The Story Of The Camel

Every era had its modernity, but XX century had it on another level. Before XX century, all generations of classical composers accepted certain rules dictated by tradition and composed down those lines. But around the beginning of XX century, for some reason, that changed. Musicians started to depart from traditions, feeling them as a burden. French composer Claude Debussy was bored with Beethoven and Mozart, and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky with the whole romanticism. They started experimenting, striving for something different; very individual, out of all rules. Priority was breaking and overcoming the tired rules of tradition; and in the time, tradition was, formally and emotionally, romanticism. One of the last romantics, Gustav Mahler (and whose music had many hints of what is to come) died in 1911; and with 1920s, the spirit of modernism already left the bottle and there was little romanticism to be found around. A number of luminaries took care to present to the world some of the strangest music pieces ever composed.

Igor Stravinsky

The prime big bang with which modernism arrived happened on 1913, with the premiere of a ballet Le Sacre Du Printemps by Igor Stravinsky. It was a famous musical scandal. Among attenders of the premiere was also a conservative XIX century French composer Saint-Seans, who left it after just a few seconds, bragging about the “abuse of the instrument” (the instrument that was “abused” was a bassoon). But soon the whole theater will transform into a madhouse, as Stravinsky depicted in his autobiographical recollections “Expositions and Developments”:

Mild protests against the music could be heard from the very beginning of the performance. Then, when the curtain opened on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down (Danse des adolescents), the storm broke. Cries of “Ta gueule” came from behind me. I heard Florent Schmitt shout “Taisez-vous garces du seizieme”; the “garces” of the sixteenth arondissement were, of course, the most elegant ladies in Paris. The uproar continued, however, and a few minutes later I left the hall in a rage; I was sitting on the right near the orchestra, and I remember slamming the door. I have never again been that angry. The music was familiar to me; I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance. I arrived in a fury backstage, where I saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a last effort to quiet the hall. For the lest of the performance I stood in the wings behind Nijinsky holding the tails of his frac while he stood on chair shouting numbers to the dancers like a coxswain.

Audiences were so loud in theirs protest that no one could hear the music anymore. One of the rares who was loudly praising the work was French composer Maurice Ravel, in the company of his followers -- but couldn't help out-voicing the annoyed majority.

Nevertheless, this ballet will soon be all over Europe and will become one of the most famous works of the century. The music itself was full of primal atmosphere and powerful rhythms, with depth of mood that could be compared with the music of the French composer of somewhat older generation, not quite associated with modernism, Claude Debussy. As Stravinsky himself acknowledged in Expositions and Developments: ”…Le Sacre owes more to Debussy than to anyone except myself…”. These two men even met before the premiere of Sacre and played it through together on the piano (the four hands version of the work), when Debussy called it “a beautiful nightmare”.

Stravinsky will remain the single most famous and revered modernist composer. Probably the greatest composer of the century, he will during his lifetime produce a very varied output which is marked by originality and experiment. Although he didn't dabble with electronic instruments, his influence on the future modern music is indisputable. Stravinsky will not live to hear the most groundbreaking popular electronic music; the last true classical great, in the opionion of many, passed away before electronic era in music truly began.

Claude Debussy

Debussy was the musician who brought the term “impressionism” to music. Although not completely belonging to modernist activities, he was a rather individualistic musician who was searching for something that was not easy for him to find. His preoccupation was a sort of music that emphasizes uncatchable moods rather then common emotions, and in that aim it pays no attention to traditional cannons of “proper form”. His music sounded like a dreamy transfiguration of the real world. This gave his approach the name "impressionism", since this is what impressionist painters do. This term will remain often used throughout XX century, although not very consistently. Later, when electronic instruments became commonplace, many musicians will see him as the single most important influence on modern music.

Alexander Scriabin

Another musician who was similarly as Debussy important for modernist music although not completely belonging to it, and whose life and work are maybe the most illustrative of mystique usually bond with modernism, was Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin. With time, he built a world of his own around a peculiar brand of mysticism that set him apart from other musicians. His most important work is a grandiose symphony “Divine Poem”. Composed on 1903, it was the first XX century mystical and other-worldly composition, brimming with pantheism and transporting the listener into another world. Although having a Russian flavor most of the way, most closely resembling Borodin (especially 2nd symphony), it was a very original work. It conveyed a world dominated with all-present sun light, suggestive of endless steppes filled with insects, sunsets and dawns in an ever-lasting flow of nature; here and there, an ancient, mystique monument, maybe not built by man; and here and there, a gate towards other worlds and higher dimensions. One gets a peek through them, seeing strange, unnatural sights.

The composition was meant to be of cyclic nature, to collapse and dissipate into nothing and than recollect from its ashes and rise again, imitating the cycles of nature. But Scriabin was still working in sonata form, and this somewhat spoiled the composition, as leading American composer of the time Aaron Copland pointed out.

The conscious “program” of the work was inspired with Nietzsche, who Scriabin was reading at the time. The program was dealing with Ego divided into Man-God and Slave-Man, that struggle with each other, to finally through unity and blissful ecstasy attain freedom “in the sky of other world”. (Ates Orga, 1996).

This piece was a precursor of all the mysticism that is to follow throughout the XX century, and had a certain impact on Stravinsky's "Sacre du Printemps" and many other works (ex. "Thurangalila" symphony of Messiaen). Scriabin was maybe the first musician who consciously gave himself into expanding of consciousness and self-overcoming in Nietzschean sense. He dreamed of his ultimate composition, called "Mysterium", which will be performed in Indian temple, accompanied with light and color. Scriabin himself would die on the end of the concert. This didn't come to be; but Scriabins music sounds unusual even today.

When you listen to Divine Poem, look straight into the eye of the Sun!

Eric Satie

There was another French musician from the beginning of XX century apart from Debussy with original ideas. Eric Satie was into writing music that communicates from the background, rather than being closely listened to -- some sort of ethereal, environmental music. He referred some of his music as "Musique d'ameublement" ('furniture music', or more literally, 'music for the furniture' and 'music to mingle with knives and forks'), referring to something that could be played during dinner and would create an atmosphere for that activity rather than be in the focus of attention. This was the seed of what will later be called “elevator music”, “muzak” and “ambient music”. He was also into extraordinarily simple yet effective compositions, that is from the other side the seed for what will become so-called minimalism. Alluding on this interpretative simplicity, he named some pieces “Gymnopedie” (leg gymnastics, meaning pieces that could be played with legs). Eric Satie was maybe the first composer to consciously turn his back to music.

Ferruccio Bussoni

Modernism is usually including usage of electronic instruments; but at the time we are now discussing, there weren’t any real synthesizers available. But still, ideas for electronic music existed. Italian Ferruccio Bussoni was the first to, in 1906, propose to divide octave into 36 intervals and develop corresponding microtonal musical language (the idea of microtonal music was discussed as early as in ancient Greece), and 1911 again called for “a wealth of harmonic and melodic expression”. When Thaddeus Cahill in United States constructed an early electronic instrument Dynamophone, Bussoni immediately evangelized about future microtonal electronic music.

But Bussoni only theorized; he never actually tried to create microtonal or electronic music. Much later, close to the end of his life in early 1970s, Igor Stravinsky will talk about “expressional poverty of tempering” and will single out the possibility to work in scales different than traditional as the most important among the possibilities brought by electronic instruments.

Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, builder of experimental musical instruments and the author of the manifesto "The Art of Noises" (1913). In this remarkable manifesto, he argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to "substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms". Russolo's essay explores the origins of man made sounds. The text that follows is an integral version of his manifesto as can be found on Wikipedia (the whole manifesto is also available online).

"Ancient life was all silence"

Russolo states that "noise" first came into existence as the result of 19th century machines. Before this time the world was a quiet, if not silent, place. With the exception of storms, waterfalls, and tectonic activity, the noise that did punctuate this silence were not loud, prolonged, or varied.

Early sounds

He notes that the earliest "music" was very simplistic and was created with very simple instruments, and that many early civilizations considered the secrets of music sacred and reserved it for rites and rituals. The Greek musical theory was based on the tetrachord mathematics of Pythagoras, which did not allow for any harmonies. Developments and modifications to the Greek musical system were made during the Middle Ages, which led to music like Gregorian chant. Russolo notes that during this time sounds were still narrowly seen as "unfolding in time." The chord did not yet exist.

"The complete sound"

Russolo refers to the chord as the "complete sound," the conception of various parts that make and are subordinate to the whole. He notes that chords developed gradually, first moving from the "consonant triad to the consistent and complicated dissonances that characterize contemporary music." He notes that while early music tried to create sweet and pure sounds, it progressively grew more and more complex, with musicians seeking to create new and more dissonant chords. This, he says, comes ever closer to the "noise-sound."

Musical noise

Russolo compares the evolution of music to the multiplication of machinery, pointing out that our once desolate sound environment has become increasingly filled with the noise of machines, encouraging musicians to create a more "complicated polyphony" in order to provoke emotion and stir our sensibilities. He notes that music has been developing towards a more complicated polyphony by seeking greater variety in timbres and tone colors.

Noise-Sounds

Russolo explains how "musical sound is too limited in its variety of timbres." He breaks the timbres of an orchestra down into four basic categories: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds, and percussion. He says that we must "break out of this limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds,"and that technology would allow us to manipulate noises in ways that could not have been done with earlier instruments.

Future sounds

Russolo claims that music has reached a point that no longer has the power to excite or inspire. Even when it is new, he argues, it still sounds old and familiar, leaving the audience "waiting for the extraordinary sensation that never comes." He urges musicians to explore the city with "ears more sensitive than eyes," listening to the wide array of noises that are often taken for granted, yet (potentially) musical in nature. He feels these noises can be given pitch and "regulated harmonically," while still preserving their irregularity and character, even if it requires assigning multiple pitches to certain noises.

The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.

Six Families of Noises for the Futurist Orchestra

Russolo sees the futurist orchestra drawing its sounds from "six families of noise":

Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping
Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots, Howls, Death rattles, Sobs

Russolo asserts that these are the most basic and fundamental noises, and that all other noises are only associations and combinations of these.

Conclusions

Russolo includes a list of conclusions:

Futurist composers should use their creativity and innovation to "enlarge and enrich the field of sound" by approaching the "noise-sound."
Futurist musicians should strive to replicate the infinite timbres in noises.
Futurist musicians should free themselves from the traditional and seek to explore the diverse rhythms of noise.
The complex tonalities of noise can be achieved by creating instruments that replicate that complexity.
The creation of instruments that replicate noise should not be a difficult task, since the manipulation of pitch will be simple once the mechanical principles that create the noise have been recreated. Pitch can be manipulated through simple changes in speed or tension.
The new orchestra will not evoke new and novel emotions by imitating the noises of life, but by finding new and unique combinations of timbres and rhythms in noise, to find a way to fully express the rhythm and sound that stretches beyond normal un-inebriated comprehension.
The variety of noise is infinite, and as man creates new machines the number of noises he can differentiate between continues to grow.
Therefore, he invites all talented musicians to pay attention to noises and their complexity, and once they discover the broadness of noise's palette of timbres, they will develop a passion for noise. He predicts that our "multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears, and . . . every workshop will become an intoxicating orchestra of noise."

Edgard Varése

The most famous early electronic instrument was created by Russian inventor Léon Theremin in 1919. He will later work with French avant-garde composer Edgard Varése, who created first music that could be said to be electronic. It was piece Ionization, played on orchestra of sirens, percussions and whatever early electronic instruments existed back then. This rhythmic music, with its outbursts of noise, was laughed at at the time. It was the beginning of the awful reputation that electronic music will have throughout the XX century.

But Varése was serious about possibilities of electronic music. ”I had an obsession: a new instrument that would free music from the tempered system”. He was interested in rhythm and timbre more than in harmony and melody, and was thinking about “pure sound as living matter”.

Arnold Schoenberg And The Second Viennese School

But there was finally another composer to make the most formally advanced music of the period: Arnold Schoenberg. He is still the single most controversial composer of the generation. While taken for one of the prime composers of XX century in academic circles, he never wrote a single half-famous piece. What he was into, was what is today usually called dodecaphonic or “atonal” music. What would that be?

Normal, “tonal” music is organized around what we would call a normal melody. Normal melody is built out of notes from scales that are restrictions of a full 12-tone chromatic scale. If all 12 notes of a chromatic scale are used treated as equal, the result is chaos. Schoenberg hoped that he will succeed in, for the first time, employing all 12 notes for constructing tunes yet end up with something that is not meaningless. In that purpose he coined the phrase “emancipation of the dissonance”, that could be translated as “meaningful chaos”. So what he was trying to make was like hot ice.

Yet Schoenberg saw his work as a natural continuation of musical tradition. It can be argued, however, that it didn’t sound like it. This musician was making the most unlovable music a classical composer ever produced. Even modernist composer Stravinsky didn’t hear anything in it.

Schoenberg knew this and was irritated by this lack of response. However, Schoenberg had two followers who worshiped him – Anton Webern and Alban Berg. They became known as the “second Viennese school”. While Schoenbergs music and atonal school grew more and more respected among musicians, in those intellectualized years, it continuously failed to make any waves among wider audiences. While believing in necessity of changes he introduced, Schoenberg was aware that the need for this change was so unapparent that he can not expect to be understood even by musicians of his time. After hearing Schoenbergs Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky later admitted “it was beyond me”, as it was “beyond all of us at the time”. Arnold Schoenberg knew to say that he writes music for future generations of audiences. Yet to our days this audience failed to appear.

At the bottom of his heart Schoenberg himself must have felt that everything he wrote fell short of his dreams. Through his whole life he had a fine line in self-deprecation. They say his last words were: harmony. But the truth is, there was little harmony for the innocent ear to find in his music. While composing his last opera, Moses und Aron, Schoenberg was unable to finish the last act, rewriting it four times, allegedly because of some contradictions in the Bible. Letter he sent to an expert for the Bible ended with: “Up to now I have been trying to find a solution for myself… It does go on haunting me”. He didn’t manage to finish Moses und Aron; like Moses himself, while never doubting in his message, he was wondering if he is able to tell it to the people.

These days his music is not much less controversial than it was. But despite that, and despite the hermetical form of his music, his dreams are easy to understand, especially for the one today interested in modern music. He dreamed about expanded melodicism – music outside of traditional scales; about sight-singing and “melody of timbres”; about returning to simplicity of means, and to harmony. He was the most extreme inside of the first generation of modernists -- all fostered in glorious classical tradition, but while loving and respecting it, feeling it in the same time as a burden, as something that must be overcame on a path to somewhere else. While his music lacked wider appeal, his pioneering activities will prove to be the spiritus movens of musicians to come.

There are many heavy things for the spirit, for the strong, weight-bearing spirit in which dwell respect and awe: its strength longs for the heavy, for the heaviest.

What is heavy? thus asks the weigh-bearing spirit, thus it kneels down like the camel and want to be well laden.

What is the heaviest thing, you heroes? so asks the weigh-bearing spirit, that I may take upon me and rejoice in my strength.

Is it not this: to debase yourself in order to injure your pride? To let your folly shine out in order to mock your wisdom?

Or is it this: to desert our cause when it is celebrating its victory? To climb high mountains in order to tempt the tempter?

Or is it this: to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger of the soul?

Or is it this: to be sick and to send away comforters and make friends with the deaf, who never hear what you ask?

Or is it this: to wade into dirty water when it is the water of truth, and not to disdain cold frogs and hot toads?

Or is it this: to love those who despise us and to offer our hand to the ghost when it wants to frighten us?

The weight-bearing spirit takes upon itself all these heaviest things: like a camel hurrying laden into the desert, thus it hurries into its deserts.

But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphoses occurs:the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zaratushtra