After 1945

Introduction: Many Paths

After the Second World War, there was no longer one common practice. Composers pursued radically different answers to the question of what music could be: total control (integral serialism, Chapter 33) and its opposite, chance; dense masses of sound; electronic media; steady pulse and repetition; the physics of sound itself; and the free mixing of styles past and present. This chapter surveys the main currents and gives you analytical tools for each. Many of them are still very much alive in concert, film, game, and electronic music today.

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Chance and Indeterminacy

• Chance in composition: the composer uses random procedures to make decisions, but the resulting score is fixed. John Cage composed Music of Changes (1951) by consulting the I Ching through coin tosses.
• Indeterminacy in performance: the score leaves choices to the performers, so every performance differs. Cage's 4′33″ (1952) frames the ambient sounds of the performance space as the piece.
• Open form: the performer chooses the order of sections (Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, 1956).
• Aleatory counterpoint: Witold Lutosławski wrote passages in which each player repeats a notated figure ad libitum at their own pace, uncoordinated, producing a shimmering texture whose pitch content is controlled but whose rhythmic alignment is free.
• Graphic notation: symbols, shapes, and drawings in place of (or alongside) staff notation, as in Earle Brown's December 1952, Morton Feldman's Projections, and Cornelius Cardew's Treatise.

Texture and Sound Mass

Some composers shifted attention from individual lines and chords to the shape of the whole texture. In Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), fifty-two strings play tone clusters, quarter-tone bands, glissandi, and extended techniques, notated with thick black bands and new symbols. György Ligeti's Atmosphères (1961) uses micropolyphony: dozens of independent lines, each precisely notated, blur into a slowly changing cloud in which no single line can be heard.

• Cluster: a chord of adjacent semitones (or quarter tones), notated as a black band between its outer pitches.
• Extended techniques: unconventional ways of playing (col legno, bowing behind the bridge, multiphonics, prepared piano, key clicks, speaking into the instrument).
• Texture as form: sections are defined by density, register, and timbre rather than by themes and keys.

Electronic and Electroacoustic Music

• Musique concrète (Pierre Schaeffer, Paris, 1948): recorded sounds (trains, voices, objects) cut, looped, reversed, and transformed on disc and tape.
• Elektronische Musik (Cologne, early 1950s): sounds built from electronic oscillators, carefully controlled (Stockhausen's Studie II). His Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) blends electronic sounds with a recorded boy's voice.
• Tape and space: Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique (1958) was played through hundreds of loudspeakers in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair.
• Synthesizers and computers: voltage-controlled synthesizers (Moog, Buchla) in the 1960s, then digital synthesis, sampling, and real-time interactive systems (today, environments such as Max and Pure Data).
• Mixed works combine live performers with fixed media or live electronics.

Minimalism

In the 1960s, composers including La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass turned away from complexity toward steady pulse, consonant or modal harmony, and gradual processes that the listener can follow. Riley's In C (1964) has performers move through 53 short patterns at their own pace over a steady pulse.

• Additive process (Glass): a figure grows or shrinks by one note at a time: 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4…
• Phasing (Reich): two performers play the same repeating pattern; one gradually speeds up until it's one note ahead, settles, and repeats, so the pattern lines up against itself in every possible way (Piano Phase, 1967).
• Process as form: the piece unfolds by its process; harmony may change rarely, and slight shifts become major events.
• Postminimalism (John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Julia Wolfe, and many others) keeps the pulse and repetition but adds dramatic harmony, orchestration, and form.

Spectralism

In the 1970s, French composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail founded spectral music, which takes the physics of sound as its source. Using computer analysis of real sounds, they built harmonies from the harmonic series (a fundamental and its overtones), and treated harmony, timbre, and form as one continuum. Grisey's Partiels (1975) begins by orchestrating the spectrum of a low trombone E.

Two useful facts: the frequency of partial n is n times the fundamental, and partials that are powers of two (1, 2, 4, 8, 16) are octaves of the fundamental. Partial 3 is a fifth above partial 2; partial 5 is a (slightly flat) major third above partial 4.

Tintinnabuli

Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli style (from the Latin for "little bells"), begun with Für Alina (1976), pairs two voices by rule: an M-voice (melodic) moving mostly by step, and a T-voice (tintinnabuli) that always sounds a note of the tonic triad, chosen by a fixed rule, such as the nearest triad note above the M-voice ("first position, superior").

Postmodernism, Collage, and Today

• Quotation and collage: Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968) layers quotations from Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and others over a movement of Mahler's Second Symphony. George Crumb and Alfred Schnittke ("polystylism") mix styles within single works.
• Neo-Romanticism and a return to tonal and modal materials (Rochberg, Górecki, many film composers).
• New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough and others): extremely intricate notation as a deliberate performance challenge.
• Today: composers move freely among all these resources, plus jazz, rock, electronic dance music, and world traditions. Analysis starts by asking which tools the piece uses, then applying the right methods from this whole book.

Try It: Phase Machine

Summary

• Chance (in composition) and indeterminacy (in performance), open form, aleatory counterpoint, and graphic notation give up some control to procedures or performers.
• Sound mass, clusters, micropolyphony, and extended techniques make texture and timbre the primary materials.
• Electronic music: musique concrète, elektronische Musik, tape, synthesizers, computers, and live electronics.
• Minimalism: steady pulse and audible process (additive process, phasing); postminimalism adds drama.
• Spectralism builds harmony from the harmonic series; partials 7, 11, 13, and 14 deviate notably from equal temperament.
• Tintinnabuli pairs a stepwise M-voice with a triadic T-voice; collage, polystylism, and eclecticism characterize much recent music.

Check Your Understanding