and satirical: stealing might alo be accomplished by seduction. Other composers of the period took a more consistently irreverent attitude to the past, particularly those in what was now Stravinsky's ‘own city of Paris. By 1920 a group of them, influenced by Jean Cocteau’s manifesto Le coq et Varlequin (rox8) and largely stage- ‘managed by him, found themselves banded together as ‘Les Six’, espousing an aesthetic of fippancy and determined anti-Romanticism. Debussy was out; Wagner was most definitely out. Music now must be straightforward, drily witty and up to date. The chosen model was Erik Satie (1866 1925), whose harmonic expetiments inay have influ- enced his friend Debussy in the 1890s, but who had since become osomething of a Dadaist. He wanted music stripped to the barestessen~ tials; he dealt in poker-faced clowning and parody, offering his music tunder such titles as Choses ones @ droite et d gauche (sans nett) (“Things seen to right and lef (without spectacles)’) and Sonatine bureaucratique, and he cultivated inconsequence in his ‘furniture music’, designed to be ignored. Satie’s six young colleagues followed him in mocking all accepted musical conventions, if more with Cocteau’s shock tactics than the dapper composer's disarming charm. Five of them collaborated with Cocteau on a crazy skit, Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921), and they all wrote short instrumental pieces and songs which combined Stravinsky's urbanity with Satie's satirical sense of the ridiculous. But Les Six did not exist asa group for more than a few years, and the three leading members, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, all went off in more positive and promising directions. For Stravinsky the main point about Neoclassicism had never been that it enabled the composer to poke fun at the past but rather that it lent a work distance. This he took advantage of with particular cffectiveness in his opera-oratorio Oedipus ex (1926-7), for which he hada text by Cocteau translated into Latin, ‘a language of convention, almost of ritual’ as he put it. He also took ‘a language of convention’ Les Six; group portrait in ols by Jacques Emile Bhinche. The five members ofthe goup depicted are Germaine Taillefere (seated lef) Danis Milhaud (cated lef, fing, font), Archur Honegger (eated Jef, ing righ), Francis Povlene (sanding right, head inclined) and Georges Auric (cated right); Louis Durey is absent. Cocteas presides over the group fom the fright, and the picture ako shows Marcelle Meyer and Jean Wiener, ‘who were associated with Le Six as panise and conductor. Stage design by Ewald Dalberg forthe Kroll Opera (Berlin) production of Swavinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus rex in choosing to set Oedipus in the form of an abbreviated Baroque ora ‘rio, His stated reasons for this are revealing of his Neoclassical ati- tudes in general, and indeed of his deepest artistic beliefs. “The need for restriction,’ he wrote, ‘for deliberately submitting to a style, has its source in the very depths of our nature. . . . Now all order demands restraint. But one would be wrong to regard that as any impediment to liberty. On the contrary, the style, the restraint, contribute to its development, and only prevent liberty from degenerating into licence. At the same time, in borrowing a form already established and consecrated, the creative artist is not in the least restricting the ‘manifestation of his personality. On the contrary, itis more detached, and stands out better when it moves within the definite limits of a convention. This it was that induced me to use the anodyne and impersonal formulas of a remote period and to apply them largely in my opera-oratorio, Oedipus, to the austere and solemn character of which they specially lent themselves.” Like the Histoire du soldat, Oedipus has a narrator, but now he stands quite apart from the action. He wears modem evening dress and, speaking the vernacular, explains the story to the audience, so con~ firming their dissociation from what is happening on stage. There is oFno invitation to identify with the characters, rather to observe; and the {quasicliturgical presentation of the legend is, as Stravinsky implies, emphasized by the square-cut form of the music. But having chosen, a stark framework, Stravinsky often allows his principals to sing with a Verdian effusion of feeling, the emotion safely rendered objective by the formal surroundings. Oedipus was Stravinsky's frst success in using Neoclassicism as the means with which to create that ritual severity ‘which marks his greatest works, earlier examples including The Rite of Spring and Les noes; and he soon repeated that success, though in quite different ways, in the Symphony of Psalms and the ballet Perséphone Stravinsky's reference to Verdi in Oedipus rex draws attention to the inappropriateness of ‘Neoclassicism’ asa label. The movement was not, always directed towards revamping the ‘classical’ styles of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, though certainly those periods came in for most attention. Nor even was the element of retum a distinguishing mark, for Reger had looked to Bach without being at all Neoclassical in the sense of the 19208. Neoclassicism meant, above all, irony, and the subject of that irony could be taken from any period. In his Piano Sonata, Stravinsky glanced at Beethoven within the context of his pseudo-Baroque contrapuntal style, and in his, Capriccio for piano and orchestra he brought Tchaikovsky and early Romantic lyricism into the concerto grosso form. Such eclecticism was typical of the Neoclassicist, but in Stravinsky's music the borrow- ings are always to some degree hidden: his intention was not to assemble musical objets trourés but to own them. Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), on the other hand, appears to have delighted in the incongruity of a blatant popular tune appearing within a concerto, of a piece of post-Gounod sentiment in 2 monumental, sacred work after the Baroque mould, His music may seem gay and flippant, and some of tis no more than that; but in many of his larger compositions there is the same disconcerting juxtaposition of banal objects that one finds in much ‘Surrealist painting, and the same academic skill which brings quite unrelated things into a coherent whole. In music the technique had its roots in such works of Satie as, his ballet Parade (1917), which includes a typewriter and a revolver within the orchestra and which drily places one naive musical con- struct after another. Poulenc’s works of the 1930s and 1940s, however, have changed Satie’s prankishness into something both more seduc~ tive and more perturbing, For a German composer Neoclassicism had of necessity to be a ‘more earnest affir. Across the Rhine, Busoni’s ‘young classicism’ was, Poulene at the piano; caricature by Cocteau, whose words Poulenc set in several works from the song cele Cocades (1919) to the opera for solo soprano La vot humaine (958).