by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

David Tudor “performs” John Cage’s 4′33”

 

On August 29, 1952, pianist David Tudor performed– if that word can be used here- the piece 4′33” by John Cage for the first time. The piece has three movements in it, but no notes. Thus Tudor opened and closed the piano three times, and kept track of time on a stopwatch. The piece is whatever sounds happen in the room during the four minutes and thirty-three seconds it is “played.” If you or I tried to pull off something like this, we would be laughed out of the room and that would be the end of it. But John Cage had gravitas in the world of avant-garde and experimental music, and with 4′33” he created the most minimal of minimalist pieces of music. In a way, 4′33” represents the many challenges to conventional music from new and experimental musicians in the 20th century. The alternately brave, brilliant, goofy, and bizarre efforts to break free of conventional musical constraints in the 20th century mirrored efforts in other art forms (e. g. Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” or some of Jackson Pollock’s works– you can become an instant abstract painter yourself at http://www.jacksonpollock.org). Art where the artist had less than full control or responsibility for the work generated reflected the overall intellectual zeitgeist.

 

Minimalism suggested that less is more. Composers such as Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, and Terry Riley offered repetitive, slowly-evolving phrases. Many of these were catchy and melodic, making them among the most popular experiments of the times. Ambient music is an outgrowth of these efforts.

 

Atonal music challenged the rules commonly in use though not really noticed for developing melodies and chord progressions. The music of noteworthy (pun intended) atonal composers such as Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg can be very hard listening. (I first heard Ives in a friend’s darkroom in the 70s; he claimed the music made his pictures develop better.) Without getting technical here, we can say that atonal music may draw on all 12 tones in an octave, or even more, if the octave is divided into tones separated by different pitch intervals than the tones we’re used to on our pianos. Serialism brought mathematics and perhaps even politics into the act. Using ordered sets of parameters to generate pitch, duration, and other musical elements, composers seemed to be abdicating the full role of composer in favor of a mathematical map. Karlheinz Stockhausen described using elements in the musical set equally in a “democratic” way and wrote pieces offering performers the choice of what page to start on, and which direction to read the notation.

 

To many listeners, atonal music is music without musicality. Berg’s atonal opera “Wozzeck” will never achieve the popularity of works like “Tosca” and “Carmen”. Atonal ideas did find their way into the work of many 20th century composers, including Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky, though Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart have nothing to fear from works that are primarily atonal. The Nazis hated atonality (Arnold Schoenberg was Jewish); the embracing of atonal composition after World War 2 by modern composers and music intelligentsia probably reflected in part the desire for a strong rejection of Nazi ideology. For what it’s worth, Nirvana’s music, in terms of tonality, is far closer to Mozart than some of Schoenberg’s.

 

The value on musical virtuosity also faced challenges, from sources as diverse as punk rock, where the idea of tremendous technical skill was rejected, to synthesized music, where complex music could be played without the need of a musician woodshedding for years to develop amazing playing skill. In 1974, Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra of musicians of differing skill levels, but mostly pretty bad, performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Their records were humorously awful, but they had– and still have– a sort of following. There was even a thirtieth anniversary celebration in 2004.

 

Avant-garde jazz never achieved particular popularity, though it was still unfairly slighted in Ken Burns’s documentary “Jazz.” John Coltrane saw attendance at his shows diminish as he moved into the avant-garde direction following his album “A Love Supreme” — albums such as “Ascension” and “Om” and his other post-Supreme work were incomprehensible to many jazz fans. Coltrane persisted, but who knows where this restless musician would have gone had he lived past 1967? The Art Ensemble of Chicago believed it was talking to black people with its music, but it enjoyed greater popularity in Europe than here, and many of its fans were white, collegiate types, some even certifiable nerds. Far-out pianist Cecil Taylor did make it into the Burns documentary, only to be dissed by Branford Marsalis for “self-indulgent bullshit.”

 

Physicists tell us that when we throw a ball up in the air, it pulls on the Earth just as the Earth pulls on it. Obviously the Earth’s pull is much stronger. Many of the musical experiments of the 20th century were like a very large ball, exerting some influence on the Earth of the mainstream of music, but ultimately not effecting radical changes in what we like. We seem programmed to like tonal melodies and the familiar chord progressions that we so often encounter in popular music. We want to think of composers as really being the force behind the music they compose. We are wowed when someone plays a musical instrument on stage with uncommon skill. We recognize, and don’t like, poor performance (notwithstanding Sanjaya Malakar on American Idol). There is a great deal of flexibility in what we like, and the 20th century certainly demonstrated that flexibility; but there are clearly musical qualities that appeal to us that we want to have satisfied in the music we hear.

 

The challenge now is daunting. The 20th century also gave us a huge expansion of musical forms within the conventional constraints. Blues, jazz, bluegrass, country music, rock, etc. either didn’t exist or were barely beginning to exist in the early 20th century. Now the territory within the melodic and tonal areas of music that we naturally like is well-explored, and the challenge for this century will be less an attempt to break free from the constraints of what we just seem to like naturally, and more a problem of making music that is new, creative, and distinctive within those constraints.