In the turn of the century, there were a group of men called the American Five. They composed pieces outside the norm, that would help shape an original, distinct American style of classical music. Who knows where we’d be without them.
But, all composers come and go as they do. And they typically carry on the work their predecessors leave behind. For the American Five, these were the Modernist composers.
Much like the American Five before them, the modernist composers of the 1950s were also producing compositions unlike anything America had either seen or was prepared for. Unlike, the American Five, however, they took that experimentation much farther than the former group, creating pieces that are best described as Organized Chaos.
No, not THAT type of Organized Chaos.
Ah, that’s better.
Whether they come from John Cage, John Cowell, or any old John who believed in the style, the pieces usually sounded like a Sturm und Drang, but with more “Sturm” and less “Drang”. But like most compositions, there’s a method to this madness: a method Milton Babbitt described in his thesis “Who Cares if you Listen”.
He describes the following four key features of “new music”:
1. There is an increased tonal vocabulary (in others words, increased atonal elements) compared to styles past.
2. An in turn increased number of functions (all related to the following five dimensions: pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration, and timbre) associated with the musical components being presented.
3. There is a greater sense of autonomy and contextuality in these types of pieces then there is in pieces past; they don’t so much share a set of characteristics so much as there are a set catered specifically to that piece.
And 4. Though it should be new and exhilarating, it should not stray too far from tradition, for to not honor the people who helped your music get to where it is now will isolate the listener (not that the compositions didn’t end up isolating listeners anyway, but that’s a whole other matter completely).
To boil the above guidelines into one sentence, what Babbitt’s saying is this: Move forward but Don’t Forget where you came from. It’s bad for you and bad for your audience. And there’s no shame in taking something away from a seasoned composer. Babbitt himself did this with one composer in particular, one that has influenced him and countless other composers like him: Anton Schoenberg.
Herr Schoenberg came to America in 1941 to escape Nazi persecution. It was not because he was a Jew, but because his style of composing was frowned upon in Nazi Germany. (incidentally, Kurt Weill left for that exact reason, but that's neither here nor there). And that style of composing:
Why, twelve-tone serialism, of course (17:59).
Twelve-tone technique, of course, is one that ensures that all twelve tones in the chromatic scale are heard, without any one tone being emphasized. The music thus promotes both equality and atonality at an equal level. And when he came to America where his music was (...somewhat) more accepted, He found composers willing to give Schoenberg’s idea a try. Composers like Aaron Copland, William Schuman, and Royal Harris found uses of Twelve-Tone Serialism in their catalogs. Even Leonard Bernstein crafted a cleverly-hidden Row in the Fugue section of “Cool” from West Side Story.
But there is another man who would also experiment with this idea of Twelve-Tone serialism, a man who, in his address at a Schoenberg conference, Claudio Spies would call out by name: Milton Babbitt.
He would not only embrace Schoenberg’s idea of the Twelve-Tone Row, but would also expand on and improve it.
Take his Composition for Four Instruments, for example.
One need only take a pacing glance at the score to see the atonal and twelve-tonal influences. Below is a chart detailing the pitch arrays found in this piece.
As one can hear in the beginning, this piece does not follow any of the prescribed sets exactly. And that’s part of what sets Babbitt apart from Schoenberg: the amount of variation and transformation found within this composition. Sure, Schoenberg experimented with Retrograde, Inversion, and Retrogrades of Inversions, but there are literally billions of combination possibilities with Twelve-tone music, and Babbitt clearly recognized that.
So, to recapitulate, Experimentation is always good for music. All things have to evolve to fit their environment in order to achieve long-term survival, and music is no exception. That being said, though, it’s equally important to respect and build off of the lessons of the past. The masters of days gone by are masters for a reason, and many of them were experimentalists in their days. Learning from their past and what made their compositions so special is the difference between a composer and a master.
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