Modern classical

On December 22, 1894, in Paris, a flute opened Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune alone, sliding down to a tritone — the one interval the whole harmonic language had agreed must resolve — and letting it hang there, unaccompanied.¹ Pierre Boulez later called the piece “the beginning of modern music,” and what began was a permission.² For roughly three hundred years European art music had run on a shared law: a home key to leave and return to, dissonance as tension owed a resolution, consonance as rest. Modern classical is everything composers built once they stopped paying that debt: atonal Vienna, the postwar electronic studios, an American music of pulse and process, and a living wave of quiet piano records that outsell all of it. A century of refusals holds the wing together.

The break with tonality

The old language died of its own richness before anyone attacked it. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde opens on a four-note chord so ambiguous that theorists have produced at least six competing analyses of it — the chord had outrun the vocabulary available to describe it.³ Debussy and Maurice Ravel loosened the obligations further, letting chords float free of function. Then came the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on May 29, 1913 — stamped, displaced accents and grinding superimposed chords under Nijinsky’s deliberately graceless choreography. The disturbance was real: laughter from the first bars, factions shouting each other down, Nijinsky in the wings screaming step numbers to dancers who could not hear the orchestra, and, by the conductor Pierre Monteux’s account, “Everything available was tossed in our direction, but we continued to play on.”⁴ What it was not was the legendary riot. A Paris critic described “a rowdy debate.” About forty offenders were ejected, and the performance ran to completion and took curtain calls. The word “riot” was pinned on it eleven years later, by an American reviewer of the Boston Symphony’s 1924 New York performance.⁵

The deepest break was Viennese and quieter. Arnold Schoenberg argued that dissonance differs from consonance in comprehensibility, and that ears had been catching up for centuries: “emancipating” the dissonance meant releasing the chord from its legal obligation to resolve.⁶ He annotated his own crossing: in the finale of his Second String Quartet the key signature disappears, and a soprano sings Stefan George’s line about feeling the air of another planet.⁷ A decade of free atonality later, he systematized the freedom into the twelve-tone method — all twelve notes arranged into a fixed row, none permitted to rule, the row’s orderings serving as the piece’s entire genetic material — and insisted to the end that this was inheritance, the craft of Bach and Brahms carried on after tonality’s scaffolding fell away.⁸ His two great pupils pulled it in opposite directions. Alban Berg smuggled the old world back in: the row of his Violin Concerto ends in four rising whole tones that happen to be, note for note, the opening of the Bach chorale Es ist genug, which the concerto then quotes outright in Bach’s own harmonization.⁹ Anton Webern went the other way, compressing whole symphonic arguments into minutes of pointillist quiet. Same system, opposite temperaments: the best evidence that what Vienna built was a method, never a style.¹⁰

The postwar laboratory

After 1945 the center moved to a hunting lodge outside Darmstadt, where a bombed-out Germany began holding summer courses in the music the Nazis had banned — premieres arriving decades late, the early budgets partly underwritten by the American occupation.¹¹ The catalyst came from Olivier Messiaen, whose 1949 piano study Mode de valeurs et d’intensités welded every pitch to its own fixed duration, loudness, and attack: a note was no longer a pitch but a pre-formed object.¹² The young Boulez pushed the idea to totality in Structures, serializing rhythm and dynamics along with pitch, and buried Schoenberg the same year in a notorious essay — the master had poured a radical method into inherited classical molds, “reminiscences of a dead world,” and the obituary ends in capital letters: “SCHOENBERG IS DEAD.”¹³ György Ligeti, analyzing Structures bar by bar, drew the deflating conclusion that would hang over the whole project: the numbers had become tables, and the tables were “finally used like a fetish.”¹⁴

The laboratory’s other wings redefined the instrument itself. In Paris, Pierre Schaeffer built the first musique concrète from six locomotives recorded at Batignolles station, looping the sounds in locked record grooves — “I am seeking direct contact with sound material,” he said, “without electrons getting in the way.”¹⁵ In Cologne, Karlheinz Stockhausen went the opposite direction, building timbre from bare sine tones, and in Gesang der Jünglinge sent a boy chorister’s recorded voice dissolving into synthetic timbre across five composed channels of loudspeakers, space itself scored as a musical dimension; the studio century that grew from Paris and Cologne is Electronic’s own founding story.¹⁶ In New York, John Cage handed decisions to coin tosses and the I Ching, and after a visit to an anechoic chamber, where silence turned out to be the sound of his own nervous system and his own blood, wrote 4′33″: the pianist David Tudor at Woodstock in August 1952, closing the piano lid over three timed movements. Of the audience that stormed out, Cage said: “What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.”¹⁷ Iannis Xenakis, an engineer from Le Corbusier’s office, composed sound the way physics describes gases: Metastaseis gives its sixty-one players sixty-one separate parts, massed string glissandi tracing curved sheets of sound. His models, set out in Formalized Music, were mass events — hail on hard surfaces, cicadas in a summer field, the crowds of the demonstrations he had heard in wartime Athens.¹⁸ And in 1970s Paris, Gérard Grisey opened Partiels by handing an orchestra the sonogram of a trombone’s pedal E and assigning each player one partial of the analyzed spectrum: the ensemble as a living synthesizer, the inside of a single sound blown up into a piece.¹⁹

The empty hall

The invention came at a price the era admitted in print. The critic Henry Pleasants opened his 1955 broadside with “Serious music is a dead art.”²⁰ When Leonard Bernstein programmed Cage on the New York Philharmonic’s subscription concerts in 1964, the players themselves sabotaged the piece — whistling into the contact microphones, playing scales — and Cage afterward called the orchestra criminals.²¹ Elliott Carter had already made the withdrawal explicit, writing his First String Quartet “to say to hell with the public and with the performers too.”²² The era’s manifesto arrived in 1958, when High Fidelity published Milton Babbitt’s argument that the modern composer had become a specialist, as unintelligible to the layman as a research mathematician, and should withdraw into the university. It ran under the inflammatory title “Who Cares if You Listen?,” which an editor substituted for Babbitt’s own “The Composer as Specialist.” The headline pursued him for the rest of his life. “Of course, I do care if you listen,” he protested decades later, but the essay had said what it said.²³ Schoenberg had supplied the charter years before: “if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”²⁴

The pulse

The reaction came from California, and it began as a practical fix. Terry Riley’s In C (1964) fits on a single page: fifty-three numbered modules, no time signature, every player repeating each figure as long as they like before moving on. In rehearsals for the San Francisco premiere the ensemble kept drifting apart, and one member suggested an eighth-note pulse on the piano’s top two Cs. “So Steve Reich came up with the idea of putting a pulse in it so that we could stay together,” Riley recalled: minimalism’s steady heartbeat was born as a rehearsal aid.²⁵ Reich’s own discovery was an accident of cheap equipment: two tape recorders playing identical loops of a Pentecostal preacher slowly slid out of sync, and what he heard, in his words, was “a whole way of making music.” The phasing pieces that followed put the discovery on principle, stated plainly in his 1968 essay: “I don’t know any secrets of structure that you can’t hear” — a single sentence answering Ligeti’s fetish-tables and Babbitt’s specialist at once.²⁶ Philip Glass reached the same country through India, transcribing Ravi Shankar’s music for Western players and learning from the tabla master’s repeated rejections that rhythm could be built by addition, small cells piled into long lines. The additive style carried him to Einstein on the Beach (1976), five hours with Robert Wilson and no intermission, the audience free to come and go; the Metropolitan Opera performances left the production in debt, and Glass went back to driving a cab.²⁷ The establishment’s verdicts were savage — Glass’s music was “lobotomized Bruckner” to one Harvard composer, minimalism “an aspect of a society-wide mental illness” to another — but the audience the avant-garde had lost came back through this door, and stayed.²⁸

A sacred branch slowed the pulse to stillness. Arvo Pärt emerged from years of silence in 1976 with tintinnabuli, a technique of exactly two voices: a melody moving by step, and against it a voice that only ever plays the three notes of one triad. “The three notes of a triad are like bells,” runs his gloss, in the line that follows him everywhere.²⁹ Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 was buried by German-language critics at its 1977 premiere; fifteen years later the Nonesuch recording with soprano Dawn Upshaw sold past a million copies, reached No. 6 on the UK album chart, and sat on top of the American classical chart for thirty-eight weeks — a living composer’s symphony outselling pop records.³⁰

The living wave

Minimalism’s tonal, audible processes proved the wing’s most portable invention, and from the 2000s a generation raised on both Pärt and electronics built from them a music that reaches audiences the postwar avant-garde never had. Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks (2004) — five string players, piano, and Tilda Swinton reading Kafka — was recorded as, in his words, “a protest album about Iraq”; his Sleep (2015) runs eight and a half hours and premiered overnight on BBC Radio 3 with the audience in beds.³¹ Jóhann Jóhannsson carried the idiom deeper into film scoring, Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm built parallel piano-and-electronics catalogs, Ludovico Einaudi filled the arenas, and Ryuichi Sakamoto spent his last decade inside it. What the wave rejects is the name: Richter says he invented “post-classical” as a joke and that “these things are mostly made up by marketing departments.” His real target is the compositional orthodoxy he grew up under, a world that, he says, “was really just post-Boulez.”³²

What it made possible

The refusals kept turning into other people’s tools. John Cale carried La Monte Young’s eternal drones from the Theatre of Eternal Music into the Velvet Underground, where, as he put it, “the drones that we used there turned out to be a drapery for the songs.”³³ David Bowie heard Music for 18 Musicians in Berlin in 1976, and the debt surfaced on Low’s instrumental side.³⁴ Brian Eno named Reich’s tape music “probably, as a working composer, the most important piece that I heard” — a simple system generating endless variety became the operating principle of Ambient.³⁵ The lineage even produced a family quarrel in print: in 1995 The Wire had Stockhausen listen to Aphex Twin, and he prescribed his own Gesang der Jünglinge so the younger man “would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions”; Aphex Twin’s reply suggested Stockhausen listen to his tracks in turn and “stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to.”³⁶ Dance music answered with Sampling: the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” is built over Pat Metheny’s recording of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint.³⁷

Film carried the postwar sound furthest, by accident. Stanley Kubrick cut 2001: A Space Odyssey to a temporary track of classical records and fell for his own placeholder (the same cutting-room accident The song in film documents for pop records), discarding the commissioned score and released the film with four Ligeti works in it, without the composer’s knowledge. Ligeti learned at the Vienna premiere, sued, and by his own telling collected three thousand dollars; the film, one critic wrote, “did for him what Sgt. Pepper’s did for Stockhausen.”³⁸ William Friedkin built The Exorcist from Krzysztof Penderecki records, wanting music like “a cold hand on the back of your neck.” Kubrick did it deliberately in The Shining, which is how the postwar avant-garde became, permanently, the sound of horror: not because composers set out to frighten anyone, but because directors reached for concert records as placeholders and never put them back.³⁹ The commissions followed the needle-drops. Jonny Greenwood, who first heard Penderecki thinking “it must be an electronic concert… But it was just a string orchestra playing,” wrote There Will Be Blood out of that revelation, and Mica Levi scored Under the Skin in deliberate microtones — “out of tune, but… more expressive because it’s not precise and accurate” — the whole postwar argument compressed into one sentence by a composer born in 1987.⁴⁰

Is it one genre?

The wing still argues over its own name — “modern” against “contemporary,” with neoclassicism’s backward glances pointedly held apart — and the argument is the identity. Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise narrates the century as social history, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s Music after the Fall picks up after 1989, when the subsidized world that had sheltered the specialists gave way and new music went looking for its audience again. Keith Potter’s Four Musical Minimalists and Robert Fink’s Repeating Ourselves take the measure of the style that turned out to matter most.⁴¹ What unites an atonal scream and a consonant drone is a shared decision, renewed for over a century, that the inherited language was optional. Every school here refused something — resolution, the concert hall, the audience itself — and every refusal became a resource: the drone became the Velvets, the process became ambient, the shriek became the movies’ fear. The wing that emptied its own hall keeps furnishing everyone else’s rooms.

rhapsode

Explorer

Modern classical

The break with tonality

The postwar laboratory

The empty hall

The pulse

The living wave

What it made possible

Is it one genre?

See also

Sources drawn on

rhapsode

Explorer

Modern classical

The break with tonality

The postwar laboratory

The empty hall

The pulse

The living wave

What it made possible

Is it one genre?

See also

Footnotes

Sources drawn on