This page is a quick shortcut to help listeners contextualise the music. It's also an opportunity to sing the praises of some of the people I admire, many of whom are still making music so any boost to sales is a positive side effect!!
Clearly the history of the twentieth century involves the dawning of the realisation that virtually anything, once heard enough times and in the proper context, will unavoidably begin to become 'music'.
Cage's journey is an important one and every part of it has relevance and beauty. For me personally though, the final years represented a golden ideal of music-making and I will always aspire to that level of musical purity and clarity.
Equally the twentieth century saw the inception of serious vernacular music. Instead of non-concert-hall music (these labels are completely useless!!) being a limited 'noble' verbal tradition passed from musician to musician with little scope for creativity in manners conventionally the domain of the concert-hall, in the 20th century the people making permanent records of their "vernacular music" achievements were able to express the very most lofty of concepts and feelings in ever-subtler ways. I'm not a musicologist and I'm not going to trace the roots of this tendency, and neither do I wholeheartedly stand by what I just said which implies it's purely a 20th century thing, but there is SOME truth to the idea that a creative subtlety arose in the latter part of the 20th century within "popular music" that hadn't really been there before.
For me the ultimate expression of the tendency for popular song to carry heart-stopping emotion and subtle philosophical and political realities lies in the work of Kristin Hersh. I would not hesitate to assert that I owe more to her work than to any "classical" composer of the 19th century. Indeed the musical grammar of a work like 'The Fat Skier' is of more use to a contemporary artist trying to find a voice than the equivalent musical grammar in 'Pierrot Lunaire'.
Inevitably Stockhausen will always tower over the work of those who started out towards the end of the period when the avant-garde was already being contextualised within the old bourgeois musical hierarchy. The difference between Stockhausen and the rest is that rather than merge with the concert tradition, he divorced from the wider music world. The 'Licht' operas are now self-sufficient concerns utilising members of his family, himself, and trusted musical collaborators. Not through a dearth of interested parties, by any means, but because working within the heart of "the industry" is impossible.
The twenty-first century is perhaps the age of the individual. If that's so then some of the early models for this way of thinking and working can already be found in the latter works of this old Master.
"Goth classical", if you will. Schnittke sometimes makes me wonder whether I'm too light-hearted and jovial about things and whether perhaps I ought to express the darker side of the truths inherent in the world. Of course that's only the case whilst listening to Schnittke's music; afterwards it's clear that he and I are in the minority.
The other thing, other than Schnittke's incredible blackness, is his sense of the need to bridge the gap between concert-hall music and vernacular music; in his case music for film.
The thing is, if you've heard the Viola Concerto and the Piano Quintet and the Piano Concerto and the First Concerto Grosso then you'll probably have an idea that Schnittke's film music will be orchestral but a bit whimsical - in actual fact he wrote a good deal of "porno-style" soundtracks, a lot of hideous marches and waltzes, sunrises and water-musics and the whole range of clichés. The key point is though it filtered through into what he started off seeing as his "serious" work - the Viola Concerto for example, the most serious of his serious works, has quotations from some very silly film music. And yet those idioms were completely integrated. When we talk about it in words it makes a mockery of the concept, as though we're talking about "stylistic quotation", but that's not it at all - the reality probably can't be expressed in words, at least definitely not by me.
I'm not certain by any means that Schnittke solved the 'problem' of the two worlds, and I'm not certain that it's necessary or desirable to create a "fusion" - the very word conjurs up horrible precedents from the past. What is clear though is that there are some extremely interesting grey areas springing up between what might be regarded as the historical premise of the concert-hall and the historical premise of the beer-hall. The boundaries are no longer at all meaningful and since both "worlds" speak more and more via recordings, that's only going to get muddier with time. My own stuff, for example, probably wouldn't fit into a traditional historical classical music concert, with only a tiny few exceptions. With Schnittke, it broadly does, with the exception of some of the film scores.
Like Cage, Xenakis quickly realised that the details were far less important than other people were assuming, and took instead to taking decisions about the broad nature of music, controlling it from above and waiting to see what beauty came out of the consequential details.
The interesting thing with this "statistical" level approach (like looking at the brain as a collection of regions rather than a collection of neurons) is that he was only using it because he knew that it was a useful way to start a piece - people have always wrongly believed that Xenakis was in some way "anal" about the methodology, and after all it's pretty much the only side of music that can be talked about (since the word 'go') so not surprisingly, like Bach and Mozart and Wagner and all the rest, the method was the thing that got into print. However the reality is that Xenakis would start off looking at a piece from the top down, then tweak it to bring out its potential. It's exactly like action painting: how many people can seriously resist tweaking it a bit? Certainly not the best people.
Interestingly, like Cage, the later works are the most moving. His 'Omega' for Bass Marimba and Trombone is probably the most beautiful contrapuntal melody-piece written in the 90s.
Again, like Stockhausen there's the punk 'do it yourself' ethic. Apparently it was T.S.Eliot who told Tippett to stop ruining other people's plays and just make up his own words, so ironically it's Eliot we have to thank for the first opera-stage utterance of "you motherfucking bastard", not to mention the first inter-racial homosexual male kiss on the opera stage, in 1973. Tippett for me has always been the voice of on the one hand naive innocence, directly expressing things through the words of sincere feeling, and on the other hand the doomed intellectual, analysing and rendering everything esoteric when really of course it's not. That sounds like two negatives, but in Tippett they come together to produce a mystical social music of incredible expressivity - the touchingness of the melodies is reason enough to shout from the rooftops that the clichés and pop gestures are wonderful!
From the first time I heard Saariaho's lurid scores, I knew that here was someone who could see the meaning of 'extended technique' - instead of gestures of anti-music, in Saariaho the over-bowing and over-blowing and skronkin' it up is all about human sensuality - it's precisely those times when feelings brim over that the instruments also brim over, and I think that's proper. That's how it's always worked for the human voice "breaking with emotion". So I suppose with Saariaho it's the kind of over-blowing ethic that I admire the most.
Gerald Barry on the other hand is all about how it's ok to write a stream of the same duration and it's ok to be dissonant in the older sense of the word. He's also got attitude by the bucketload.
There's a theme running through this page: that of the bringing together or destruction of "genre", particularly the top level genre gap of "serious versus vernacular". It's an entirely false impression because frankly I don't care two hoots for such matters, which are entirely the imagined nonsense of critics and musicologists! However, if I had to think of a group that really deconstructed those boundaries, it would be these guys: Francoise Kubler and Armand Angster at the core, Accroche-Note make Stockhausen sound sleek and jazzy (the Stockhausen of 'Tierkreis', that is, not of Freitag aus Licht) and they put John Zorn next to John Cage. And most importantly, they all make original music themselves as well as play. I know that's a given in the pop world but when you're putting on a Georges Aperghis gig, it's not assumed that you're also his peers as well as his interpreters.
Having spent half the 'essay' deconstructing the gulf between the concert-hall and the beer-hall, I'll now reinstate the top-level genre divide and list pop and 'non-pop' separately!!
Shannon Wright, Thalia Zedek, Mark E Smith, Jad Fair, Sexton Ming, Mike Patton
Luigi Nono, Rebecca Saunders, Bohuslav Martinu, Francis Poulenc, Benjamin Britten
Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Knut Hamsun, Simon Armitage, Michael Moorcock (not the fantasy shit), Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Joseph Beuys
What a horrible document this is! It does have a function though if it helps contextualise anything for anyone.