Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Yates: "The American Experimental Tradition" (and microtonal Mahler!)

I'm really sorry for the totally inexcusable length
of this post, which I've - unforgiveably - made even
longer by the insertion of several comments [in square
brackets]. But this publication is quite hard to find,
and I thought this article would be of such great interest
to members of this list that I'm quoting the entire thing
here. Many of you will be glad I did.

(I hope this is no case of copyright infringement...
it may very well be. Oh well... slap the cuffs on me now...
another great sacrifice for the microtonal cause!)

At the end of my Microfest presentation, I was speculating
on an idea that I've presented here before: that since
all of Mahler's major works are for orchestra - which
plays in strict 12-tET only with some difficulty and
a lot of coaxing and rehearsal - perhaps the "best" tuning
for his symphonies is something other than 12-tET.

Warren Burt attended my lecture, and after I finished, he
generously informed me of this article by Peter Yates in
which Yates mentions that Mahler once told Schoenberg that
it was too bad that European music chucked meantone in favor
of 12-tET, and lost so many harmonic possibilities. AHA!
Just the ammunition I was looking for to justify (all puns
intended) the retuning of my Mahler MIDI-files! They'll be
posted here as soon as I retune them, and no longer with an
"off-topic" warning as I've used in the past!

Yates speaks quite a bit about tuning in this article.
Two other quotes from it that will interest readers here:

"Just because [Harry Partch and Lou Harrison] have not
accepted the easy alternative of following nearly everybody
else in the wrong direction, they are among the most
important musical thinkers in the world today."

"In his later years Schoenberg linked himself playfully
with Gesualdo, whom he called 'the Schoenberg of the
16th century'".

And here are two that are simply too good not to repeat:

"Ives, to put the matter simply, replaced Parker's
Europeanized quotations from the best eclectic sources
with good American quotations that nobody could mistake
as academic."

"Or hear Webern's early Piano Quintet, the fragments
of authentic Webern like minute bits of living tissue
among the dead stretches of imitation Brahms."

Yates is the sole source for several anecdotes I have
heard or read about Schoenberg, including his description
here of Schoenberg's 1st Quartet. They knew each other
personally when Schoenberg lived in Los Angeles, and
Yates was responsible for getting a lot of Schoenberg's
music performed in LA in those days, principally in the
"concerts on the roof" series held at his house in the 1940s.

There's also a very long section on Ives, which many
here (attention, Dan Stearns!) will appreciate.

And it was great to read about Varèse right after hearing
Steven Schick's ensemble "red fish blue fish" play Schick's
terrific arrangement of _Ionisation_ for 6 players (it was
originally written for 13) at the SONOR concert tonight at
UCSD. _Ionisation_, besides being a landmark and extremely
influential piece, also counts here as microtonal because it
uses two sirens to produce nice not-quite-controllable glissandi.

The comments by Varèse about not being a revolutionary are
also interesting, because they were emphasized at the
pre-concert talk tonight by Chou Wen-Chung, whose great piece
_Echoes From The Gorge_ (for percussion quartet) was featured
prominently, and who studied with Varèse. Note especially the
comment by Varèse about his lack of interest in tuning.

Note also that this article is one of the earliest (c. 1960)
"popular" recognitions of well-temperament that I have come
across. (Try to remember or realize how "underground" all this
tuning stuff was back then.)

The actual article is worth seeking out for the great
photos (which I've never seen anywhere else) of Partch,
Harrison (whom I had the great pleasure of meeting at
Microfest), Ives, Varèse, and Cage. I'm particularly fond
of the picture of Cage, because it was taken in 1979,
around the same time I met him, and is very much as
I remember him.

The full citation is:

Yates, Peter. 1990.
"The American Experimental Tradition".
_Soundings_ (last issue), p. 135-143.

PS - This issue also has the score of a piece by Lois
van Vierk for guitar quartet, with the guitars having
half the strings tuned to quarter-tone pitches.

(Warren, I can't thank you enough for letting me know about
this!)

------

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL TRADITION
by Peter Yates

(This unpublished article was written ca. 1960, and is
printed here [that is, in _Soundings_] with the permission
of Frances (Mrs. Peter) Yates. With thanks to Toshie
Kakinuma.)

[It is reprinted here on the Tuning List with no-one's
permission... hopefully with no negative consequences...]

My friend Wesley Kuhnle in Los Angeles has devoted nearly
thirty years to a concentrated study of earlier keyboard
music. Among his many accomplishments, he has learned to
build harpsichords and clavichords from the sound outwards.
String by string, working on a monochord, he plans the
sound pattern of the instrument, the scale, the length
and weight of string, the plucking-point; then he plots
this scale upon a sheet of drafting paper and designs the
instrument around it. Some instrument builders do it the
reverse way: they begin by using for a model an authentic
instrument, and the sound comes afterwards. Let us take
this for our parable.

Studies of the sound an instrument should produce directed
Wesley to inquire about tuning. He began wondering why,
since the invention of keyboard instruments, the tuning
of these instruments has changed several times. He taught
himself painstakingly how to tune, with nothing but the
instrument to guide him, each of the principal temperaments
of European music. These tuning orders, the means by which
our forefathers adjusted their instruments to the music
that was to be played and then used them to create new
instrumental idioms, are the basic facts of the development
of European music, its styles, its habits, its harmonic
systems, its methods of organization, its manners of
performance. The 4 1/2 hour tape that Wesley Kuhnle has
developed, a History of Tuning, may be one of the more
significant musicological achievements of our lifetime.

When he began we had knowledge of tour historic types of
tuning, or temperament, plus several deviants of these.
The four are: _Pythagorean_ (perfect fifths in all intervals
except one, which absorbs the imbalance between the perfect
octave and the lesser perfect intervals within it);
_Just Intonation_ (which combines the principal perfect
fifths with the principal perfect thirds [i.e., 5-limit JI);
_Meantone_ (which narrows all the fifths to produce as many
perfect thirds as possible); and our own tuning,
_Equal Temperament_. [Of course, we here also know that
there are well-temperaments - on which does speak below
- as well as other non-just non-equal tunings.] Equal
Temperament, though in some ways the most practical, is
acoustically the most imperfect tuning. [Comment from
Monzo: this is certainly a debatable point. Feel free.]

As a result of these investigations Wesley Kuhnle added
two more temperaments: _Tempered Pythagorean_, beginning
with the perfect fifth as Meantone begins with the perfect
third; and _Well Tempered_, the much modified Meantone
identified with the work of J. S. Bach.

Pythagorean was the principal temperament of European
music for about 2000 years, until the 16th century.
It is purely melodic and allows only simple harmony.
Polyphonic music of the earlier centuries would sound far
more expressive in our ears, if it were sung in Pythagorean
perfect fifths instead of Equal Temperament. Every upward
interval rises to its full height, instead of falling short
by the slight fraction of our imperfect fifths.

As polyphony became more elaborate during the 15th and 16th
centuries, composers began seeking a temperament which
would allow some pure thirds as well as some pure fifths.
They developed in Italy a new temperament called Just
Intonation [Comment from Monzo: "temperament" to describe
JI is not really correct.], used by Palestrina and Vittoria.
Some modem choirs have been trained to sing in Just
Intonation; it is easier to sing than Equal Temperament
and vocally far more beautiful.

These two primarily vocal temperaments permit very
little of what we nowadays call harmony and modulation
on conventional, fixed-pitch keyboard instruments.
When during the 16th century primacy in music passed
from the voice to instruments, a distinctive keyboard
tuning was developed, having all the principal thirds
tuned perfect or beatless and all the fifths slightly
narrowed. This keyboard-related tuning, called Meantone,
survived in general use until the first decade of the
19th century. Meantone provides good harmony in 8 keys,
up to three sharps or flats, so long as one avoids a few
dissonant combinations which are called collectively
"the Wolf". If you examine the classical literature of
keyboard music before Schubert and Chopin, you will find
that, with the important exceptions of Sebastian Bach
and Domenico Scarlatti, the composers confined themselves
almost entirely within the few Meantone keys.

A second keyboard-adapted temperament is the newly
discovered Tempered Pythagorean, but since it does not
enter directly into this survey, I shall go no farther
with it. [Comment from Monzo: Too bad he didn't. I'm
sure many of us would love to know what he was talking
about.]

Hearing English virginal music in this tuning after
hearing it in Equal Temperament is like seeing for the
first time in the original color a painting known before
but in black and white. I might add, for specialists,
that it solves the problem presented by the Bull _Hexachord_.
[Comment from Monzo: Those in the know, please elaborate.]

Sebastian Bach was one of several composers and theorists
who set out to temper Meantone tuning so that it might be
used in full chords in all keys without any excessively
dissonant combinations. Such a tuning is called Well
Tempered. Meantone tuning is the easiest to tune accurately
on a keyboard instrument. Well Tempered is very difficult
to tune. Therefore Meantone lingered on for a long time.
In Meantone each of the 8 keys has a distinct harmonic
coloration, to which composers and listeners attached
emotional and dramatic connotations related to the figurative
devices known as the Affections. Well Tempered tuning
preserved these distinctions, though the color differentiation
was reduced.

When composers turned to Equal Temperament, in part
because of the easy accommodation it provides for tuning
all the instruments of an orchestra [comment by Monzo: I
would disagree with this - keyboards were mainly responsible],
these color distinctions among keys were lost. I believe it
was Arnold Schoenberg that reported to me Gustav Mahler's
comment that European music, in giving up Meantone tuning,
had suffered a great loss. Because all intervals of the
same sort in Equal Temperament are mathematically and
acoustically of equal imperfection, all keys sound exactly
the same, apart from their relative position. To make up
for the lost key coloration, which as we know from their
writings musicians and theorists long struggled to preserve,
composers added more and more harmonic enrichment, reaching
towards increasing extremes of dissonance, until at last
all differences among the keys disappeared theoretically
as they had already vanished for the ear. They disappeared
just as thoroughly in Strauss as in Schoenberg, but
Schoenberg was the first to recognize what had happened
and do something about it. [Comment from Monzo: This
paragraph is exremely pertinent to what I presented in my
lecture.]

To overcome what seemed, at least to a German composer,
the disadvantage of composing without key references,
Schoenberg introduced the method of the tone-row, in which
the 12 tones of the octave are related only to one another,
the accompanying rules providing a partial substitute for
the invalidated rules of harmony. Schoenberg's purpose was,
as he said, the emancipation of the dissonance, to establish
a new convention of tonal relationship which no longer
technically denied but instead realistically accepted the
equal component of dissonance in every interval. Schoenberg
did not consider the 12-tone method to be a means of
composition, any more than the rules of harmony are a means
of composition. He condemned those among his followers who
chose so to use it. In spite of his strictures, 12-tone or
serial composition has become a new composing formula,
a new technical academicism. (See the comment by William
J. Mitchell in his edition of the _Essay on the True Art
of Playing Keyboard Instruments_ by C. P. E. Bach, page 17:
"Bach's rejection of Rameau can be traced largely to the
fact that the latter had pronounced a *theory*, whereas
thorough bass was essentially a practice.")

The principal theory of composition holding attention in
the world today is founded therefore on a misuse, the
false understanding of a convention. Given that convention,
the composer is on his own. He can use the method with
a row of more or less than 12 tones. He can use it just
as well to eliminate unwanted dissonance. He can use it
to establish a key reference and to escape it again when
he wishes. He can use it even without accurately pitched
tones. The more thoroughly he understands it, the better
he should be able to modify the convention to his purpose.

So much for the tone-row or serial method which engrosses
our present day composing theory. It is a partial replacement
for the lost harmonic method, a polyphonic extension of
musical syntax with a consequent loss of harmonic and
modulatory formulas. As it has become itself a formula,
the effect has been to magnify the artless dissonances
inherent in Equal Temperament. When listeners have grown
weary of listening to more and more unrelieved dissonance,
undifferentiated by consonance or by the textural distinction
of great melody as in Schoenberg and Webern, this whole
technical academicism will most likely be thrown out of
use. We have seen the formula grow; we already see it dying.
[Comment from Monzo: Such a prophetic comment in 1960!]
But Schoenberg will remain and so will Webern, composers
first and only afterwards technicians.

Don't believe by the way that there is no real distinction
between consonance and dissonance. That notion is merely
another of the consequences of Equal Temperament. If theory
won't tell us, our ears will. No fixed point exists at
which tolerable consonance becomes intolerable dissonance
or discordance. Several extended passages of Bach's F sharp
minor Toccata, fully acceptable in Well Tempered Tuning,
become intolerable in Meantone. Playing this Toccata in
Equal Temperment eliminates Bach's coloring entirely, so
that nothing remains of the composition except its notational
design, and much of that obviously inexplicable.

On this second point, let me cite another example. One
evening I invited Igor Stravinsky and several others to
my home to hear a Japanese musician, newly come to this
country, play the koto. The player chose to begin with
a modern composition for the koto tuned in Equal Temperament.
After hearing this, followed by an older composition played
in the same tuning. Stravinsky objected that the tuning
was not correct for the instrument. Though Stravinsky
had no previous experience of the instrument or its
correct intervallic tuning, his acute ear had told him
at once what the performer, for all his sensitivity,
had accustomed himself to forget, that the koto and its
tuning belonged together; one could not alter the tuning
without altering the nature of the instrument.

To anyone accustomed to hearing the original in its ownidiom
Colin McPhee's transcriptions of Indonesian gamelan music
for two pianos or Henry Cowell's use of the style of
Japanese Court music in his orchestral composition _Ongaku_
present no less serious objections.

Two American composers have found means to release their
compositions from the disintegrating key harmony and
increasing dissonance inherent in the continuing use of
Equal Temperament. They are Harry Partch and Lou Harrison.
Just because these composers have not accepted the easy
alternative of following nearly everybody else in the
wrong direction, they are among the most important musical
thinkers in the world today. The course of esthetic
evolution is inevitably by way of the exceptional rather
than the routine occurrence.

Harry Partch was the first to attain the uncompromising
wisdom that Equal Temperament must he abandoned. His
reasons for thinking so are set forth in his book,
_Genesis of a Music_. He divided the scale in minute
subdivisions, working out at about 43 intervals to the
octave, though, like Schoenberg in regard to the 12-tone
method, he insists that the numerical count of his scale
has nothing to do with the music ho makes of it. By this
minute subdivision of the octave Partch approximates the
natural intervals of the speaking or chanting in contrast
to the singing voice. He eliminates harmony as a
determinant, gets rid of its grammar, [Comment from Monzo:
I think both those points are debatable.] and removes the
unwanted consequences of Equal Temperament. His early
experiments were made on viola and reed organ; only later
did he begin building his kitharas and marimbas. [Comment
by Monzo: altho it wasn't finished until later, Partch
actually began building his kithara in the mid-1930s,
immediately after his visit to Kathleen Schlesinger in
England, and quite early on in his career.] His music
will be compared with gamelan music only by those who
do not know the gamelan.

In Partch's music there is strictly speaking no dissonance,
except among the higher overtones, which the open resonances
of his string and wooden sound-producers give out in
abundance. Thus the foreground of musical texture is very
pure and clear, while the sonority glows with rich and
subtle contrast. Partch conceives his art to be music of
the theatre, to he used with voice or balletnot as an
operatic or an absolute music. Nothing in the medium,
however, prevents it being used for an absolute music.

Lou Harrison took a different direction than Partch.
After studying with Schoenberg and displaying great skill
in manipulating the 12-tone row the big 12-tone Piano
Suite he wrote at that time for my wife is soon to be
published he progressively discarded dissonance. He
came at last to wonder why Schoenberg, having reduced
all harmony to a single key of 12 tones, had not gone
farther and retuned the intervals to approximate the
acoustically more perfect intervals of Just Intonation.
[Comment from Monzo: Something I've wondered about much
myself. Schoenberg gave at least two important reasons:
lack of microtonal instruments, and increased resources
of his way of using the whole 12-tET scale as a unit.]
If Schoenberg had done this, all other factors being the
same, serial composition would now be fundamentally
consonant instead of dissonant. The dissonance, instead
of being emancipated, would have vanished with Equal
Temperament. (I should say here that Schoenberg was well
aware of the problem). Harrison himself now composes in
Just Intonation, and his subtle ear, made acute by years
of earlier sound exploration while writing compositions
in non-tonal polyphony for a great variety of sound-
producers, remains creatively unhampered by the lack of
ordinary harmonic devices and modulation.

Although the use of Just Intonation would seem to
present insuperable difficulties in performance,
experience has shown that musicians can adapt themselves
to these acoustically correct intervals more easily
than adjust themselves back again to Equal Temperament.

In effect, Harrison has returned composition to that point
in the 15th century where the direction of interest began
changing towards vertical harmony; he goes on from there
as happily and creatively as if Bach and Beethoven had
never existed.

Love and revere the music of Bach and Beethoven as I do,
I know that we must accustom ourselves to removing these
great figures out of the foreground of our musical
understanding, if we are to discover the vistas of genius
they conceal. We must also get out of the way the present
cult-devotion to counterpoint and complication, the notion
that an expertly written score is necessarily music. We
should free ourselves from the contrary superstition also,
that any composition which does not accord with the
prevailing criteria is necessarily not music the sort
of nonsense spoken about John Cage.

A good deal of music these days is being written to
seem more difficult than it is. Much of the technical
difficulty in later Schoenberg or Webern, or Boulez,
is the result of their effort to notate exactly the
sort of extra-rhythmic expressiveness that a 16th, 17th,
or 18th century musician was supposed to react into the
notation at the time of playing. As my patron Amateur,
the Englishman Roger North, wrote in the early 18th
century: "It is not of great import how the breaking
is managed, provided the general equallitys are maintained;
on which account it is that the capitall masters, in
their performing, capreole it in such a manner as one
would think they kept no time at all, and yet they never
fail their gross measures.'' This is an art we have lost,
and we shall never recover it by exact notation. I have
observed, however, that Pierre Boulez, though he divides
the time of his compositions to a fine measure, does not
conduct to the point of the metronome but melodically.

The bigotries I speak of are changing, but the academic-
fashionable intelligence still clings to them, as if
ability to analyze a score without hearing it were the
chief proof of competence. Analytical competence ceases
exactly at that place where it ceases to be operative:
Sir Donald Tovey [renowned writer of critical essays]
was helpless before the 20th century.

So Harrison's seeming simplicity baffles the generality
of sophisticated listeners, who presume that contemporary
music, if it is to be taken seriously, must appear difficult.
Those of us who hear not as fashionably sophisticated
listeners but as posterity will not be so deceived but
will recognize in Harrison one of the most exquisitely
balanced gifts for music in our century.

Partch and Harrison are two of the composers in the
American Experimental Tradition. Their workmanship outmodes
the authority' of that great period of European music,
between 1600 and 1900, the period of European Vertically
Related Harmony. or as I prefer to call it, the period
of Modern Music. Calling these 300 years the period of
Modern Music helps us to join, as if at each end of a
parenthesis, the 20th with the 16th century. There are
other kinds of harmony besides the vertically-related,
as our increasing knowledge of the world's other musics
now informs us, the most prevalent being the horizontal
harmony of self-sustained melody. It is precisely the
putting aside of the recent European tradition that
distinguishes, that is the characteristic craft mark of
American Experimental composition.

Schoenberg was not the only or the first composer to
recognize the end of what I have called the period of
Modern or Vertically Related Harmonic Music. In his
later years Schoenberg linked himself playfully with
Gesualdo, whom he called "the Schoenberg of the 16th
century." Charles Ives, whose lifetime runs concurrently
with that of Schoenberg, came to the truth earlier and
no less conclusively. Unlike Schoenberg, he did not consider
this to be a problem requiring theoretical solution. He
took his art as he found it, and he found it crowded with
opportunity. If you listen to _Hora Novissima_, the best
work of Ives's music professor at Yale, that onetime cynosure
of American academic good taste, Horatio Parker, you will
find it studded with quotations from and references to the
best European composers. Brahms's Tragic Overture comes in
right at the start, and there is a later movement a capella,
a fine Palestrinian imitation. _Hora Novissima_ is a splendid
composition, to be praised in company with the work of
Parker's other famous pupil, Roger Sessions. Compared with
such self-taught composers as Wagner and Schoenberg, Horatio
Parker was a master: he had mastered everything about music
a composer doesn't need to know. Ives, to put the matter
simply, replaced Parker's Europeanized quotations from the
best eclectic sources with good American quotations that
nobody could mistake as academic. The tunes don't make the
music American; harmonizing of national tunes and folk
music had been going on for a century, and nothing had
come from it. Like Bach and at least as thoroughly as
Bartók, Ives took the native idiom and made it his own
language.

There is one important distinction. Bach's choral melodies,
though they were the commonplace of musical experience in
his society, are not commonplace for us; Bartók's folk
melodies came out of a culture nearly forgotten by its
own people: Ives drew his melodies out of our childhood
experience, and we have trouble abstracting them as we
quite naturally abstract Bach's and Bartók's melodies. We
are embarrassed by them, as many have not ceased being
embarrassed by song or opera in English.

Ives had trained his ear by listening to a great variety
of sounds that are not, in the technical or European sense,
harmonic. He listened to bands playing in competition with
other bands, to the sounds of divided instrumental groups
coming from different distances and directions, to singers
singing off key and masses of untrained voices singing
hymns, to popular airs and ragtime and patriotic tunes,
and to the minute distinctions among noises and rhythms
that are the product of such acoustical divergences. All
of us hear such things, but as John Cage is forever
reminding us few of us listen to them. Fewer hear them
as a means of music.

Ives was gifted with an eye that could translate the
appearance of nature into tonal resemblances. He wielded
as wide a vocabulary of words as any American poet or
author. To open Ives's little book _Essays Before A Sonata_
is to be tempted to quotation. I choose one of the less
commonly repeated and less ingratiating, from the essay
_Emerson_. It applies as immediately to the music of lves.

``Emerson is definite in that his art is based on something
stronger than the amusing or at its best the beguiling of
a few mortals. If he uses a sensuous chord, it is not for
sensuous ears. His harmonies may float, if the wind blows
in the right direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere,
but he has not Debussy's fondness for trying to blow a
sensuous atmosphere from his own voluptuous cheeks."

Ives was always a bit hard on Debussy, though he set a
high value on _La Mer_. Debussy represented for him the
composer who deliberately makes pretty art. He is "the
city-man who comes out for a Sunday in the country." Ives,
by contrast, was a country-man who went to live for a
while in the city; he heard each as a part of nature,
the Housatonic in one mode and in another _Central Park
in the Dark_. Here are three private musings from the
manuscript sketches for the First Piano Sonata. I borrow
them out of the heroic catalogue of Ives's manuscripts
prepared and privately issued by John Kirkpatrick. From
the 4th movement: "Left hand a little louder than right
hand as a kind of the nature sounds which like a tree toad
etc sometimes is heard in the woods, a chronic beat and
over the outdoor singing."

For the first movement: "Cadenza of bells and boys shouts."
(Makes you think of Stockhausen's _Gesang der Jünglinge_.)
Or this: "1st Sonata IV 1st theme and development. How
many Ninnys in US Ye$. Answer to show highest intelligence
bang off glib test (Question ear) answer Yes! or No.
What is the date of birth? Yes 100% No 100% What great man
once died? Yes 100% No 100% Are you fully conversant?
Yes 100% No 100% Mournfully both. All right! Answer
these questions more fully than I did. Mr. Wright!"

Here is idea passing through idiomatic language to the point
of metamorphosis into musical idiom.

Ives heard that conventional music played in conventional
harmony had gone flat. "Old Joe is a supreme musician," he
heard his father say. "Look into his face and hear the music
of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds.
If you do, you may miss the music. You won't get a heroic
ride to heaven on pretty little sounds." Ives took this
teaching to himself; he also paid attention to the sounds.
He didn't think the sounds so important in themselves as for
what they could convey. He set out to put "Old Joe" at the
center of his music. Having started out this way he wasn't
long discovering that simple triads, written to cross at
irregular places and, so to speak, violate their harmony,
also extend the harmony. The ear goes looking for the harmony
and finds it by a more extreme reach. Thus the power of
Ives's early composition for voices, the _67th Psalm_.

Going ahead in this way Ives discovered by anticipation
every major development of 20th century music, except
the formal tone-row, which would not have been likely
to hold his interest, though I have read that in one of
his compositions, prophetically entitled _Tone Roads_,
composed around or before the time of _Pierrot Lunaire_
[Comment from Monzo: a full decade before Schoenberg ever
wrote "12-tone" music], he does begin with a full 12-tone
row. Neither Ives nor Schoenberg stopped to figure out
that if you put together Schubert's melody with Beethoven's
harmony and Bach's counterpoint, you must either extend
your composition to "Heavenly lengths," arriving at the
impasse of Bruckner and Mahler, or something will have to
give. Consider the origins of Schoenberg's First Quartet:
the style from Brahms, the harmony from Wagner, the unitary
form from Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor, and one of the
two exposition sections modeled after the exposition of
Beethoven's Third Symphony. (These attributions refer to
a taped talk by Schoenberg to accompany a performance of
the First Quartet.) By the Second Quartet everything had
changed, the style, the harmony, the form, the imitation;
in the last movement atonality enters. Or hear Webern's
early Piano Quintet [Comment from Monzo: from 1907; a small
MIDI excerpt is on my "A Century of New Music in Vienna"
webpage], the fragments of authentic Webern like minute
bits of living tissue among the dead stretches of imitation
Brahms.

What gave in each case was not the formality of the writing
or the solidity of form in the composition but the theory
which required that melody, harmony, and counterpoint must
follow certain rules of combining that would no longer work.
Schoenberg used his ideas first and theorized about them
afterwards. Ives simply went ahead and put his ideas to use.
Schoenberg paid Ives the tribute, incorrectly, of thinking
him a free spirit. Neither of them was altogether free, not
that free, because each knew that what he had done was right
and was convinced that what he had done must be accepted.
Fame and success were not what they wanted: Schoenberg was
celebrated from his 50th birthday; Ives made a big success
and reputation in the insurance business. Each was convinced
that what he had given would some day be received in the
spirit he had given it. We know that it has been and will be.

The more you become acquainted with great composers, dead
and alive, the more you learn that music is for them a
spiritual as well as a technical experience. Ives wrote
canons as enthusiastically as Schoenberg, but like Beethoven's
fugues, they go wandering off into their own dimensions.
The technical authority is always being turned aside by
the spiritual. Small minds have laughed at Schoenberg
because he acknowledged such spiritual guidance. See how
this deep vein runs through the music by Stravinsky.

If Ives is the great source of American experimental music,
Schoenberg contributed the more directly towards pushing
some of the best experimental composers in that direction.
Schoenberg himself remained in the European tradition to
the end.

Someone may be objecting: you say these American composers
are experimental: how about Schoenberg? how about Bartók
and Stravinsky?

Let's go back again into history. From 1600 down to
Schoenberg, on the one line, and to Bartók and Stravinsky
on the other, European music has been split between two
opposing attitudes about the proper relation between
consonance and dissonance. The difference has fussed up
all the rules of correct composition, without ever being
clarified. The Meantone tradition, which became the German
tradition, took dissonance not discordance as a proper
extension of consonance in harmony and eventually made
abstract drama of it in the sonata. [Comment by Monzo:
note Yates's distinction between "dissonance" and
"discordance". I'm not entirely sure what he means, but
it's noteworthy because we've done the same here recently.]
Bach's counterpoint is always verging towards the same
dissonance that finally burst into the open in Beethoven's
Great Fugue. Schoenberg came at the end, when the
dissonance implicit in the German tradition finally won
out over consonance.

This German tradition seems to us today the mainstream of
European music, but it wasn't, not until well into the
mid-19th century. The other tradition, now so hidden behind
a slope of history that we can scarcely see it, came down
from Palestrina and Just Intonation. This was the Italian
tradition, which later merged with the French. In this
tradition dissonance was held to be no more than a relish,
a spice, for consonance. Dissonance for its own sake was
to be excluded. That is why this tradition produced few
successful sonatas. (There is of course the distinctively
Italian sonata, of which Domenico Scarlatti produced so
many fascinating variants, strongly consonant compositions
often in unusual key colors, spiced by sharp dissonance.
These were probably in Well Tempered or, as Wesley Kuhnle
has demonstrated, in Meantone tuning adjusted to the
disposition of the piece.)

The authority of the Italian tradition established what
is known as "formal counterpoint," the counterpoint taught
at the Conservatory which nobody uses. This counterpoint
is said to have been worked out by Italian theorists on
the model of Palestrina; it paid no attention to what had
happened afterwards by changes in tuning. It assumed a
harmony derived from perfect intervallic ratios, although
every musician knows he works with intervals that are
imperfect. Since this tradition couldn't go back to Just
Intonation and could use the expressive dissonance of
Meantone only for emotional coloration, its rationale
thrust ahead, as Rameau regretfully foresaw, to Equal
Temperament. Thus practical harmonists substituted a
harmony based on equally imperfect intervallic ratios
for an harmonic theory based on unequal hut perfect ratios,
and tried to (10 this impossibility without changing any
of the rules. Exemplars of this tradition are the great
formal harmonists, Rameau, Cluck, Handel, from whom came
the formal colorists, Berlioz, Liszt, Debussy, and the
simpler melodists, from Pergolesi to Gounod. (Recall how
intensely Berlioz, who avoided the keyboard, disliked Bach?
Or Stendhal's strictures against German music in favor of
Pergolesi?)

This anti-dissonant theory reached full display in the
_Gradus ad Parnassum_ of Clementi. Who today has read
through the four volumes of Clementi's _Gradus_? When
Rossini was reckoned greater than Beethoven, Clementi's
_Gradus_ and Cherubini's fugues furnished the models of
counterpoint. Clementi's _Gradus_ is the graveyard of
Italian formal counterpoint. The ghost haunted European
music for another century. Seen in this relationship
there is nothing strange about Bartók turning from Brahms
to Liszt and Debussy, or Stravinsky seeming to overvalue
Gounod or Glinka or Pergolesi, nor in the sudden reversal
of the fundamentally consonant bias of this music into
relatively strict polyharmony. Throughout Stravinsky's
career he has never swerved from his dislike of German
Expressionism, his preference for _ordonnance_ instead
of the German tendency to submerge beat and accent within
expressive rhythm. (Remember that critical fallacy of a
few years ago, that there is not rhythm in Schoenberg,
but Stravinsky is the very model of good rhythm?) Even
in his latest work, since he has come under the inspiration
of Schoenberg and Webern, Stravinsky has not changed in
those essentials which distinguish his craftsmanship in
every period. He would naturally prefer Webern to
Schoenberg.

Stravinsky first heard his Septet read through by a group
of musicians at my home. At the end, jumping to his feet,
characteristically, he exclaimed: "It is tonal fiercely
tonal!" His ear had heard what his will would not yet
accept, that only the closing cadences of each section
can be accepted by the ear as tonality. Not many years
later Stravinsky's insistent honesty spoke, in a recorded
conversation with Robert Craft, the epitaph of the Italian
tradition of pure formal harmony.

"Harmony, a doctrine dealing with chords and chord relations,
has had a brilliant but short history... Today harmonic
novelty is at an end. As a means of musical construction,
harmony offers no further resources in which to inquire and
from which to seek profit. The contemporary ear and brain
require a completely different approach to music. It is one
of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant
generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
Therefore, the present generation's interests are directed
to music before the `harmonic age.' Rhythm, rhythmic
polyphony, melodic or intervallic construction are the
elements of musical building to he explored today."
Stravinsky was thinking, as we know, of the new European
academicism, symbolized by Webern, typified by Pierre
Boulez.

Ives had come there first and long before, with a reach far
beyond the theoretical confines and justifications of Boulez.
Before any other 20th century composer Ives had broken the
grip of the keyboard, which had governed the layout of all
European music during the 300 year harmonic period. The
finale of his Second Symphony piles up a polyphony of
obbligato voices with the freedom of the 15th century
Flemings. They used their popular tunes, which are foreign
to us; Ives used our popular tunes.

It is in the First Piano Sonata that Ives most
convincingly, writing for the piano, liberates that
instrument from its long-established conventions. And
he does this directly from the instrument, appealing to
no authority, no more than hinting at any tradition,
seeking above all unlike Boulez no external or
theoretical justification. The Second Sonata, the more
famous Concord Sonata, is structured of continuous
variation. Continuous variation, not the tone-row,
was the principle of composition Schoenberg was to
recommend.

One device, the tone-cluster, introduced in the First
Sonata and expanded in the Second, was taken up later
by Henry Cowell and borrowed from him by Bartók, who
acknowledged his first use of it in a letter to Cowell.
This may have been the first backward transmittal from
American Experimentalism to Europe. Later transmittals,
setting loose new theoretical developments in Europe,
have come from Edgard Varèse and John Cage.

Ives freed himself in harmony by accepting as equally
valid any combination of tones which would sound to his
purpose. He did not offer a formula to escape key harmony;
he emancipated dissonance and consonance together and
exercised the privilege. The extraordinarily dissonant
Second Quartet is never wry or discordant. The body of
its sound is richly ample, its speech an idiomatic unity.
The one agreement among nearly all who hear and discuss
the music of Ives is this: however arrived at, the music
sounds as Ives wished. Growing experience refutes the
nibbling criticism that his music is primitive, that it
is badly orchestrated, that Ives might have written better
had he heard his music performed. As a boy Ives had
performed publicly major works by Bach and Mendelssohn;
he had received the best musical education America could
provide. He would most likely have written worse, if he
had not been prevented by his isolation from hearing his
music performed; he might not unreasonably have tried to
adapt his work to immediate use. We are the gainers by
his unbroken isolation. For we are able to hear in his
art not only the liberated tonality, a transcendence of
tonalities rather than an atonality, but also and this
is equally important the origins of subsequent
percussion and noise music.

The American Experimental Tradition begins in Ives and
finds there the full armory of its equipment, lacking
only the electronic medium. For our Webern we have Carl
Ruggles, never satisfied, forever working over and
rewriting his few compositions. I am not going to recite
the whole of the Tradition, Cowell, Riegger, and the
other rugged individuals. I am simply discovering it
and leaving the details for others to work out. If I
have left some questions, I assure you these are worth
looking into.

Now for a coda, a few remarks about Edgard Varèse and John Cage.

Varèse came to a new blooming during 1960 with the appearance
of a record including the best of his varied compositions
of the 1920s. These are not many, but they are distinguished
by a search for types of tonal and extra-tonal sound that
have come to fruition in his new works for electronic means.
In _Deserts_ the flesh and tissues of the European symphony
take a running jump out of the old formal skeleton into a
new structure as seemingly free as it is still essentially
symphonic. Varèse is now deeply engaged in his own sound
laboratory composing new works, of which his _Electronic Poem_,
composed for the Le Corbusier designed Philips Building at
the Brussels Exposition is a foretaste. Varèse gives credit
for his technical independence to the theoretical writings
of his master, the pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni.
[Comment by Monzo: Busoni was also featured prominently
in my lecture.] In the work of Varèse, who alone of the
American Experimentalists was born and nurtured in Europe,
the old tradition has transformed itself idiomatically into
the new language.

Varèse would deny that he is an experimentalist: the
experiments, he says, have all been made before I composed.
He said to me: "I'm not interested in tuning. I am able
to invent and produce by electronic means any sound I wish."

Partch works with a very large and subtle scale, which
includes for practical purposes the entire overtone series.
[Comment by Monzo: the doors to debate on that one are now
wide open!]

Harrison nowadays retunes the 12-tone scale to approximate
the acoustical normality of a correct Just Intonation. His
later works in Equal Temperament were designed to reduce
and as nearly as possible eliminate the factors of
dissonance and modulation. He is no less capable of drawing
polyphony out of arbitrarily pitched objects, for example
the one pound coffee cans, the six flowerpots, the washtub,
the string bass laid on its back and beaten with small
hammers each side of the bridge, all to be found in his
Concerto for violin and percussion. He discovered many
years ago that the overtones of a one pound coffee can
combine well with the upper partials of the violin. [Comment
by Monzo: the concert at which I met John Cage in 1979
featured his "Constructions in Metal", whose ensembles
include these very coffee cans.] The beaten recumbent
bass furnishes an antiphony to the violin, just as in
Harrison's Suite for violin, piano, and small orchestra
the tack-piano supplies a tonal medium between
piano-harp-celesta and the bowed instruments.

No use trying to pretend that any one of these composers
writes as he does because he could not learn to write
conventionally. He writes as he does because he can't
write conventionally; because the spirit will not let
him rest in the convention. This sort of side-of-the-mouth
gossip began very early about John Cage. I've known John
for 20 years: our first meeting turned into a fight, over
that same question in rhythm in Schoenberg and Stravinksy,
and we've been disagreeing ever since. Yet I have never
been so overwhelmed by the sense of absolute rightness
in the development of a composer as when I first played
through the album of John Cage's 25-year retrospective
concert at Town Hall in May '58. His theories seem usually
unpromising and are usually as right as Webern's. Granted
that there may have been false starts not represented in
the picked company of the album. I presented John twice
playing his music for prepared piano, but I could never
get the hang of his piece for prepared quartet. I doubted
until I heard it that the music by chance could be other
than arid. Yet I listened to his Concert for piano and
orchestra with a feeling of almost rapturous expansion.

I don't buy the argument that what Cage does may be
interesting but it isn't music. I've quoted several times
Schoenberg's comment to me about Cage: "He is not a
composer, but an inventor of genius." I have a different
term: I call Cage's works "esthetic instances." They are
like philosophical assumptions with which to proceed:
one works with them to determine not whether they are
wrong or right but the consequence. You don't evaluate
a geodesic dome by saying it isn't a work of art or a house.
John Cage's _Imaginary Landscape No. 1_, using the sine
curve of pure fundamental tone from a telephone company
testing record and composed directly on a record, is the
first example of what is now called, clumsily, _Musique
concrète_, and of composition by electronic means. Cage
also composed the first work directly on tape, another
_Imaginary Landscape_. With Lou Harrison he brought to
performance the new medium of non-orchestral percussion,
in which Harrison has been especially prolific.

Cage stated to me the converse of Harrison's argument:
that Schoenberg, when he emancipated the dissonance,
should have gone farther and emancipated music from its
notes. Therefore the prepared piano and the other prepared
media, the compositions for percussion, the piece for
12 radios, the arbitrarily combined noises of _Williams
Mix_ and the many possible free fantasias of noise made
sensitive by intermingling of _Fontana Mix_. Once the idea
has been established that sounds or events may be
combined in any number of arbitrary combinations, subject
to rules determined for the occasion and Cage has gone
a long way towards demonstrating its vitality, regardless
of whether you call the combinations random chance or
just ordinary chance then we are at the point of setting
foot ashore in a new creative landscape. And why not!

If some readers have been bruised by what they may think
my extreme chauvinism, let me go farther. American music
being written today, both experimental and academic, is
the equal of the best that is being written anywhere.
There is perhaps too much of it, but that is no reason
why it should not be estimated by the best. Its multifarious
theories are as stimulating as any to be found abroad.
Few Americans have yet shown courage to esteem the flowering
American musical creation as highly as it deserves among
the flourishing older musical cultures. It is time to do so.

--------

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

Yates: "The American Experimental Tradition" (and microtonal Mahler!)

🔗monz <MONZ@JUNO.COM>

🔗JSZANTO@ADNC.COM

🔗Bill Alves <ALVES@ORION.AC.HMC.EDU>

🔗JSZANTO@ADNC.COM

🔗monz <MONZ@JUNO.COM>