GEORGE EDWARDS
419
Piano Variations
(1930) with
Appalachian Spring
(1944), the same picture
emerges: the thirties and forties were as inhospitable to modernism as are
the eighties. Most composers adapted to these circumstances, and in some
cases their conservative music was stronger than their earlier modernist
works. Even Schoenberg returned to tonality in some works, a move which
had hardly any effect on his unpopularity; Varese chose nearly twenty years
of silence until the early fifties.
Only a prophet could have predicted in 1939 that musical modernism,
apparently dead, would get its revenge in the 1950s. To the European
Darmstadt School composers (Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, et al), coming of
age in a continent which had been physically and morally almost destroyed,
there appeared to be little worth saving from the past.
As
Andre Hodeir
admiringly puts it, "In abandoning tonality, music had entered a singularly
coherent universe of privative attributes. The new values were: rhythmic
and melodic discontinuity, irrational rhythm, athematicism, non-tonality ... "
Many of the composers who first explored these negative values through
"total serialism" (the extension of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method to all
musical "parameters") soon discovered they could obtain similar results much
more easily by aleatoric means.
As
Ernst Krenek said:
... the composer has come to distrust his inspiration because it is not
really as innocent as it was supposed to be, but rather conditioned by a
tremendous body of recollection, tradition, training, and experience.
In order to avoid the dictations of such ghosts, he prefers
to
set up an
impersonal mechanism which will furnish, according to premeditated
patterns, unpredictable situations.
Amazingly, even ideas like these did not always prevent the composi–
tion of interesting music.
In
America, blessed among other things with the
presence of important European composers in the thirties and forties (Bartok,
Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky), and with the survival of a native tradi–
tion of modernist composers (Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, Seeger, Sessions), the
second wave of modernism took a less virulent form. On the other hand,
American modernists such as Babbitt, Carter, Perle, and Shifrin lacked the
Jacobin zeal and gift for self-promotion of their European counterparts.
Lacking public support, they tended to retreat to the university, where their
concerts often took on some of the character of Schoenberg's Society for the
Private Performance ofMusic.
Since they have had little impact on the '''real'' musical world, American
academic modernists, however numerous and persistent, are not to be
