The 20th century scientific explosion had been in the works since the Enlightenment, but the rate of change, which had been slow, and adaptable, now came in flashes – like a supernova - and repeatedly, one major wave after another and in ways that dramatically changed our society; instead of having time to gradually adapt and fold these changes into our ordered lives, our lives were forced to conform instead.
I hope you’re ready for an adventure, because this episode, and actually the next two after this, are going to challenge you. You see, the music we’ll discover together was written in complete rejection of the basic assumptions about western music. What’s equally fascinating is what the rest of the music world did with these musical ideas!
To understand what was happening in America, we have to start away from home, in Europe, in the late 1930’s. There were a number of European musicians and composers who developed completely new ways of creating, performing, and sharing music that had an equally transformative influence on the music being made in America.
In This Episode
Arnold Schoenberg
Milton Babbitt
Charles Wuorinen
Jerrald Goldsmith
Gerard Schurman
Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind
The Beatles
Primus
Dave Brubeck
Bill Evans
John Coltrane
Ornette Coleman
The 20th century scientific explosion had been in the works since the Enlightenment, but the rate of change, which had been slow, and adaptable, now came in flashes – like a supernova - and repeatedly, one major wave after another and in ways that dramatically changed our society; instead of having time to gradually adapt and fold these changes into our ordered lives, our lives were forced to conform instead.
I hope you’re ready for an adventure, because this episode, and actually the next two after this, are going to challenge you. You see, the music we’ll discover together was written in complete rejection of the basic assumptions about western music. What’s equally fascinating is what the rest of the music world did with these musical ideas!
To understand what was happening in America, we have to start away from home, in Europe, in the late 1930’s. There were a number of European musicians and composers who developed completely new ways of creating, performing, and sharing music that had an equally transformative influence on the music being made in America.
In This Episode
Arnold Schoenberg
Milton Babbitt
Charles Wuorinen
Jerrald Goldsmith
Gerard Schurman
Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind
The Beatles
Primus
Dave Brubeck
Bill Evans
John Coltrane
Ornette Coleman
One: Serialism
The 20th century – it was an interesting place, but you probably wouldn’t want to live in it.
I think you’d have to agree, the most impressive thing about a pretty violent, and destructive century was the bewilderingly rapid growth of science and technology. These two forces influenced and changed every aspect of life as we’d known it for many centuries. In fact, in 1961, President Kennedy told us this….
(Kennedy quote from U of Texas Houston speech)
Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime
Science and technology were virtually erasing life as people had always known it, right before their very eyes. In a single life time, cars, airplanes and jets, radios, transistors, and vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, semi-conductors, television, movies and calculators, gigantic-building sized computers and then desk-top models with much more memory and processing speed, local area networks, the world-wide-web, satellites, telegraphs, telephones, mobile phones, electric lights, fluorescent lights, neon lights, and lasers, polio shots, antibiotics, cardiac surgery, brain surgery, organ transplants, molecular biology, the discovery of DNA, mapping the human genome, sub atomic physics, nuclear fission, the atomic bomb, the first satellites, space research, rockets, lunar landings and space shuttles….
The 20th century scientific explosion had been in the works since the Enlightenment, but the rate of change, which had been slow, and adaptable, now came in flashes – like a supernova - and repeatedly, one major wave after another and in ways that dramatically changed our society; instead of having time to gradually adapt and fold these changes into our ordered lives, our lives were forced to conform instead.
There were also changes to our cultural institutions; folklore, language, psychology and psychiatry, social customs, ways of life, religions, and education systems – all these things were reshaped in the flood of change that swept in during the 1900’s. Social communication, entertainment, traditional arts, for instances puppet shows, storytelling, mythology, drama, and folk dances were marginalized as commercially produced mass media – movies, radio, recorded music, television and the world wide web were introduced, grew, and expanded. As the technology engulfed older forms, it carried messages, pictures, sounds, and moving images that changed the way we thought about the world around us, as well as people’s people’s beliefs, attitudes, opinions, tastes and expectations, making things that had once been evergreen seem antiquated instead. And this meant that traditional cultural values and cultural differences were also changed. Our individual cultures lost some of the things that made each of them special and unique. At the same time, the artists started questioning fundamental things like, “What IS music anyway?”.
Songs and music that had been revered and respected for generations –like ancient hymns, folk tales, fables and mythology – things that had taught ideas and values to new generations began to seem diminished in their value. But these stories, and songs, traditions and religions were the devices that helped societies attach meaning to their lives and order to their behaviors. Radio, cinema, metal cylinders, gramophone records, reel-to-reels, 8-tracks, cassettes and CDs. Television, tv networks, cable networks, film, videotape, picture disks, DVDs and blue-rays. Electronic pickups, electric guitars, electric pianos, synthesizers, changing all that in the same way that the science was challenging the foundations and principles that people had built their lives on. Sometimes, the messages that came with modern media had a lot of negative baggage too, encouraging sensationalism, sex and violence.
The average American, by the end of the 20th century, had attained twice the education that his/ her counterpart had just a century earlier. In 1900, the average American had less than an eighth grade education. By 2000, most people had a minimum of an AA degree. For the top 20% of Americans, education had gone from an 11th grade level to a post-graduate degree. The universities were the sources of many of the changes we’d experienced, and they also were the seedbed for the markets that demanded them, but in the midst of it, they’d also taken away many of the assurances and comforts that had always made us feel at home. For all the education though, it seems to me that in some very important ways, we know less today, and some people seem more insecure about themselves today, than we did one hundred years ago. So what has it all gotten us?
By 1999, it was as if a great tsunami had swept through not just America, but most of the world, totally erasing the old one, and leaving the survivors adrift in an altogether new one. Along the way, the everyday folks who had been busy grinding away hadn’t had time to look up and notice or record what was happening. It was left to the artists to perceive the changes, and reflect them back to us in ways that helped us appreciate the magnitude of what had happened. It’s nearly impossible to see a connection to the world of 1921 from our vantage point in 2021.
One hundred years is a bit longer than most human lifetimes. A small fraction of us – I don’t know if I’d call it lucky or not – but they live longer than a century. For the first time ever, though, someone who may have started a lifetime at the front end of a century would not be able to look back from the far side of it, and still recognize the world he or she had once known. I think we might need a broader context. Let’s take a page from Kafka, and imagine we’re houseflies.
A housefly lives for 28 days. In 2019, the average span of an American man was a little less than 80 years, or roughly 1,000 housefly generations. Now, let’s think about the 1900’s again, and all the social upheaval; two world wars, political revolutions, unspeakable genocides, long-distance, mechanized warfare that leaves us feeling ‘shock and awe’, technological game changers, the erosion of the family and family values, massive environmental devastation and so on. Looking back across that hundred years would not feel like one lifetime – It would be more like looking back 1,000 generations to a world we’d once called ‘home’. Who could still recognize it?
Starting in the 1930’s, a group of composers recognized the world had changed profoundly. To be relevant, and to honestly reflect life and society as it had become, the most progressive musicians felt that a radical departure was required. Welcome to Episode 14: When the World is In Chaos, Music Becomes Noise.
I hope you’re ready for an adventure, because this episode, and actually the next two after this, are going to challenge you. You see, the music we’ll discover together was written in complete rejection of the basic assumptions about western music. What’s equally fascinating is what the rest of the music world did with these musical ideas!
To understand what was happening in America, we have to start away from home, in Europe, in the late 1930’s. There were a number of European musicians and composers who developed completely new ways of creating, performing, and sharing music that had an equally transformative influence on the music being made in America.
The Rite of Spring - Stravinsky
Imagine the sounds an orchestra, or even a single piano might make, if you suddenly removed every single rule about harmony, rhythm, song structure and melody ever created and told the musicians “I’d like you to reflect the complete loss of sanity and structure that you sense in the century you’re living in.”
12 tone music also called atonal music is a genre that has no tonal center; it’s not in any key. Instead, it uses something called a tone row – a series of notes that are related only to each other, but not to any musical key. The tone row is based on the traditional 12-pitch chromatic scale, where notes are arranged in a row or series, with each successive note being a half-step removed from the last note. All the notes in the tone row, or series, have to be used in equal measure. This way, the piece can’t acquire a tonal center. This is what gives atonal music it’s distinct sound of awkward leaps, or maybe like a three-sided wheel that – instead of rolling smoothly – moves in awkward jerks and jolts. Once a series of tones has been established, the composer creates derivatives for the original series and presents each of them throughout the composition.
Audience, meet Arnold Schoenberg, from Vienna Austria. Born in 1874, in Vienna, Austria. Schoenberg is the father of this interesting departure from the entire canon of western music - what must of us recognize as listenable. Quite an accomplishment, even if most people find it alienating, frightening, and only listenable in very small doses.
Schoenberg’s father, Samuel, was the owner of a small shoe shop located in the jewish quarter of Vienna. His family was mostly a-musical, except for a few relatives with some singing experience. Obviously a prodigy, he began composing before he was nine years old, and quickly graduated to writing violin trios and string quartets. By the time he was 23, Schoenberg had accomplished his first publicly performed work, the String Quartet in D Major, which showed the strong influence of Johannes Brahms; and for the first decade or so of his music career, he wrote fairly traditional music. But that all ended in 1909 with his first atonal piece, Opus 11.
His most important atonal pieces were written by 1924, and, translated to English, these include Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 (1909); Expectation, Op. 17 (1924), Lunar Pierrot; The Hand of Fate, Op. 18 (1924) and an unfinished oratorio called Jacob’s Ladder”). His invention of atonal music was an artistic breakthrough, even if a lot of people find it hard to listen to. Before atonal composition, western music had always been centered around a collection of notes within a given key. A key determines which notes can be included, and which cannot, based on a set of accepted rules about harmony and what we’ve been taught to think is a ‘pleasing’ sound. The musical key is a basic corner stone in music. Schoenberg’s atonal music took all that history and tore it into millions of pieces. That’s why the examples I’ve been playing for you sound so…. WEIRD!
In atonal music, the tone row – those 12 selected pitches - are more important than the concept of a melody. Instead of melody and harmony, composers worried more about how the tone rows could manipulated; inverted (the manuscript is actually turned upside down – for instance, in one direction a note could represents a ‘g’ pitch; inverted, that ‘g’ becomes a ‘d’ pitch ), the notes could be played backwards – for instance C-E-G could be played G-E-C instead, and finally the manuscript could be played backward and inverted. It’s also possible to transpose a given row from one pitch level to any other pitch level desired. Sounds nuts, right? But that’s not all of it! A series of notes written to be played as a melody, or they could also all be struck at once, regardless of the dissonance – an ugly sound - that would produce. In fact, all harmonies and melodies in the piece must be drawn from that row. You might think that writing this way would be pretty limiting – but Schoenberg showed that it was actually really freeing and he used the 12-tone row to create what some people say was his greatest work ever, an opera called Moses und Aron – the piece we’ve just been listening to.
Schoenberg, his String Quartet No. 4.
When the Nazis came to power in the 1930’s, Schoenberg, a jew, saw the writing on the wall and he emigrated to the United States. He had important professorships in music at USC and UCLA.
His presence in America electrified the classical music world – which was much more prominent in those days than it is now. If you were in that scene in those days, chances are your imagination was all around this new music. American composers – who until now felt like they were lost in a backward, provincial, populist music culture, suddenly felt like they could participate in something that was new and exciting. This new sound was the pinnacle of American art music for a good two decades, basically until the time of Schoenberg’s death, in 1951. American 12-tone composers sat on boards that awarded grants, prizes, and the occasional recording contract to like-minded composers. Even modern composers like Copland and Stravinsky – who was also living here by then – began receiving criticism for not having jumped on the serialism band wagon sooner, and they both eventually took up the technique. Better than being remembered as living fossils!
Milton Babbit was one of the Americans that Schoenberg heavily influenced. Born in 1916, Babbit’s been called the dean of American serialism. Serialism actually picks up where atonal music left off; it breaks a composition down into discrete units that can be manipulated in various ways by an orchestra instead of a piece of music being composed in a linear, beginning to end, fashion.
Babbitt was originally a mathematician, so, he was naturally attracted to the precision, theory, and abstraction. Way beyond just understanding and reproducing Schoenberg’s system, Babbitt created new rules and algorithms of his own that were used to generate new tone rows. You can see his math-roots in the terms he applied to things, such as “secondary” and “derived” sets of musical notes, combinatoriality, partitioning, arrays, pitch class, pitch set and time‑point system.
Babbitt wrote music the way other people invent new tech gadgets, with great precision and theory. To Schoenberg’s tone rows, Babbitt contributed 12 time intervals, 12 dynamic levels, and 12 instrumental timbres (or sound qualities). Perhaps the best fully mature example of Babbitt’s total serialism is his Third String Quartet (1970), in which changes in rhythmic density trigger changes of velocity, and serial principles govern every parameter, right down to when the musicians use their bows and when they pluck the strings.
Charles Wuorinen was another American composer in the Serialism category. This is his composition, Time’s Enconium, a piece written around the time that the synthesizer was first invented – at the end of the 1960’s.
During his lifetime, Wuorinen won the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. Like Babbitt, he was just as strict in his application of serial techniques.
Being a mathematician, like Babbitt, Wuorinen was fascinated with the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, a mathematician among many other accomplishments who, in the 1960’s, showed the world that many things, including clouds, snowflakes, coastlines, stock market fluctuations, brain tissue— display "self-similarity," patterns that recur at smaller and smaller scales. This principal, in Wuorinen’s work was the inspiration for pieces such as Grand Bamboula, the piece we are listening to now.
He composed in every medium of classical music, including works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, soloists, ballet, and stage. In total, he composed over 275 compositions.
For, what by now must be pretty obvious reasons, atonal and serialism styled music never found wide acceptance. But mass market popularity was never the reason behind this music. In fact, in 1958, Babbitt himself wrote an article for a record-review magazine titled “Who Cares if You Listen?” It was pretty evident Babbitt did not.
Still, atonal and serial music have left a sizable imprint on American culture. It shows up in film scores, especially in the horror and science fiction genres. If you think about it, it’s a sound that seems perfectly suited for that use, doesn’t it?
While I was preparing this episode, I crossed paths with research that showed how listening to atonal music affects people’s physiology. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that it generates fear responses! This makes serialism or atonal music the ideal genre for horror or science fiction films; it’s guaranteed to agitate and it’s certainly less joyful than tonal genres.
The score from the film, The Haunting, with Liam Neasom and Catherine Zeta-Jones is an example. The score was written by Jerrald Goldsmith, an LA native. He studied music at LA City College and USC. His films score career extends back to the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and over the years, his atonal scores have given audiences the creeps in famous films like the original version of Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Freud, the Man From U.N.C.L.E, Patton, Papillon and more. Coming from an experimental music background, his scores are full of interesting techniques. For instance, when he scored Planet of the Apes, Goldsmith used innovative techniques like looping drums into an echoplex, using the orchestra to imitate the grunting sounds of apes, having horns blown without mouthpieces, and instructing the woodwind players to finger their keys without using any air.
Gerard Schurman was another composer of film scores for horror films, including one from 1959 called Horrors of the Black Museum. He was born in the Dutch East Indies, but lived most of his life the US, and recently died in LA, aged 96. I think you’d have to agree; this is the perfect soundtrack for a film sadism, cruelty and violent sex.
When it came time to choose the composers for his 1980 film, The Shining, based on Steven King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick chose the American composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind.
Wendy Carlos also wrote the score for Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange. Born in 1939, when Schoenberg was at the height of his atonal creativity, Wendy Carlos was born and raised in Rhode Island. She studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 where she studied composition at Columbia. She helped develop the Moog synthesizer, the first commercially available keyboard instrument created by Robert Moog. Her work on the Shining’s film score, as was a lot of her work, shows her continued fascination with electronic music. In addition to the original music they wrote for the film, Carlos and Elkind also selected other atonal works for it, including a selection from Krzystoff Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. A Threnody is a song of lamentation for the dead.
I’ve already made a pretty strong point about this music being difficult, strange, and challenging. And honestly, I really don’t like it. But what else should music, forged in the literal ashes of World War II, and meant to reflect the brokenness of our world, sound like?
It’s not like the composers who were involved in the movement were unaware that what they were doing was moving away from large audiences. That said, if you look hard enough, it’s still possible to find, among the most adventurous rock bands for instance, the influence that atonality has left behind in popular music. A few examples are:
The famous orchestral section of the Beatles “A Day in the Life”.
Or this track from the band, Primus, called Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver.
So Lonely
You can also hear serialism’s influence in jazz – not surprising since jazz has always been more sophisticated than most pop music. One example comes from one of my favorite jazz pianists and composers, the great Dave Brubeck. We talked about him in an earlier episode.
In true 12-tone form, he opens the first three measures of So Lonely by presenting the tone row, and although he detours away from the tone row for most of the rest of the piece, he presents it again near the end. Unlike other strict tone row disciples, there’s no transformations of the original tone row. As for why he wrote this music, there’s a few guesses out there. For one, it forces composers to think about music in a totally different way. If you’re stuck in a rut, this is a great way to shake the creativity loose again. The second guess is that maybe Dave wanted to send a message out to the music world that he was just as sophisticated as anyone out there. A few other jazz musicians also approached 12-tone music. Bill Evans is one of those guys. He wrote a piece called T.T.T. – Twelve Tone Tune. So is Ornette Coleman.
Like 12-tone music, free Jazz is also often lacks a tonal center and free jazz was created first by Ornette. The idea, roughly, involves playing without a set harmonic structure, without a foot-tapping beat, and sometimes even without the notion of solos. The musicians are free to do whatever they want – as the spirit moves them. There’s no beat, harmony, or tonality. Since it can be atonal, it gives the improviser maximum freedom to play a solo, with no regard to underlying chords or modes. The 12 tones can be used in any order, and are all created equal. In other words, unlike other forms of jazz, there are no guide tones (notes that are found in the chords) or avoid tones (notes that aren’t in the chords). Free jazz requires no rehearsal, and often sounds disjointed. The alto and tenor sax jazz musician, Ornette Coleman and the tenor sax, alto sax and flautist, John Coltrane, are probably the two best known free jazz players.
In 1960, Ornette released an album that polarized listeners, critics, and launched a whole new genre. It was called Free Jazz, by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. Two jazz quartets played on the album, at the same time, and in totally disconnected ways. One occupied the left channel, one occupied the right channel. The entire album was recorded in a single take, with no overdubs. Have a listen to this; it’s mind-melting.
In February, ’66, the American jazz musician, John Coltrane released his album, Ascension. Ascension picked up where A Love Supreme had left off - extended solos, open, dissonant chords and he moved past the small group sound he’d used on the prior album by moving to more of a big band of very strong players including trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders, and Archie Shepp, and bassist Art Davis. Bill Evans Twelve Tone Tune was Coltrane’s inspiration for Ascension, and about that he said, “I feel indebted to him (Evans), myself. Because actually, when he came along, I was so far in this thing (harmonic structures), I didn't know where I was going to go next. And, I didn't know if I would have thought about just abandoning the chord system or not. I probably wouldn't have thought of that at all. And he came along doing it, and I heard it, I said, ‘Well, that - that must be the answer.’”
We’ll see how other modern forms of music have impacted American music in the next episode. If you’re enjoying this topic, it’s already available for you. Look for episode 15 of American Song wherever you go for your favorite podcasts! Also, we always publish our sources, in case you’d like to dig deeper into any topic. Just go to our facebook page; American Song Podcast! Thanks for listening!