In 1906 the so-called “atonal revolution” took place in Vienna. Arnold Schoenberg and his allies left the framework of traditional harmony and wrote compositions marked by dissonance and by abstract, asymmetrical rhythms. Young composers elsewhere had similar aims. The music that resulted, which set the course for all composed music in the classical tradition in the 20th century, was and still is called “New Music”, even though it is by now more than a hundred years old.
This article looks at the path taken by “New Music” and examines its basic principles and how it differs from jazz and jazz-related music, but also from modern visual art (painting, sculpture and so on). It also considers possible future developments in music and the ideas about society behind them.
If you take a close look at how European composed music developed as a creative, contemporary art form in the 20th century and compare it with the development of the visual arts, the fundamental difference in how the two art forms are perceived by the public, and how much they matter to it, leaps out at once. While exhibitions of modern art, from “classical modernism” to the “young avant-garde”, draw a large and varied public, while prints or even originals of 20th-century art hang in millions of homes, and while the art market keeps reporting new record prices even for genuinely contemporary works, so-called “New Music” is confined to an elitist niche. Classical music of past centuries is still listened to and admired, certainly; but those who see themselves as carrying this tradition forward are barely noticed outside a narrow circle of followers.
What is the reason for the completely different development of these two art forms, which in earlier eras always developed largely in parallel, both stylistically and socially? In my view it lies in their different stances towards two decisive cultural developments of the 20th century: on the one hand the encounter of the European tradition with the cultures of the southern continents, and on the other the invention of new ways of producing, preserving and distributing works of art, such as photography and the gramophone record.
Visual art in the 20th century
Both aspects play a central role in the emergence of 20th-century visual art, “modern art”. The discovery and spread of photography robbed painting of what had until then been its most important task: depicting landscapes, events and people true to life. The artists at the turn of the 20th century took up the challenge and began to develop an entirely new understanding of their task. They were helped by the visual art of African and Oceanic cultures, which in the wake of colonialism could be seen in Europe on a larger scale for the first time: masks, pictures, textiles, ritual and everyday objects. Neither the Expressionism of the Dresden “Brücke” painters nor the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque is conceivable without this influence.
This willingness to engage with the supposedly primitive cultures was deepened further in several steps. While the Expressionist painters, for example, were still more or less after an exotic surface appeal, the French Surrealists of the 1920s studied the myths and rituals of non-European peoples intensively in order to broaden their understanding of art. A painter like Max Ernst took an explicit interest in the culture of the Native Americans, much to the annoyance of his American hosts, and was enthusiastic about it. Finally, in the course of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, Joseph Beuys transferred the role of the shaman in Central Asian cultures to his own understanding of himself as an artist, and so reached a new dimension of an art in which different approaches from different parts of the world permeate and enrich one another.
This openness to encountering the unfamiliar, this willingness to leave the traditional frame (which many artists also did quite literally), made modern art exciting and many-layered. It was able to take up questions that move many people and give them a visual form that did not remain confined to museums and exclusive private views, but also influenced everyday and popular culture.
The path of “New Music”
That New Music in the 20th century would take such completely different paths from “modern art” was by no means clear from the outset; it was the result of a choice of direction made at the end of the 1920s and renewed once more at the end of the 1960s. Roughly between 1890 and 1928 there were many parallels in the development of music and the visual arts. In 1889 the French composer Claude Debussy got to know Indonesian gamelan music at the Paris World Exhibition and was thrilled by it. He immediately tried to use the scales of this music in his own compositions. Ragtime, too, a style of music developed by Black pianists in the southern United States, interested him greatly and inspired him to write several pieces. At the same time the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, by then no longer young, wrote the symphony “From the New World” during a stay in America. In it he uses Native American and African American themes in a way that corresponded to the use of European folk music in the compositions of Brahms, Mahler and Grieg.
This openness to non-European music continued and was an important source of the breakthrough to atonality. Igor Stravinsky, for instance, worked influences from the Russian and Asian sphere into his ballet score “Le Sacre du printemps” (The Rite of Spring) of 1913. Under the impression of the explosive spread of jazz in the 1920s, Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Krenek, among others, wrote compositions influenced by jazz. In the USA, George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman and Aaron Copland tried to develop an American style of composition that took in elements of jazz. With “Die Dreigroschenoper” (The Threepenny Opera), Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill created a German-language musical at a time when this genre was only just beginning to emerge. The end of the 1920s, however, marks a clear turning away, at least in Europe, from all these attempts to bring about an encounter between European and non-European musical cultures.
What brought about this change of direction, which shapes New Music to this day? In my view it was a whole series of factors that caused a deep split between New Music and the styles of music influenced by African American music, a split that is still almost insurmountable today.
1. Towards the end of the 1920s there was a growing conservatism in cultural and political life. Phenomena as different as the brutally enforced displacement of the Russian avant-garde by Socialist Realism, the rise of the fascist movements with their associated demand for a nationally minded art, and an increasingly conservative attitude even among liberal and progressive artists combine to form the picture of a spirit of the age in which reassurance about one’s own traditions, and rejection of or indifference to what was foreign, played a large role. Even artists who are above any suspicion of sympathy with dictatorial regimes behaved this way: Picasso temporarily abandoned his Cubist approach and painted pictures that drew on images from antiquity. Stravinsky and Hindemith ended their engagement with jazz and non-European folk music and in their new compositions referred back to European music history. Well-known examples are Stravinsky’s ballet “Pulcinella” and Hindemith’s opera “Mathis der Maler” and his viola concerto “Der Schwanendreher”, which is built on German folk songs.
2. The artists who did not want to follow this trend placed great trust in constructivist, intellectually worked-out concepts. A special role was played here by the so-called Second Viennese School, with the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, and by the twelve-tone technique introduced by Schoenberg. This technique was meant to give atonal music a formal framework by building each composition on a note row in which each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale occurred once. A note could only be used again once all the others had occurred. This method of composition leads to a strict music shaped by the intellect, whose structures often cannot be grasped by the ear at all but can only be recognised in the score. In the following decades this way of composing had an overwhelming influence on the further development of European composed music. It goes without saying that this put it in stark opposition to jazz, with its basic elements of improvisation and rhythmic intensity.
3. The experiments with incorporating jazz elements in the 1920s had also made clear that this combination is not so easy to achieve. Unlike in the visual arts, where the painter or sculptor is the sole creator of the work and can bring influences together however he likes, a piece of music as it actually sounds is always the result of a collective. However hard the composer tries to integrate jazz elements into his score, if the orchestra has no feel for this style of music the result will always be unsatisfying. But a musician’s feel for music and sense of style have grown through decades of practice; they cannot simply be changed. A large orchestra is particularly inflexible in this respect. So even if you set aside the Eurocentric arrogance present in the 1920s, which went as far as feelings of racist superiority towards “Negro music”, it becomes clear that these attempts to bring about an encounter between different musical cultures on the basis of European orchestral music could not really convince. When you hear a ragtime by Stravinsky or Hindemith today, you feel you are witnessing an interesting but somewhat odd attempt to approach a musical culture that in the end remained foreign both to the European composers and to the musicians performing it.
4. An extraordinarily lasting and in many respects devastating influence, reaching right into school curricula, was exerted by the Frankfurt sociologist and music critic Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno held everything beautiful and every expression of feeling in music to be the result of a commercialisation that drags music into the realm of the alienated world of commodities, deceives the listener about the actual state of society, and thereby serves to stabilise the capitalist system.
For Adorno the only possible stance for music was a fundamental critique of society, to be achieved through the uncompromising application of atonal principles and through strictly logical constructions free of any expression of feeling. For him the sole aim of listening to music was the conscious, rational recognition of the structures laid down in the music. He fiercely condemned feelings or physical impulses in connection with music. With this understanding of music, Adorno could see nothing worthy of recognition in the African American styles of music.
What is most striking about his furious rejection of this music, however, is Adorno’s lack of expertise. In his classification of types of listener he confuses jazz with rock ’n’ roll and does not know even the very simplest formal criteria of jazz. Elsewhere he goes so far as to claim: “The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a symbolic castration. ‘Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,’ the eunuch-like sound of the jazz bands mocks and proclaims, ‘and as a reward you will be received into a brotherhood that shares with you the mystery of impotence.’”
The path of jazz
So while on the European side a strange and ill-matched coalition of cultural traditionalists on the one hand and a constructivist avant-garde on the other rejected jazz, jazz itself developed further towards the end of the 1920s and put its formal principles, improvisation, individual tone and rhythmic intensity, on a new footing.
For in the 1920s it was not at all clear whether improvisation would last as the central feature of jazz. In the first jazz bands, whose members often could not read music, improvisation was more or less a means of lengthening the pieces they played from memory. If an improvisation sounded good, it was played again and again from memory and so gradually became a fixed part of the composition, which was sometimes even taken over and copied by other musicians. The compositions of George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman were seen by the (white) American public as a refinement and upgrading of jazz, which was thus freed from dirt and crudeness.
It was only Louis Armstrong’s famous recordings with his “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” in 1928 that clearly put the spontaneous and improvisational side of jazz back at the centre. With great creative power, Armstrong presented his improvisations not as variations on the melody but as entirely new inventions based on the chords of the piece. His earthy and expressive trumpet tone became a model for countless jazz musicians and so set jazz on a new course. At the same time the composer and bandleader Duke Ellington found a way of combining composition and improvisation that remains a model in jazz to this day. In his compositions he left the musicians room to bring in their own ideas, and he wrote his pieces so that they were tailored to the improvising styles of his soloists.
What all three basic elements of jazz (improvisation, groove, sound) have in common is that they cannot be written down in a score. An improvisation is by its very nature not notated, and rhythmic intensity and individual tone cannot be captured in notes either. The further development of jazz brought about by Armstrong, Ellington and others was therefore only possible through the spread of a new medium: the gramophone record. To this day the recording (by now mostly the CD) is the central medium through which musicians get to know new styles and in which old styles are preserved. In jazz, sheet music only has an auxiliary function, to make it easier to perform pieces. But every jazz musician knows that the “real” music lies not in the notes but in spontaneous interplay.
Two media, two styles of music
By the mid-1930s, then, two different ways of making music faced each other, each linking a fundamentally different scale of values regarding music with the use of different techniques for passing music on:
On the one side, European composed music, referred to by its advocates, not really accurately, as “E-Musik” (“serious music”; for of course composers like Bach and Mozart also wrote out-and-out entertainment music). Here the score is the decisive medium. The musical work of art is contained first and foremost in the score, which takes precedence even over the actual performance of the music. Form, structure and construction are the decisive features by which the value of the music is measured. The question of whether this music is able to speak to listeners fades completely into the background, since there is a strong mistrust of the listener without an academic education and of any emotional and physical perception of music. Paradoxically, there is a strong, historically grounded link here between a cultural traditionalism that refuses to give up listening expectations formed in the 19th century and an avant-garde of composers who rely on musicians from this tradition to perform new works, while consistently applying atonal and constructivist principles.
On the other side stand the African American styles of music that grew out of jazz: rock music, South American music, reggae, soul, funk, all the way to hip hop. These kinds of music need no sheet music; the music is passed on through recordings, since its essential means of expression cannot be written down in notes. Although this music is often disparaged as “U-Musik” (“entertainment music”), it is artistically shaped music that deals with the existential problems of people today, produces worldviews and visions of life, and is quite often extraordinarily complex. The ability of this music to appeal directly to physical feelings does, however, carry the danger of commercial exploitation, of its being used as a stimulating or sedating drug. Then again, one has to recognise that commercial marketing strategies have opened up possibilities even for artistically ambitious music from this field that it would never have had in the ideologically entrenched concert world of so-called “E-Musik”.
The unfulfilled predictions of New Music
After the Second World War both forms of music developed further within their respective stylistic approaches. It then became clear that two predictions the composers of New Music had made about the further course of music history did not come true.
According to these predictions, the influence of jazz was to be merely short-lived and superficial, a passing fashion. In fact, however, jazz developed ever new and artistically ever more ambitious styles, as well as a strong awareness of its own history. Rock music, which grew out of jazz, shaped the musical sensibility of further generations of young people and not only displaced the Schlager (German popular song), which is a form of entertainment music modelled on classical music, but also produced impressive works of art with a lasting influence.
The composers of New Music had also assumed that atonal means of expression would prevail in the general listening sensibility. Analogous to the sequence of scandal and acceptance that accompanied the work of many classical composers in the 18th and 19th centuries, general acceptance was expected for “New Music” too. “In 50 years people will be whistling my pieces in the street,” Arnold Schoenberg had said. In the decades after the Second World War, however, this assumption increasingly turned out to be wrong. The “emancipation of the dissonance” that had been called for, that is, liberation from tonal hearing, did not happen. A dissonance is still felt as tension and the consonance that follows it as release.
It is precisely on this point that the difference between New Music and modern art shows most clearly: the paintings of Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee and the other representatives of classical modernism did, after initial rejection, achieve great public success and shaped the visual sensibility of most people and everyday culture, right down to advertising graphics. The new artistic techniques, such as the techniques of collage and frottage developed by the Surrealist Max Ernst, are indispensable parts of an education in creativity in school art lessons.
A new attempt at encounter in the 1960s
While many composers of New Music responded to the growing drift apart of these two stylistic concepts by demanding political support and more public presentation of their music, and regarded the spread of African American styles of music as a catastrophe for European culture, there were some composers who sought renewed contact with jazz. Outstanding among them is the Cologne composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who in his opera “Die Soldaten” and in many other works tried to bring jazz and popular music into his style of composition. His idea of time as a continuum in which all layers of time overlap and relate to one another is closely connected with the experience of time in jazz improvisation. Other composers in the 1960s also tried to bring improvisational elements into music through so-called “aleatoric” methods. They built principles of chance and freedom for the musicians into their compositions. Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the leading composers of the avant-garde, even led an improvisation ensemble towards the end of the 1960s.
On the other side, free jazz brought jazz musicians closer to the atonal sounds of New Music. Jazz improvisations were freed from the harmonic frameworks and continuous metres that had underpinned them until then; what mattered now was spontaneous interaction, which also took in noise-like elements. In Europe above all, jazz musicians tried to develop an independent variety of free jazz that was in close contact with New Music. Albert Mangelsdorff, Manfred Schoof, Gunter Hampel and Peter Brötzmann in Germany, Misha Mengelberg and Willem Breuker in the Netherlands, Evan Parker and John Surman in England, and many others shaped the sound of this music.
But while free jazz really did make jazz in Europe independent, grown up so to speak, and there are still scenes of freely improvising musicians in many European cities today, the composers of New Music soon gave up their engagement with jazz and other improvisational means of expression. In the 1970s and 1980s the avant-garde concepts lost their force. Karlheinz Stockhausen began writing his esoteric magnum opus “Eine Woche aus Licht”, which in some respects leads back to the 19th century and to Richard Wagner’s conception of music theatre. Composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Wolfgang Rihm, who saw themselves as guardians of the tradition of orchestral music, shaped how the younger generation of composers understood itself. The works of Henze and Rihm are tailored to the traditional line-ups of orchestral music, which makes them easier to perform. Moreover, despite their atonal way of composing, they connect to the music of the 19th century in how they sound to the listener, which also makes them easy to integrate into the classical music business.
A divide that persists
The two lines of development in 20th-century European music that I have described have led to two completely separate musical worlds, which live largely by their own laws. It should be noted that the forms of music that stem from jazz shape the feel for music and for the body, the way of moving and the sense of time of most people. As with every vital form of culture, in African American music there are close relationships and mutual influences between art and functional music. The spectrum ranges from complex concert music in jazz, through rock music, which is often ambitious in its lyrics and staging too, all the way to the shallow background music on many radio stations.
An important aspect of African American music is its ability to take up both short-lived trends and the profound problems of our time and give them artistic form. Like no music before it, it is also able to integrate different influences and musical cultures. In recent years, for example, both jazz and popular music have increasingly engaged with stylistic elements of the musical traditions of the Middle East. This is a positive side of globalisation and a creative alternative to the much-proclaimed clash of civilisations.
European composed music, by contrast, is sealing itself off more and more. Although it is supported politically and with large sums of money and still dominates school curricula, it is less and less anchored in people’s musical experience. It is increasingly felt to be a self-contained musical language no longer capable of development, comparable to the ancient languages, Latin or Ancient Greek. Of course it is important for understanding the history of European culture to learn ancient languages too, and of course there are irreplaceable and timelessly valid texts in these languages. But no one would try to hold a discussion about today’s issues in one of them. It is the same with classical music: even the many young people who learn a classical orchestral instrument generally do not listen to classical music outside their focused work on the instrument and their few visits to concerts, but to popular music, which is also what they identify with.
New Music is a little-loved appendage of classical music, imposed as a compulsory part of the programme at “Jugend musiziert” (the German national youth music competition), a rare item in subscription concerts, rather dreary teaching material in the upper years of secondary school, and otherwise confined to insider events. It is wedged between its own utopian, avant-garde aspirations and the cultural traditionalism of the classical music business into which it is integrated. That business, after all, serves to a large extent to give the middle classes a sense of their own identity and to set European culture apart from the other cultures of the world. This situation leads many composers and followers of New Music to interpret the history of the 20th century as one long decline, against which a tiny band of initiates struggles desperately and in vain.
A look into the future
But what does the split in musical life described above mean in concrete terms for the further development of European music in the 21st century? In my view, New Music, through its fixation on the written score and on the classical orchestral instruments, and through its mistrust of all physical ways of perceiving music, is not able to combine an authentically European consciousness with openness to the world and positive visions of the future. The basic stylistic elements of jazz (improvisation, rhythmic intensity and individual tone) are too important as stylistic achievements of the 20th century simply to be ignored. They also shape listeners’ musical sensibility too strongly; this step in development cannot be reversed.
So if there is to be an approach that makes European traditions fruitful for the music of the 21st century, it must take the opposite path: on the basis of jazz, both the written score and the classical orchestra as an ensemble can be reinterpreted, changed and combined with other stylistic elements, so as to build a bridge between the music of earlier centuries and the music of the future.
Notes:
On rereading the text, I noticed a few things that call for explanation and addition. First, I noticed that my account of both the music history of the 20th century and the present situation refers very strongly to conditions in Germany. In Germany, Adorno’s theses and Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique have had a particularly lasting effect. Political support for the classical concert business and the orientation of school curricula towards classical music are also particularly strong here.
In other European countries, above all England, France and Russia, composed music in the 20th century was not so much determined by constructivist concepts, but followed on from the concert music of the 19th century from the outset. The works of Benjamin Britten in England, Ravel, Milhaud and Messiaen in France, and Prokofiev and Shostakovich in Russia may serve as examples. What characterises these countries, however, is that the opposition between supposedly “serious” and “entertainment” music (E- and U-Musik) does not exist in this form, that the styles of music influenced by jazz enjoy far greater recognition and public appreciation, and that classical composed music is required to face a competitive situation in which it must remain comprehensible to enough listeners.
Second, in Germany too there is a school of composers, the “Neues Musiktheater” (New Music Theatre) founded in Cologne by Mauricio Kagel, which brings improvisational concepts and engagement with popular and non-European music into its work. Among them are the composers Manos Tsangaris, Maria de Alvear and Carola Bauckholt. What characterises this school, however, is the strong inclusion of elements of experimental theatre. Music is only one element among others here. Popular music, when it is occasionally brought in, is used in the manner of a collage and alludes to social realities. In this respect, interesting as it may be, this approach does not resolve the stylistic dilemma I have described. In addition, this group of composers plays only a small role within the classical music scene, one that certainly gets attention but has little influence.
I am aware that so brief an account of 20th-century music history as the one I have given above is always incomplete and in a certain sense one-sided. My aim was to show how the opposition between classical concert music and the African American styles came about, an opposition that is painfully felt every day in musical life, in the concert world as well as in schools and music schools, and that blocks both the passing on of musical awareness to the young generation and the development of forms of music fit for the future.
Matthias Petzold, June 2008