Gresham College Lectures

Life Without Chords? – Atonal Music

May 31, 2023 Gresham College
Gresham College Lectures
Life Without Chords? – Atonal Music
Show Notes Transcript

In the early 20th century, the system of tonal harmony started to break down. The vertical accumulations of notes became too complex for our powers of memory and recognition, and some have suggested that this led to a loss of meaning and even humanity in music.

In this lecture we will discuss expressive uses of atonality, and also the return of familiar chords to music, but outside the grammar that used to give them their logic.


A lecture by Marina Frolova-Walker recorded on 18 May 2023 at LSO St Luke's Church, London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/atonal-music

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Welcome to your friends, to the last lecture of our course, uh, the Life of Courts. And today we are going to ask the question whether life is possible without them. Uh, this story, the story of the solution of tonality, the emergence of atonality, and, um, then the creation of new ways of organizing this eternal music into 12 tone. For example, surrealist music, uh, was a story that used to be told when I was young, um, as a story of progress. Yeah. This great sort of going up the steps of human musical evolution, uh, towards greater complexity, um, and, um, more and more things happening in the music and so on. Yeah. So in the last, uh, at, at that point when we were telling this story that way, and every single textbook would, would tell you, um, the story precisely this way, at that time, composers who didn't do atonality, somebody like Rachmaninov for example, were completely, um, marginalized. Yeah. They were not written about. They were kind of almost embarrassing to mention. If you think about 1950s, not even Rachmaninov, just rachman ov until recently, I used to look up Wikipedia article on 20th century music, and just coach was not even mentioned there because he was not actually sort of part of this great magisterial road, uh, through the century or the road of progress. But things have changed in the past few decades. And, uh, more and more composers are learning at, at the concert war, not just to write eternal music, but also to write eternal music. And that might be their preference. That certainly seems to be the preference of concert organizers, uh, who would hardly program this these days, music by Schonberg or Bules. Uh, so today, after I tell this story to you again with a different ending, um, we are going to have a little mini recital, uh, by Alexander Su Suarez who specializes in this kind of music. So, uh, let's begin in, There are three ways, um, in which chords start to disappear. Yeah. There, the three things I will, uh, present them in, in several chapters, you know, all these events, but basically there are three main routes. Yeah. So one thing to do to tonality to make it disappear is to gradually weaken the harmonic function of the court. Yeah. So we were talking, um, in say, lecture two of the course about how the dominant seventh was a very powerful dynamic chord that wanted to resolve into the tonic. Well, if you add a few notes to it, a few extra notes, it loses this dynamism, it becomes more static, doesn't want to resolve. So the tension resolution, you know, is not perceived by us quite so strongly. Um, you can weaken it another way. We we're going to look at these things, um, a bit later. Uh, the second way of doing it is to write more polyphonically. You know, if you remember in lecture one, I was telling you that chords sort of gradually arise out of polyphony. Yeah. So the, all these independent lions, which form various sort of vertical, um, things, and eventually they crystallize into chords that we now recognize and we give them names. Yeah. So here the opposite happens. Yeah. So music becomes less vertical and more horizontal, and there are more and more things happening. Um, and again, we have these, these vertical similarities that we don't know how to explain, don't know how to name. And the third way is just to get rid of the 12 notes altogether. Yeah. Why should there be just 12 notes? Yeah. We can invent alternative tuning systems, you know, why not 48, why not 36? Why not 72? Why not 49? Right. So, but when we do that, uh, then familiar course disappear as well. Yes, sir. Most of the things that I'm going to talk about are going to fall into one of these three categories. So we'll start, uh, with people who were tearing up the rule book. Yeah. Because in, in the 19th century, music is still governed by certain rules. Yeah. You're not supposed to do parallel ths, for example, in your voice leading. You're not supposed to like follow, um, uh, you're supposed to follow one chord with another and so on. Uh, but we have mentioned already that France list, for example, was, uh, especially, um, in inventive in the way he used diminished and augmented chords. Yeah. And that weakened analogy as well. So, uh, there is this piece that he wrote, uh, in 1881, and it wasn't published during his lifetime. It was only discovered, uh, in 1927, and it became one of these landmarks Yeah. Of atonality on the road to eight analogy, because although it still has a key signature and pretends to be in g mine, it doesn't actually sound like g mine at all. It has all kinds of strange, again, augmented chords. And, uh, the most important thing is how it ends. Yeah. It seemed to end on, on the, on the chords are not only dissonant, but they don't seem to have anything to do with the G G I at all. Yeah. So it's a kind of great, um, strange thing that happens there. So one might think, well, maybe it's a fragment. Maybe he didn't finish it, but, well, it seems to be a completed piece. That's how we take it. So let's have a look at how it ends. Let's, let's hear it. So enigmatic, Andy. So when that piece was discovered, obviously people who were, uh, very much into this narrative of modernism Yeah. Going further and further forward, uh, used it as, as an example, as an important point. Uh, so much so that the composer Mauricio Ka, actually, um, in 1972, deconstructed it into little, um, bits, you know, took all the mos and chords away, mixed them up, and even used all the pedal of markings and made the pianist perform them separately. So let's hear how that happens at the end. Yeah. It gets louder and louder, uh, and at the end they shout list and seal. Yeah. So to make it read it backwards as the the go. Yeah. So list, list is leading us to this go of atonality Now, uh, a much more interesting, um, probably a case, uh, in terms of narrative is dbc because it was, um, pronounced by Pier Boles, um, as somebody who awakened modernism with this piece. Yeah. Um, symphonic piece from 1894. Um, and you know, today we might not notice it. What's, uh, what's so striking about this piece? It sounds extremely nice. Yeah. It sounds like a warm bath as <laugh> some of the French composers of later generation used to say, um, yeah. The very sens harmony. What's wrong with it? All? Very beautiful, quite unexpected various terms. Yeah. But all very beautiful. Well, people were really perplexed by the fact that they could not identify all the chords and why that chord was there. And people like Rimsky Corki were especially angry. Yeah. Because Rimsky Corki wanted to understand how it works logically. Yeah. And it, it didn't seem to work logically to him. He liked the sounds, but he wanted to produce them in a logical way. So, uh, DBC made a lot of, uh, these kind of rule break, uh, statements. Um, these are some of them torn and dominant had become empty shadows of use only to stupid children. Uh, the prayer that I have just heard, um, plate shows a disdain for the so-called constructional know-how that places a burden on our finer intellect. It has no respect for tonality. Nothing more mysterious, he says than cons consonant court, despite all theories, both, all the new, we're still not sure first why it is consonant, and second, why the other courts have to bear the stigma of being dissonant. Yeah. And finally, there is no theory, you have merely to listen. Pleasure is the law. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously he, he, he exaggerates, uh, yeah. He, he had had great experience of writing tone music, and he knew how it worked, but nevertheless, he know, he didn't feel that he needed to be constrained by these rules anymore. One of the rules that he breaks is the rule of the parallel fifth. Yeah. So he and parallel octaves, so he actually writes the whole piece. Yeah. Which is sort of consists of these parallel, uh, octaves and fifths. But what looks like chords to you, they are these vertical things. Yeah. Vertical similarities. They are not actually acting as functional chords. They don't seem to have any function. They seem just to, like a doubling of the melodic line. Like something that would happen, for example, on an organ. Yeah. If you pull another stop that adds a fifth to it. Uh, yeah. So essentially it's not, uh, a, a sequence. Of course, it's not a progression. Yeah. Had just a melodic line, which is kind of embellished, decorated with this, these beautiful minorities. In the middle section though, this court suddenly become chords and they, they create something like a cadence. And when, when in C M H Yeah. There's no question about that. And then towards the end of the piece, they stop being cords again, even though he now adds a little dissonance to it. Very mild, lovely dissonance. Uh, he li he adds the sevens into these. So, So this is why people were so perplexed. Yeah. They didn't know how to treat them. Shall we treat them as chords within a progression or just as something sort of entirely decorating the melody? Our next chapter is called Too Much to Take. You will see why, um, we will start with Schau Berg's first quartet, uh, which he performed, uh, with Gustav Mahler attending and show to Mahler. And Mahler, uh, uh, was perplexed by it. He didn't know what to make of it. He wanted to be very supportive of Schoenberg. He thought that Schoenberg was extremely talented, but he couldn't make sense of it. Uh, and that happens Yeah. Bec because there's too much going on. Polyphonically, there's the, all these lines, although there were only four of them, they create sonorities that even Mar's ear couldn't quite catch. And it sounds very nicely in D Minor. And already on the second page, you will hear, you know, you will hear that it's not in a major or a minor. Uh, so Marla said to him, very honestly, now, openly, I have conducted Wagner's most difficult scores. I have written complex music myself in scores of 30 states and more, yet, here is a score with no more than more than four states, and I'm unable to read them. And shown the reminiscing about this, this meeting says, the most embarrassing circumstance was that the harmony is produced by those independently moving parts changed so fast and were so advanced that the ear could not follow their meaning. And, uh, in, in the same, uh, article, he says that as in the early epoch, so before chords, harmonies will now be a product of the voice leading justified solely by the melodic lines. And now things get even more interesting in Chen second quartet only a few years later. Um, so it's in four movements, the first three half key signatures, and this the last one doesn't. Yeah. So finally, Seck sort of decides to admit there is no key, um, in this piece. And, uh, this coincides with him using a poem by Stefan Georgie, which says, at this point, uh, I feel the air of another planet. Yeah. Of another planet. So this is how it sounds. Oops. Uh, so this, the poem is entitled Rapture, and it's a transcendent moment. Uh, so actually for Schoenberg, it was a very important moment in his personal life when he was overcoming a huge personal trauma and coming out of it, um, looking forward rather than into the past. And it's interesting how you can read it as almost a manifesto of this new, a eternal world. I dissolve into notes circling, weaving in groundless thanks. And nameless praise, surrendering without a wish to the mighty breathing. Because of course, Sean Beck believed that it was historical necessity that moved him. Yeah. From, uh, tonality to a tonality and a slightly less poetic explanation of what happens in this movement by Schoenberg is, uh, the overwhelming multitude of dissonances could not be counterbalanced anymore by occasional returns to such tonic tris as represent a key. Yeah. So, uh, we give up only key, although actually this, this quartet still ends on a, on a triad, uh, of F sharp major, uh, next year. Yeah. Things get even, um, even more exciting. And now various formal aspects are also given up. Motiva development is sort of given up, and the, there's a free for all situation when you have, uh, music that seems to be expressing something very freely without being constructed at all. And that goes, of course, um, hand in hand with the artistic movement of expressionism, which was all about expressing the subconscious. Yeah. So something that could not be, um, expressed in, in a more constructed way. Yeah. That's why the writer starts writing in a stream of consciousness way, for example, you know, Freud discovered psychoanalysis, you know, just a few decades before it all happens in Vienna. So this is the kind of music that expresses the inner south, Uh, Kandinsky. Yes. So somebody who from a, from a sister art Yeah. From a painting, uh, who was at that time looking into similar ideas in the visual arts into abstraction Yeah. Of getting rid of figure art. Uh, in the same way Asberg was getting rid of tonal. So he was present at, at the concert where, uh, the second quartet and these pieces, uh, Opus 11 were played. This is actually his, uh, his picture from that concert. Yeah. That big black thing is a piano, believe it or not. Yeah. But you seen, it's, it's almost abstract. Yeah. It has these figures, but they might might as well be something else. Uh, and Kandinsky was so impressed that he started corresponding with Schonberg, and they worked out various ideas together as one of very interesting, um, moments. Yeah. One really, uh, two arts. Yeah. In the same side, guys sort of intersect very closely, but not everyone, uh, was as enthusiastic as Kandinsky. And the normal kind of review that Schonberg would get for this would be like this one by, uh, by Arthur Han. The almost hair raising cacophony seemed rather too much, even for those who had so far kept a straight face as they followed Schoenberg's Welch Smartz, and its musical revelation here. So he's mo mocking him. One can only shake one's head in astonishment as at his effrontery in trying to pass off this kind of thing as music, in the sense that this term has always been understood. These sound effects gave rise to accidental convergences of notes entirely at random. By near chance, we might expect occasion combinations of notes that sound harmonious to our ears, shown by however. And this is the only thread of consistency in his composition, deliberately select only sounds at the opposite end of the spectrum from whatever could sound right to our ears. Yeah. So kind of being deliberately contrary and trying not to give you even by accident any tribes or anything that might please you. And, uh, that was a very typical, uh, type of criticism. Now, let's look at other ways how, uh, so atonality could be achieved. Uh, well, I'm going to look at a few of transcendent pieces that are really reaching for the Holy Grail. Uh, all 12 notes of the chromatic scale sounding together. Uh, you might remember I played you, uh, SCRs, um, yeah, the beginning of the pro, um, Prometheus, the Mystic Ward, which only has six notes, but it already, uh, sounds good enough to represent the cosmos. Yeah. So almost like a kind of noise and scr and of course, in his, uh, final work that he never got to write in the Mysterium was thinking of getting to all 12 notes, and he called that chord the chord of the ple. Yeah. So the chord of plenitude of everything, everything, um, being embraced by it. Uh, we have a few more examples around the same time. It's interesting how composers from various countries trying the same thing and always in the, in the context of some kind of transcendence. So alberg from Alton Berg leader Beyond the borders of all we know. Yeah. So, So Yeah. 12 note called Alfred ela, um, same year, 1913. Yeah. His, um, piece, which is called not, um, may Night. Um, here he uses a chord, which he calls the natural harmony of the eternal system, because the question is, well, if you write eternal music, where is the tonic of it? What is the main chord? So he says, well, this is the main cord of the A tunnel system. Yeah. It includes everything. And then you can just pick and pick and choose from it as you go along. So here, uh, we have this moonlet mysterious landscape. And, uh, at the moment when, um, he perceives all the souls of the dead populating this landscape, this is when we get this chord, uh, in a completely different place. Charles Ives, uh, uses that cord. You can, you can even see, yeah. No, he was really trying to occupy almost all a range that is available to him and the orchestra. Um, so he, um, wrote this about, it's also about the landscape. Yeah. It's about the river in a particular place. Um, and he always imagined nature as being kind of consisting of different things going on at once. And at the end, they all come together in this joyful cacophony, which is sort of divine transcendent moment. Yes. Yet again. So there was com also, of course, a very different approach of, uh, compromise ality, so to speak. Yeah. Um, without getting rid of it all together. And the root of that we can find in a piece by Morse, which you might know, uh, which ends in a very strange way. Yeah. A musical joke. Yeah. So it's, um, about the ensemble of village musicians who've gone wrong at the very last moment. So if you, if you saw it, the end of the score, you had the three keys stacked together. Yeah. Different keys. So that is what, uh, people like Stravinsky start doing. Um, also at first humorously and then completely seriously at the beginning of the, uh, 20th century, uh, one of my favorite moment is in Petrushka, and I'll play the, the solid piano version so that you can hear it more easily. Uh, so there is a folk melody, and it has a harmony that we kind of imagine a very simple harmony, dominant and tonic. And he would take this bass Yeah. If you can see this little notes. Yeah. He would take it regularly at the right moments. And then this base suddenly, um, separates from the harmony, and it comes at the wrong time, and then it becomes the wrong base. Yeah. So, so the harmonies separated from its base for a moment. So you, you get this strange displacement happening. It comes in random as if it's exists separately from the rest of the court. So, um, in Patricia, it's all sort great farm and, and it has a humorous effect. Um, but when you get to the rite of spring, everything is displaced. And this is how one of the critics described it as, as early as 1914. Yes. The rite of spring is 1913, and the next, um, next year, uh, the Russian critic, Verla Kagan describes it as displacement, which is, uh, very similar to cubism. Yes. You have seen all futurist paintings. You have read futurist verses, and you have of course noticed the displacement is the characteristic feature of futurist art. Either the two eyes in the portrait have skitted to different corners of the painting, or else the letters in the world in the world have been rearranged mixed up. And what Stravinsky is doing, and the right is founded mainly on displacement, tonalities are displaced. They have begun to pile up on top of one another, and intervals are displaced. Octas are suddenly slip down into sevens and rhythms are displaced. Everything has been shifted and shuffled. Uh, I wanted to give you, uh, a little bit of the ballet version Yeah. With the original choreography to see, so that you could see that actually when you see it with the choreography, it is much easier listen to listen to, because it makes sense that every group of dancers sort of have their own key, more or less. So I'm sure you know that both Chan Beck and Stravinsky at that time had scandals at the Premiers. Yeah. So people were not prepared to take it. Yeah. They really thought that they were ma being made fun of. Uh, and indeed there was a lot of fun involved, like in a piece which he wrote for . And it's a kind of polka, which has very primitive harmony. Basically, nothing happens in the harmony, but the melody has lots of wrong notes. Yeah. So it kind of, um, just gets into, into a key where it shouldn't be. He just insists Yeah. On this being out of tune, uh, pretending Yeah. That one of the pianists cannot actually play or playing the wrong, wrong notes. And as rinky himself, uh, described Alfredo Kaza, when he, he heard this, this piece was so impressed by it that that's the moment musical Neoclassicism was born. And so, because basically what happens is you have this displacement, but now the, the material sounds familiar in the right of spring, it wasn't necessarily familiar, uh, but here, it's, it's something very easy, something familiar that you are distorting Yeah. In a very deliberate way. And it sounds funny. And eventually you, as these harmonies started, uh, getting into the mainstream and during the 1920s new classes and really became the musical mainstream, and our ear, you know, started getting used to, to it and didn't even feel that there was anything particularly wrong with them or funny about them. Yeah. So even a distorted cadence still sounds like a cadence sometimes in Stravinsky, but, uh, there was also, um, that this is an extension of this idea Yeah. Of, uh, stacking up keys, um, which we can, uh, name as ality or polytonality. So yeah, once again, you can see here that, um, if you look at the beginning of the, of the score that the left hand is playing in B flat miner, and the right hand is playing nef sharp miner. Yeah. So he has two key signatures. It's kind of in your face by tonality, um, even though actually it doesn't maybe sound that desant. Yeah. So these loud cords, they're supposed to kind of mock a cadence. Yeah. So it's supposed to look like a cadence, but of course doesn't sound anything like a cadence. Um, a French composer who really made the trade in ality and polytonality. Uh, so this is quite a famous piece of his ka cabana from South Brazil. And actually, you know, I think vitamin, it doesn't spoil it, it still sounds quite sexy. Uh, well, an English composer who, uh, heard this, uh, wrote about this in 1933. This is music on two planes, but surely of the most facile, the most banal description, just naughty, perverse, this music or anti music is in spite of the incongruity of its part definitely harmonic. Yeah. So it still definitely has chords, yet it's not actually polyphonic, and yet it is perverse. It's tonality is used against itself. Well, mijo, as I said, you know, made, made, uh, a meal of Polytonality, and he here in this extract, he claims to be using five keys simultaneously. Yes. So this is kind of his own analysis. So listen, and he uses quite simple kind of folk like material in the voices so that you can hear them better separately. But it's still a moot point whether we can actually, our ear can distinguish, you know, five or six separate layers. So again, even naughty, even more perverse. So as I mentioned, why stop at 12 notes? Um, there were, um, so three reasons why people started getting interested and going beyond the 12 notes. Um, one was that they found out about other cultures, such as the, the Japanese gamelan, for example. Yeah. Which is not based on equal temperament. Um, so, uh, another reason is that technology allowed them to create instruments now that could do quarter turns. Yeah. Or even even smaller divisions of the town. Uh, and the third reason they were in, some people were interested in kind of historic scales, the Greek scales, which already had these microtones. So, uh, well, let's look at the piece by Arturo, who was a kind of futurist, and he would do any new thing he Yeah. Any avan gar thing that was going. So this is what he wrote in 1912 for quarter Sounds very strange. Yes. Sounds like scraping being played on out of Titiana, because the chords are kind of scraping. Ask still. Uh, well, this, uh, this is probably sort of sounds more independent, uh, alo haba also, you know, that that was his trade, uh, microtonal music. So he built this, um, harmonium, which had 36, um, notes in the scale, and he uses them in more polyphonic. So you can actually hear these little divisions of the tone in independent voices Once you get to court. It really sounds horrible. Yes. Um, there's nothing you can do about it. So, you know, micro mental tonality still exists, but that sort of never became mainstream despite all, all the great claims of them liberating the music from this prison of 12 Semitones. The next chapter is called Ending the Chaos. Um, uh, it was, uh, they burn who re reminiscing of those 10 years after Atonality was sort of discovered by, by Schonberg that were the years of chaos and blind groupings for some kind of new way of organizing music, because it was terrifying not to have any rules at all. So they, when he was talking about the new, uh, way of organizing music, the 12 Tony, I was surrealist, um, serial way of organizing music. He showed this, uh, classic palero, uh, table. Yeah. So sat 10 opera rota, which you can read the same way in four different ways. Yes. Starting from the left top like this, and also down and starting from the right hand side down corner also in two ways. Yeah. Up and to the left. So, um, this is, you know, the first time it was found in Pompe, I think, you know, nobody really knows how to translate this. This is about million translations, but SAT is, so apo seems to be a, a name. Uh, so the sewer of seeds, a repo takes good care of his wheels, for example. Something like that. Well, the point is, yeah. That now if you imagine every letter being a, a musical note. Yeah. You can, you what, what they wants to do is to create this symmetrical structure, uh, that would work in the same way. Uh, so, uh, this is for example, a square that, that can be created for his symphony Opus 21. And then every one of the notes, the way he uses them is kind of isolated. It's almost like sort of pointless painting, you know, it's, it's, they are separate in, uh, in the musical space. They don't seem to form melodies that easily. Yeah. Even the familiar textures are absent. Um, and, uh, this is an extremely sort of symmetrical row, and I don't have time to go into this, but basically what you can do, so you decide on what's, how you want your 12 notes to be arranged. So that is main row or series at the top, and then you can do the three types of things about that. You can, you can play it backwards. Yeah. Which is what the Pandora principle, um, tells you to do. You can also rotate it sort of symmetrically, um, in relation to the first note. Yeah. So all the are intervals that would go at the start, would go down, would start going up. You'll get the second kind of mirror reflection around that central access. So that's the second operation. Then you can combine them and you will get retrograde inversion. Yeah. So you can play it backwards as well. Um, and then you can transpose them, of course, that you can shift it yet to every single note of the, um, of the 12 out of the 12. Yeah. So you, you get all these, these possibilities. But the striking thing was this isolation Yeah. Of individual notes and completely new texture. It's really are other worldly music. So not all 12 of 10 music sounds like this, you know, some of it by Hanberg for example, sounds more kind of human than normal because it still has something that resembles chords, even though they are, uh, usually dissonant. Um, and Schonberg is usually credited or credited himself with the invention of this completely kind of artificial method of organizing music. But there was another, uh, composer called Yo of Howard who did it just kind a couple of years earlier, and we shouldn't forget about him. Um, although he was much more modest than Schonberg. So he wasn't trying to promote himself, but they actually communicated, corresponded with each other and even wanted to write a book together about this method. So this is Now, as you can imagine, um, all that time through the twenties when Neoclassicism was mainstream, a eternal music basically was the term of abuse. And this is, uh, what Alberg was interviewed in 1930 complained about. Yeah. He said that this term has come to stand collectively from music of which it was assumed not only that it had no harmonic center, but that it was also devoid of all other musical attributes such as malice, rhythm, form in part and hall. So that today, the designation as bud as signifies in music, that is no music at all. And the term is used to imply the polar opposite of whatever was previously considered to be music. And so that's 1930, that's still the situation. And he is trying to argue against it. And he says, well, melody for us is still fundamental. You might not find this periodic structure kind of rhyming structure of cadences, but, uh, the music has a freer rhythm like prose. Yeah. As opposed to poetry. Uh, the freer rhythm, not kind on a small scale comes from a combination of individual line, individual lines, just like it doesn't js bark. And the one thing he wants to, uh, reassure his public about that every single bar has been subjected to the sharpest control of the outer and in the ear. Yeah. So we are not just taking you for a ride. Yeah. This is not just random. We have thought about it. We bear responsibility for every single bar of this music. So now let's look how that changes. How do we give up control of the ear? So, uh, Pierre Bules in, uh, at the beginning of the 1950s, uh, wanted to have even more control. Yeah. So he thought, well, if you can serialize pitch Yeah. Which is you see on the top, let's do the same with the all the other parameters of music such as rhythm. Yeah. Yes. Let use, use note values, which will be also serialized. Let's use dynamic, which is a bit of a, uh, can you really have 12 levels of dynamics, but you know, you can serialize them as well and modes of attack Yeah. So that every note would be struck in a different way with different kind of accent. So, um, then he arrives, uh, at this mechanism. Yeah. That's, uh, he can sit in motion and the music then comes out almost a automatically, and this is what it sounds like. So this is already music that is kind of not really organized by, by human ear. Yeah. It's something that's been pre, there's a pre composition phase, and then it sort of runs itself on the mechanism that he's been put, uh, in, into practice. And at the very same time, American composer John Cage, uh, was writing music that would sound probably to our ear very similar, but based on chance. Yeah. So he, he used the Chinese divination book Yeah. To create these, uh, sounds just by as, as you would do fortune telling. Yeah. Just by kind of looking at the chart, The interesting thing that Cajun bulls also corresponded, and they discussed these things together, even though, yeah. They, they seem to be coming from, to the same result from very opposite sides. So one through chance at another one through this very, very tight organizations. But what they both want is to get rid of the past, to get rid of these habits and tastes of previous music. So they deliberately want to write the music that nobody has written before, and it has nothing to do with it. So only for a short moment they intersect, and then they go, uh, their own separate ways. And, you know, cage, for example, writes, uh, four minutes, 33 seconds of silence. Yeah. And Les and other composers were trying to make their music even more mathematical up to the point that Milton Babbit famously says, well, music should be like physics or mass or engineering. It should be just done in universities. And, you know, it doesn't matter whether you don't understand it because it's like science. I mean, you are not understanding, not, not everyone would understand the theory of Relativity some higher mask. Why should you think that you should understand it? Yeah. So once he published his article and the editor added a title, who cares if you listen? Yeah. So it wasn't actually his title, but it's, it's entered the musical history as this kind of really moment when the listener is not needed anymore. Yeah. So, um, and you can see that, you know, cages, uh, eating tables and, and, uh, B'S ma mattresses, they kind of look similar even though they, they come, we come from, from different, uh, perspectives to the same result. Now, interestingly, uh, in the fifties, uh, a eternal music finally becomes mainstream. And this is, this was Berg's, um, dream and what Schonberg already died, and that, that point suddenly even Stravinsky defects to the other camp. So he starts doing 12 turn music. Um, he, uh, and, and it wasn't just, uh, taught at the Conservatoires now, but also it appears in film scores. Uh, the first, uh, film score that is written with 12 note technique in it is the Cobweb 1955. So that's all right. Yeah, that sounds familiar. That sounds like the sound, yeah. From the fifties to the seventies, this was mainstream film scores that were, that were written, uh, in jazz as well. Yeah. Jazz became, becomes a, at that point as well. Um, so, uh, Jimmy Jre, for example, the Fugue, not just, it's written polyphonically as, so not without with chords, but with lions, but also eternally, uh, and, uh, even, um, more excitingly Ornette Coleman's band, which introduces free improvisation and this kind of collision of different lions, I feel almost nostalgic. Yeah, no, listening to this. Yeah. So that it's the sound that we once have gotten used to, and then, uh, now we are not used to it anymore, perhaps o okay. Now, very quickly on the return of the courts. So, um, just as we thought that eternal music was everywhere, and composers were primarily, um, learning in conservatives how to write music in a 12 turn, um, there was another kind of countercultural movement which, uh, got out of, um, uh, California. And, uh, it was, it wasn't the first even viewed as art music. It was something Yeah. That was kind of on the, um, on the, you know, a fusion maybe of art music with, with pop music. Um, and then it became, uh, mainstream, and now it is still mainstream. We call it minimalism. Uh, the point was that it introduced a different way of listening to music. And it was more about sort of meditation and focusing maybe on a single note or on a single chord for a long time. Sometimes things developing very slowly and gradually in the, in the course of this, people started getting back into chords. Philip Glass, for example. Um, he says, um, another look of odd harmony, I think it's 1972, uh, when he actually created something very much like progressions of eternal music. Uh, or for example, John Adams, he actually calls one of the sections of his grand piano music on the dominant divide. Yeah. And he gives you a chord, which we've described as, uh, I think at one point, a third inversion of the dominant seventh. And he holds it for so long. Um, if we have enough patience, we might get to the tonic for very long time, but you finally got wonderful resolution of that dominant at the tone. Yeah. So that's how con tonality gloriously comes back. Um, it also comes back in, um, in the, in poly stylistic music when people want to pit atonality against tonality. Uh, and sometimes the tonality associated with the good and atonality with the evil as in this piece by our pet. So starts with be compromised. Bye. That's A kind of hellish idea of eternal music. Yeah. And then eventually, yeah, the, the, uh, single note will come back again as salvation. So you can see how the, there's gonna be this dichotomy, uh, but in, in the, um, I wanted to go back for a moment to that interview that Burke gave in 1930, who said, I tell you, this whole human cry for tonality comes not so much from a yearning for a keynote relationship as from a yearning for familiar concords, let us say, frankly, for the common triads. And it seems to be, uh, true because, um, the most downloaded music, um, today is by, uh, somebody called Lu. And that is what he practices. Yeah. These, uh, common triads, uh, let's hear it. That's All you need, four courts, nothing else. Yeah. Then you will have a long sort of sequence of repetitions of these four courts. And this is what people love, I think most of all. And I download in the millions around the world. Now, at this point, I'm going to invite finally, uh, Alexander Suarez, uh, to the stage, and we are going to have a little chat before he plays this program of music. Please give him a round of applause. You, Alex. Um, could you tell us something about the pieces, uh, that you're going to play? Yes. So we're going to start with a short preed by Olivia Messier, who I guess is somewhat of an outsider in context of, uh, of, uh, the talk tonight. So he was a French composer who was inspired by a whole host of things, the natural landscapes, the stars, the cosmic stars, and above all Bird song. So you hear some snatches of that. Then we moved to a couple of, uh, early 12 tone, uh, pieces. The first by, uh, Arnold Schoenberg. We have the six little pieces, which I'll be playing numbers two, four, and six. And then, uh, by Les the Notta, which is his very first, uh, experimentations with the form. But you see in this nationals all of the ideas which you later find in his later works. So structures and some of his later works that were discussed today. And then finally, John Adams, China Gates, a wonderfully haunting, uh, piece. Um, yeah. So, uh, for you as a performer who actually recorded, uh, Les and you're one of the few people who have done that, um, how do you find, you know, working with this music? Is it something, you know, is it really a test of learning, you know, or test of side reading or test of memorizing or, Yes. In fact, it's, uh, a real test of memorization above all. I remember when I first started learning, there's one of the movements, I'm, I'm not playing this one tonight, but it's a row of semiquavers. I think there's about three hundreds that l let, uh, jump up and down the piano. And it was really a case of just one note after the other and practicing that for hours, and then you add one more note in. But eventually, I think you begin to find the composer's language that he's using, and that's really the way in. But of course, there's, uh, kind of huge, kind of emotional, uh, challenges as well. I think it's easy for the, the music to feel abstract when you first start it, but finding the kind of humanity, I think is, uh, is a really important way in to, to find the expression of these pieces. Mm-hmm.<affirmative>. And we have to say that they are quite short. Yeah. Because people might think that they're here for another hour and, and there is a reason for them being short, I guess. Yes. I think there's the ultra kind of, uh, concentration of musical thoughts. So you have these very brief, uh, snapshots for both the, the Schaumberg Ganger Bules. So you have almost like you're immersed in this sound world, and then, uh, withdrawn almost as quickly. That's great. So how are you going to divide them? Are we going to know which one is which?<laugh>? So the, the Metier prelude ends with a huge flourish in G Major, which almost has a kind of metallic kind of, uh, uh, overtones afterwards. And then there's a very clear, um, divide with the, the Schoenberg, which begins with a very, uh, kind of very curious ao, which repeats. There's the three movements there. And then we have, uh, the first of the Bules, which in a similar way begins with, uh, two sororities that you find, which also has a, a little ato, which was, uh, based on a dge from Asia music. And then I think you'll, you'll recognize the sound world of John Adams. You have this wonderful, lush, lush sound world. That's great,<laugh>. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alex. You played it so beautifully and so emotionally as well. Yeah. But <laugh>, I, I want to, uh, say that probably, you know, there's no better vindication for a eternal music as to be perform in this way. Um, but I wanted to just make a little conclusion because it's the last lecture of the series and actually my last lecture as Gresham Professor of music as well. Uh, so I want to ask this question again. Uh, so what happened with eternal music? Is there something sort of essentially unviable about it? Is there something that is kind of unnatural about it is because, uh, in these, um, these days, even our Cambridge composition students, well, Alex was my student a long time ago, but, uh, these days you will not believe, but people actually, um, you know, would, would hear something, a piece of modernist music and say, well, it's complete chaos. You know, I don't understand anything. I I don't want to engage with it, which would would've been unheard of like 20 years ago. Right. So something has shifted towards tonality and, um, one of the, uh, labels Yeah. That was attached to eternal music always was kind of that it was dehumanized. And it starts with Ortega IGA set's, uh, famous essay of 1925, which is called Dehumanization of Art. Uh, and he actually writes about music, but not about music. The music you, you might think of. He writes about dbc and he says that dbc, uh, was is is one of these, these first people who kind of removes narrative and empathy, uh, from our reaction to, to the music and therefore dehumanizes it. Yeah. Therefore makes it more this human connection not possible, so that we kind of start perceiving it in a more distant way. And he sees it as a good thing. He says, modern artists and popular. And it's a good thing because we don't want the masses, you know, we don't care what the masses think. Uh, it's for can says it's for someone who understands. Um, and this is the kind of art which would make the emphasis on the how it's done rather than what is expressed. Yeah. Which, uh, you will have seen in a number of examples that I presented today. And if you look at somebody like the Tido Adorn who writes about in 1956, so at the, at the Height Yeah. Of, at the Apex of Eternal Music, um, he says, what music, basically as a result of this development, uh, lost its responsibilities, uh, to communicate he, to be, to be more like a language, to be intelligible. And this is what he says, he says it in a very strong words, but with the prescription of everything that is even remotely similar to language. And that's of every musical sense, the absolutely objective product becomes truly sinless, objectively, absolutely irrelevant. It's a very strong words. Uh, and, um, you know, obviously people have said also that, um, this music that is dehumanized de emotionalized, um, that might not be quite true yet, because if you look at the film scores, it's certainly Yeah. Creates a sense of anxiety or creates, uh, a lot of negative emotions. Yes. A suspense, or it creates other otherworldly sense of, you know, sci-fi uses it quite a lot. It seems a little bit low on the, on the positive emotions. You have joy, and, you know, messian is such a great, um, exception. Uh, and he of course uses very carefully selected by his ear chords that would sound joyful and, uh, uh, and life-affirming. But basically, uh, I would say that there are people who would suggest that there is something kind of unnatural. And there's a lot of studies of being done about our perception of a eternal music, uh, which I don't think, uh, you know, taken into account the, the simple basic fact that we are immersed in tonality from the moment we are, I dunno, born. Yeah. Everything around us, all the pop songs, everything that sounds around us is based on tonality. So it's much more familiar to us than any kind of atonality. Um, some, you know, say that it's completely kind of unintelligible. It's impossible to hear what's going on. Um, I remember Mahan Fahan, who is a very famous hopsy recordist, while interviewed recently. He said, after 12 years of playing 12 turn music, I can hear all the rows. He can hear all these, you know, when it goes backwards, when it, when it's inverted, when it goes backwards, and then inverted yet, because he's, he's experienced in that. And I thought, well, 12 years is a long time, but any professional musician, uh, will have studied at least 12 years studying tonal music. Yeah. So actually the understanding the hearing of tonal music is just on a high level, is just as difficult to achieve. So I wanted to end on an optimistic note and suggests that just as in a strange way, um, the, the, the heyday of, uh, a eternal music in the fifties was, was cut short by the reintroduction of chords. Something like that might happen in reverse. Um, one day, we don't know how soon this will be, and we will suddenly start enjoying aton music much more again, I, I think we should leave this possibility open. And, uh, in the meantime, um, I would invite you to keep listening. And I hope that some of the chords that we've learned about in this course, when you encounter them in music, you will greet them as old friends. Thank you very much for your attention.