contemporary music

Contemporary Music
Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by
Max Paddison and Irène Deliège
An Ashgate Book
CONTEMPORARY MUSIc
This book is dedicated to the memory of
CÉLESTIN DELIÈGE,
musicologist and music theorist,
born 29 October 1922, died 18 April 2010
Contemporary Music
Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives
Edited by
MAX PADDISON
University of Durham, UK
and
IRÈNE DELIÈGE
University of Liège, Belgium
First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright © 2010 Max Paddison, Irène Deliège and contributors
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Max Paddison and Irène Deliège have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Notice:
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Contemporary music: theoretical and philosophical perspectives.
1. Music – 21st century – Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Avant-garde (Music)
I. Paddison, Max. II. Deliège, Irène.
780.9’05–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contemporary music: theoretical and philosophical perspectives / [edited by] Max Paddison and Irène
Deliège.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-0497-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4094-0416-3
(ebook) 1. Music – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Music – 20th century – Philosophy and
aesthetics. 3. Music – 21st century – History and criticism. 4. Music – 21st century – Philosophy and
aesthetics. I. Paddison, Max. II. Deliège, Irène.
ML197.C75126 2009
780.9’04–dc22
2009050043
This is a revised and expanded English edition of Musique contemporaine: perspectives théoriques et
philosophiques, edited by Irène Deliège and Max Paddison (Sprimont: Pierre Mardaga éditeur, 2001).
Translators involved in this project were Mark Berry, Anne Giannini, Christopher Johns, Sebastiaan
Kokelaar, Matthew Lavy, Dave Meredith, and Max Paddison. Translations editor: Max Paddison.
This book has been published with the support of the Wernaers Foundation and under the auspices of
ESCOM, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.
ISBN 9780754604976 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315573885 (ebk)
Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita.
Contents
List of Music Examples List of Figures and Tables Contributors ix
xi
xiii
Preface Irène Deliège and Max Paddison
xix
Introduction Contemporary Music: Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory Max Paddison
1
PART I: THEOrEtical PErSpEctiVES aNd REtrOSpEctiVES
1The Principles of Music and the Rationalization of Theory Hugues Dufourt
19
2
Atonal Harmony: From Set to Scale Célestin Deliège
51
3
In Search of Lost Harmony Rudolf Frisius
77
4Against a Theory of Musical (New) Complexity Richard Toop
89
5
Heterogeneity: Or, On the Choice of Being Omnivorous Pascal Decroupet
6
Varèse, Serialism and the Acoustic Metaphor Pascal Decroupet
117
7
‘I Open and Close’? Richard Toop
133
8A Period of Confrontation: The Post-Webern Years Célestin Deliège
99
143
vi
Contemporary Music
PART II: PHilOSOpHical CritiQUES aNd SpEcUlatiONS
AFtEr AdOrNO
9A Philosophy of Totality Herman Sabbe
10
Possibilities for a Work-Immanent Contemporary Musical Logic François Nicolas
175
183
11Postmodernism and the Survival of the Avant-garde Max Paddison
205
12Material Constraints: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt Anne Boissière
229
13
Towards an Aesthetics of Risk Marc Jimenez
14 Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation Max Paddison
249
259
PART III: CrEatiVE OriENtatiONS
15Music, Ambiguity, Buddhism: A Composer’s Perspective Jonathan Harvey
279
16Artistic Orientations, Aesthetic Concepts, and the Limits of
Explanation: An Interview with Pierre Boulez David Walters
305
17
Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with
Brian Ferneyhough Lois Fitch and John Hails
319
18
Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview
with Helmut Lachenmann Abigail Heathcote
331
19
Hunting and Forms: An Interview with Wolfgang Rihm Richard McGregor
349
Contents
vii
Postlude: Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and the Austro-German
Tradition Alastair Williams
361
Index of Names 371
Index of Subjects 379
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Music Examples
2.1.Metric series founded on harmonics 1 to 6
2.2. Harmonics 1 to 32, divided according to octaves
2.3. Reading of the 4th
2.4.Atonal type triad
2.5. Linked triads within twelve-tone aggregate
2.6.Schoenberg, Klavierstück op. 33a, harmonic matrix
2.7. Webern, Concerto op. 24: (a) harmonic matrix; (b) reading
conforming to the present hypothesis
2.8. Boulez, Répons: (a) harmonic matrix; (b) chords in fundamental
position; (c) figuring of chords
2.9. Berio, serial mode of La Vera Storia: (a) figuring of the fundamentals;
(b) (Fêtes), figuring of fundamentals and chords
2.10. Stockhausen, Klavierstück III: (a) notation of basic pentachord
(following Harvey); (b) basic chords in fundamental position 0
2.11. Stockhausen, Klavierstück III (after the original edition, Universal
UE 12251)
6.1. Boulez, Structure 1a: graphs (a) and (b)
6.2. Varèse, Octandre: graphs (a), (b) and (c)
6.3. Webern, Cantata No. 2 op. 31: graphs (a) and (b)
6.4. Varèse, Hyperprism: graph
6.5. Varèse, Intégrales: graph
6.6. Varèse, Déserts: graphs (a) and (b)
15.1. Beethoven Piano Sonata op. 2, no. 2
15.2. Harvey, Wheel of Emptiness (opening)
15.3. Harvey, Wheel of Emptiness (p. 27)
15.4. Harvey, String Quartet No. 4
15.5. Harvey, One Evening, movement 1 (opening)
15.6. Harvey, One Evening, movement 2
15.7. Harvey, One Evening, movement 4: rhythm
15.8. Harvey, One Evening, movement 4 (pp. 134–5)
55
57
59
63
63
66
67
69
70
71
73
121
123
124
127
128
130
284
291
292
295
297
298
299
301
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List of Figures and Tables
Figures
10.1.Penrose tiling 14.1. Work-immanent mediation of music 14.2. Social mediation of music 14.3. Historical mediation of musical material 193
268
271
272
Tables
2.1.Scale of harmonics conceived as a mode
2.2. Harmonic intervals: model ratios
2.3. Chromatic scale of frequencies: comparison between systems
2.4. Figuring of the chromatic scale, band 16…32
2.5.Transcription of pitch classes in relation to the scale of harmonics
10.1. Three logical principles: classical/dialectical
10.2. Three dialectical categories (Kierkegaard)
10.3. The 3 (1+2) dimensions of logic in music
59
60
60
61
62
196
199
203
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Contributors
Anne Boissière is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics, Centre d’Étude des
Arts Contemporains at the University of Lille 3. She has written extensively on
Adorno and critical theory, and is the author of Adorno, la vérité de la musique
moderne (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999) and La
pensée musicale de T.W. Adorno: l’épique et le temps (Paris: Beauchesne, 2010).
Pierre Boulez is one of the most important and influential French composers of
our time. He is also equally renowned as a conductor, having worked with all
the great orchestras of the world, and was founder and first director of IRCAM
(Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris. He has won
many honours and awards, and received the Ernst von Siemens Prize in 1979.
From 1976 to 1995 he held the Chair of Invention, Technique et Langage en
Musique at the Collège de France, and his writings on the theory and aesthetics
of contemporary music remain an important contribution to the debates on music
today. His publications include Relevés d’apprenti (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), Par
volonté et par hasard: Entretiens avec Célestin Deliège (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1975), Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), and Points de
repère I, II and III (3 vols) (Paris: Bourgois, 1995 and 2005).
Pascal Decroupet is Professor of Musicology at the Sophia Antipolis University
of Nice. He has written extensively on twentieth-century and contemporary music,
and in particular on Stockhausen, Boulez and Pousseur. He has selected and edited a
range of Pousseur’s writings in Écrits théoriques 1954–1967 (Sprimont: Mardaga,
2004), and Série et harmonie généralisées: Écrits (1968–1998) (Sprimont:
Mardaga, 2009).
Célestin Deliège was Professor of Music Analysis at the Liège Conservatoire.
He is regarded as one of the most significant and perceptive writers on music
today, and is credited with introducing Schenkerian analytical theory to the
francophone world in his book Les fondements de la musique tonale (Paris:
Éditions JC Lattès, 1984). His reflections on modernism and the predicament
of contemporary music since 1945 have produced many important publications,
culminating in his monumental and definitive study of the period, Cinquante ans
de modernité musicale: de Darmstadt à l’IRCAM (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2003).
He died in April 2010 as this book was going to press.
Irène Deliège is founding Director of the European Society for the Cognitive
Study of Music (ESCOM), Liège, and founding editor of the journal Musicae
xiv
Contemporary Music
Scientiae. Her research is on the cognitive psychology of music, and she has
published widely in this field, including The Perception and Cognition of Music,
jointly edited with J. Sloboda (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997).
Hugues Dufourt is a distinguished French composer associated with Spectralism
(a term he coined in 1979 to describe his own music and that of Tristan Murail
and Gérard Grisey). He is also Professor of Philosophy and Director of Research
at CNRS Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), was a founding member of
the Ensemble Itinéraire, the Collectif de Recherche Instrumentale et de Synthèse
Sonore (CRISS), and the Centre d’Information et de Documentation / Recherche
Musicale (CID-RM). As well his prolific compositional output – which includes
large-scale works often inspired by painting, such as La maison du sourd and Le
déluge d’après Poussin – he has also written widely on issues in contemporary
music. His main writings have been published under the title Musique, pouvoir,
écriture (Paris: Bourgois, 1991).
Brian Ferneyhough is a highly influential and internationally acclaimed British
composer, strongly associated with the European avant-garde and with the ‘New
Complexity’. Currently Professor of Music at Stanford University, he has regularly
taught at the Darmstädter Ferienkursen für Neue Musik, and was for many years
Professor of Composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg.
His works range from the early Cassandra’s Dream Song, through the Études
transcendantales from the 1980s to his largest work yet, the opera Shadowtime
(1999–2004). He was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize in 2007. He has
written extensively on his own and other composers’ music, and most of his earlier
articles, essays and interviews are included in his Collected Writings, ed. Richard
Toop and James Boros (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
Lois Fitch is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Royal Northern College of Music,
Manchester. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Durham was on the
music of Brian Ferneyhough.
Rudolf Frisius was Professor of Musicology at the Pädagogische Hochschule,
Karlsruhe. He has published and broadcast extensively on issues in contemporary
music, and has written on Cage, Pousseur, Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Rihm and
many other important post-war composers. Since 1998 he has been President of
the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung in Darmstadt.
John Hails lectures in Music at Napier University, Edinburgh, and has a particular
interest in the music of Ferneyhough. He is also a composer (he did his doctorate
at the University of Durham) and is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society
Prize for Composition.
Contributors
xv
Jonathan Harvey is a distinguished British composer of international importance.
His music is sensuous and contemplative, and for some time has been influenced by
his experience of Buddhism, notably in works such as One Evening and Wheel of
Emptiness. He was for many years Professor of Music at Sussex University, where
he remains an Honorary Professor, and he is also Visiting Professor at Oxford. In
the early 1980s he was invited by Boulez to work at IRCAM. He is author of The
Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction (London: Faber, 1975), and his subsequent
writings include Music and Inspiration (London: Faber, 1999), and In Quest of
Spirit: Thoughts on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Abigail Heathcote is doing research on Jean-François Lyotard at the University
of Paris VIII. Her research at the University of Durham was on the music and
writings of Helmut Lachenmann.
Marc Jimenez is a philosopher and translator, and is Professor of Aesthetics
and Art History at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Director
of the Centre de Recherche en Esthétique. He is the author of many books on
Adorno, aesthetics and history of art, including Adorno: art, idéologie et théorie
de l’art (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973); Adorno et la modernité: vers
une esthétique négative (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1983); La critique: Crise
de l’art ou consensus culturel? (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995); and Qu’est-ce que
l’esthétique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). He is also the translator into French of
Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie.
Helmut Lachenmann is a distinguished and highly original German composer
whose distinctive approach to composition he has himself described as musique
concrète instrumentale. Some of his most celebrated works are Schwankungen
am Rand, Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, Staub and the music-theatre piece Das
Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. He is a regular teacher at the Darmstädter
Ferienkursen für Neue Musik, and was formerly Professor of Composition at the
Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik. He was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize in
1997, and is currently Fromm Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He has
written many articles and essays, published in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996).
Richard McGregor is Professor of Music at the University of Cumbria. He has
published on the music of Peter Maxwell Davies, James MacMillan and Wolfgang
Rihm, and is editor of Perspectives on Peter Maxwell Davies (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000).
François Nicolas is a composer and writer on music. He is Associate Professor
at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and joint founder of the journal
Entretemps. He has published numerous books and articles on twentieth-century
xvi
Contemporary Music
and contemporary music, and has edited the IRCAM dossier La singularité
Schoenberg (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997).
Max Paddison is Professor of Music Aesthetics and Associate Director of the
Centre for Contemporary Performing Arts (CCPA) at the University of Durham.
He has published extensively on Adorno, aesthetics, critical theory, and the
concept of modernism, and is author of Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture
(London: Kahn & Averill, 1996).
Wolfgang Rihm is one of the most impressive German composers of the postwar generation. His music, which was initially regarded as representative of
the ‘New Simplicity’ and ‘New Romanticism’, is anti-systematic and open to
many stylistic influences. Rihm is extremely prolific, and has written important
works in all genres, as well as many that defy categorization; he regards pieces
as ‘works in progress’, like Jagden und Formen, and often continues to produce
different versions over long periods. He was awarded the Ernst von Siemens
Prize in 2003, and is Professor of Composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für
Musik in Karlsruhe. He has published several volumes of his writings, including
Ausgesprochen. Schriften und Gespräche, ed. Ulrich Mosch, 2 vols (Zurich:
Amadeus, 1997), and Offene Enden (Munich and Vienna: Hauser, 2002).
Herman Sabbe is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Ghent, and
was also Professor of Musicology at the Free University of Brussels. He has
written widely on all aspects of twentieth-century and contemporary music, and
is author or co-author of over 20 books, including György Ligeti: Studien zur
kompositorischen Phänomenologie (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1987), and All that
Music! Een Antropologie van de Westerse Muziekcultuur (Leuven: Acco, 1996).
Richard Toop is Reader in Music and Chair of the Musicology Unit at the
Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney. He has written extensively on
contemporary music and the post-war avant-garde, especially Stockhausen. Ligeti
and Ferneyhough. He is author of György Ligeti (London: Phaidon Press, 1999),
and is joint editor (with James Boros) of Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
David Walters teaches Musicology at Marmara University of Istanbul. His
doctoral dissertation at the University of Durham was on Boulez’s aesthetics of
music.
Alastair Williams is Reader in Music at Keele University. He writes widely on
issues in contemporary music, and is currently working on new music in Germany
since 1968, and especially Lachenmann and Rihm. He is the author of New Music
Contributors
xvii
and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), and Constructing
Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
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Preface
Irène Deliège and Max Paddison
Theories and philosophies of contemporary music: why bring them together in
a colloquium of which the present work is the result? Composers such as Pierre
Boulez and Luciano Berio have been of the opinion that in our day the idea came
first and then led directly to style. The idea has been, in the first instance, the
fruit of prescriptive theories; in engendering style it has also been the starting
point for aesthetic developments. However, after the initial shock of creation, the
judgement of the observer intervenes and creates a space of confrontation and
collaboration in which other theoreticians and philosophers encounter each other;
their work exercises its influence a posteriori. They too, in their turn, bear witness
to this level. Amongst the philosophers, the figure of Theodor Adorno stands out.
He has set in motion a train of thought that is still alive and seems far from being
exhausted. His critical aesthetic theory permeates the philosophical contents of
this book, whereas the theoretical sections tend more towards logical positivism.
Together they constitute a thought-provoking ensemble put forward by ESCOM,
the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, at the turning point
between two centuries.
The project on which the book is based went through several distinct stages.
The original colloquium, entitled Musique contemporaine: théories et philosophie,
was organized by ESCOM and led by Irène Deliège, and took place in Brussels
at La Monnaie, The Royal Opera, on 18 and 19 March 2000 in connection with
the Ars Musica Festival of that year and with the collaboration of the Centre de
Recherches Musicales de Wallonie. There were invited papers from Célestin
Deliège, Hugues Dufourt, Richard Toop, Rudolf Frisius, Pascal Decroupet,
Herman Sabbe, François Nicolas, Anne Boissière, Marc Jimenez and Max
Paddison, and each of the two days’ contributions were framed by commentary
from Jean Molino and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who also chaired sessions. From
the start the participants had been asked to take part in the colloquium with the
intention that their papers would later be expanded and developed to become
essays in a substantial book. As a stage in this process, a small French/English
volume of ‘Working Papers’ (textes d’étude) was also published to coincide with
the colloquium, containing short versions of the papers to be delivered. Following
the success of the colloquium itself, the contributors were accordingly asked to
Irène Deliège (ed.), Contemporary Music: Theories and Philosophy. Working
Papers / Musique contemporaine: théories et philosophie. Textes d’Étude (Liège: ESCOM
Publications, 2000).
xx
Contemporary Music
revise and develop their papers into full-length essays, and also in some cases to
provide a second related essay for the volume if they wished. The resulting book
of fourteen essays and an Introduction, edited by Irène Deliège and Max Paddison,
was published in French in 2001 (a publication not to be confused with the
French/English ‘Working Papers’ volume mentioned above, which shares a very
similar title). Work then began on an English version of the book, involving much
translation and in some cases further revision of the original conception. What
also became apparent during this process was the need to embrace a wider range
of music and to give more voice to composers themselves. In view of this, we have
added a third part to this edition in the form of five theoretical and philosophical
perspectives of a different kind from those which dominate the essays in Parts I
and II. These are statements from five contemporary composers who have each
made highly significant and very different contributions to debates around music
today, both through their compositions and through their writings on music: Pierre
Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang
Rihm. Finally, Alastair Williams was invited to contribute a Postlude to the book,
drawing strands together and giving an important emphasis to Lachenmann and
Rihm lacking in the original French edition.
The editors are indebted to the French publisher Pierre Mardaga and the
Director of the Collection Musique et Musicologie, Malou Haine, for their
permission to publish translations of material that had originally appeared in
French. They would also like to thank all the original contributors to this volume
for their help and support, and in particular for their great patience in view of the
time it has taken to get their work to press in English. Gratitude is also due to the
composers in Part III, who have granted permission for the interviews with them
to be included here – Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann
and Wolfgang Rihm – and also to those who interviewed them – David Walters,
Lois Fitch, John Hails, Abigail Heathcote and Richard McGregor – as well as to
Jonathan Harvey for his essay and to Alastair Williams for his concluding chapter.
We are also very appreciative of the work done by Joris De Henau in resetting
the music examples and tables for this edition, Kelcey Swain for his computer
enhancements, and for a grant from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research
Committee of the University of Durham to pay for this work. Finally, we are
grateful for the initial draft translation work done on this project by Mark Berry,
Anne Giannini, Christopher Johns, Sebastiaan Kokelaar, Matthew Lavy and Dave
Meredith. Further extensive and detailed translation work, both of a technical
and of a stylistic nature, was essential to the final shape of the project, and Max
Paddison has acted as overall translator as well as translations editor.
Irène Deliège and Max Paddison (eds), Musique contemporaine: Perspectives
théoriques et philosophiques (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2001).
Introduction
Contemporary Music:
Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory
Max Paddison
‘Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art. He
simply thinks it is irritating. Irritating one way or another, that is to say keeping
us from ossifying …’ (John Cage, Silence)
I
You might reasonably say that contemporary music is simply what is going on
now, music that reflects its time, where multiplicity rules and music fits in, one
way or another. Or you could argue that contemporary music also has a history of
being ‘contemporary’, where in many respects it has never really fitted in, and has
become self-reflexive and critical in ways that relate not only to its own time but
also to its own history. If you take this view – which, broadly speaking, is the view
of the chapters in this book – then the contemporary music in question becomes
that of the avant-garde and the experimental, particularly since 1945, with all the
difficulties to which this has always given rise. If such music continues to have
irritation value, in John Cage’s sense of ‘keeping us from ossifying’, then the
discourses that surround it are also likely to prove provocative.
The idea of a music that is truly contemporary, in the sense of relating to its
time, is one which has always had its problems. To discuss contemporary music
today – at least, in the way in which it is intended here – could even be regarded
as to be out of step with what appears as current, relevant and widely accepted,
particularly if it is assumed that the essential debates have already happened and
that the matter is now closed. We argue here that the case very much remains
open, and that the debates continue, if for no other reason than that what could be
called ‘advanced’ contemporary music itself continues to change and to go into
unexpected and unforeseen places. The end of history has not happened – at least
not in music. In fact, especially in music, the need for discussion has never been
John Cage, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1968), p. 44.
Ibid., p. 44.
Taking his cue from Hegel’s philosophy of history, where the motor of history is
driven by conflict and contradictions, Francis Fukuyama had famously argued that perhaps
Contemporary Music
greater, with the general demise of heroic modernism, the decline of the New, the
turn away from experimentation, and the celebration of diversity, all of which
were features at one stage seen as marking the shift to the postmodern – a concept
which itself now shows distinct signs of ageing. Indeed, this has been the case
ever since the concept was employed to identify stylistic changes in contemporary
architecture by Charles Jencks and more fundamental social, technological and
epistemological changes by Jean-François Lyotard in the 1970s and 1980s. It
was also partly the result of the critique of postmodernism by Jürgen Habermas
and others on the grounds of the (neo)conservative implications of the critique
of subjectivity and of rationality to be encountered in the writings of Foucault,
Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari. At the same time, the social situation of art music
in general and of advanced music in particular remains distinctly contradictory,
stark in its contrasts, and confused in the face of conflicting demands. The kind of
cultural democracy created to a large extent since the 1980s by new and accessible
technology is matched by the increasing bureaucratization and managerial control
of culture by the new politics which also emerged in Europe in the 1980s, with
its insistence on accountability, participation, value for money, and entertainment.
(You could see this as a market updating of what in the late 1970s had been known
somewhat confusingly by the Arts Council in the UK as the ‘democratization of
culture’ under its slogan at that time, ‘Arts for All’, amid accusations of levelling
the end of history had occurred in 1989, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the triumph of Western capitalism and the emergence of the United States
as the world’s only super-power (see Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National
Interest 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18). The falseness of Fukuyama’s argument was evident at
the time, and has certainly been revealed to be so by subsequent world events. Nevertheless,
1989 was a significant date, but more so as the beginning of a new age of uncertainty.
Alastair Williams argues for the importance of 1989 as a turning point in contemporary
music in Germany (see Alastair Williams, ‘Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and the
Austro-German tradition’, this volume). Contemporary music in the rest of Europe and in
North America appears to have been slower in its response (see Max Paddison, Adorno,
Modernism and Mass Culture, London: Kahn & Averill, 2004, pp. 132–3).
In his What is Post-Modernism? (London/New York: Academy Editions/St Martin’s
Press, 1986), p. 3, Charles Jencks traces the term ‘postmodern’ back to the Spanish writer
Federico De Onis in his Antologia de la poesía española e hispanoamericana of 1934 and to
Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History of 1938. What I’m referring to here is the emergence
of the term ‘postmodernism’ as a widely employed label both for a style and for a historical
period dating from the late 1960s / early 1970s up to the early twenty-first century, with the
1980s as the most intensive period in the modernism/postmodernism debate, especially that
between Habermas and Lyotard.
See Richard Rorty, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity’, in Richard J. Bernstein
(ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 161–75. See also Jürgen
Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). Trans. as: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve
Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
Introduction
down on the one side and elitism on the other.) Situated in a vortex of impossible
demands, contemporary music cannot be identified as one thing, consistent
and recognized by all. Artists tend to do what they do, in spite of political and
social pressures to make art ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’ in some way, in order to justify
supporting it with public funding. Instead, you could say that the real situation
faced by contemporary music is that all we have are widely differing and often
sharply contrasting responses to a common dilemma within a cultural context
characterized by fragmentation, a situation which compels advanced music
towards reflexion. Put crudely, the role of a theory of music today is to identify and
explicate those responses, and the role of a philosophy of music is to problematize
them in relation to the common dilemma in a fragmented world of special-interest
groups and niche marketing. This collection of essays places itself precisely there,
taking stock, seeking new patterns in the already-familiar, and casting a critical
eye over the assumptions that surround the idea of an advanced music today. The
emphasis is largely music-theoretical in the first part of the book, philosophical
in the second, with a combination of the two in relation to the composers in the
third part. Strict lines of demarcation cannot easily be sustained between theory,
philosophy and creative practice, however, and the fact that they inevitably and
most profitably interact is evident throughout.
But how are we to understand such a tired term as ‘contemporary music’,
given its capacity to refer to all and everything and nothing in particular? Strictly
speaking, ‘contemporary’ should mean ‘now’, right up to date, the music of
our contemporaries in the twenty-first century. The problem, however, is that
‘contemporary music’ has become a label just like those it has tried to replace
in a fast-moving culture – labels like ‘modern’ (from modo, meaning ‘now’, but
displaced interestingly by ‘postmodern’), the ‘New’ (so often recycled, so many
old ‘New Musics’), and the ‘avant-garde’ (which originally had a more specialized
meaning to do with pushing boundaries, but is now regarded in some circles as
distinctly old fashioned). In view of such difficulties regarding the question ‘what
is contemporary?’, and recognizing my already evident bias towards the idea of
an ‘advanced’ music, we can only be pragmatic, and say that in the context of
these essays the term can be seen in two ways. The first, and relatively simple
answer is that the use of terms such as ‘contemporary’ and ‘advanced’ refers here
An interesting perspective on this now largely forgotten debate between the
proponents of ‘cultural democracy’ and those of the ‘democratization of culture’ is that
of community arts in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Britain, in particular as seen in
the exchange between the community artist Owen Kelly and the then Secretary-General
of the Arts Council, Sir Roy Shaw. See especially Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the
State: Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia, 1984). The French version of this debate
concerned animation socioculturelle versus mainstream gallery, museum and concert hall
culture, and was taken up in Germany as soziokulturelle Animation. It is probably safe to
say that both community arts and animation socioculturelle have now become thoroughly
institutionalized.
Contemporary Music
also to the legacy of very different but radical musics which can be traced back
at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. This is a legacy which persists,
in spite of all, and through it we continue to engage with problems of musical
material, form and structure in ways that can best be described as critical and
self-reflexive, in musical terms at least. (It has to be said that, while the politics
of music strongly underpins the debates represented in this book, especially in
Parts II and III, the question of directly politically engaged contemporary music
is not a focus.) The obvious examples of a ‘legacy’ that spring to mind are best
seen as taking their orientation from the music of composers such as Schoenberg,
Webern, Berg, Stravinsky, Varèse, Cage and Carter, through Feldman, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Pousseur, Kagel, Xenakis and Ligeti to Birtwistle,
Ferneyhough, Finnissy, Lachenmann and Rihm, to name but a few. (Debussy,
for example, remains a strong influence on many composers of the later
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Spectralists, as well as
the French-orientated English composer Jonathan Harvey, and the German neoromantic composer Wolfgang Rihm, and therefore must also be acknowledged
as a continuing presence). But the problem with such lists is that the attempt to
trace a legacy or a characteristic line of historical development quickly begins to
look like the construction of a tradition, and even a canon, and would therefore
appear to come into conflict with the idea of a critical and self-reflexive music,
of resistance and the search for the new and the unknown. The second, and
more difficult, answer to the question ‘what is contemporary music?’ involves
complex issues around the different forms taken by such musical self-reflexion,
the relation to rapid developments in technology and to the dominant commodity
culture, and the tension between what is often seen as the most extreme autonomy
and consistency of such music and the heterogeneity and diversity of society at
large, given the power of the culture industry and the mass media. Aspects of
rock music are also discussed, at times in abrupt juxtapositions around issues of
heterogeneity and reflexivity. Frank Zappa therefore also features, not because he
wrote some ‘art music’ that happened to be taken up by Boulez and IRCAM in
Paris, but particularly because his rock music appears as radically critical today as
it did in 1966 and because it cuts across such boundaries. By way of introduction
I offer a thematic overview of the book before going on to take up some of the
issues raised. First of all, however, there are some important theoretical issues
that need to be addressed.
II
It is hardly surprising that a common point of reference in many of these essays is
critical theory, and in particular that of Theodor Adorno. In the 1920s and 1930s
Adorno was already engaged on a critique of the music of the period and its social
Introduction
situation. By the late 1940s, with Philosophy of New Music (1949) Adorno could
be said to have intervened directly in the course of what was then contemporary
music, in effect hastening the decline of neo-classicism and the emergence of postWebernian serialism. Further interventions were his critique of total serialism at
Darmstadt in 1954, and then his call for une musique informelle in 1960. In
his essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’ Adorno put forward the idea of a music
which resists the impulse towards total rationalization and presents to us again
something of the exploration of the unknown and the unforeseen which goes
back to decisive moments of pre- and early modernism: the spirit of Baudelaire’s
seminal writings from the 1840s and 1850s, the French Symbolism of the 1880s
and 1890s, and the freedom of the Second Viennese School Expressionism of
the years 1908–1914. Indeed, the concept of musique informelle has turned out
to be an intriguing, enigmatic and influential ideal, and, as it is often invoked
in the essays and interviews in this volume, it is worth spending a moment to
consider its implications in a little more detail here.10 The origins of Adorno’s use
of the term musique informelle are currently of considerable interest and a range
of unlikely theories is being put forward to explain where Adorno got it from. To
attempt to put the matter straight, I would suggest that it is quite clear that Adorno
took the concept from existing usage in painting, as anyone with a knowledge
of the art informel movement in Europe following the Second World War and
the influence of American Abstract Expressionism from which it in part derived
will immediately recognize – indeed, Gianmario Borio has traced many of these
connections in detail in his book Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960.11 Adorno was
certainly aware of the use of the concept of the informel in painting in Germany
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949). Gesammelte Schriften
Vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). A new
translation, as Philosophy of New Music, trans., ed. and with and introduction by Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), supersedes
the earlier Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
(London: Sheed & Ward, 1973).
Originally given as a paper in 1954, ‘Das Altern der neuen Musik’ was published
in Der Monat in May 1955, an expanded version appearing the following year in the
collection of essays on music, Dissonanzen (1956), Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 14, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, 1980), pp. 143–67.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1960), Quasi una Fantasia
(1963). Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1978), pp. 493–540. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, ‘Vers une musique informelle’,
Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 269–322.
10
I am grateful to Joris De Henau for providing me with the occasion to revisit
Adorno’s concept of musique informelle. Our discussions encouraged me to elaborate my
thinking on the subject.
11
Gianmario Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960: Entwurf einer Theorie der
informellen Musik (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1993).
Contemporary Music
in the 1950s as informelle Kunst, or informelle Malerei,12 represented by action
painting and also by Tachist artists such as the German painter Wols (Alfred Otto
Wolfgang Schulze) and, in particular perhaps, the painter of informelle Bilder with
a confusingly similar name, Bernhard Schultze.13 In its turn this German usage
derives from a French use of the term, as art informel (‘art with no form’) from the
School of Paris in the immediate post-war years of the 1940s and early 1950s, a
use further legitimated by an exhibition under the title ‘Signifiants de l’Informel’
put on in Paris in 1952 by Michel Tapié.14 Given this developing history, Adorno
needed only to take it over into music as musique informelle to designate a kind
of new music that did not yet exist, but which would be in ‘no form’, in that
it would refuse to accept pre-given solutions, including those emerging from
Darmstadt (informelle Kunst does not, of course, mean ‘formless art’, given that,
in order to exist at all, everything has a ‘form’, even if it goes directly against
all previously known and familiar forms). All this, I think, is pretty convincing,
and in demonstrating clearly that the notion of the informel had already been a
motivating factor in the visual arts for fifteen years prior to Adorno appropriating
it, it also shows the extent to which Adorno was attempting to drag the attention
of an increasingly self-obsessed and insular musical avant-garde towards larger
horizons already being explored in the visual arts. At the same time it demonstrates
Adorno’s firm conviction that it is the task of a critical theory to attempt the
impossible, and to prompt practice to move from where it is and yet again to move
on in order ‘to find something new’.15
What Adorno focuses so acutely in his theoretical and philosophical writings,
and what makes them so relevant to the situation today, is the dilemma of theory
(both philosophical and musical) and its relation to art itself. That is to say, there
See Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 7 ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 329, where Adorno uses
the term ‘informal painting’ (informelle Malerei) in conjunction with action painting and
aleatoric music.
13
The brief mention in passing of the contemporary painter of ‘informelle Bilder’
[Bernhard] Schultze in ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 16,
p. 526) shows that Adorno was familiar with the idea of informelle Malerei, introduced
by Schultze, K.O. Götz and Wols to Germany in the very early 1950s. Gianmario Borio
cites evidence where Schultze himself reports that Adorno was present at an exhibition
of Schultze’s work in Düsseldorf in 1957; Borio also suggests that Adorno had visited
the Quadriga Exhibition of ‘informal painting’ in Frankfurt in 1952. He is also firmly of
the view that Adorno derived his concept of ‘informelle Kunst’ from painting: see Borio,
Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960, p. 90, note 45. The fact that Adorno uses the French
form of the term, however, suggests that he was also aware of its origins in Paris in the mid1940s, and that the German painters had got it from there.
14
Gianmario Borio also shows much evidence for this link, as well as for connections
with Italian artists of the period: see Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960, p. 129.
15
Adorno often quoted the final line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Voyage’ from Les
fleurs du mal, ‘Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’.
12
Introduction
is the imperative, on the one hand, for theory to describe, explain and interpret,
while, on the other hand, there is the need for theory to recognize its failure to
explain that which in the work of art resists interpretation – what Pierre Boulez
has insisted, citing André Breton, is an ‘indestructible kernel of darkness’16 at
the heart of the creative process. And this tension within theory and philosophy
as resistance to interpretation is present, of course, both within the creative
process and within the work of art itself. The shared premise of all these essays,
discussions and interviews is that musical works are themselves highly structured
and thus constitute a mode of cognition, albeit – and importantly, in case we
mistake music for language or philosophy in any literal sense – non-conceptual.17
However apparently unorthodox they might at first appear, musical works are
systematic in their structure and constitute relationships between parts and whole
which have a coherence and logic of their own and which can be analysed,
theorized and philosophically interpreted. Indeed, it could be said, taking up
Adorno’s important insight, that the experience of art works, and musical works
in particular, demands continuation in thought. This is not least of all because the
systematicity of art is frequently troubling and provocative, turning out to be antisystematic in relation to prevailing systems outside art – Adorno’s suggestion
(following Karl Kraus) that ‘in society as a whole it is art that should introduce
chaos into order rather than the reverse’.18 At the same time, musical structures,
however necessarily autonomous they appear, share their materials, their elements
and even their systematicity with society as a whole, especially when attempting
to shake themselves free from it. An important task of both theory and philosophy
of music is to identify these points of intersection, but without succumbing to the
delusion that everything is thereby explained.
Other important theoretical and philosophical strands in these essays have very
different trajectories: analytic philosophy, cognitive psychology, and positivism.
That points of contact are made between Adorno and these traditions is clearly
16
‘… un “noyau infracassable de nuit”’, André Breton, cited in Pierre Boulez,
‘Nécessité d’une orientation esthétique’, Points de repère I: Imagine (Paris: Christian
Bourgois, 1985), p. 552. Trans. as: ‘Putting the Phantoms to Flight’, Orientations, trans.
Martin Cooper (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 83.
17
In Aesthetic Theory Adorno talks of art in general (and music in particular) as a
form of begriffslose Erkenntnis (‘conceptless cognition’); he also talks of music as having
a ‘language-character’ (Sprachcharakter), arguing that it is ‘language like’ but is not a
language. See my essay ‘The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno’,
in Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (eds), Mit den Ohren denken. Adornos
Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), pp. 71–91, where I
consider this position in detail.
18
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
Athlone Press, 1997), p. 93. See original German: ‘Mehrfach ist, zuerst wohl von Karl
Kraus, ausgesprochen worden, daß, in der totalen Gesellschaft, Kunst eher Chaos in die
Ordnung zu bringen habe als das Gegenteil.’ Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 7, p. 144.
Contemporary Music
evident in a number of contributions, even where the emphases are quite distinct
and critical. At the same time there is no sense that Adorno has in some way
become an orthodoxy for the areas of contemporary music discussed here – far
from it, as the criticisms from the composers represented in Part III clearly signify:
Jonathan Harvey, for instance, finds Adorno’s interpretation of Wagner through
the concepts of phantasmagoria and commodity fetishism runs counter to his
own understanding of the composer, and is disturbed by Adorno’s essentially
Marxian analysis. Even Adorno’s idea of une musique informelle, increasingly
speculated upon by theorists and composers alike, and described by Lachenmann
as ‘a beautiful idea’, is not a prescription for composers to try to put into practice
(that would be ‘dead on arrival!’, says Ferneyhough), but is really what I would
call a ‘prismatic concept’ – that is to say, a multi-faceted concept that enables us to
see things from different and unusual angles and in a new and unfamiliar light. In
other words, it alienates or estranges our thinking about form. Even though Adorno
had undoubtedly diagnosed something, and had tried to reveal different facets of
it, making an effort to think beyond the immediate problem and to provide new
perspectives, he could not jump over his own shadow, his Austro-German legacy
from the nineteenth century, nor could he predict how things would actually turn
out in the future. Lachenmann’s observation in his interview in this volume is
telling, if two-edged: ‘I have a great deal of respect for Adorno, but … he was [a]
fossil from the nineteenth century.’ But he then goes on: ‘From that perspective he
had a very precise diagnostic eye for what happens today.’ Adorno undoubtedly
stood somewhat apart from the avant-garde of his time, but his perception was
probably all the more acute for that, and the problems he saw were real ones.
Solutions, however, were for composers to find. Critical reactions and responses
to Darmstadt orthodoxies of multiple serialism led, as it turned out, to remarkably
creative solutions – one thinks of Kagel, Ligeti, Nono and, later, Lachenmann,
Rihm, Birtwistle, Ferneyhough, Murail and Grisey – and even if Adorno could not
have predicted them, they could also, in very different respects, be seen to display
facets of a possible musique informelle.
III
While different, and sometimes conflicting, theoretical or philosophical
perspectives characterize the chapters in this book, what is also striking is
the extent to which certain concerns are seen as central. One of these is the
acknowledgement of the significance of the new musical developments that
took place in the period from the late 1940s up to the early 1960s, and which
particularly involved innovations from Messiaen and Cage taken up by, among
others, Boulez and Stockhausen. Célestin Deliège, chronicler of the avant-garde,
music analyst and author of one of the first books in French on Schenker, puts
forward an uncompromising case for the enduring historical significance of
these developments, centred largely on Darmstadt, in his essay ‘A period of
Introduction
confrontation: the post-Webern years’; at the same time, however, his critical
assessment of the successes and also the failures of these years is equally
uncompromising. Another important concern has to do with the way in which the
technical development of music is closely tied to the technological development
of society itself. This is the central theme of Hugues Dufourt’s chapter ‘The
principles of music and the rationalization of theory’ – an exhaustive historical
survey of the relation of music to technology, with a view to situating the
importance of French Spectralism in contemporary composition (as well as being a
philosopher, Hugues Dufourt is also himself a composer and a founding member of
the original group of French Spectralists, together with Tristan Murail and Gérard
Grisey). Underlying Dufourt’s theme is the explanatory power of the sociologist
Max Weber’s concept of rationalization, particularly as he himself had applied it
to music in his pioneering study Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen
der Musik (1921) (The Rational and Social Foundations of Music).19 A further
theme is the discussion of musical material. A range of emphases is evident. The
concern with the systematicity and logicality of musical structures, and the need
to relate to handed-down materials, is fundamental both to Célestin Deliège on the
rationalization of atonal harmony and François Nicolas on musical logic. In his
chapter, ‘Atonal harmony: from set to scale’, Célestin Deliège puts forward here
a completely original alternative to set theory for the analysis of atonal harmony
which takes account of fundamental tones, resonance and timbre, and through this
is able to make a meaningful connection with the Spectralist composers. François
Nicolas, in contrast, from his research work at IRCAM, carries out a philosophical
analysis of the necessary conditions of a musical logic, focusing in turn on notation
and consistency, the dialectical relationship to other works, and the possibility
of an autonomous, strategic musical logic, not determined by external factors.
The focus in both these contributions is therefore decisively on the autonomy of
musical structures and their immanent consistency, something which throws into
relief the repressed social ‘other’ of autonomous musical structures. This can be
seen in different ways in Pascal Decroupet’s contribution ‘Heterogeneity: or, on
the choice of being omnivorous’, and Rudolf Frisius’s ‘In search of lost harmony’.
Indeed, Frisius suggests that Ives and Cage have shown us ‘that music may
also renew itself harmonically when the composer opens the windows to let the
exterior world penetrate into his work’. Decroupet ostensibly focuses on ‘ways in
which stylistically diverse materials are incorporated in a range of different types
of music’. He explores the crossing of boundaries, quotation, montage, attempted
syntheses, and cross-over, discussing a range of musics including Cage, Schaeffer,
Pousseur, musique concrète, Zimmermann, rock music, jazz and ‘world music’,
in relation to emerging technologies, sampling and scratching. The contributions
Max Weber, Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, with an
Introduction by Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921). Trans. as: The
Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel
and Gertrude Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).
19
10
Contemporary Music
of both Frisius and Decroupet throw into relief yet again the issue of musical
material. And any discussion of musical material, whatever its origins, is clearly
also a discussion of form, of the interaction of material and structure, of history,
historical movement, musical ‘meaning’, and of social mediation. This is the
substance of Anne Boissière’s ‘Material constraints: Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt’,
where she discusses the pre-formation of material in relation to the notion of ‘inner
necessity’ and interrogates directly the status of the concept of form that grants the
material its poetic value, as well as seeking to counter the accusation sometimes
levelled at Adorno, that he was an ‘anti-avant-gardist’. Boissière’s approach is an
original one, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of storytelling and Hannah
Arendt’s dual concept of work as both process and as object to emphasize the idea
of historical transmission of materials as a living tradition. The focus of my own
chapter on the mediation of music and society, ‘Music and social relations: towards
a theory of mediation’, offers a discussion of the concept of musical material in
Adorno in relation to dialectical levels or modalities of music’s mediation.
But the historical process of increasing control over material, according to
Adorno, leads not only to the crisis of total rationalization – Max Weber’s ‘iron
cage of rationality’ – but also to a crisis of material itself. The idea of a coherent
and ‘appropriate’ musical material falls into fragments and collapses as the actual
available material, however apparently diverse in its origins, becomes ever more
homogeneous and standardized through its appropriation by the music industry
in an age of mass culture. The tendency of art to take extreme rationalization into
the inner world of its form, to become what Valéry had called ‘a closed world’,
creating its own individual context of meaning with each new work, had long been
noticed as a characteristic of the avant-garde. One result of this has been complexity
taken to its extreme, as seen, for example, in Brian Ferneyhough’s music, where
the work itself sets up, quite literally, a resistance to interpretation, discussed by
Richard Toop in his essay ‘Against a theory of musical (new) complexity’. The
other extreme, already suggested by both Frisius and Decroupet, and touched on
by Herman Sabbe in ‘A philosophy of totality’, is the omnivorous acceptance
of everything as material, as seen in the case of John Cage. I take this further
in my own essay ‘Postmodernism and the survival of the avant-garde’ through
contrasting the omnivorous example of Frank Zappa with the complexity and selfreferentiality of Brian Ferneyhough, relating both to a concept of the absurd.
The double focus of these essays – theoretical and philosophical perspectives –
means, on the one hand, a focus on the details of musical syntax and material and on
details of particular compositional issues (Decroupet’s discussion of Varèse, Toop
on Ferneyhough, Deliège on post-Webernian music, in particular Stockhausen and
Boulez). On the other hand, it also means an emphasis on critique – in effect a
metacritique of theory itself. The debates that arose over the last three decades of
the twentieth century concerning the legitimacy of modernist art and of the avantgarde with the ascendancy of the ‘condition of postmodernity’ led to a crisis within
theory itself as well (and by this I don’t mean theory simply in the specialized
sense of ‘music theory’, but theoretical discourse in the larger sense, including
Introduction
11
philosophy). Indeed, Marc Jimenez goes so far as to suggest that there may be
a correlation between two crises: ‘one of an institutionalized, complaisant and
promotional criticism, which thus is no longer functional, and one of a confused
art, victim of a loss of legitimacy’. To that extent, he argues, theory – in this case
aesthetics – must be prepared to take risks.
IV
But creativity involves living with risk, uncertainty and ambiguity, and developing
strategies to encompass and articulate these through giving them form – however
informel that might actually turn out to be. The composers represented in Part
III of this book have themselves also all written extensively about music in both
theoretical and aesthetic terms, and here speak directly of their ideas and concerns.
Indeed, the big issues are those that have increasingly come to occupy composers
for well over a century now – how to deal with the essential arbitrariness of musical
materials in the absence of any overarching and generally accepted system for
organizing them, and the evident need with each new work to build a new structural
context within which such initially arbitrary and, in a sense, meaningless materials,
in spite of their shared ‘commonality’ and handed-down historical meanings, can
be organized and become again meaningful in a new context. Inseparable from
these concerns in music, oscillating constantly between intuition and the urge to
systematize, are questions of freedom in relation to control, chance in relation to
determinacy, and time and temporality in relation to space and spatialization – time
as structure, time as experience, and time as things in perpetual transition, a sense
of the transitoriness of things, of objects in space. In view of such all-pervading
instability and uncertainty it might seem all the more remarkable that composers
should be concerned at all with ideas of ‘truth’ in relation to their music; in fact
some kind of ‘truth concept’ emerges directly or indirectly as an issue in most of the
composers represented in Part III, alongside the ever-present problem of meaning.
For Jonathan Harvey, in his chapter ‘Music, Ambiguity, Buddhism’, truth in
music – ‘axioms that are true for all music’, as he puts it – is what he calls ‘a
kind of … Uncertainty Principle’, and there is a sense in which he has recourse to
Buddhism as a way of framing and structuring the potentially disturbing ambiguity
and transitoriness of the world, a world which, as a composer, he articulates through
music. The transcendent and mystical character of Harvey’s form of Spectralism
also points, perhaps inevitably, beyond music itself in a search for meaning, using
music as a model for understanding the relationship between illusion and reality.
Faced likewise with the dilemmas of choice and the unforeseen in his work, Pierre
Boulez is a Cartesian, casting all into doubt in the pursuit of immanent-musical
truth, and starting again from basic principles. As he puts it in his interview with
David Walters, ‘You have to put what you want to decide into doubt – that is
already in the writings of Descartes – doubt is fundamental; ‘… as long as you
don’t doubt, you cannot find the truth, or the temporary truth.’ The life’s work of
12
Contemporary Music
the artist is the necessity of ‘building an instrument’ – that is to say, ‘an instrument
that is totally adapted to his own thinking … “Original,” as in the sense that it
goes to the origin of himself.’ Here, the instrument is the music – or, perhaps
more accurately, the unique and systematic instrument which becomes a new
‘second nature’ through which the music emerges. While it’s difficult to imagine
a composer more different to Pierre Boulez than Helmut Lachenmann, there is a
striking convergence on the need to create a unique context of meaning through
the act of composing. While with Lachenmann it is Cage rather than Mallarmé
who is the dominant influence, in his interview with Abigail Heathcote he says:
‘In my music there’s no such thing as chance. … That’s what I mean when I
sometimes say, “composing means building an instrument”. Composing means
discovering and revealing a new, invented imaginary instrument. In my case the
problem is that such an imaginary instrument doesn’t exist before I develop it by
composing the piece. So my composing is full of helpful “mistakes”.’ There is a
fundamental sense in which this applies to all art today – the context itself must
also be built, as a special world within which each gesture can become meaningful,
where the arbitrary is eliminated and chance is embraced by the total context of
the work, and a kind of consistency is achieved as ‘truth’ to the dominating idea
of the work, its ‘scheme’. When, at one point in his interview with Lois Fitch and
John Hails, Brian Ferneyhough states: ‘If music is not true, it can’t be beautiful’,
he perhaps had something along these lines in mind – that the dominating idea
that animates a work permeates every detail at every level, and the beauty of the
work is this consistency of idea and work, in a very Schoenbergian sense. Indeed,
it’s also precisely this thought that Boulez derives from Mallarmé, that ‘the Idea
is reflected in everything’. In Ferneyhough’s opera Shadowtime, which arises out
of a longstanding engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin, it is the concept
of time itself that is central – or rather, several different concepts of time, as life
time, historical time, dramatic time, and what he calls ‘failed time’ – and which
systematically structures the work. On the other hand, fundamental to Wolfgang
Rihm’s approach to composition is a rejection of any overt systematization, and
what comes through clearly in his conversation with Richard McGregor is the
value he lays on intuition and his admiration for those composers who most
strongly exemplify the sense of freedom of the music of the period around 1910
– Debussy, Mahler and the pre-serial Schoenberg, and in this respect, although
this is not raised as such in the interview, Rihm could be understood as having
much in common with Adorno’s notion of une musique informelle, to return once
again to that seminal ideal. Speaking of his early experience of taking part in a
performance of Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien Rihm says: ‘There was
a music which only consists of itself, self-sufficient. The music was not something
a teacher talks about with words … the music was a living creature, and singing
within this living creature opened me.’
Introduction
13
V
The importance of Rihm and Lachenmann in contemporary music in Germany
as figures who have emerged since 1968, and therefore after the first wave of the
post-1945 avant-garde, cannot be overemphasized. The original French edition
of this book in 2001 had little to say on either composer, and it gives cause for
some satisfaction that this omission has now been addressed. As a postlude to this
English edition of the book Alastair Williams was invited to provide a commentary
on the significance of these two very different composers who could be said to
encompass the extremes of contemporary music in Germany today. His chapter,
‘Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm and the Austro-German tradition’, brings
together a number of important strands also highlighted elsewhere in the book
and links developments in contemporary music in Germany to a larger European
and American context.20 As Williams argues, we probably need to rethink the
significance of what has happened in advanced music since the mid-twentieth
century. The pivotal date may no longer be 1945, but 1968, with the recognition at
last that the revolution of the late 1960s was significant after all, together with the
enormous political and cultural significance of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
What is more, the key role played by Germany in contemporary music may need
to be revisited and recognized for a second time. It is not only German composers
as such – although the importance of Stockhausen, Henze, Huber, Lachenmann
and Rihm is now probably clear enough – but also developments in contemporary
music in Germany, of composers from elsewhere – such as Nono, Kagel, Ligeti,
Ferneyhough – who had chosen to work in the country either permanently or for
extended periods of their lives, as well as the opposite: German composers who
have chosen to live outside Germany, like Henze in Italy. As Alastair Williams
suggests, all this challenges us to rethink the musical historiography of the later
twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, and compels us to experience again
the relationship of subjectivity to objectivity and of modernity to tradition. In their
very different ways Lachenmann and Rihm in particular have developed new
critical musical ‘languages’ which, in Williams’s words, ‘contribute to the larger
cultural project of bringing the more abstract procedures of modernity into contact
with heightened, self-reflexive forms of perception’.
Finally, it needs to be re-emphasized that this book does not claim in any way
to be all-inclusive, nor does it set out to offer a historical survey of current and
past tendencies in the whole range of music available today or, for that matter,
since the mid-twentieth century,21 although the historical context of ideas is
certainly important. It is the theoretical and philosophical questions arising
20
See also Alastair Williams, ‘Ageing of the New: The Museum of Musical
Modernism’, in Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (eds), The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 506–38.
21
For a book that does precisely that, see Célestin Deliège, Cinquante ans de modernité
musicale: De Darmstadt à l’IRCAM (Sprimont: Pierre Mardaga, 2003).
Contemporary Music
14
from the situation of particular areas of advanced contemporary music seen also
in the context of key developments in earlier twentieth-century music that the
contributions seek to address – difficulties, problems and dilemmas at the turn
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In many respects the book is likely to
prove provocative, as much by what it includes as by what it leaves out, and by
the kinds of theoretical and philosophical approaches taken. All this is completely
in line with a publication that has its origins in a symposium of invited theorists,
philosophers and composers22 – that is to say, it is speculative, sometimes difficult,
often contentious, and hopefully thought-provoking. As Carl Dahlhaus said at
another symposium on contemporary music held at Darmstadt in 1966, and which
included Adorno, Ligeti, Kagel, Haubenstock-Ramati and Earle Brown: ‘But
difficulties are provocations, or at least they should be.’23
Bibliography
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12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Trans.
as: Philosophy of New Music, trans., ed. and with and introduction by Robert
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
2006)
——, ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ (1956 version), Dissonanzen (1956),
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 14, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, 1980), pp. 143–67
——, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1960), Quasi una Fantasia (1963)
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), pp. 493–540. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, ‘Vers une
musique informelle’, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London:
Verso, 1992), pp. 269–322
——, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 7 ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). Trans. as: Aesthetic Theory,
trans. with introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press,
1997)
22
The original colloquium of invited papers at La Monnaie, Brussels, in 2000, and
the original French edition of the resulting book – Irène Deliège and Max Paddison (eds),
Musique contemporaine: Perspectives théoriques et philosophiques (Sprimont: Mardaga,
2001) – have been greatly expanded for the present English edition. See Preface for details.
23
‘Schwierigkeiten aber sind Provokationen oder sollten es sein.’ Carl Dahlhaus,
Form in der Neuen Musik: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik X, ed. Ernst Thomas
(Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1966), p. 49 (my trans.). For an English version of Dahlhaus’s
introductory paper to this symposium, see the chapter ‘Form’ (trans. Stephen Hinton), in
Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 248–64.
Introduction
15
Borio, Gianmario, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960: Entwurf einer Theorie der
informellen Musik (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1993)
Boulez, Pierre, ‘Nécessité d’une orientation esthétique’, Points de repère I:
Imagine (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1985). Trans. as ‘Putting the Phantoms to
Flight’, Orientations, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber & Faber, 1986),
pp. 63–83
Cage, John, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1968; 1980)
Dahlhaus, Carl, Form in der Neuen Musik: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik
X, ed. Ernst Thomas (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1966)
——, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Deliège, Célestin, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale: De Darmstadt à l’IRCAM
(Sprimont: Pierre Mardaga, 2003)
Fukuyama, Francis, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16 (Summer
1989), pp. 3–18
Habermas, Jürgen, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985). Trans. as: The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)
Jencks, Charles, What is Post-Modernism? (London/New York: Academy Editions/
St Martin’s Press, 1986)
Kelly, Owen, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels (London:
Comedia, 1984)
Lyotard, Jean-François, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris:
Éditions de Minuit, 1979). Trans. as: The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Foreword by Fredric
Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
Paddison, Max, ‘The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno’,
in Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (eds), Mit den Ohren denken.
Adornos Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998),
pp. 71–91
——, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and
Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996, 2004)
Rorty, Richard, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity’, in Richard J. Bernstein
(ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 161–75
Weber, Max, Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, with
an Introduction by Theodor Kroyer (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921).
Trans. as: The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. and ed. Don
Martindale, Johannes Riedel and Gertrude Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1958)
Williams, Alastair, ‘Ageing of the New: The Museum of Musical Modernism’, in
Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople (eds), The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 506–38
This page has been left blank intentionally
References
Introduction: Contemporary Music: Theory,
Aesthetics, Critical Theory
Adorno, T.W., Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949).
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Trans. as:
Philosophy of New Music, trans., ed. and with and
introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
——, ‘Das Altern der Neuen Musik’ (1956 version),
Dissonanzen (1956), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 14, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973,
1980), pp. 143–67
——, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1960), Quasi una
Fantasia (1963) Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 16, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), pp.
493–540. Trans. Rodney Livingstone, ‘Vers une musique
informelle’, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music
(London: Verso, 1992), pp. 269–322
——, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 7 ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).
Trans. as: Aesthetic Theory, trans. with introduction by
Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997) 22 The
original colloquium of invited papers at La Monnaie,
Brussels, in 2000, and
the original French edition of the resulting book – Irène
Deliège and Max Paddison (eds),
Musique contemporaine: Perspectives théoriques et
philosophiques (Sprimont: Mardaga,
2001) – have been greatly expanded for the present English
edition. See Preface for details. 23 ‘Schwierigkeiten aber
sind Provokationen oder sollten es sein.’ Carl Dahlhaus,
Form in der Neuen Musik: Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen
Musik X, ed. Ernst Thomas
(Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1966), p. 49 (my trans.). For an
English version of Dahlhaus’s
introductory paper to this symposium, see the chapter
‘Form’ (trans. Stephen Hinton), in ahlhaus, Schoenberg and
the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton
University Press, 1987), pp. 248–64.
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einer Theorie der informellen Musik (Laaber: Laaber
Verlag, 1993)
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Cage, John, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1968; 1980)
Dahlhaus, Carl, Form in der Neuen Musik: Darmstädter
Beiträge zur Neuen Musik X, ed. Ernst Thomas (Mainz: B.
Schott’s Söhne, 1966)
——, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett
and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
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Fukuyama, Francis, ‘The End of History?’, The National
Interest 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18
Habermas, Jürgen, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne:
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1985). Trans. as: The Philosophical Discourse of
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trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Foreword by Fredric
Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
Paddison, Max, ‘The Language-Character of Music: Some
Motifs in Adorno’, in Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen
Mahnkopf (eds), Mit den Ohren denken. Adornos Philosophie
der Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), pp.
71–91
——, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical
Theory and Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1996, 2004)
Rorty, Richard, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity’, in
Richard J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 161–75
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Drei Masken Verlag, 1921). Trans. as: The Rational and
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Martindale, Johannes Riedel and Gertrude Neuwirth
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958)
Williams, Alastair, ‘Ageing of the New: The Museum of
Musical Modernism’, in Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople
(eds), The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 506–38
This page has been left blank intentionally
1 The Principles of Music and the
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2 Atonal Harmony: From Set to Scale
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3 In Search of Lost Harmony
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4 Against a Theory of Musical (New)
Complexity
Adorno, T.W., Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949).
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Trans. as:
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Toop, Richard, ‘Four Facets of “The New Complexity”’,
Contact 32 (Spring 1988), pp. 4–8 25 See, for example,
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Notations (New York: Something Else This page has been
left blank intentionally
5 Heterogeneity: Or, On the Choice of
Being Omnivorous
Adorno, Theodor W., Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte
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1964)
Chion, Michel, Musiques, Médias, Technologies (Paris:
Flammarion, 1994) 26 After David Hesmondhalgh,
‘International Times: Fusions, Exoticism, and
Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music’, in Georgina Born and
David Hesmondhalgh (eds),
Decroupet, Pascal, ‘A la recherche de l’harmonie perdue.
Regards analytiques sur le “Prologue dans le ciel” de
Votre Faust de Henri Pousseur’, Revue Belge de Musicologie
43 (1989), pp. 87–100
Hesmondhalgh, David, ‘International Times: Fusions,
Exoticism, and Antiracism in Electronic Dance Music’, in
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds), Western Music
and its Others: Difference, Representation and
Appropriation in Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2000)
Klein, Helmut, ‘Einrichtungen des Siemens-Studios für
elektronische Musik’, Bayerischer Rundfunk. Konzerte mit
Neuer Musik 13/50 (1962), pp. 26–45; abridged in Siemens
Kultur Programm (ed.), Siemens-Studio für elektronsiche
Musik (Munich: Siemens, 1994), pp. 19–25
Kühn, Clemens, Das Zitat in der Musik der Gegenwart – mit
Ausblicken auf bildende Kunst und Literatur (Hamburg: K.D.
Wagner, 1972)
Landolt, Patrick, and Wyss, Ruedi (eds), Die lachenden
Außenseiter. Musiker und Musikerinnen zwischen Jazz, Rock
und neuer Musik. Die 80er und 90er Jahre (Zurich:
Rotpunktverlag, 1993)
Lissa, Sofia, ‘Ästhetische Funktionen des musikalischen
Zitats’, Die Musikforschung 4 (1966), pp. 364–78
Macam, Edward, Rocking the Classics. English Progressive
Rock and the Counterculture (London: Oxford University
Press, 1997)
Malraux, André, La psychologie de l’art, Vol. 1, La musée
imaginaire (Paris: Albert Skira, 1947–50)
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Musicologie générale et semiology
(Paris: Bourgois, 1987). Trans. as: Music and Discourse:
Towards a Semiology of Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1990)
Olive, Jean-Paul, Musique et montage. Essai sur le matériau
musical au début du XX e siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan,
1998)
Pousseur, Henri, ‘L’apothéose de Rameau. Essai sur la
question harmonique’, Musiques Nouvelles. Revue
d’esthétique 21 (1968), pp. 105–72.
——, Musique, sémantique, société (Tournai: Castermann, 1972)
Ramaut-Chevassus, Béatrice, Musique et postmodernité
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998)
Sabbe, Herman, ‘A logic of coherence and an aesthetic of
contingency: European versus American “open structure”
music’, Journal of New Music Research 16/3 (1987), pp.
177–86
Schaeffer, Pierre, A la recherche d’une musique concrète
(Paris: Seuil, 1952)
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, ‘Die dritte Epoche. Bemerkungen
zur Ästhetik der Elektronenmusik’, Die Reihe 1 (1955), pp.
17–19
Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, ‘J.M.R. Lenz und neue Aspekte der
Oper: Libretto, Vorwand oder Anlass’, Theater und Zeit 8
(1961), pp. 152–5
——, ‘Vom Handwerk des Komponisten’, in Intervall und Zeit
(Mainz: Schott, 1974)
6 Varèse, Serialism and the Acoustic
Metaphor
Boulez, Pierre, Relevés d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966)
——, Points de repère (Paris: Bourgois, 1985)
—— and Cage, John, Correspondance, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez
(Paris: Bourgois, 1991); Eng. trans.: The Boulez–Cage
Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques
Example 6.6. Varèse, Déserts: graphs (a) and (b)
(a)
(b) Nattiez, trans. and ed. Robert Samuels (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Cage, John, Silence (London: Marion Boyars, 1989)
Helmholtz, Hermann von, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen
(Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1913, 6th edition)
Kostelanetz, Richard, John Cage (Cologne: DuMont, 1973)
——, John Cage im Gespräch. Zu Musik, Kunst und geistigen
Fragen unserer Zeit (Cologne: DuMont, 1989)
Leibowitz, René, Introduction à la musique de douze sons
(Paris: L’Arche, 1949)
——, Schoenberg and his School (New York: Da Capo Press,
reprint 1979; orig. 1949)
Peyser, Joan, Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma (New
York: Schirmer, 1976)
Piencikowski, Robert, ‘Nature morte avec guitare’, in Josef
Häusler (ed.), Pierre Boulez. Eine Festschrift zum 60.
Geburtstag am 26. März 1985 (Vienna: Universal Edition,
1985), pp. 82–98
Schädler, Stefan, ‘Transformationen des Zeitbegriffs in
John Cage’s Music of Changes’, Musik-Konzepte Sonderband
John Cage II (Munich: Text + Kritik, 1990), pp. 185–236
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, Texte zur elektronischen und
instrumentalen Musik, Vol. 1 (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg,
1963)
Varèse, Edgard, Écrits, ed. Louise Hirbour (Paris:
Bourgois, 1983)
Wyschnegradsky, Ivan, ‘Ultrachromatisme et espaces non
octaviants’, La revue musicale 290–291 (1972), pp. 71–141
This page has been left blank intentionally
7 ‘I Open and Close’?
Ferneyhough, Brian, Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and
Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1995) Ibid., p. 290.
8 A Period of Confrontation: The
Post-Webern Years
Adorno, T.W ., Ästhetische Theorie (1970), Gesammelte
Schriften Vol. 7, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970; 2nd ed. 1972).
Trans. as: Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: Athlone Press, 1997)
Bachelard, Gaston, Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1934)
Boulez, Pierre, Relevés d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966)
——, Points de repère (Paris: Bourgois-Seuil, 1981)
Cage, John, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with
Daniel Charles (London: Marion Boyars, 1981). Original
French edition: Pour Les Oiseaux (Paris: Éditions Pierre
Belfond, 1976)
Cott, Jonathan, Stockhausen: Conversations with the
Composer (London: Robson Books, 1974)
Dahlhaus, Carl, Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Cologne:
Gerig, 1967). Trans. as: Foundations of Music History,
trans. J.B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983)
Deliège, Célestin, ‘Sur quelques motifs de l’ouverture aux
mythologiques’, L’Arc 26 (1965), pp. 69–76
——, Invention musicale et ideologies (Paris: Bourgois, 1986)
——, ‘La fin du romantisme’, Entretemps 4 (1987), pp. 27–48
Harvey, Jonathan, The Music of Stockhausen (London: Faber,
1975)
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Mythologiques 1, Le cru et le cuit
(Paris: Plon, 1964)
Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of
Industrial Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964)
——, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1972)
Menger, Pierre-Michel, ‘L’oreille spéculative, consommation
et perception de la musique contemporaine’, Revue
française de sociologie 27/3 (July–September 1986), pp.
445–78
Messiaen, Olivier, Music and Color: Conversations with
Claude Samuel, trans. E. Thomas Glasow (Portland, OR:
Amadeus Press, 1994). For the French edition, see under
Claude Samuel, below.
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, ‘Musique laissée en liberté’, in John
Cage, Cahier 2 (Nevers: Maison de la Culture de Nevers et
de la Nièvre, 1972), pp. 15–29
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ‘Rencontre avec Lévi-Strauss: le
plaisir et la structure’, Musique en Jeu 12, Autour de
Lévi-Strauss (1973), pp. 3–10
Pousseur, Henri, Fragments théoriques 1, sur la musique
expérimentale (Brussels: I nstitut de Sociologie, ULB,
1970)
Ruddick, Chester Townsend, ‘On the Confirmation of Natural
Law’, The Monist 42/3 (July 1932), pp. 330–84
Samuel, Claude, Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris:
Belfond, 1967). For the English edition, see under
Messiaen, above.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, ‘Musique dans l’espace’, Revue
belge de musicologie, Vol. 13 (1959), 1–4 (Brussels), pp.
76–82
——, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, Vol.
1 (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963)
——, ‘Musique universelle’, Musique en jeu 15, Forum de
musique contemporaine 1 (1974), pp. 30–34
Valéry, Paul, ‘Discours de l’histoire’, Essais quasi
politiques, In Variétés, Oeuvres, Vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1957), pp. 1128–37
9 A Philosophy of Totality
Adorno, Theodor W., Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949);
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Trans. as:
Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Attali, Jacques, Bruits: essai sur l’économie politique de
la musique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1977). Trans. as: Noise: The Political Economy of Music,
trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1985)
Boehmer, Konrad, Das böse Ohr: Texte zur Musik 1961–1991
(Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1993)
Bosseur, Jean-Yves, John Cage (Paris: Éditions Minerve,
1993)
Deliège, Célestin, Invention musicale et Idéologies (Paris:
Bourgois, 1986)
DeLio, Thomas, Circumscribing the Open Universe (Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1984)
Sabbe Herman, ‘Die Einheit der Stockhausen-Zeit …: Neue
Erkenntnismöglichkeiten der seriellen Entwicklung anhand
des frühen Wirkens von Stockhausen und Goeyvaerts.
Dargestellt aufgrund der Briefe Stockhausens an Goevaerts’,
in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds),
Musik-Konzepte 19: Karlheinz Stockhausen: … wie die Zeit
verging … (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1981) pp. 5–96
10 Possibilities for a Work-Immanent
Contemporary Musical Logic
Boulez, Pierre, Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris:
Denoël-Gonthier, 1963)
——, ‘Le système et l’idée’, Inharmoniques 1 (1986), pp.
62–104
Connes, Alain, Géométrie non commutative (Paris:
InterEditions, 1999)
Deliège, Célestin, Invention musicale et ideologies (Paris:
Bourgois, 1986) • • •
Grünbaum, B. and Shephard, G.C., Tilings and Patterns (New
York: Freeman & Company, 1987)
Imbert, C. Pour une histoire de la logique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1999)
Lalo, Charles, Éléments d’une esthétique musicale
scientifique (Paris: Vrin, 1939)
Nicolas, François, ‘Le monde de l’art n’est pas le monde du
pardon’, Entretemps 5 (1988), pp. 109–32.
www.entretemps.asso.fr/Nicolas/TextesNic/Xenakis.html
——, Les moments favoris: une problématique de l’écoute
musicale (Conférence Noria, Reims, 1997).
www.entretemps.asso.fr/Nicolas/TextesNic/momentsfavoris.
html
——, La singularité Schoenberg (Paris: Ircam–L’Harmattan,
1997)
——, Une poignée de mains: la musique du poète Gerard Manley
Hopkins (Lyon: Horlieu, 1997)
Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (London: Faber & Faber,
1968)
Schaeffer, Pierre, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris:
Seuil, 1966)
Schoenberg, Arnold, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter
(London: Faber & Faber, 1978)
Souris, André, Conditions de la musique, et autres écrits
(Brussels and Paris: Université Libre de Bruxelles et
CNRS, 1976)
11 Postmodernism and the Survival of the
Avant-garde
Adorno, T.W., ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’
(1932), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 18, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), pp. 749–50.
Trans. as: ‘On the Social Situation of Music’, trans.
Wesley Blomster, Telos 35 (Spring 1978), pp. 128–64 66 My
translation. See original German: ‘Die philosophische
Geschichte als die
Wissenschaft vom Ursprung ist die Form, die da aus den
entlegenen Extremen, den
scheinbaren Exzessen der Entwicklung die Konfiguration der
Idee als der durch die Adorno, Philosophie der neuen
Musik, p. 13.
——, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), Gesammelte
Schriften Vol. 12, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). Trans. as: Philosophy of New
Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
——, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962), Gesammelte
Schriften Vol. 14, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). Trans. as: Introduction to the
Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury
Press, 1976)
——, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, Quasi una Fantasia
(1963), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 16, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), pp. 493–540.
Trans. as: ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una
Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992),
pp. 269–322
——, ‘Zum Problem der musikalischen Analyse’ (1969), first
published in German in the journal of the Th.W. Adorno
Archiv, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurter Adorno-Blätter 7
(2001), pp. 73–89. Originally first published in E nglish
translation as: ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis’,
trans. with an introduction and notes by Max Paddison,
Music Analysis 1/2 (July 1982), pp. 169–87
——, Ästhetische Theorie (1970), Gesammelte Schriften Vol.
7, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970; 2nd ed. 1972). Trans. as (i)
Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge,
1984); (ii) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: The Athlone Press, 1997)
—— and Eisler, H., Composing for the Films (1947) (London:
The Athlone Press, 1994)
—— and Horkheimer, M., Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947)
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981). Trans. as: Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder &
Herder, 1972)
Anderson, Walter Truett (ed.), The Fontana Postmodernism
Reader (London: Fontana, 1995)
Benjamin, Walter, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels,
Gesammelte Schriften 1.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), pp. 203–430. Trans. as: The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne and
introduced by George Steiner (London: NLB, 1977)
Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974). Trans. as: Theory of the
Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, foreword by Jochen
Schulte-Sasse (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1984)
Dahlhaus, Carl, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans.
Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987)
Ferneyhough, Brian, Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and
Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers,
1998)
Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’,
trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern
Culture (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 3–15.
——, ‘Questions and Counterquestions’, trans. James Bohman,
in Richard J. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 192–216
——, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), trans.
Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987)
Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodern and Consumer Society’, in Hal
Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture ( London: Pluto Press,
1985), pp. 111–25
——, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (London/New York: Verso, 1991)
Jencks, Charles, What is Post-Modernism? (London/New York:
Academy Editions/ St Martin’s Press, 1986)
——, ‘What is Post-Modernism?’, in Walter Truett Anderson
(ed.), The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London: Fontana,
1995), pp. 26–7
Kofsky, Frank, ‘Frank Zappa Interview’, in J. Eisen (ed.),
The Age of Rock (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp.
254–68
Lyotard, Jean-François, ‘Defining the Postmodern’, in Lisa
Appignanesi (ed.), Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4 (London:
ICA, 1986), pp. 7–10
——, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979),
trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, foreword by Fredric
Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
——, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence
1982–1985, trans. and ed. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas
(London: Turnaround, 1992)
Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen, ‘Adornos Kritik der Neueren
Musik’, in Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (eds),
Mit den Ohren denken. Adornos Philosophie der Musik
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), pp. 251–80
Middleton, Richard, Studying Popular Music (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 1990)
Paddison, Max, ‘The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular
Music’, in Richard Middleton and David Horn (eds), Popular
Music 2: Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 210–18
——, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993)
——, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture (London: Kahn &
Averill, 1996; 2004)
——, ‘Der Komponist als Kritischer Theoretiker – Brian
Ferneyhoughs Ästhetik nach Adorno’, trans. Wolfram Ette,
in Musik & Ästhetik 3/10 (April 1999), pp. 95–100
——, ‘Frank Zappa’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds),
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (revised
edition) (London: Macmillan, 2001), Vol. 27, pp. 748–9
Sandner, Wolfgang, ‘Popularmusik als somatisches Stimulans.
Adornos Kritik der “leichten Musik”’, in Otto Kolleritsch
(ed.), Adorno und die Musik (Graz: Universal Edition,
1979), pp. 125–32
Toop, Richard, ‘Four Facets of “The New Complexity”’,
Contact 32 (Spring 1988), pp. 4–8
Watson, Ben, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle
Play (London: Quartet Books, 1994)
——, ‘Frank Zappa as Dadaist: Recording Technology and the
Power to Repeat’, Contemporary Music Review 15/1 (2000),
pp. 109–37
Whittall, A rnold, ‘Complexity, Capitulationism, and the
Language of Criticism’, Contact 33 (Autumn 1988), pp.
20–23
Zappa, Frank, The Real Frank Zappa Book (with Peter
Occhiogrosso) (London: Picador, 1989)
12 Material Constraints: Adorno,
Benjamin, Arendt
Adorno, Theodor W., Mahler. Eine musikalische Physiognomik
(1960), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971)
——, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1960), Quasi una
fantasia (1963), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 16, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), pp.
493–540
——, Berg. Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs (1968),
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 13, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971)
——, Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 7, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970)
Pierre Boulez, Jalons (Paris: Bourgois, 1989), pp. 70–95.
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958); French trans.: Condition de l’homme
moderne (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1983)
——, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1, Thinking (London: Secker
& Warburg, 1978). French trans.: La vie de l’esprit, Vol.
1, La pensée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1983)
——, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, Willing (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1978). French trans.: La vie de l’esprit, Vol. 2,
Le vouloir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983)
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), Illuminations,
ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973), pp. 83–110
——, ‘Expérience et pauvreté,’ in Poésie, No. 51 (Paris:
Belin, 1989)
Boulez, Pierre, Jalons (Paris: Bourgois, 1989)
Valéry, Paul, ‘Première leçon du cours de poétique’, in
Théorie poétique et esthétique, Oeuvres, Vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1957), pp. 1340–58
Vattimo, Gianni, La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti,
1985). French trans.: La fin de la modernité (Paris:
Seuil, 1987). English trans.: The End of Modernity:
Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans.
John R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) This page
has been left blank intentionally
13 Towards an Aesthetics of Risk
Adorno, T.W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: Athlone Press, 1997). Original German edition:
Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 7, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970)
Danto, Arthur C., The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)
G enette, G., L’oeuvre de l’art II. La relation esthétique
(Paris: Seuil, 1997)
Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1976)
Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, in
Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press,
1985), pp. 3–15
Jimenez, Marc, La critique. Crise de l’art ou consensus
culturel? (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995)
——, Qu’est-ce que l’esthétique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)
Lories, D., Philosophie analytique et esthétique (Paris:
Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1988)
——, Expérience esthétique et ontologie de l’oeuvre
(Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1989)
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi,
with a foreword by Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984; orig. French: Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1979)
Michaud, Y., La crise de l’art contemporain (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1997)
Schaeffer, J.M., L’art de l’âge moderne. L’esthétique et la
philosophie de l’art du XIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris:
Gallimard, 1993)
——, Les célibataires de l’art. Pour une esthétique sans
mythes (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)
Steiner, George, Real Presences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991)
14 Music and Social Relations: Towards a
Theory of Mediation
Adorno, Theodor W., ‘On the Social Situation of Music’
(1932), trans. Wesley Blomster, Telos 35 (Spring 1978),
pp. 128–64. Cf. original German: ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen
Lage der Musik’, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 18, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), pp.
729–77
——, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), trans.
E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). Cf. original
German: Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: Zwölf
theoretische Vorlesungen (1962) (with Dissonanzen),
Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 14, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), pp. 169–433
——, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York:
Seabury Press, 1973). Cf. original German: Negative
Dialektik (1966) (Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 6, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973)
——, ‘Theses on the Sociology of Art’ (1967), trans. Brian
Trench, Birmingham Working Papers in Cultural Studies 2
(1972), pp. 121–8. Cf. original German: ‘Thesen zur
Kunstsoziologie’ (1967), in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica
(1967, 1968), Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 10.1, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), pp.
367–74
Hanslick, Eduard, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) (Leipzig,
1902, 10th ed.)
Hegel, G.W.F., Logic (1830), trans. William Wallace, with
foreword by J.N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Cf. original German: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften, Erster Teil: Die Wissenschaft der Logik,
24 See Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Appendix:
‘Berg’s Sonata op. 1 pp. 279–84; also ‘Immanent Analysis
or Musical in G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, Bd.8, ed. E.
Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1970)
Kneif, Tibor, Musiksoziologie (Cologne: Musikverlag Hans
Gerig, 1971, 2nd ed. 1975)
Leibniz, G.W., Monadology (1714), trans. and commentary by
Nicholas Rescher (London: Routledge, 1991)
Marx, Karl, Capital, Vol. 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes
(London: Penguin, 1976). Cf. German original: Das Kapital,
Bd.1, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Bd.23
(Berlin: Dietz, 1962)
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——, ‘Immanent Analysis or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and
the Problem of Musical Analysis’, in Nigel Gibson and
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——, ‘Performance, Reification and Score: The Dialectics of
Spatialization and Temporality in the Experience of
Music’, in Musicae Scientiae: Forum de Discussion 3.
Aspects du temps dans la création musicale (2004), pp.
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——, ‘Die vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit der Musik: Zum
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15 Music, Ambiguity, Buddhism: A
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Examples 15.2, 15.3, 15.4, 15.5, 15.6, 15.8 are all
reproduced by kind permission
of Faber Music Ltd.
Postlude: Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang
Rihm and the Austro-German Tradition
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Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification
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——, ‘Staub. Für Orchester (1985/87)’, in Musik als
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2000)
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