Inhalt: #6 - Frühjahr 2006
ALBERTO C. BERNAL
ROTHKOPRINZIP
DIETER MACK
VOM SINN DER TOLERANZ
DAVID TOUB
NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR MUSIC DISSEMINATION
MANOS TSANGARIS
WAS HEISST SITUATIVES KOMPONIEREN?
CHRISTIAN WOLFF
EXPERIMENTS IN MUSIC AROUND 1950
GAYLE YOUNG
A PIECE OF MUSIC
To start with I ’m going to rehearse a little history, for the sake of context – but with a warning. This history – the music scene as I experienced it around 1950 and after, in which a new kind of music emerged – is hard to recount without mixing what I remember of the time then and what I later found out. John Cage once reported asking a historian how he did history, to which the historian answered, to Cage’s pleased astonishment, that he made it up. There’s a comparable phenomenon in one’s hearing of music at longer time intervals. I t may well sound different, not necessarily better understood, but really different. When we first heard Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata in New York in 1952, we were overwhelmed by its force and a complex intricacy we hadn’t known could exist (Ives might have come closest but he wasn’t so utterly abstract). When I heard the piece again some 25 years later, it sounded like another sonata in the great literature of piano sonatas, not so far, I thought, from Brahms. What could be heard in New York (where I was lucky enough to be growing up) around 1950? The Bartók string quartets, performed entire for the first time in the U.S. (Bartók had come in exile to New York in 1940 and died in 1945). A program of Berg’s Lyric Suite, Schoenberg’s 4th string quartet and Webern’s Five Pieces for String Quartet at Tanglewood in the summer of 1948. All this thanks to the Julliard String Quartet. Stravinsky’s music for Balanchine’s Orpheus. Of course a standard classical concert repertoire dominated completely, going no further back than Bach or Handel, nor beyond Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss (maybe a little Mahler). There was outstanding Dixieland jazz. Unfortunately I had little awareness of the emerging newer developments in jazz, Bebop and Charlie Parker. The popular music which I did catch on the radio – it was the era of the hit parade – seemed mostly awful to me. I did see a few musicals, Guys and Dolls and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
In January of 1950 Dmitri Mitropoulos conducted the first U.S. performance of Webern’s Symphonie, opus 21. John Cage and Morton Feldman attended. Both, overwhelmed, left the concert immediately after, found and introduced one another in the lobby of Carnegie Hall, and became close friends, passing their music and thoughts back and forth, intensively for about the next four or five years. (After that Cage would move out of the city, to Stonypoint, NY and by the end of the 60s Feldman was in Buffalo, where he lived and was professor at SUNY until his death in 1987.) A few months later, in 1950, my piano teacher, Grete Sultan, sent me to John Cage. I ’d realized my lack of talent for serious piano playing and had started to compose on my own, and, she rightly observed, I could use some help. Cage generously took me on immediately. He set me exercises to teach about structure – his rhythmic structure scheme, a practical and elegant way of organizing a whole piece such that all the time spaces, both micro and macro, were in proportional relationships. He had me analyze the first movement of the W bern Symphonie. We did – attempted – counterpoint exercises (16th century, Palestrina style). And he had me just get on with my own composition. Which I did, while the formal lessons stopped after about five or six weeks. He said the point of the exercises and counterpoint was to learn how discipline is acquired and works. Then you were on your own. We continued to see one another, sometimes with Feldman, regularly. I n 1952 Earle Brown came to New York with his wife Carolyn, she to dance with Merce Cunningham, he drawn by shared musical interests with Cage and having heard the New York based pianist David Tudor play Cage, Feldman, Boulez, and my work. The term New York School, used for the artists, then poets of around this time, got attached to us – Cage, Feldman, Brown, myself – rather later, I think. It should include the crucial figure of David Tudor and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, already associated with Cage for some time and now embracing, and using for his dances, the music of the rest of us as well. (For myself, I ’ve found in retrospect, that Cunningham’s dances, which I’ve been seeing since 1950, have had a strong effect, both inspirational and supportive or confirming; especially with respect to the dancers’ performing – the abstract patterning of movement realized by different, individual bodies (and souls, personalities) – and with regard to the structural rhythms of the choreography – its irregular, fluid, matter-of-fact and elegant ways of continuity, overlap, and simultaneity.) As for David Tudor, it is hard to imagine our musical scene without him. […]
Excerpt from Christian Wolff: EXPERIMENTS IN MUSIC AROUND 1950
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