The Story Of The Lion

It was Weberns music, that “loneliest desert”, that woke up “a lion” in a young Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. He is to remain the most prominent figure inside of a diverse group of academic experimental musicians that also included Pierre Bulez, Ianos Xenakis and others. Anton Webern was greatest inspiration for most of them, more so than the pioneer of atonal music himself Arnold Schoenberg. The young Pierre Boulez wrote a study of Schoenberg in which he proclaimed, with capital letters, SCHOENBERG IS DEAD.

Some features of Weberns music that were perceived by Pierre Boulez were: it functioned as “dichotomy of sound and silence”, using silence as an element of rhythmic patterns; it was of “athematic” character, meaning there was no melody in accepted meaning of that word, no theme in it; and it was taking polyphony on another level, further than baroque counterpoint.

All of this sounded murky even to a highly educated musician, and Weberns music itself didn’t help making it more clear. The idea of athematic music is ridiculed to our days.

'We have escaped from the tyranny of the theme', exulted British composer Iain Hamilton, who in any case had never been guilty of composing memorable themes. From “The Lives of Great Composers” by Harold C. Schoenberg

However, in the second part of XX century the second Viennese school was taken with greater enthusiasm by musicians. In one moment, atonal music was synonym for contemporary academic music (then it already progressed into “serial music”).

...any musician who has not experienced -- I do not say understood, but truly experienced -- the necessity of the dodecaphonic (12-tone) language is USELESS. Pierre Boulez

Trying to carry Webern and second Viennese school further, serialists started to write almost unplayable music. Stockhausen and Boulez will meet around 1952, and this is when Stockhausen came into contact with electronic instruments. He will become passionate with them. Impressed with a brand new world of completely synthesized music, he and his colleagues started from basic waves, constructing timbres from scratch, synthesizing sounds from sinewaves, aiming for “totally organized music” which is composed from these basic oscillations, and that had little to do with “basically instrumental” music of acoustic orchestras.

Following the lead of Boulez and Babbitt, composers of the 1960s championed the total organization of music. Not only were the pitches to be serialized, but also durations, timbre, intensity, tempo, and dynamics. From “The Lives of Great Composers” by Harold C. Schoenberg

They also used distortions of recorded materials, such as human voices. Yet they weren’t the first composers to deal with electronic music. It was Edgar Varese. His concepts were very important to serialists, who were seeing him as a hero. They then went on to experiment with just anything imaginable. Stockhausen, for example, experimented with music written for three different orchestras, with a separate conductor each, in three different parts of the concert hall (piece Gruppen). He also composed music for helicopters. A bit later, when computers arrived, Xenakis will compose pieces down the lines of probabilistic theories. These pieces were not strict, final forms, but "the beginnings of a family of compositions". There was no limitations both in depth and width in theirs concepts and ambitions, and there was simply not an idea we can think of that these composers did not principally evangelized about. There was a completely new terminology: instead of chords, there were “densities”. Then there were “events, actions, gestures, interval classes, sets, periods, indeterminacy, aggregates, parameters, tritones, tetrachords, hexachords, aleatory”. They pushed the concept of musical creativity as an experiment to the end, striving towards almost impossible music.

David Paul for "Seconds" magazine (issue #44, 1997): In the late Forties and Fifties, did you feel that you were creating music from scratch? That there was really no tradition, and it had to be re-invented?

Stockhausen: There was a lot of tradition, because I studied traditional music in all styles and as part of my training at the State conservatory I had to write pieces in all styles of the past. It is true that as a student I had heard Stravinsky's work for the first time on the late night radio programs in the student dormitory in Cologne, and also performances of Bartok which I had never heard before. Hindemith I played myself as a student only at the end of my studies in 1950 and '51, the Hindemith sonatas, et cetera. It's true that I had not yet heard this music, and it sounded very different from what I had heard before and what I'd played before as a piano player and what I sang in the conservatory choir. But then at the end of my studies in 1951, I felt that all the music that I had played and sung before belonged to another era. That era was completely finished. After my first work, Kreuzspiel - which sounded very strange to me when I conducted it for the first time - I felt that a new era was beginning, with completely different methods of composition. The music was my state of the soul at the time. I composed it as if I were an astronomer >from the outer world reorganizing planets and sounds and circuits and time proportions. So I was not so much identifying with sounds, but creating new sound worlds. And since then I know that a new music began about 1951.

That theirs music wasn’t very popular among audiences at first, they explained by the fact that common audiences expect usual emotional, sentimental charge, that was however not interesting to these composers. Theirs aim wasn’t to stir common emotions, but to introduce new ones.

David Paul: You once said music in the post-war period was not an expression of human feeling, but a re-creation of cosmic order. There was an orientation away from mankind.

Stockhausen: Well, it is true. When I discover something that is mysterious for me, new for me, and when I very carefully try to formulate it in sound, then it is certainly not the human side of myself which is touched. It is very strange to me. And I feel there is something that I don't know; I don't even know how to formulate it and to translate it into the instrumental world, whether in the electronic studio or with traditional instruments is secondary. The music which is composed by me and rehearsed many times and perfected in a lot of rehearsals very slowly creates feelings that I haven't had before. But it is not the expression of my feelings. So then I have new feelings. New music creates new feelings. It gives us completely different experiences that we haven't had before. That's why it is so important - it expands us.

David Paul: It expands us?

Stockhausen: It expands our range of feelings, yes. Thoughts and feelings.

David Paul: So is music always an expansion -

Stockhausen: No, no, no [laughs]. Most of the music just touches us, because there exists already a feeling, due to the fact that we have heard it before in a similar way. But only new music which expands our consciousness has that quality that leaves us in a state of surprise, and we are astonished. That is very rarely the case.

It had to do with self-expansion and self-overcoming. There was something Nietzschean around Stockhausen.

David Paul: With respect to rhythms of the body and perception, what about mental rhythms - the rhythms of thought?

Stockhausen: Aha!The fact is that all the music of the past is based on our muscle rhythms. What we can tap on the table, or what we can dance to, what we can do with running, walking, slowly moving the hands, the eyes, et cetera - this is the basis of rhythm in music. Everything is related to a basic periodicity, like the heart, the breathing, the tapping, the dancing. But since 1951 I have slowly but steadily left the body rhythm of my own body. I like dancing - I love it. And I play dance music and there's a lot of electricity in the air. Nevertheless, I purposely leave the rhythms of the body, of my body and the body of others - my body's not so different from other bodies. I allow myself rhythms that are much more complicated and very often cannot be related to periodic rhythms of the body anymore, and that is very interesting. I have written more and more irregular rhythms, like eleven-tuplets, thirteen-tuplets, et cetera. If they're based on basic unities which can be still felt with our bodies but subdivided irregularly in a more complicated way, then we can enormously expand our ability to make distinctions between different durations. This is true for the relatively short rhythmic values. What is a problem and will be true for the relatively short rhythmic values.

It is true that certain parts in my own work approach nine, ten, eleven, twelve pulses per second, around the alpha wave region, which is very important for telepathy and telekinesis - a very interesting zone where we lose our ability to make distinctions between rhythm and pitch. It starts already at six or seven per second, and then after sixteen per second we are in a new realm of perception where we talk about pitch, a "low sound." But the zone that I have just mentioned is related to our brain vibrations, and I have composed quite a lot of music where I like to stay in this zone. It's a sort of gray zone between realms of perception, between rhythm and pitch. And the same applies, by the way, to a zone between pitch and timbre. So if it goes beyond about thirty-two hundred per second, then there is a zone where pitch is steadily becoming what we call timbre, the high partials. And the same is true also for eight seconds: when the durations from one-sixteenth of a second become longer and longer, there is that gray zone, and then we come into rhythm. We are dealing with longer and longer durations for slow movements, slow rhythms and metres; and when we go beyond eight seconds, then we lose memory, we cannot remember well enough if it is eleven seconds or twelve seconds. We have no developed sense for that. The memory is then weak. And that's very good, very interesting. Because then we begin to perceive formal subdivisions, longer durations. What's inside we consider as being the texture of a longer formal duration. So we have new music, switching sometimes in transitions from one realm of perception to another one, and that really is something new.

This should be enough to depict in what lengths these musicians went to develop understanding of more evolved, “super-human” kind of music.

What was also understood was abolition of national character in pieces; music is to become cosmopolitan. A composer himself is to resemble more a scientist than an artist. This was one of the holy grails of modernists: to make composing into science, to make music more “mathematical”. For example, composer Babbit was a mathematician by profession. As early as in old Greece it was said that “music is mathematics”, and we can read this same idea appearing in all epochs; yet classical music was never so based on science as these musicians would like it. So they decided to do something about it. Xenakis was using stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases in Pithoprakta, aleatory distribution of points on a plane in Diamorphoses, minimal constraints in Achorripsis, Gaussian distribution in ST/10 and Atrèes, Markov chains in Analogiques), game theory (in Duel and Stratégie), group theory (Nomos Alpha), Boolean algebra (in Herma and Eonta), and Brownian motion (in N'Shima). In the United States the official publication for the new musical thought was Perspective On New Music, in which one could come across such delightful prose as the following, from an article by Michael Kassler in the issue of Spring 1963:

R is a single-value function of D to E and only if, for every element w of D, one and one only element of Z of E exists such that (w,z) is an element of R. R is the relational inverse of the relation R’ of E to D if and only if R is the set of all the elements (w,z) such as (z,w) is an element of R’. R is a one-to-one function of D to E if and only if R is a single-valued function of D to E and the relational inverse of R is a single-valued function of D to E and the relational inverse or R is a single-valued function of E to D. (In this last case each of D and E is in one-to-one correspondence with the other).

Inspirations and themes of music were also scientific. Names for pieces such as “Ionization”, “Constellations” etc. were common. Composers were inspired by astronomy, chemistry, geometry, genetics, psychology and whatever scientific branch existed. Also, certain emotional coolness was commended; to sound very abstract, “emotionless”, was a high aim.

And as all of this wasn’t mad enough, there was opposition to it. Pierre Schaeffer of France despised “atonalists” and “serialists”:

This made for a century of the most boring music. Schoenberg, a teacher lacking genius, had a brilliant idea. One was supposed to use all 12 notes without repeating any. One is sure in this way to avoid the problems of tonality and to avoid copying Mahlers music.

Unfortunately, when you suppress the intervals between notes you suppress music. You make it insignificant. You take the feeling, the intelligence, and meaning away.

Schaeffer developed the ideas of “musique concrete”, in which sounds recorded from the real world are packed with meaning and emotional effect.

It was an emotional experience because the railroad carries many memories, many psychological and psychosomatic feelings. Sometimes these feelings can be very violent, deeply rooted in your childhood. Pierre Schaeffer

He made a distinction between such music, “concrete music”, and serial music. Sound of music of him and Pierre Henry, the composer who wrote most of the pieces concretes, starting with Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony for a Man Alone), is easy to imagine to todays listeners of ambient – mixture of recorded sounds of surroundings -- “mechanical noises, orchestral hits, trains, and text-sound babble; doors open and close on conversations; engines start, stop and transform into screams and moans; disembodied pianists jam with mouth noise rhythm sections”. It is also notable this name – “Symphony for a Man Alone“ – indicating the future concept of symphonic music that is meant to be listened in, probably solitude, of ones home.

As for the relationship between Schaeffer and the rest of modernists, there weren’t many.

One day we had the visit of a young and unknown musician, Pierre Boulez. At the time, I was involved in trying to create a solfege that could include many sounds and timbres. I thought we should classify the sounds in terms of their effect on the listener, of their psychological effect. We would classify them in high, low, hard, harsh sounds. Boulez objected to that. He refused to collaborate and left after composing one piece, as boring as usual, with one single sound (Etudes, 1952). Pierre Schaeffer

Concrete music wasn't more popular than serial. As with some other contemporary academic concerns, the first successful piece of concrete music can be found in movie music -- Ennio Morricone’s overture to “The Good, the bad and the ugly”.

And that is still not all. There was an opposition even to both serialism and concrete music. And it was none other but an ex-pupil of Arnold Schoenberg: John Cage.

Schoenberg said I would never be able to compose, because I had no ear for music; and it's true that I don't hear the relationships of tonality and harmony. He said: 'You always come to a wall and you won't be able to go through.' I said, well then, I'll beat my head against that wall; and I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises. John Cage

There simply had to be a modernist who didn’t want any system at all. He drove the concepts of destroying old music to its end. Some of his pieces could be interpreted as one wishes. For example, his Concert for Piano and Orchestra can be played by any number of players, in whole or in part and in any order. If this is not enough, consider his Imaginary Landscape No. 4: twelve radios simultaneously emitting different radio stations, with two players controlling the radios by changing stations and volume. Obviously, every performance of the “piece” would be different. And if even this is not weird enough, consider his most famous work – 4’33. It is for piano. Pianists sits at the keyboard without playing anything for 4’33, or any other period of time. The piece is in three movements, indicated by pianist lowering and rising the lid.

All of this, often coupled with sensationalism and exhibitionism, made modernists easy targets of jokes and ridicule. Yet that was not quite the dominating feeling about them. Rather, they were respected. This was because of theirs knowledge of classical musical tradition. They were probably more knowledgeable about it than any generation before them, despite theirs music was so different than classical. This, and abstract complexity of theirs pieces, gave authority to theirs experiments, despite theirs unpopularity.

However, this intellectualism also caused resistances. One part of modernism was often seen as “complexity for the sake of complexity” affair. The epitome of this could be American composer Eliot Carter.

While some would ridicule an idea of a “great” composer whose music can not arouse enthusiasm from at least a segment of the concert-going public, Carter’s admirers regard him for a composer of unparalleled technique and integrity, who writes works of awesome complexity. From “The Lives of Great Composers” by Harold C. Schoenberg

What was beyond doubt is that these all-encompassing and revolutionary theories resulted in music that sounded unpleasant. Noise is how most of the people would call most of it. On words so avant-garde, this music wasn’t enchanting nor arousing peoples admiration, and sounded somehow all the same.

That the audiences will remain unfazed by these experiments, is not strange when we consider that it was Weberns music – and that was almost not made for listening at all - that was the spiritus movens of this generation of experimentators. Serialism never became popular, and today is probably more controversial than ever. But while it was happening, musicians were embracing it - even those who originally didn’t accept it.

Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he (Webern) inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge. Igor Stravinsky

Mainstream of academic music, while respecting musical knowledge of modernists and theirs passions for novelties, kept distance from theirs music.

It seeks here it’s ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to it’s ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon.

What is the great dragon which the spirit no longer wants to call God and lord? The great dragon is called “Thou shalt”. But the spirit of the lion says “I will!”

‘Thou shalt’ lies in it’s path, sparkling with gold, a scale-covered beast, and on every scale glitters golden ‘Thou shalt’

Values of thousand years glitter on the scales, and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: ‘All the values of things – glitter on me.

‘All values have already been created, and all created values – are in me. Truly, there shall be no more “I will”!’ Thus speaks the dragon.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

And thus indeed spoke the dragon of classical tradition. Good old classical music is everything that can be good, said institutions calmly. Modernism was all about the dry intellect, while heart was still firmly with the only real musical world – and that seemingly can not be changed -- that of traditional classical music.

Classical culture did not have to convince anyone to stay away from “modernist music”; the way this “new music” sounded was enough to do the job. It was a violent experience, that offered little vision and human spirit.

There were however a few academic composers of the generation who managed to become somewhat popular, who cared to touch the audiences that knows nothing about how music is made. One of them was Olivie Messiaen, the most popular – or at least the least unpopular - serial musician of the generation. Although, that probably has to do with him dropping serialism. He replaced it with a mixture of modernism, archaism, paganism, Catholicism, and pantheism. And ornithology. He was very interested in bird calls and notated bird calls all his life, integrating them into music. When in 1952 he was asked to provide a test piece for flautists wishing to enter the Paris Conservatoire, he composed the piece Le merle noir for flute and piano which was based entirely on the song of the blackbird. He took this development to a new level with his 1953 orchestral work Réveil des oiseaux — its material consists almost entirely of the birdsong one might hear between midnight and noon in the Jura. From this period onwards, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into all of his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of thirteen pieces for piano Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971).

But Messiaens main ideas were connected with rhythm, of which he wrote a book. His main interest was to escape clock-rhythm, breaking free of rhythm & patterns, to create more “organic” music.

I totally despise even beats. And even tempos. I not only hate military music, I also detest jazz, because it depends on even beats. My music depends on uneven beats, as in nature. In nature rippling water is uneven, waving tree branches are uneven, the movement of clouds is uneven. Olivie Mesiaen

However, Messiaen was still not belonging to the most popular academic experimentators of the generation. These were to become – and what still saddens many music lovers -- the so-called minimalists. Theirs progeny from previous generation could have said to be Eric Satie, that drop off from all other experiments of his time. Tired of complexities of modernism, minimalists were making music that saw the other extreme: obsessively repetitive, intentionally simplistic music, based on patterns. First practitioners of minimalism were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich. Unlike the rest of modernism, minimalism was anti-intellectual. It made a cult of simplicity, with parole “less means more”. The work is stripped down to its core, avoiding ornaments and side-evolutions.

It was remarkable that this, for a change, was a spontaneous happening which only later entered musical books (now, that is what you call “experimental music”!) The term minimalism was endowed independently by composer-critics Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson. It has been controversial, but is in wide use since the mid-1970s. This stream will dominate contemporary “serious” music for the next 40 years, to nowadays.

The main “trick” of minimalism was polyrhythm and a technique called phase shifting, devised by Steve Reich. A single note, or chord, or constantly repeated pattern of notes is played at different speeds, so they eventually get out of phase and than come together again, creating certain polyphonic effects.

Minimalism was the only truly sucesfull and widely listened accademic music during this period. The most known minimalist composers are Philip Glass and John Adams, who, unlike other modernists, had some contacts with popular music.

So when all divisions inside accademic cicrles themselves are added to the principal division on accademic and pop music, one gets the full picture of divergence and madness of musical world back then. Music was split wide and deep in innumerable divisions, in more and more untraceable directions and sub-directions. It was a wild, unprecedented era in music, and that probably will not repeat for ages; electro-acoustic musicians squeezing synthesizers next to the wild screaming of Rolling Stones. And so the mad, orgiastic phase went its way.

How will this period in modernism be remembered? It will be remembered for its high ambitions which had not quite came out in practice. Modernists are today more respected as visionaries than creators. While results were falling short, theirs dreams were noble and far-reaching. While they were feeling the drive towards something new, they actually weren’t there, nor even sure they actually want to go there. Theirs genuine driving force was ‘No’ to the past, rather than ‘Yes’ to the future. It was more a rebel spirit of turning back to everything, rather than creating.

Our direction was to turn our back on music and that is crucial. People who try to create a musical revolution do not have a chance, but those who turn their back to music can sometimes find it. Pierre Schaeffer

In the name of dreams, theories and ideas that are far-reaching, they practically destroyed, de-composed music back to noise, or with John Cage literary to silence. In strive for hyper-music, they have led music to its utter negation. On the end of the day, it was work of John Cage that was the essence of practical work of all of them:

I have nothing to say

and I am saying it

and that is poetry

as I needed it

John Cage

What they did was not create themselves, but winning the freedom for new creation. They were essentialy more fighting against traditional methods and tastes than creating new ones.

My brothers, why is the lion needed in the spirit?

To create new values – even the lion is incapable of that: but to create itself freedom for new creation – that the might of the lion can do.

To create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty: the lion is needed for that, my brothers.

To seize the right to new values – that is the most terrible proceeding for a weight-bearing and reverential spirit. Truly, to this spirit it is a theft and a work for an animal of prey.

Once it loved this ‘Thou shalt’ as its holiest thing: now it has to find illusion and caprice even in the holiest, that it may steal freedom from its love: the lion is needed for this theft.

Friedriech Neitzche, Thus Spoke Zaratushtra