Dear All,
I have a few distinct questions about which I wondered if subscribers to this list might have some answers.
- The 1972 four-LP set
Music Before Revolution (available at Ubuweb -
http://ubu.com/sound/music-before-revolution.html ) (Odeon 1C 165-28954/7 -
https://www.discogs.com/Ensemble-Musica-Negativa-Music-Before-Revolution/release/872739 ) features works of Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff and Ichiyanagi, and conversations with these, and Hans G Helms and Heinz-Klaus Metzger. According to Alex J. Lubet, ‘Indeterminate
Origins: A Cultural Theory of American Experimental Music’, in James R. Heintze. (ed.),
Perspectives on American Music since 1950 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), p. 99, this album was a ‘tribute to Mao’s Cultural Revolution’. What is known of the extent to which the composers involved were aware of or sympathetic to the
motivations behind such a project? Wolff’s Maoist sympathies for a period are well-known, as are Cage’s over a shorter time from the early 1970s; but I have not encountered anything from Feldman or Brown on this subject, and am unsure of the extent to which
Ichiyanagi shared sympathies with other Japanese composers of his generation who gravitated towards Maoist ideas.
- Both Antonio Trudu (in
La “Scuola” di Darmstadt: I Ferienkurse dal 1946 a oggi (Milan: Ricordi, 1992), p. 125 n. 6) and
Christopher Shultis (in ‘Cage and Europe’, in David Nicholls (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 33) argue that Bruno Maderna was apparently responsible for suggesting that Wolfgang
Steinecke invite Cage to Darmstadt in 1958 in place of Boulez, though these claims (which apparently come from former IMD archivist Wilhelm Schlüter) have been contested by Martin Iddon (in
New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 198-200) on the basis of examination of the published Maderna-Steinecke correspondence. What I have not yet found, after consulting
various sources on both Cage and Maderna, is much about the relationship between the two, and Maderna’s thoughts on Cage’s music and aesthetic. One of the areas I am considering at the moment is the ‘aleatoric’ work of Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna and others
and its provenance. Much historical writing and that on new music in French treats this body of work as a separate category from Cageian indeterminacy, while Cage and (especially) Feldman, and many others after them, portrayed the former as essentially a second-hand
rendition of what members of the New York School were doing earlier. So – does anyone know of any sources on Maderna and Cage, including anything Maderna said about Cage in the 1950s and after? (Italian sources are fine). Maderna’s
Musica su due dimensioni (1952) was one of the first works to draw upon the ideas of the aleatoric of Werner Meyer-Eppler set down in the range of lectures he gave between 1949 and 1953, which also of course inspired Meyer-Eppler’s student Stockhausen.
I am interested to establish to what extent Maderna perceived a degree of commonality between this school of thought and that coming to Europe soon afterwards from Cage.
- As William Brooks, Christopher von Blumröder, Heinz-Klaus Metzger and others have shown, the term ‘experimental music’ or near-equivalents have been around since the early twentieth-century
at least. However, it was given a more focused meaning in Cage’s 1955 essay ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’ – more specific than when he used it in the 1930s, reflecting his increasing estrangement from what he portrayed as European avant-garde traditions.
This concept was clarified in ‘Experimental Music’ (1957), then ‘History of Experimental Music in the United States’ (first published in German, 1959). Also in 1955, in the first edition of his
America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), Gilbert Chase has a chapter on ‘The Experimentalists’, pp. 571-96, ranging from Cowell, Ornstein, Antheil (both of these two dismissed rather quickly on the grounds that
their later music became more conventional), Ruggles, John J. Becker, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, the Canadians Colin McPhee, Gerald Strang and Henry Brant, and then the French-born Carlos Salzedo, Dane Rudhyar and Varèse, also Lou Harrison and Partch,
through to Cage and Feldman, noting the important precursor of Russolo and ‘The Art of Noise’. But, despite noting Partch, Cowell and Cage’s Californian origins, Chase makes less of the European/American divide than does Cage, and there is little reason why
a good deal of other European composers with no strong American connection could not have fitted his category were this a history of art music in general rather than specifically American music. As such, his definition is mostly compatible with that current
in the 1930s.
Following Cage’s mid-late-1950s essays, something akin to the older definition, simply entailing experiments with new instruments, technology, sounds, notation, etc., as had been presented in Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘Vers une musique experimentale’ (1953) , in
La revue musicale 236 (1957), pp. 18-23, was continued by Lejaren Hiller, then Abraham Antoine Moles, Fritz Winckel and others, and can be found loosely in a lot of European writings on new music through the 1960s and 1970s. But in terms of the Cageian
definition, I have found very little between Peter Yates’s ‘The American Experimental Tradition’ (1960) (which as far as I can tell was not published until 1990, in
Soundings 16, pp. 135-43), which informs his Twentieth-Century Music
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), until the formation of the Experimental Music Catalogue in London around 1970, and then the growth of this sub-culture leading to the publication of Michael Nyman’s
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1974), one in a whole series of books on ‘experimental’ varieties of painting, theatre, cinema, architecture and dance from the same publisher. Leonard B. Meyer’s ‘The Arguments for Experimental
Music’, in Music, the Arts and Ideas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 245-65 is really closer to the Schaeffer/Hiller/Moles definition. Various histories of American music published in the 1960s, such as those of Wilfred
Mellers and H. Wiley Hitchcock, argue for a major difference between European and American developments in general, as presented by Cage, and anticipated in Henry Cowell’s 1933 essay ‘Trends in American Music’, which when printed in
American Composers on American Music: A Symposium, second edition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962) included the term ‘experimental music’.
I am just curious to know if anyone knows of any more obscure or other writings from the 1960s which pick up upon and/or expand, develop or theorise Cage’s definitions further? By around 1960, the divide between Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Pousseur and others
(though perhaps not necessarily Maderna) on one hand, and Cage, Feldman and Wolff (though not necessarily Brown) on the other was established, and events such as the ‘Contre-Fest’ in Cologne in 1960, or Josef Anton Riedl’s
Neue Musik München the same year consolidated a divide between what might crudely be called a modernist ‘mainstream’ and a series of more iconoclastic European figures with links to Cage and Fluxus (with Stockhausen characteristically trying to keep
a foot in both camps, involved with both the ISCM and the Contre-Fest in Cologne, 1960). These battles did not disappear in that decade, and were carried on in polemics by Metzger and others, while Amy Beal (in
New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006))
has traced in great detail the work of Helms, Hans Otte, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, Reinhard Oehlschlägel and others in promoting the music of Cage and others in Germany, while she and Martin Iddon (in ‘Trying to Speak: Between Politics and Aesthetics, Darmstadt
197-1972’, twentieth-century music 3/2 (2007), pp. 255-75) have also examined the tensions between the aesthetic agendas of these types of figures and that pursued by Ernst Thomas when running the courses at Darmstadt. But as far as I can tell, these
debates were, during this decade, rarely centred specifically around the concept of ‘experimental music’. But I am very interested in any literature which might suggest otherwise.
Best,
Ian
Dr Ian Pace
Senior Lecturer, Head of Performance
Department of Music
City University London
Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB
UK
Tel +44 (0)20 7040 8016
‘what distinguishes an educated person is not an elevated sense of one’s knowledge and intelligence. It
is, instead, humility arising from an ever better comprehension of what we don’t know. And that can only be instilled by being confronted at university with genuine intellectual challenge – and learning to rise to it.’
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