Abstract
At the end of World War II, composers of art music in Western cultures found their craft radically affected in three different but related ways. The first was historical: composers had to face, in their own domain, the shattering consequences (geopolitical, economic, ideological) of the largest and most horrific war in history. The second was technical: the burst of industrial growth which accompanied and followed the war fundamentally altered both the tools of the composer’s trade and music’s economic and social position. The third was institutional: the postwar conviction that specialization is prerequisite for progress provided composers with a new means of support, while deeply altering their relationship to their audience. These three domains are central to the understanding of all postwar music; in the Americas their impact has been especially keen.
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Notes
D. Cope, New Directions in Music (Dubuque, 5/1989), 45f.
The content and structure of this discussion of technology draw heavily on H. Davies’s ‘Electronic Music: History and Development’, in Dictionary of Contemporary Music, ed. J. Vinton (New York, 1974).
The first, seminal experiments using computers to write music, are described in a pioneering book: L. Hiller and L. Isaacson, Experimental Music (New York, 1959).
Good contemporary overviews of 1950s and 60s technology are in E. Schwartz, Electronic Music: a Listener’s Guide (New York, 1973),
and J. A. Appleton and R. C. Perera, The Development and Practice of Electronic Music (Englewood Cliffs, 1975).
See S. McLary, ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Cultural Critique, xii (Spring 1989), 57–81.
W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (New York, 1969), 217–51.
There is a reverential account of Boulanger’s enormous influence in D. G. Campbell, Master Teacher: Nadia Boulanger (Washington, 1984);
for Philip Glass’s seemingly unlikely tribute, see his interview in C. Cagne and T. Coras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1982), 211f.
In a chapter entitled ‘The Rise of American Art Music and the Impact of the Immigrant Wave of the Late 1930’s’, J. Rockwell examines Krenek as a paradigm at this development; see Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, 1983).
The importance of the CBC and other Canadian institutions is revealed throughout G. A. Proctor, Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century (Toronto, 1980), especially in the preface (pp.ix–xii).
Many of these teacher-pupil relationships are summarized in an appendix to N. Butterworth, A Dictionary of American Composers (New York and London, 1964).
Yates is an important figure whose Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1967) is neglected.
The central importance of twelve-note technique can be gauged by the fact that by 1961 it alone, among technical procedures, was deemed worthy of an independent bibliography: A. Basart, Serial Music: a Classified Bibliography of Writings on Twelve-Tone and Electronic Music (Berkeley, 1961).
L. Hiller, ‘Music composed with Computers: a Historical Survey’, in The Computer and Music, ed. H. Lincoln (Ithaca, NY, 1970), 42–96.
A contemporaneous and influential book by R. Smith, Contemporary Percussion (London, 1970), helped to focus the wide-ranging experiments in this domain.
The literature on ‘extended techniques’ began with B. Bartolozzi, New Sounds for Woodwind (London, 1967), and continued with numerous articles and a celebrated series of monographs published by the University of California Press (The Contemporary Contrabass, The Avant- Garde Flute, etc).
Timbre and texture are treated as central compositional tools in R. Erickson, Sound Structure in Music (Berkeley, 1975).
Copland gives a cogent summary of the dynamics associated with this development in The New Music (New York, 1968), 107f.
Copland also remained a perceptive commentator on musical events, manifested in his addenda to the revised edition of Our New Music, repubd as The New Music (New York, 1968).
Schuller introduced the term ‘third stream’ in August 1957, to help identify a body of works already written; see N. Cernovale, Gunther Schuller: a Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn., 1987), 9.
Information about the former, more conservative composers can be found in A. Tischler’s Fifteen Black American Composers: a Bibliography of their Works (Detroit, 1981);
the latter group is presented in D. Baker, L. M. Belt and H. C. Hudson, The Black Composer Speaks (Metuchen, NJ, 1978).
D. Reck, Music of the Whole Earth (New York, 1977), though neither about nor for composers, summarizes the emergence of a globalist aesthetic in the 1960s.
Carter’s writings are also of great importance, compiled in The Writings of Elliott Carter: an American Composer Looks at Modern Music, ed. E. K. Stone (Bloomington, Ind., 1977);
his music is well served in D. Schiff, The Music of Elliott Carter (London, 1983).
Varèse’s late aesthetic was best presented by the composer himself in writings collected as ‘The Liberation of Music’, in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. E. Schwartz and B. Childs (New York, 1967), 196–208.
Nancarrow’s work has produced a flurry of interest in the past decade; the best single source remains P. Garland, Conlon Nancarrow: Selected Studies for Player Piano (Berkeley, 1977).
Carrillo then dropped from view again until the 1970s, when an issue of P. Garland’s journal, Soundings, no.5 (Jan 1973), included scores, a tribute and a translation of Carrillo’s essay ‘The Thirteenth Sound’.
In addition to Partch, Genesis of a Music (Madison, Wisc., 1949/R1977),
see B. Johnston, ‘The Corporealism of Harry Partch’, PNM, xiii/2 (1975), 85–97.
Johnston’s music is thoroughly discussed in H. V. Gunden, The Music of Ben Johnston (Metuchen, NJ, 1986).
M. Babbitt, ‘Who Cares if You Listen’ [the correct title is ‘The Composer as Specialist’] High Fidelity, viii/2 (Feb 1958), 38–40, 126f.
These developments are traced in four seminal articles by Babbitt: ‘Some Aspects of Twelve-Tone Composition’, in The Score and I.M.A. Magazine, xii (1955), 53–61;
‘Twelve-Tone Invariants as Compositional Determinants’, MQ, xlvi (1960), 246–59;
‘Set Structure as a Compositional Determinant’, JMT, v (1961), 72–94; and
‘Twelve-Tone Rhythmic Structure and the Electronic Medium’, PNM, i/1 (1962), 49–79.
Cage’s legacy is discussed in M. Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (London, 1974),
and T. DeLio, Circumscribing the Open Universe (Lanham, 1984).
Hiller’s contemporaneous overview, ‘Music Composed with Computers: a Historical Survey’, in The Computer and Music, ed. H. Lincoln (Ithaca, NY, 1970), 42–96,
has been augmented and extended by C. Ames, ‘Automated Composition in Retrospect, 1956–86’, Leonardo (Oxford, 1987).
The contemporaneous context for such works is discussed in R. Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York, 1968).
Pellegrino, The Electronic Arts of Sound and Light (New York, 1963), although largely self-serving, includes a compact overview of early experiments.
also pertinent are parts of D. Higgins, Postface (New York, 1964).
Gaburo published 32 of his works in a series entitled Collection (San Diego, 1975); his work was the subject of a special issue of PNM, xviii (1979).
The interaction of music with language and poetry is well represented in an anthology by R. Kostelanetz, Text-Sound Texts (New York, 1980).
R. S. James, ‘ONCE: Microcosm of the 1960s Musical and Multimedia Avant-Garde’, American Music, v/4 (1987), 359–90.
S. Barnes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor, 1983);
see also Barnes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-modern Dance (Boston, Mass., 1980).
See M. Cunningham, Changes: Notes on Choreography (New York, 1969).
R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Philadelphia, 21/1980);
and also Creative Music Education: a Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (New York, 1976).
In 1965 Cage began a series of texts entitled ‘Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)’; and the dedication to his second volume of writings, A Year from Monday (Middletown, Conn., 1967), reads ‘To us and all who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less’ (p.[v]).
Bibliographical Note
For the period 1945–70 the three most essential sources for the USA, Canada and Latin America respectively are all more general references: The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. H. W. Hitchcock and S. Sadie (London, 1986);
Contemporary Canadian Composers, ed. K. MacMillan and J. Beckwith (Toronto, 1975);
and G. Behague, Music in Latin America: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, 1979).
Several other standard texts, though covering a broader domain than that discussed in this chapter, are of considerable use: N. Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York, 4/1971);
J. Machlis, Introduction to Contemporary Music (New York, 2/1979);
E. Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: an Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, 3/1988);
and G. A. Proctor, Canadian Music of the Twentieth Century (Toronto, 1980).
Especially valuable is D. Cope’s New Directions in Music (Dubuque, 5/1989); the extensive annotated bibliographies and discographies make this an important research tool as well as an introductory text.
Other research and reference sources are now outdated but remain extremely useful for the contemporaneous insights they offer; prime among them is the Dictionary of Contemporary Music, ed. J. Vinton (New York, 1974).
Biographical information on particular composers can sometimes be supplemented from sources like E. R. Anderson’s Contemporary American Composers: a Biographical Dictionary (Boston, Mass., 1976),
Thirty-Four Biographies of Canadian Composers (Montreal, 1964), and material scattered through the series Composers of the Americas, published first by the Pan American Union and later by the Organization of American States.
Also outdated but useful are several books on technology: The Development and Practice of Electronic Music, ed. J. Appleton and R. C. Perrera (Englewood Cliffs, 1974);
E. Schwartz, Electronic Music: a Listener’s Guide (New York, 1972);
The Computer and Music, ed. H. Lincoln (Ithaca, NY, 1970);
and Music by Computers, ed. H. Von Foerster and J. W. Beauchamp (New York, 1969).
Four recent volumes are primarily concerned with later music but contain important discussions of the period 1945–70: J. Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York, 1983);
P. Garland, Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture, 1973–80 (Santa Fe, 1982);
J. Schaefer, New Sounds: a Listener’s Guide to New Music (New York, 1987);
and P. Manning, Electronic and Computer Music (Oxford, 1985).
An important series of Canadian biographies published by the University of Toronto Press includes Barbara Pentland, R. Murray Schafer and others. Threejournals occasionally address this period in articles of high quality: American Music, the Yearbook of the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research and the Inter-American Music Bulletin.
Contemporaneous periodicals offer a rich spectrum of opinions and aesthetics. The two best-known are Source: Music of the Avant-Garde and Perspectives of New Music [PNM]; articles from the latter were reprinted in two collections edited by B. Boretz and E. T. Cone: Perspectives on American Composers (New York, 1971)
and Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory (New York, 1972).
For a representative picture, however, these journals should be supplemented with others like Soundings (whose editor, P. Garland, also produced important occasional volumes), The Composer (California; not to be confused with the British periodical Composer), Numus West, and the Proceedings of the American Society of University Composers. Many other periodicals presented special issues on contemporary music during the 1960s; often overlooked and especially valuable are the November 1968 issue of Music Educator’s Journal, devoted entirely to electronic music, and the 1970 special issue of Arts in Society, edited by G. Chase and called Sounds and Events of Today’s Music.
Arguably the best sources are the composers themselves. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. E. Schwartz and B. Childs (New York, 1976),
continued in the tradition of The American Composer Speaks, ed. G. Chase (Baton Rouge, 1966).
Two important collections of interviews are C. Gagny and T. Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, NJ, 1982)
and W. Zimmermann, Desert Plants (Vancouver, 1976).
Books and articles by composers are far too numerous to be fairly represented here; an interesting sample might include, for entirely different reasons: R. Reynolds, Mind Models: New Forms of Musical Experience (New York, 1975);
G. Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival: a Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music (Ann Arbor, 1984);
R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York, 1977);
J. Tenney, Meta + Hodos: a Phenomenology of 20th-century Music and an Approach to the Study of Form (New Orleans, 1964/R 1990);
B.Johnston, ‘On Context’, Proceedings [of the American Society of University Composers] (1968);
and S. Reich, Writings about Music (New York, 1974).
Babbitt’s writings, surprisingly, have not been anthologized; a complete bibliography appears in PNM, xv/1 (1976), which is devoted to Babbitt’s work, and a recent series of lectures by the composer has been published as Words about Music, ed. S. Dembski and J. N. Straus (Madison, 1987).
Cage has written, contributed to or been interviewed in hundreds of publications; his first book, Silence (Middletown, Conn., 1961), remains a starting-point for (some would say the death of) postwar music in the Americas.
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Brooks, W. (1993). The Americas, 1945–70. In: Morgan, R.P. (eds) Modern Times. Man & Music. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11291-3_14
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