A composer viewing this century's music. [UCSD Lecture I]

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In these meetings I propose to sketch a panorama of our musical situation as observed through the windows of my personality and delineated by the positions that were as- signed to me in the changing scenes. Obviously the picture will be subjective, which I hope shall not impair is relative validity, especially since I will try to show that objectivity is intrinsically impossible, and where it is attempted, illusionary. It I thus limit the perspectives of my design to my own field of vision, I hope that this will not be interpreted as an expression of egotism, or vanity. Much as I have from time to time desired to occupy the vantage point of a de- tached observer who would faithfully register the sum total of the phenomena offered to his view, it was my fate to become always actively involved in the processes that would come under the consideration of comprehensive criticism. This my ruminations are inevitably conditioned by the changing positions of my creative personality. It would seem to me insincere if I should pretend that I am able to disregard these limitations, and therefore I have to accept them for better or worse.

My presentation will be articulated in four chapters. The first, which is the subject matter of today's meeting, will be concerned with the position in history of the contem- porary composer, and with the varying degrees of his histor- ical consciousness and the ways in which his work is influenced by these factors. In the second meeting I plan to discuss the problems of the composer's in- volvement in the problems of the society of which he is a member. This subject matter I shall mainly illustrate by referring to my operas (of which I have written twenty), since a good number of these works have very outspoken political implications.

31 2'30" 19.12 =15 27 I 2

In the third session I should like to talk about the sociological and economic background of the composer's work as it has un- folded in our century. To conclude this series of informal communications I wish to focus the particular situation of composition at the present time, discussing the concept of serialism and investigating how it developed und what became of it. At the end of each session I shall play the tape recording of one of my works, such as would seem appro- priate to illustrate some of the points made.

To turn to the object of today's deliberation, which is history and historical consciousness, let us consider first the nature of history. It we define history as the sum total of things past, we have to realize that it exists only to the extent of our knowledge of it. We may experience the consequences of something that has happened in the past, but this in itself does not suffice to make us know that it happened, and before unless we know this, the particular event might just as well never have happened. The nearly unique source of our histor- ical knowledge is the report that was made by somebody who some witness of witnessed the event and was left for us to peruse. The historian's pious resolution to write give faithful account of what happened ex- actly as it happened, or as it has become fastionable to say: to "tell it like it is", this resolution must remain wishful thinking to a high degree, for he depends on reports that were drawn up by human beings who were biassed in hundreds of different ways. And the historian sifting those reports is himself prejudiced even if he should not be aware of it, his prejudice being generated by the sequence of the very events he is planning to explicate.

Insight of this kind became available to me only when I immersed myself into the mysteries of history con- preparing nection with my opera Charles V., about which I shall have to say much more later. At the beginning of my career

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as a composer, around 1920 when I had reached the same age as our century, my historical consciousness was at a very elementary level. In the composition classes of my teacher Franz Schreker in Vienna we heard very little about music history. because he did not care He did not think very highly of the musicological studies that went on at the University, and at the Conservatory the teaching of history was greatly limited to abstract descriptions of styles and endless lists of com- posers' names whose music we never heard nor saw, for at that time there were no records or tapes to listen to, and no micro- films of ancient music to look at. Thas the composition stu- dents knew hardly any music before Bach. We studied six- teenth century counterpoint for more than good three semester six hours weekly according to a watered-down nineteenth century version of the eighteenth century interpretation by Johann Josef Fux of the idiom of Palestrina whose music we never touched.

The purpose of this training was to endow the students with a sense of discipline and to make them aware of the im- portance of technique, meaning that they should understand that one can not rely on inspiration alone, but must also have enough skill for moving on to keep going on the assumptions of a certain stylistic image. This The acquisition of such know how was supposed to be indispensable when we were turned loose as "free" composers.

While in the regimented field of strict counterpoint every note was scrutinized for its correctness according to the rules, in free counter composition we were left more or less to our own devices - criticism was vague, perfunctory and capricious. The general idea was that the music to be written by the young composers should sound well and be original - which was interpreted mainly to mean that it should not be obvious or commonplace - and modern, that is fitting into the generally accepted concept of progress, but not shocking or absurd.

The concept of progress, of course, implies some sort of

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historical consciousness. It is based on the assumption that the events of history follow each other as a chain of causes and ef- fects wherein the causes are observed, ascertained and ana- lyzed by man so that he may control the and bring about the effects in such a way that the subsequent state of affairs will be better than the previous one - whatever he may set up as the ulti- mate ideal goal of this wonderful process.

In terms of the musical situation in which I found myself as I described it before progress meant that the musical idiom of Wagner was better than that of Haydn or Beethoven because he dared to use more dissonant chords and delay their resolutions more ingeniously, that songs by Hugo Wolf were better than those by Schubert for similar reasons, which made them more communicative for the "modern mind", and so forth. From all this it followed that we had were trained to go on in the same spirit, discover new dissonances and disguise the facts of tonality more cleverly. Thus we moved about in a territory vaguely delineated by the landmarks set up by Debussy, Max Reger, Richard Strauss and perhaps Skrjabin. This was the generally accepted image of modernism. Franz Schreker who was at home in that territory was considered as pretty progressive, while Schoenberg was looked upon as a dangerons lunatic.

In fact, the difference between the more moderate conventions in which I launched my first compositional ventures and the seemingly radical philosophy of the Schoenberg circle was more one of degree than of essence. Schoenberg too was a believer in progress moving along a one-way street toward higher and more valuable achievements. He was had, however, an infinitely keener intellect than Schreker, was much more articulate and more courageous to in living up to the conclusions he had dra derived from his view on history. But at the time I am speaking of, in the first quarter of the century he was either praised and damned as a revolutionary prophet who cleared away the useless rubble of the past, or damned as a subversive nihilist bent upon tearing down the venerable conventions established by a glorious past.

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When my teacher, Franz Schreker, was called to Berlin around 1921 to become director of the Academy of Music I followed him there ostensibly to complete my formal studies in music. Actually I received this institute's diploma, which made me a sort of a licensed composer - whatever that may have meant - more or less on sufferance, for I had drifted away from the official official line of thinking long before. More than ever I was convinced that a young composer had to serve the cause of progress, but now to be progressive meant to break away from traditional concepts with much more daring and conviction. As much as, I knew of , Schoenberg's music, to me which was little enough, to me it still remained very little known and rather obscure. I was more attracted by the elemental features of Béla Bartók, and began to write music which disposed dispensed rather cavalierly with of the respectability of tonal relationships and was rich in dissonant polyphony and rhythmic insistence on protracted ostinatos.

At that time I wrote produced quantities of music at a speed which that today is quite incomprehensible to me. I am unable to figure out how it was possible only mechanically to write down so many notes in so short a time, not to mention the creative effort that had to go with, or before the desk work. In addition to the sheer number of compositions, many of them were rather bulky, long works. Today I dont see a contradiction here, for it seems to me that the habit of writing fast promotes the production of long, possibly repetitious and loquacious pieces while a pro- pensity for writing slowly favors induces concentration und economy.

My main interest was devoted to the form of the Symphony, and in this I can see a certain symptom of being conscious of historical continuity. I remember distinctly (that for I even put it down as a note in a diary that I used to keep off and on at times) that I had

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decided to try to become the successor of Mahler in the field of the Symphony. Thus I wrote no less than three symphonies at the age of 23, and each one of them has, in my opinion, retained to this day many some elements of high vitality. The fact that I did not approach the problem of the symphony for another twenty years should, however, indicate that I was not quite convinced of my accomplishments the validity of the project. When I took it up again in the 1940s, I found the results rather disappointing. My only comfort is that nobody else has succeeded any better in continuing the great sym- phonic tradition.

A considerable number of modernistic compositions of mine originated in those years of the early twenties. In looking back at them I notice that their generally atonal idiom here and there includes isolated fragments of the language of tradition, usually evoking memories of a very early stage of the musical material, not yet touched by the late-romantic mannerisms of chromatics. Such en- capsulated remnants of another age evoke frequently a feeling of nostalgia and melancholy. The procedure as such is re- lated to the principles of surrealism, of which at that time I had not the slightest idea.

Elements of surrealism also characterized the move- ment of neo classicism that became began to be noticeable at that time and was to become the dominant musical style for more than two decades. In terms of the notion that history is a one-way street of history leading onward and upward, neo-classicism evidently was an anti-progressive, contrary movement in that it professed the wish to restore ancient manners of expression musical design. As I remember it, the first manifestation of this trend was Stravinsky's Pulcinella, in which he transcribed, re-wrote and remodeled materials fished out from the work of the early eighteenth century Italian composer Pergolesi.

At the same time it looked progressive for it was designed to do away with the romanticism of the preciding generation, of which Schoenberg's expressionism seemed to be an obsolete continuation. 15 min. 33 I 7

This set the tone for most of the retrospective efforts to come. The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the primary targets of the restaurative activities of neo-classicism. Of course the reactionary aspect of this movement made it highly popular with a public frightened by the progressive attitude of the Schoen- berg school, by what was called the destructive excesses of expressionism.

The situation was not really as simple as all that, for the neo-classicists, especially Stravinsky, did not just excavate the old models to imitate them in their new creations, they treated them rather as pleasing and attractive relics of a better age - I shall have to say more about this when I will consider the sociological aspects - and they presented the models with all the damage and scars inflicted upon them by time. Today, by hin by hind-sight we are able to state that in this respect neo-classicism was progressive after all, for the concept of fragmentation, of the broken-up whole, of the irrevocable alienation of its parts was to inherit survive and succeed the age of neo- classicism. But at the time one could not know this, and actually the victory of this progressive, be it negative aspects of neo-classicism was based on entirely different premises, as we shall see.

Another thing element that made neo-classicism interesting even for the followers of the atonal-expressionistic tendencies was the emphasis on objectivity. The public, which was repelled by the sharp dissonances of the atonal idiom, did not recognize that they were the inevitable result of carrying further and on to the bitter end the essential features of the beloved late romanticism. The emotional exuberance that had made Wagner, Strauss and related composers so dear to au- diences wallowing in soulfulness as long as it was con- tained within the boundaries of an ever so expanded tonality had eventually exploded beyond these lines and created brought about the wildly gestures, violent contrasts, cutting dissonances and improbable melodic jumps of the expressionistic idiom. Some of the younger , adepts among them myself became 35

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a little tired of the overheated emotionalism of the style and began to dream of a cool, detached objective music that would rely on perfect construction rather than on communication of exuding senti- ment. The concept of the autonomy of music as a law unto itself began to take powerful roots. For such composers neo-classicism seemed to carry a significant message, even if they would not agree with its reactionary program.

Personally I have not conscientiously or consistently followed the line of neo-classicism. In Germany, under the in- fluence of sociological considerations which I shall discuss later, it took on a distinctly restaurative shape when com- posers such as Hindemith and started to revive the concerto grosso style of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The busy contrapuntal texture of Bach became the chief model of these compositional endeavors. To my taste the results often were academic, betraying too obviously the histor- ical consciousness of the authors, and pedantic in displaying a fatiguing sameness of color and texture.

During this period, strenuous efforts were made everywhere to create national musical styles. Composers were as- siduously delving into the materials provided by folkloristic research. Nearly all of this work was neo-classically oriented, be it only because the raw mater- ial was easily adaptable to traditional treatment. Bartók was about the only composer who tried in his most important works to interpret the folklore stuff in different ways. It is remarkable that these nation- alistic tendencies that for decades were most voci- ferously advanced have totally petered out after the Second World War, and fortunately so.

I was eventually more attracted by the French variety of neo- classiciom as represented by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Honegger and others. The occasional touches of surrealistic irony lend many some of their works a flavor of charming roguish- ness. The ancient model, slightly damaged by a few wrong notes in the harmony, by rhythmic distortion, or ana- chronistic instrumental color, is quoted in a surprising context rather than reconstructed with resources brought up to date. Another element aspect that made this newly dis- covered province of music highly interesting was the intro- duction of jazz elements.

At that time in Central Europe very little was known about American jazz which began to penetrate the con- tinent only after the conclusion of World War I. The little we knew about it fitted corresponded very well in with our wishes for a

antirom. neo class. progress ? or react. 33 I 9

clean, crip crisp, clear-cut, unsentimental, objective music. Nearly all European composers of at that time reacted to the new pheno- menon by incorporating some of its characteristics into their so-called "serious" music. As far as I know, only the members of the Schoenberg school never gave in to the templation. They were too thoroughly steeped in the idea of incompatibility of serious und entertainment music, which had been regarded for nearly a hunded years as an unshakable axiom.

My own private turn-about from modernism was became eventually somewhat different from everybody else's reactionary spree, of which I probably might could be proud if I cared to. I did not visualize returning to the seventeenth century, but to the early romanticism of Franz Schubert. This was probably due to personal circum- stances On the surface this can probably be well enough explained as owing to personal circumstances. When I arrived in Berlin as a student, I struck up close friendship with the pianist and composer Eduard Erdmann, by a few years my senior. He happened to be an enthusiastic devotee of Schubert's music, and since he had the temperament of a forceful evangelist and I was at a highly impressionable age, I was easily swayed to share his admiration for the Viennese master. More complic elaborate expla- nations would probably take into account that my hailing from the same Vienna may have caused a sort of selective af- finity when I, under the influence of the general tendency to look backward, searched for a model at the time of my rising doubts about the validity of my atonal exploits. Historical research might hit upon still other more motivations. I am using this very small, marginal detail of my private curriculum vital to illustrate what I mentioned about the relativity of historical material.

My neo-romantic period lastet about five years. The main pro- duct of my occasional preoccupation with jazz is the opera Jonny spielt auf, which became so successful and famous that it

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even infiltrated the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, forty years ags. It created a tremendous sensation for reasons that I found entirely wrong, a fact that irritated me a great deal. It was labeled "jazz opera", which I felt to be a misnomer, for whatever Jazz there occurs is brought in as to characterize the professional sphere of the protagonist, Jonny, leader of an American combo. The bulk of The music attached to the other characters, which to me were at least as important as Jonny is conceived in that early romantic idiom I had chosen as my model, occasionally touched up with dissonant spices and Italianizing Pucci Puccinesque vocal ex- uberance.

The label of jazz-opera could if at all, be affized much rather to a later opera work that I wrote in this period, the "Life of Orestes", which I shall discuss the next time. Here the jazzy flavor permeates one clearly defined sector of the stage action to create a sort of col- loquial musical language, a musical lingua franca of our time. Later In later years it has been held against these pieces that the jazz that which they displayed was really no jazz at all, or at best a very poor primitive specimen. This is true enough, and hardly worth pointing out. What I brought into play was not a replica of the real thing, which I might not even have done if I had known the real thing, but I tried to project my picture the reflexion of the image of jazz that I had formed in my mind on the basis of my very scanty knowledge of it the thing - just as I projected in this work Jonny spielt auf an idealistic wish dream of America, similar in the vein of similar pictures drawn by the early ro- manticists. Of the real America I knew hardly more than that it was the land of gangsters and prohibition, and neither aspect was inviting.

For my ostensibly reactionary exploits I also fabricated a little theory to the effect that the newly discovered means

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of musical expression, that is the atonal vocabulary, should not exclude prevent the use of the old ones, and that it should be pos- sible to restore the old vocabulary to its original power and freshness through something vaguely mystical, which I called "Urerlebnis", or primordial experience. In this I hoped so dif- ferentiate myself constructively from my fellow modernists of the Schoenberg school who promoted the idea that the new idiom had superseded the old and made rendered a meaningful use of the old resources impossible. Only Alban Berg was striving for a synthesis in ac- cordance with his conciliatory, warm hearted temperament, but he arrived at different results. I don't know how successful the application of my Urerlebnis has been. Some of the works that originated in this frame of mind, especially groups and cycles of songs, have retained a great deal of vitality. Nonetheless I noticed that after a while I had run out of steam on this track and that it was time to look for a promising switch if I should keep going at all.

The alternative was between giving up composing entirely (or at least for an indefinite period), or returning to modernism. While I considered the former seriously and concentrated for some time on literary work, the latter won out and I began a somewhat gingerly approach to the twelve-tone technique, which in the mean- time had been developed by Schoenberg. It is Today, when the high-brow musical magazines abound with analyses and de- tailed descriptions of compositional procedure, it is hardly believable that for years the only source of information on the twelve-tone technique was a rather vague and not entirely correct accurate essay in a Vienna periodical. The practitioners of the technique whom I knew, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, were quite reticent about what they were doing, and it seemed in- delicate to them become too inquisitive. Thus I had to rely on my own research, which was slow and laborious, although the basic principles of this technique were simple

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enough. But it was a completely new and unaccustomed way of musical thinking.

Among musicians at large and laymen as well the twelve- tone technique was regarded as an aggravated case of atonality, or worse, as the splenetic idea desperate effort of a group of composer who had run out of inspiration. During my romantic excursion I had shared this view, and even incurred Schoenberg's wrath by putting a few sarcasticg remarks into a lecture. The traces of the master's anguish may be found in the preface of his Sati Satires for chorus where he deposited a not too brilliant pun on my name. Later I apologized for my immature dig, and we lived in peace everafter.

It is nowadays easy to interpret the inauguration of the twelve-tone technique historically as a part of the general tendency of restoration prevailing during the nineteentwenties. At that time it appeared to be a radically new departure, and the dialectical truth probably is that it was both. This tech- nique was could may now be seen as a conservative factor because it imposed a strict discipline onto the chaotic world of atonality. The rationalization that was given leaking out from the inner circle was that the atonal composers had realized that without some kind of con- structive order only short pieces of music could be written, and that the revived desive of wor creating larger forms prompted the invention of a new discipline. Another explanation was that in order to secure the atonal character of the idiom it was necessary to prevent any tone from becomming gaining through repetition too much weight and becoming a tonal center in the old sense, and in order to achieve this end it became desirable to systematize the order of succession of our twelve pitch-classes the pitches before entering the process of actual composition so that none would reappear before the other eleven had been sounded. Be that as it may, a trend toward restoration of law and order certainly promoted the invention of the twelve-tone technique.

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This conjecture is correborated by the fact that a substantial number of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic works are structured after the pattern of the classical Sonata form. They are different from the exercises of neo-classicism in that they try the twelve-tone school tried to revive the spirit of the old forms while neo-classicism presented replicas of their façade with interesting cracks added.

Historical perspective reveals that the advent of aton- ality was experienced by the public as a violent shock while the introduction of the twelve-tone method caused hardly a ripple - just slightly raised eye-brows among tradition-minded experts, although it would have been logical had it happened the other way around. For atonality had been foreshadowed, as the evolutionist would say, ever since Wagner's generation had pushed toward the limits of tonality, while the idea of pre-organizing the musical material according to abstract serial patterns was something radically new. It did not register that way, because the character of the musical idiom, the sound material that was perceived, re- mained roughly the same, regardless of whether it was ordered serially or freely piled up in atonal clusters. On the other hand, the earlier transition from harmonies ever so loosely strung together in a tonal net to those seemingly unrelated dissonant clusters was shockingly con- spicuous.

My own first venture in the new technique was a most ambitious one. It was the full-length historical opera Charles V. About its extra- musical implications I shall talk the next time, which I hope will make clear that I considered the project one of utmost importance in every respect. This attitude prompted me to make it also the point of departure for a completely new phase of my musical development. After this opera I wrote two works, a set of varia- tions for piano and my Sixth String Quartet, in which I perhaps explored in- stinctively was exploring most thoroughly the truly progressive aspects of the twelve-tone technique, at least I see it today in this light.

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Later, when I had come to live in America after 1937, oriented myself move toward Schoenberg's inclination for reviving the Sonata form. It would be easy to say that this happened under the influence of the conformist American atmosphere, or perhaps prompted by the hope to become somewhat more acceptable to a musical community that by the critical experts was told that the twelve-tone technique was a freakish conceit of a small Viennese group of neurotics and that American music happily had left such aberration far behind. When I in the 1940s experimented with relaxing the structures of the old twelve-tone technique by introducing a new concept, which I called "rotation", it may have ap- peared to be a dubious attempt at compromise. In fact, however, this does not seem to have been the true motivation, because the first work in which I applied the rotational tech- nique, my Lamentation of the Prophet Jeremiah turned out to be of fiendish difficulty, so that it had to wait for sixteen years before it was produced in its entirety. Only about as many years later I realized that my rotational technique was my first tentative step into the still undiscovered territory of serialism, for by by the term "rotation" I wanted to describe a progressive switching and of the tones within the twelve- tone series according to premeditated patterns in order to obtain additional derivative forms of the basic set.

It was only in America that I became fully conscious and cognizant of music history, but, as it seems, purely incidentally by chance. It so happened that the place of my first teaching assignment in this country, Vassar College, had a magnificent music library, in which I loved to browse. Obviously I was ready for this new experience, for Soon enough I did stopped browsing and began to study more and more seriously. Probably subconsciously

for I was under no obligation to use that library. As a matter of fact, my boss, a hidebound, musicologist, did not like it at all. 30 I 15

I losked for prototypes of our own compositional procedures, and I eventually cen- centrated I found astonishing parallels. My attention was especially attracted by the design of Gregorian chant, where I discovered many and by the complexities of fifteenth century polyphony to my dismay I noticed that the majority of musicologists. whose work I greatly admired and appreciated because it had provided me with otherwisse inaccessible material of historical studies - that these scholars almost resented the composer's inter- est in their work, and I regretted that they did not reciprocate this interest at all.

The tension thus created led to the termination of my tenure at Vassar College, and I became head of the music depart- ment at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. Only now then I could continue my historical studies undisturbed, for I was my own boss. There was only a one slight drawback; I had practically no library. When this obstacle was to some extent degree overcome through the extensive use of microfilms I was able with the aid of a group of outstanding graduate students to achieve some results that gave at least us a great deal of satisfaction, if to nobody else. My own particular object of study was the music of Johannes Ockeghem, which I have found fascinating to this day.

It has been critized that I dewoted so much labor to apparently found it necessary to search for historical prototypes in order to justify modern compositional method. I feel that such objections are based on a misunderstanding. The fact that the melismata of Gre- gorian Chant displayed inversion and retrogression, or the fact that some medieval composers like Dufaye used their cantus firmi as basic melodic patterns from which they derived individual motivic shapes for their polyphonic design, such facts did not in my opinion justify the application of such procedure in the twelve-tone technique. Obviously the only justification of any technique is the accomplishment of viable results. What I was interested in was observing and experiencing the permanency of certain ways of musical thinking, the existence of archetypes

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that seemed to run through the known history of occidental music and from time to time to blossom out into crystalize in the shape of stylistic entities.

In my teaching I ask asked the students to undergo a thorough training in sixteenth century counterpoint the rules of which I derived as far as possible from the practice of the old masters directly, not because I wanted them to revive the style of Palestrina, but in order to make them aware of the function of strict technical discipline in relation to a completely known body of totally controlled live music so that they would be able, on the strength of such experience, to apply this experience to their excursions into new, so far unknown and not yet con- trolled territory.

Today I am not any longer so convinced that this historical orientation is as necessary or useful as I thought under the impact of my own historical studies. The nineteenth century entertained the enviably naive notion that all that had happ- ened before it was either progress welcome preparation of the its own ultimate excellence or deplorable detour and delay. I remember having read seen in the commentary of an edition published about 1890 of a work by Dufaye in which the commentator critized the fifteenth century composer for not yet knowing how to modulate properly from d minor to c sharp. It did not occur to him that Dufaye never thought of modulating anywhere, but worked on entirely different assumptions. But in the eyes of the modern critic it was just that which made his music appear inferior.

It may be true that strong ages do are not lost in awe and admiration of history because they are too occupied with creating and building their own things. The Baroque era was one of those periods. The artists of that time had no qualms about tearing down or disfiguring the most venerable monuments of the Gothic because they found them obsolete and unsightly and were convinced that they had something far superior to substitute for the ancient stuff. It is fortunate that in music to assert itself a new generation does not need to destroy

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the works of its ancestors. It is sufficient to let them gather dust on the shelves of the library. Whether ignorance, or even contempt of history reveals strength, or weakness, or just laziness and self indulgence, can be ascertained only by evaluating the products of such mentality. But this evaluation is in turn a function of historical processes. If we feel that history takes it course according to some inexorable interal necessity it would not seem to matter very much whether or not we are aware of its preordained pattern. If we feel that we are making history as free agents we may not pay much attention of to precedent - only to be told after- wards that our action was a logical consequence of all that went before.

To be or not to be historically oriented is a question that can not be answered any better than the question: to be or not to be, period. Or rather, question mark.