The Exiled Musician’s Search for Identity
Again, I have to apologise for length of time between postings. This has been an extraordinary year and following the publication of my book Music of Exile, I have had to think about a great many things, questioning some of the very foundations of what has come to be regarded as the basis of twentieth century music. In fact, these are questions I ask not so much at the beginning of a new year, but ask mid-way through the second decade of a new century. We look at musical developments in the previous century from the distance of nearly a quarter of a century later and can compare them with developments in the present. As a result, it is very difficult to establish what is considered progress and what is considered retreat. Indeed, can creative media as “music” even be seen as something on a path to progress or in retreat? Is music, as Adorno believed, a cultural engine capable of changing societies or is it merely a mirror reflecting the society it inhabits at the time?
Nearly a quarter of a century into the new century, it is legitimate to ask questions of the previous century: How and why did the split between what was considered popular and serious music occur? Why was it necessary for there to be such divisions? To what extent did such divisions exist before the twentieth century? Were they always there? Of course, there were folk- and marching songs, ballads and campfire songs, which would not necessarily have been performed in the Esterhazy palace…or were they? Only transformed by orchestration and structured by Papa Haydn into what we now consider “classical”? Schubert and Mahler were so entrenched in the music of the town square and marching band that they simply wrote their own versions for the concert hall or living room. Was it only in the twentieth century that appreciating serious music was considered a social statement and badge of bourgeois arrival? After all, in a pre-sound-recording age, it was not as if there would have been much choice. One found music in church, in the concert hall and theatre and on the market square. In any case, music as a badge of upward social mobility is certainly not the case in the twenty-first century. The wealthiest and best educated seem perfectly happy listening and bopping to popular music leaving “serious” music as a minority pursuit. More excitement is generated today by film scores, sound design and computer games than the latest orchestral or opera house commission.
So, why on earth, throughout the twentieth century, were serious music composers writing music that people did not enjoy hearing, and could not understand? It was not like literature or even the visual arts where incomprehension had also caused bewilderment. If someone did not like a painting or a book, they either moved away or put the book down. Listening to new music became synonymous with being trapped with the exit sign on the far side of the auditorium…it was like taking bad-tasting medicine with the composer as Nurse Ratchet. They knew what was good for you. There was no escape. Twentieth century literature could ditch the chronological narratives and even try out a few gimmicks like removing punctuation or putting everything into lower case…but letters still (mostly) formed recognisable words, even if they were strung together in unrecognisable sentences. The visual arts threw Jackson Pollock’s aleatoric chaos at us. But did he actively attempt to pass himself off as Nurse Ratchet? Pollock and others challenged concepts of representational art, but did not set out to make the viewer a better person.
Otto Dix’s scenes from the First World War were far more antagonising, because he elevated representational art to graphic degrees of acceptability. Music, on the other hand, appears to have set out to create better societies by synthesising the shock techniques of Otto Dix with the abstract language of Jackson Pollock. So the question remains: Why was this musical Nurse Ratchet allowed to humiliate and intimidate lovers of serious art-music for such a long time?
Right from the start of the century, Richard Strauss was creating a sound world in his operas Salome and Elektra that was intended to galvanise through dissonance. If Bach and Beethoven used dissonance it was usually resolved and only passing. Strauss employed dissonance in a new way – a way he knew would have audiences plugging their ears even if many bars later, everything resolved in resounding tonic chords. And this development paid dividends. Dissonance gave us some very powerful music – one need only think of Wozzeck or Stravinsky’s Sacre. Schoenberg used it repeatedly from 1908 onwards, often deliberately combining it with moments of tonal beauty thereby truly creating something that sounded gloriously decadent as with Gurre Lieder.
Also, with emperors and kings consigned to history’s dustbins, there emerged a sense of abandon and anarchism; and musical anarchy was best expressed in joyous cacophony. For those interested, just have a listen to Stefan Wolpe’s Zeus und Elida. But the question still dangles in the air: what changes took place in the twentieth century that moved music in so many different and often bewildering directions?
There were of course two world wars, and violent revolutions that were meant to break the existing models of society. Changes from the feudal to the enfranchisement of the masses were relatively new, though such a progression was already apparent in the nineteenth century, indeed, as early as 1830, then again in 1848. Wealth was democratised. It was no longer the sole domain of the aristocracy but started to spread to merchants, financiers, industrialists and entrepreneurs. With the abolition of the slave trade, it was clear that human dignity was universal, even if there was an economic unwillingness to accommodate such self-evident truths. By the time we reach the revolutions of the twentieth century, the security of the individual is guaranteed by the solidarity of society. Such utopian and dystopian ideas of how to make a better and more just world competed and even collided. I am reminded of how often I read references of National Socialism as “brown Bolshevism”. If Strauss operas and Schoenberg’s early Expressionist works supplied visual context, if not on the stage, then in the titles of works, dissonance began to enter the world without explanation, remaining abstract. This is why its initial, violent outing in 1905 with Salome, followed by Elektra four years later was crucial. It was staged, so it was visual. The dissonance did not exist in a vacuum, but made sense as it directly corresponded with the emotional dissonance of the drama. But dissonance was suddenly freed from the visual. Even Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces op. 16 from 1909 were provided with descriptive titles that provided a comprehensible context. There is no attempt at alienation, but rather, an attempt at engagement with the listener in a new and more expressive manner.
But is there a development in twentieth century society that can explain the dual developments of abstract, atonal, aleatoric cacophony lacking any handles and the scrupulous transparency of dodecaphony with its puritanical numeric over-structuring? What drove Anton von Webern? What was driving an apparent puritanical, mathematical urge to change the musical narrative into something so obviously alien to the normal listener? Works were conceived as beginnings with ends linked by strictly laid-out sequences. There was little in-between with successions of pitches themselves becoming the beginning, the middle and the end. Structures could easily work as palindromes. Form was more important than content, which is why Julius Korngold became indignant that the Schoenberg circle re-claimed Eduard Hanslick and his Hegelian views that music must not touch feelings, but be in and of itself a work of classical purity. Yet while this argument was going on, Alban Berg was composing Wozzeck, a work of unbound Expressionism. There were definitely elements within the Schoenberg School who skimmed so much fat that what was left was a cloudy, incomprehensible substance few would willingly ingest. So, if the vast majority of music consumers were unwilling to consume such thin gruel, why was it, and other “good-for-you” developments the only things on the new-music menu for so many post-war decades?
At Exilarte, an alternative twentieth century began to emerge. We were able to discover patterns whereby composers who were transplanted began to search for an identity lifeline. Very few resorted to reaching for the identity lifeline of cultural disruption. Put more clearly, if offered the self-identity of enlightened classicism or an arcane avant-garde, most gravitated towards the former, with even Arnold Schoenberg returning to the classical concept of the instrumental concerto. And even if those composers who returned to classical models continued to write Expressionist, free-tonal music, the language they used as justification suggested a search for points from the past that allowed them to connect to their present situation. Detached from homelands and receptive publics, musical individuality no longer linked themselves to an abstract concept of “progress” and instead, sought continuity.
Obviously, there were musicians and artists who gravitated towards avant-garde venues such as Black Mountain College in North Carolina, but even they accorded themselves an authority that derived from generations of producing serious European art-music. An important engine of the musical avant-garde, whether at home, or abroad in exile, was the view of the twentieth century as a scientific age of objectivity and progress. And in truth, since the ending of the First World War, progress was everywhere and tangible. Monarchies had fallen and citizens replaced subjects. Even Fascism, National Socialism and Communism were seen as “progressive” movements. Great thinkers, scientists and philosophers argued their “progressive” credentials persuasively and in all of these movements, the common denominator was a view of wider social structures as positive engines of progress while the individual represented negative constraints. Music was soon designated a potential generator of social progress, meaning didactic purposes paternalistically developed that would galvanise the emotional individual into the sobriety of the collective. Yet, music, by its very nature resonates within the emotional landscape of the individual, making music “useful”, “objective” or even “intellectually challenging” a difficult circle to square.
Even if it is possible to speak objectively about social or technological progress, we return to the question of “progress” as a concept applied to music. Progress suggests positive efficiency. Moving from telex to fax to email is “progress”. Moving from horse and cart to car is progress. But could one argue that the moves away from polyphony in the eighteenth century were progress? Weren’t they just change as new expressive devices were sought? What about the move from Old- to New-German School in the nineteenth century? And in the twentieth century, we had the move from consonance to unresolved dissonance and the complete abandonment of tonality. Was this “progress” or merely a reaction to what had been the norm for a very long time? Changes in the arts were not always “progress” but new directions in search of new means of expression. Think of German Expressionism as a reaction to French Impressionism. The dense complexity of the Darmstadt school was ultimately challenged by Philip Glass’s endlessly repeated triads.
Composers since the advent of Western Music have searched for new expressive devices. What I find fascinating is the realisation that the one hit upon by the Second Viennese School was perhaps the least successful of all. Serialism, once it was spiked with wide dissonant intervals and/or the removal of bar-lines, it began to resemble one of the sillier religious sects that banned sex, ultimately leading to it dying out. Once music became so puritanical that it removed all of its intrinsic elements, it forfeited its ability to be perceived as a new means of artistic expression. Of course, film scores impressively exploit Serialism and dissonant Expressionism – but without the visual, it is hard to imagine how the music itself survives as anything beyond sound design.
Where the search for new expressive pathways ran aground was the fundamental inability of listener or performer to perceive coherency. Without structure, the aleatoric and almost any departure from tonal grammar would lose its ability to be logically processed by a brain that instinctively searches for the diatonic equivalent of subject and object. It was as clear to Haydn over 200 years ago as it remains to today’s most successful pop-song composers. Drop these concepts, and we are left with random notes in no audible relationship to one another beyond the analytical. When Gluck rebelled against Händel and Liszt ditched Mendelssohn, their rebellions, developments and changes still maintained a comprehensible musical grammar. And what fascinated me while writing Music of Exile, was the realisation that so many composers who were uprooted and found themselves in strange new environments, battered by incomprehensible languages, returned to their beautiful, native, yet complicated musical grammar.
The examples are too numerous to cite but a few examples that I brought up in my book referred to the return to “the symphony” or any form that denoted classicism: sonatas, concertos, quartets, Lieder etc. The composer Karol Rathaus departed from his pre-war rhapsodic extemporisations and became highly structured, even while departing from traditional tonality. It was a characteristic shared with Egon Wellesz, starting with his fifth symphony through to his ninth, or Ernst Toch. Many still felt the badge of Modernism required atonality, yet balanced this idea with architectural clarity or references to their own musical culture. Toch, for example, appeared to love inserting fugal passages in even his most dissonant music. More revealing, however, was the music written for the desk drawer. Here, one found the exiled composer’s most intimate musical statements. Regardless of whether we cite Hanns Eisler or Walter Arlen, we find a search for beauty for its own sake. So yes, the music of exile in the previous century gives us a very different view of developments and offers expressive avenues that were both new and somehow, familiar.
This is a very interesting and thought-provoking article. I’d add something that American music critic Steven Kruger has noted: “We must remember that dodecaphony was university-supported and hence pretty immune from the wants of the public. Milton Babbitt is a good example; he said his music was meant to be looked at, not heard. Haydn never had the luxury of staking out a position like that, because his aristocratic sponsors expected a listenable piece at dinner.”
Very informative and thank you—made me understand the music of the last century better.
Hello Michael. IMHO the missing element hear is pure economics. As you know from my previous writings harmony is an element of composition. It is not composition technique, which is a unique body of knowledge. In the 20th century, musicians (and composers) with modest compositional abilities have been able to adopt harmonic systems of music creation that are lacking in composition technique. Over the century, these folks invaded the universities and obtained tenured positions. On the surface, young composers flock to these institutions and are enamored with the pedigree of faculty, many of whom are lacking in composition skills. But they have good jobs. But the music doesn’t work. It’s no small wonder that these composers invaded the concert halls, turning off audiences towards contemporary music. It’s a terrible situation.
Many of the composers in exile learned and carried on the high standards of composition technique. Most of them did not pursue such systems. As a result, and of your fine work, we have much great music in the era to enjoy. Kudos to you for what you have done.
Somewhere – I can’t recall where – I have translated an article by Julius Korngold (Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s father who was an extraordinary music journalist) on the relationship of harmony to the invention of melody. It is a fascinating subject that seems to have got lost in the last century’s obsession with linear composition, also including serialism.
That’s interesting. It’s actually the opposite in practice. Berg explored the technique of the verticalization of melody, which then George Perle expanded in his work on 12 tone modality. Bartok also did this. I have been doing this and expanding on this for years. It gives rise to new harmonies and harmonic progressions that are not intuitively derived but can result in new areas of harmonic beauty. Perle did this and failed to mention to his students that he also incorporated composition techniques he derived in the background from Krenek, a student of Schreker. It’s why Perle’s music works (sometimes). There is a neurological process that our brains contain that absorbs certain pitch relationships that are horizontal that can be artfully transformed to “stacking” or their verticalization, then work as harmonic progressions. But then a composer must apply central European composition techniques the music or otherwise wind up with bad music. Happy to discuss and show you at some point.
I have been writing about this subject for the past 50 years. I think that many of the points raised here are based on false premises. Here are just a few: “… it is very difficult to establish what is considered progress and what is considered retreat. …. Is music … a cultural engine capable of changing societies or is it merely a mirror reflecting the society it inhabits at the time?” There can be no progress without a goal toward which something is moving. For an art like music, there is no single goal, so the notion of “progress” is misleading and irrelevant. There is no reason that music should be considered to “change society” OR to be a “mirror reflecting society.” Music is most properly considered a reflection of the person who composed it. Thinking otherwise leads in fruitless directions, as indicated by the meaningless questions pursue here. Here’s one more: “So, why on earth, throughout the twentieth century, were serious music composers writing music that people did not enjoy hearing, and could not understand?” Yes, some composers were doing that. But what the arbiters of taste were trying to “sell” was the idea that this is what ALL composers were doing. So listeners were expected to “get with the program.” The fact is that there were countless composers who persisted in an effort to express human feelings in their music. But their music was suppressed, either directly or through a pervasive pattern of deprecating the talent and integrity of such composers and then dismissing them from consideration. Audiences submitted to this aesthetic totalitarianism rather than defend the composers who resisted it, giving rise to the fallacy that “composers in the 20th century just wrote ugly music.” If audiences were able to hear the music being suppressed, they would realize that they were being “sold a bill of goods.”
Anyone interested in a fuller elaboration of these points is referred to my website at walter-simmons.com or my book, Voices in the Wilderness (2004), which is all about the recent composers who continued to follow their inner voices in spite of this suppression.
I’m not sure where we disagree. I ask rhetorical questions and though I agree that music reflects the composer, I cannot agree that the environment in which the composer inhabits is without influence as well. In my book, I write about the composer Robert Fürstenthal who was only writing music for himself, his wife and few friends so it made to difference if his language was that of Joseph Marx or Hugo Wolf. He lived in San Diego and had no intention of exposing himself or his music to the wider public. Composers who were prepared to put their heads above the parapet were, however, aware of the stylistic rip tides in which they swam. Fundamentally, there is much that is “Romantic” in the music of Benjamin Britten or William Walton and they express themselves in the context of their cultural environment. Like you, I disagree that “progress” is a concept that can be applied to music, but I also see that during the last century, people were looking for practical applications for the arts, to free them from the frivolities of privilege. In a scientific age, or an age where science was calling the cultural shots, music needed to be seen as “moving forward” It demanded to be relevant – it became mathematical, complex and lost its ability to communicate with that resonance chamber of the human soul. There is a return to sentimentality in today’s music – probably a reaction to the anti-sentiment of yesterday’s music. And of course, there were 20th century composers writing music that was beyond the bounds of academia, but look carefully and it’s possible to spot a common thread: Socialist Realism, Nazi Monumentalism and Italian Verismo during the Fascist years share many characteristics with the “feel-good-about-being-American” music being composed in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a period when political ideas were trying to subvert the arts, and post-war, the arts went as far away as possible in order NOT to be subverted.
I didn’t say that the environment is without influence. But every composer’s “environment,” both internal and external, is different. So there is not just one environment. This misunderstanding contributed to much foolishness, as critics argued about whether or not a piece of music was “reflecting its time,” as if that were some sort of requirement. You speak at length about “a scientific age, or an age where science was calling the cultural shots, music needed to be seen as ‘moving forward.’ It demanded to be relevant – it became mathematical, complex and lost its ability to communicate with that resonance chamber of the human soul.” This is an apt description of one point of view that pervaded commentary on the arts during the last century. My claim is that this misguided notion held sway perniciously in some quarters, but it did not speak for the musical public as a whole, and—again—involved overlooking the many composers who had the courage to defy this notion, although they paid for this stance dearly by essentially finding their music blacklisted. Then you refer to the influence of “socialist realism” among the more accessible composers. That may be an apt point in reference to Copland, perhaps. But you would have a hard time extending that point to include composers like Barber, Hanson, Creston, Giannini et al. There may be some broad aesthetic generalities that apply to the Social Realists, Nazis, and Italian Fascists, as well as to the more conservative American composers. But that does not suggest that they shared political sympathies. In fact, I believe that this gross lumping together of political fascism with composers who felt no need to renounce emotional expression in music was another factor in efforts to ram dry, cold, ugly, uncommunicative music down the throats of the public. It remains an open question as to whether the art of music will ever recover from this travesty.
I don’t think we disagree, but you’re arguing from an American standpoint. America has always made far more space for diversity in music than in Europe where the hegemony of what I would refer to as a “violent avant-garde” held sway. This strand was pretty much confined to America’s academia, but in Europe it was highly subsidised by any number of public bodies who had drunk deeply from the Adorno-Darmstadt Kool-Aid. I recall Chicago recording David Del Tredici at a time when Europeans were rubbing their eyes and ears, laughing in disbelief. The view that music was an engine rather than a mirror dominated publically funded European institutions leaving little room for musical diversity unless composers started writing for the media, something John Mauceri has defended as a valid and important form of expression in the last century, despite its constant demotion by commentators and academics. Paradoxically, the countries where composers could break from this iron grip were in the former Soviet Bloc. I recall publishers and promoters turning up in Prague, Vilnius and Warsaw like carpet baggers in 1990, desperate to find an alternative 20th century expression. Remember Kanchelli, Sylvestrov, Pärt, Vasks etc?
Yes, I acknowledge that I’m writing from an American perspective. I was born in America and continue to live here today. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I write from an American perspective. Doing a little background research, I learned that you were also born in the U.S., but have spent much of your formative and adult years in Europe. So I should apologize for taking for granted that you would write from an American perspective as well. I take no issue with most of your other points expressed above. But my main complaint is one I have also directed to your colleague John Mauceri (see https://walter-simmons.com/writings/2737). Both of you seem to write as if the fulcrum of 20th-century music teeters between the European avant-garde and those Europeans who fled Nazism for Hollywood, where they contributed to the development of the American filmscore. I would call this a European perspective that prefers to overlook the fact that at the same time that those European composers fled to Hollywood, a whole symphonic school was thriving in America–one that upheld the traditional values and principles of classical music and had little interest in replacing those values with the view that 20th century music required an aesthetic supposedly inspired by science, mathematics, and technology. I think that the omission of the American symphonic school from the discussion seriously distorts the state of music in America during the mid-20th century. And most important, it allows the finest of those American composers to continue to languish in oblivion.
Everything you write is true, of course, and if Europeans largely stopped writing symphonies post-Mahler (French neo-classicists aside), it did not inhibit symphonies being written in other countries. One of the composers I write about extensively in “Music of Exile” is Walter Arlen who spoke at great length about his time as the amanuensis of Roy Harris. I found it intriguing that in exile, German composers returned to the symphony, having believed the concept to have been superseded. It’s probable that the presence of American symphonies was an inspiration to composers like Ernst Toch and Bohuslav Martinů. It demonstrated that post-Mahler, there was more to say. I’m not sure I agree with your view that I see the fulcrum as teetering between a European avant-garde and those composers who fled Nazism to write film music. This is perhaps closer to what John Mauceri believes and I state in my book that this is (in my view) only part of the story. America may have been the most desired destination for composers fleeing Nazism, but it was by no means the only one. In addition, even John cannot get around the fact that many of the composers themselves who landed in Hollywood had lasting doubts about the music they were having to write. Luzi Korngold in her memoirs (I’ve just translated them to be published by Toccata Press) barely spends more than a few pages on Korngold’s film work. I believe his film music is really great music, but it doesn’t alter the fact that he felt differently…for whatever neurotic reason. But composers who landed in other countries attempted to assimilate or attempted to act as representatives of a great European tradition in an incurious New World, whether it was New Zealand, Mexico or Japan. I don’t think great music can be kept down indefinitely. One of the things that inhibit performances is copyright, (Hanson, for example, is in copyright until 2052; Shuman even longer and Harris, Barber, Creston and Giannini are all still in copyright for the foreseeable future.) It will take a generous sponsor to pay for their revivals and of course, they need excellent recordings. (Though I have some first-rate recordings of Hanson) But cash-strapped orchestras and promoters have to think long and hard, and to be honest, a lot of wonderful music is being composed today. It must be difficult having to choose between paying copyright on a work by a dead American composer and a living one who can show up and talk about the work. In addition, I recall from my days working in America as Georg Solti’s producer in Chicago that there was/is a powerful trade union that ultimately made recording in the US impractical. An American orchestra is the obvious place for a series of American symphonies to be performed and recorded. As you note, there are plenty to choose from but there are a number of difficult circles to square.