The impact of WWII on the music composed after by those children who lived through it

[Guest]

In a review in January 2012 edition of IRR of CD recordings of performances by the Maggini Quartet of string quartets by Peter Maxwell Davies, Robert Matthew-Walker writes:

'However, this is not music for everyday: the ten quartets are very varied and clearly Maxwell Davies has taken on board the essential features of what constitutes major quartet composition -and have done from Haydn to the present day [ ... ] - with the result that at one level the mastery of his structures serves his ideas very well, at least in terms of character. Yet the problem remains - a problem that is perhaps exemplified by the composer's own booklet notes: we do not have the analytical exposition and ultimate conclusion of an independent authority, for when the composer writes of the importance to him of the magic square, one may think that the music has arisen not through an idea entering the composer's head and being pursued by his own creativity but subjected to a series of events from which he may indeed choose, from which the human creative element has been sidelined, if not removed. Of course all things are possible in art, given two criteria - inspiration and the technical ability to do something with that inspiration - but a thing being possible does not, of itself, give it artistic validity. One wonders, also, whether composers of Maxwell Davies's generation, as children being raised during the Second World War on the receiving end of the conflict, and seeing the wholesale destruction of Europe afterwards, the total serialization of the work of many immediate post war avant-garde composers was the psychological - rather than creative - reaction to the necessity of total organized rebuilding, of art as well as of cities and society, with composition becoming increasingly becoming an intellectually abstract, rather than emotionally driven, pursuit. As a consequence, this music has divided opinion rather more sharply than perhaps the composer would have wished, but I have found listening to these ten quartets an absorbing experience, at the end of which I can only suggest that listeners explore them for themselves"

I am no musician, practical or theoretical, and I wonder if those who are could assess for me, and I hope others, whether or not RM-W is on to something. It would also be useful to hear the reactions of those who have heard these recordings or even the pieces played in concert.

My apologies in advance if my questions appear naive.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

for when the composer writes of the importance to him of the magic square, one may think that the music has arisen not through an idea entering the composer's head and being pursued by his own creativity but subjected to a series of events from which he may indeed choose, from which the human creative element has been sidelined, if not removed.

It's RM-W who seems to be naive, Ammie; naive about what "the human creative element" is. It is almost as if he's seen the painting of Rouget de Lisle composing the Marseillaise and taken it as true for all creative activity. PMD's "magic squares" are just a convenient (to him) way of setting out the multitude of pitch/rhythm/dynamic etc. possibilities in a succinct diagram that he can use to select and reject as seems appropriate to the work he's producing. RM-W seems to think that the squares write themselves and the composer merely goes through the square from top to end at which point the piece is finished.

There may be composers who work like this (having read Paul Griffiths' book on the composer and totally missed the point, perhaps) - just as, in the early 1980s, there were composers who wrote out a 12 note pitch matrix and presumed that, just by going through the various "lines", you could write like Babbitt. Or devised wonderful "sieve" graphs a la Xenakis.

But no "real" composer works like this, or has ever worked like this: not Babbitt, not Xenakis, not Davies. Instead, the boxes, graphs, grids and charts of "random" numbers are a sort of "aide memoir" and stimulus to "ideas that enter the composer's head" and that excite the composer's aural imagination and excitement - and, if you will, his "emotions". This working out of ideas, this process of trying ideas out, refining, rejecting - and, sometimes, cheating - is precisely "the human creative element", producing Music that is both "intellectually abstract" and "emotionally driven" and, as RM-W says, "very varied" and "an absorbing experience".

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

... there is a psychological question that may have some pertinence .... the reaction to the nature of what was done in that war, that it was fought against an ideology of will [malign too] seems to have given several artists pause in asserting their individual authority as artists ... and indeed the very nature and validity of any authority was thrown into question ... artifice and randomness are elements in many arts after that war ....

[John Skelton]

If there's one composer whose music has been determined in the way Matthew-Walker proposes I'd suggest it's Wilhelm Kilmayer. YouTube isn't very helpful here; the Heine and Hölderlin settings are really what's needed, but http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZlOQ8CLnK8 What is fascinating, uncanny, about Kilmayer (I think) is that his music isn't an exercise in nostalgia or anti-modernism or anything. It's an expression of anxious love (for a haunting by, perhaps).

edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0im6OQJ8i9k

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... there is a psychological question that may have some pertinence .... the reaction to the nature of what was done in that war, that it was fought against an ideology of will [malign too] seems to have given several artists pause in asserting their individual authority as artists ... and indeed the very nature and validity of any authority was thrown into question ... artifice and randomness are elements in many arts after that war ....

Probably. This is certainly the case with, for example, Xenakis and Ligeti, (both of whom survived the trauma of the War and its aftermath).

But the stance of Boulez (who matured in Nazi-occupied France) Nono (Fascist Italy) or Stockhausen (Nazi Germany) (all of whom created glorious Music of the type that RM-W would characterize as total serialization of the work of many immediate post war avant-garde composers was the psychological - rather than creative - reaction to the necessity of total organized rebuilding, of art as well as of cities and society, with composition becoming increasingly becoming an intellectually abstract, rather than emotionally driven, pursuit) can most precisely be described as "authoritarian".

Cage, distant from the physical experience of War, was the most important/prominent/influential figure from that generation (he was ten-fifteen years older than the Europeans) to question "authority".

But I realize my argument is built on shakey ground: I'd never heard of Wilhelm Kilmayer before John's post. There must be hundreds of artists whose work can be used either to support or to refute RM-W's idea. People don't "fit" into neat theories - humans can be as well if not better "illustrated" by the "exceptions".


... There! Questioned my own previous attempt at making an "authoritative" statement!

[John Skelton]

I'm not sure what I was getting at with Kilmayer (nor do I know his music that well). I suppose that Kilmayer's uncannily loving relationship with German Romantic music wouldn't be shaped as is without a certain ideological implication of and a certain aesthetic reaction against that music. What is, for me, uncanny about Kilmayer's music is that it shares the same ground as the German Romantics rather than paying homage to or imitating them, but the ground has drifted from home (and is homeless). I realise that deploys a Romantic vocabulary.

[amateur51]

Fascinating responses all - thanks very much

Not sure that I understand it all tho' ....

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm not sure what I was getting at with Kilmayer (nor do I know his music that well). I suppose that Kilmayer's uncannily loving relationship with German Romantic music wouldn't be shaped as is without a certain ideological implication of and a certain aesthetic reaction against that music. What is, for me, uncanny about Kilmayer's music is that it shares the same ground as the German Romantics rather than paying homage to or imitating them, but the ground has drifted from home (and is homeless). I realise that deploys a Romantic vocabulary.

John - what you say about Kilmayer (whose music I have not heard) certainly applies to Hans Werner Henze in a paradoxical way. Henze acted as a despatch rider for the Nazis while still in his teens, starting to compose while knowing little or nothing of the moderns apart from Himdemith and Hartmann, least of all the Second Viennese School. After WW2 he was initially associated with the generation awakened creatively by hearing Schoenberg, Berg and Webern especially, wrote 12-tone music but, finding the asocial and political atmosphere stifling, left Germany for Italy in the early 1950s, where his music started to become much more eclectic and undoctrinaire, to his former friend Nono's disgust btw. During this time Henze became friendly with Britten; it is hard without the personal knowledge knowing to what extent the Britten musical association helped towards Henze's coming out as gay, (perhaps Ammy knows?), but since the late 60s Henze seems to havwe been on a perpetual Mahleresque revolving quest to reconnect with the German Romantic past with which he has an ambivalent relationship.

The point made by both Ammy and Calum regarding the postwar avant-garde is a strong one: Boulez has often said that he, Nono, Berio and Stockhausen set out to try and create a new musical art from a tabula rasa shorn of historical associations. For Boulez, Webern came closest to creatively following through the implications of Schoenberg's 12-tone method, which he felt and doubtless they Schoenberg had compromised by resorting to musical forms of the past dependent on major-minor tonal schemas.

Returning to the question of magic squares etc., it does seem that for a time, Boulez in particular did advocate the use of totally integrated, logically deducible compositonal methods which calculated every element down to the tiniest detail. Later he reined in on these techniques in favour of allowing greater spontaneity - as did Stockhausen at the point when he a) came to recognise the impossibility of preordering every single detail of composition, given that aspects of form existed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, and b) that some of his calculations were leading to unperformability in terms of the accuracy and precision demanded - whereupon he started turning to electronic composition which could be so realised. I have read somewhere, too, that Babbitt used integral serial structures which would exhaust all possibilities posed, thus concluding the work in question.

I'm not at all sure that all this goes any way towards understanding or explaining the motivations which drove modrn composers to pursue the creative directions they did between the end of WW2 and the late '50s, at which point influences from John Cage and the Fluxus composers in America started to impinge, but, to return to the question raised in the article about PMD's string quartets by going back to a time when Schoenberg was widely accused of imposing mechanical schemes on the composing, antithetical to spontaneity, it is worth noting that Schoenberg had already, prior in 1923 to his first conscious application of serial principles to the devising of materials which could integrate harmony with melody, spontaneously been moving in the direction of a compressed idiom in which pitches were used much more economically and with less repetition than ever before, and that, as he said, the devising of the method allowed him to create as spontaneously as he had been able to in his youth. And I think his music speaks for itself, in that regard.

S-A

[Boilk]

Instead, the boxes, graphs, grids and charts of "random" numbers are a sort of "aide memoir" and stimulus to "ideas that enter the composer's head" and that excite the composer's aural imagination and excitement - and, if you will, his "emotions".

Are you saying it's an aide memoire in the same way that earlier composers worked within the confines of, say, fugue or sonata form?

Cage ... was the most important/prominent/influential figure from that generation to question "authority".

Was he particularly prominent outside of New York artistic circles at the time (versus later on when academia had caught up with him) or actually on the periphery of American art music? And did he really question authority, or simply turn 180 degrees to the Eastern "authorities" of Zen and other philosphical exotica?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Are you saying it's an aide memoire in the same way that earlier composers worked within the confines of, say, fugue or sonata form?

Sort of; in the sense that before the 19th Century "Sonata Form" wasn't as "confined" as it later became and "Fugue" has never had exact(ing) "rules" about Form. What I meant was that a chart of numbers lays out at the start of a period of composition a set of possibilities that the composer chooses from. This saves the time of having to work out such relationships bar-by-bar; 'though some composers prefer this approach, finding it more "spontaneous". You could think of the chart as a parallel to Tab notation or Figured Bass - or even an elaborate "Cycle of Fifths"!

Was he particularly prominent outside of New York artistic circles at the time (versus later on when academia had caught up with him) or actually on the periphery of American art music?

Depends when you mean by "at this time". Boulez knew of his work in the late '40s, but Cage's influence in Europe came a decade later, just as composers in their late 20s, early 30s were confronted with the paradox that the greater the Serial control you placed on the materials, the more "random" it sounded in performance. Many a slovenly reading of Cage's ideas equated to "We can do anything; it doesn't matter any more!" Cage was much more disciplined: he questioned received authority, seeking authority from within himself, from within the Music (often using charts and matrices of his own) and from the people he worked with. I think (from what I've read of him and heard from those who met him) that he wanted others to question rather than blindly to accept what they thought of as "his" ideas. (He was delighted that a composer as different from him as Lutoslawski could take elements from his ideas useful to fuel a new direction in his (Lutos') creative work and still be Lutoslawski.)

And did he really question authority, or simply turn 180 degrees to the Eastern "authorities" of Zen and other philosphical exotica?

But chosing to take these "exotica" seriously was itself an authority-questioning act. He was always an American in the spirit of Thoreau, and his independence of idea and spirit was, I believe, fuelled - but not dominated - by non-Western ideas.

[Boilk]

Thanks for the reply ferneyhoughgeliebte.

... a chart of numbers lays out at the start of a period of composition a set of possibilities that the composer chooses from. This saves the time of having to work out such relationships bar-by-bar; 'though some composers prefer this approach, finding it more "spontaneous".

If I still composed, the last thing on my mind would be to figure out a way of how to save time when composing! But I guess nearly all music uses a system of sorts, there are simply too many choices (equals no creative discipline) otherwise.

...([Cage] was delighted that a composer as different from him as Lutoslawski could take elements from his ideas useful to fuel a new direction in his (Lutos') creative work and still be Lutoslawski.)

I think on some long-lost thread we've read that Luto wasn't the first to fuel a new direction with regard to so called 'ad libitum', but he probably was in Europe. It's ironic that his compatriot Panufnik fled to the West but ended up the more conservative of the two!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

If I still composed, the last thing on my mind would be to figure out a way of how to save time when composing! But I guess nearly all music uses a system of sorts, there are simply too many choices (equals no creative discipline) otherwise.

Quite so! How many possible permutations of twelve notes? (Something like 12x11x10x9 ... x3x2?) And that's not "counting" repeated notes! Then there's rhythms, dynamics, instrumentation ... Some composers like to limit such (near-as-practical) infinite choices. Others like to embrace the chaos! The working methods don't really matter: the end results is the important thing? (Not sure about the grammar there: "The end results are the important thing. things." = what matters!)

Incidentally, without wishing to pry or open old wounds, why do you no longer compose? I hear this a lot, and I often wonder why people give up composing to a greater extent, it seems to me, than others give up painting or writing. (None of my business, of course, so no need to respond.)

Best Wishes.

[Boilk]

Incidentally, without wishing to pry or open old wounds, why do you no longer compose?

Perfectly fine question. I started to hear Philip Glass and realised I could never be that good. But seriously ...

...lack of discipline and persistence in finding a technique to compose anything more than ditties. Actually what would excite me the most, perhapsin a few years, is probably being let loose on Pro Tools with a vast sound library at my disposal. Could still happen when domestic preoccupations recede somewhat.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Actually what would excite me the most, perhapsin a few years, is probably being let loose on Pro Tools with a vast sound library at my disposal. Could still happen when domestic preoccupations recede somewhat.

Best Wishes.

[Serial_Apologist]

I often wonder what Sibelius would have made of the computer named after him.