THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

In 1930, ater receiving dozens o letterscomplaining about their “ultra-modern” radiobroadcasts, the British Broadcasting Companypublished a set o listening instructions in

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:Listen as careully at home as you doin a theatre or concert hall. You can’tget the best out o a programme i yourmind is wandering, or i you are playingbridge or reading, give it your ullattention. Try turning out the lights sothat your eye is not caught by amiliarobjects in the room. Your imaginationwill be twice as vivid.I you only listen with hal an earyou haven’t got a uarter o a right tocriticize.Operating under the direction o EdwardClark, the BBC had been doing its best tobring the musical avant garde to the masses,programming brutal dodecaphonic operasalongside stand-up comedians and patrioticmarches. Lord Reith, who had ounded theBBC ater replying to an ad in

The MonngPot

, believed that audiences would accept newmusical works with “comparatively little eort.”He was wrong. Complaints continued to pourin, and beore long the BBC was lashing out.“Many o you have not even begun to master theart o listening,” a programming director wrotein

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. “You have not even begun totry.” In 1936, the BBC gave up the ght. Tonalityreturned to the airwaves.The situation is not much dierent today. As David Stubbs notes in his new book

fea o Muc: Why Peope Get rothko but don’t Getstockhauen

, avant-garde and experimentalmusic remain cultural punch-lines. Startingsomewhere around 1907, when ArnoldSchoenberg began to overhaul Western tonalityin 1907, compositional music completely

How the Avant-Garde Got Popular (Or Not)Richard Beck

COMMENCEMENT 2009

abandoned the theoretical anchors that hadgrounded it or centuries. It is impossible tooverstate just how radical a break this was. Thecomposer Anton Webern was not exaggeratingwhen he gloated over tonality’s corpse: “Webroke its neck.”Twentieth-century modernism had othercasualties, though, including the visible worldin visual art. In the space o about ty years,representation completely broke down. Bythe 1950s, Jackson Pollock and the AbstractExpressionists had made New York—not Paris—the cultural capital o the West, and today theirpaintings bring in tens o millions o dollars.They are dorm room posters. Stubbs’ uestion isa really good one: “Why has avant-garde musicailed to attain the audience, the cachet, thelegitimacy o its visual euivalent?”

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is an intelligent book, but itdoesn’t deliver on the promise o its subtitle, andpart o the reason is Stubbs’ idea o what ualiesas an euivalent avant-garde. The visual artshad seen impressionist painters rubbing at thetextures o representation throughout the latenineteenth century, but it wasn’t until Picassothat the structures began to crumble. Onceyou look at a woman and see an arrangemento geometries, you are no longer simply seeingthe woman. You are seeing your own seeing, androm Picasso to Pollock seeing itsel became theproper subject o painting. In 1958, the artist andcritic Allan Kaprow wrote that Pollock had madeit possible or painting to conront the senses—and thereore lie—directly. Not to see things.Just to see.Modernist music was ater directness aswell, but not through any new abstraction. Western music was abstract already, which wasan important element o its status. Musicalmimesis—fute trills or bird calls, or example—was lowbrow, and composers who did use thedevices o program music usually ended updeending themselves. Beethoven insisted thathis Pastoral symphony was not programmatic:“it is more an expression o eelings rather thana tone-painting.” This doesn’t prevent us romhearing the brook in the second movement,which Beethoven titled “By the Brook,” butit shows us how music in the West made ahierarchy o itsel. What modernism ended in music was theidea that music consisted o organized pitches,tones vibrating at particular reuencies thatcould be written down and then perormed byany musician capable o reading the language.In 1913, the painter and composer Luigi Russololaid out the new criterion: “[Music] comes evercloser to the noise-sound.” Russolo believed thatthe best model or modern listening was thebattleeld, a place where the ear is much moreprivileged than it is in daily lie. “From noise,”he wrote, “the dierent calibers o grenadesand shrapnels can be known even beore theyexplode…There is no movement or activity thatis not revealed by noise.” Decades later, JohnCage would agree: “It had been clear rom thebeginning that what was needed was a musicbased on noise, on noise’s lawlessness.”Lawlessness is a good word or it. Whenwe talk about sounds, we are talking aboutthe domesticated part o the audible world.Sounds have names. They can be controlledby the people who hear them. They are oten

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

nice to listen to. Noises, though, only reer tothemselves, and they are what we would rathernot be hearing. Until the end o the nineteenthcentury, “musical” meant pitched soundsproduced by certain kinds o instrumentsharmonizing with one another in certain ways. What modernism built was a much bigger tento musical sounds— it let the noises in.Looking to replicate war in the concert hall,Russolo designed and built his own instruments.None o his originals survived, but his diagramsshow large wooden boxes with a metal cylinderon the side. One o them was called “the roarer.” Another one was “the scraper.” The moans,whirrs, skronks, and thuds that came out o them would have been impossible to write downusing traditional notation, but what helped noisealong in the rst hal o the twentieth centurywas the uickly increasing sophistication o recording technology. The phonograph andthe studio opened up the very textures o sound itsel to composition, and they also cutout the middleman—the perormer—allowingcomposers to exercise complete control over themusic they wrote. For all the talk o “revolution”and “opening up” that accompanies themusical avant garde, the composers themselveswere oten domineering types. A musician inrehearsal once asked Karlheinz Stockhausen,who claimed to have visited the star Sirius, “Howwill I know when I am playing in the rhythm o the universe?” “I will tell you,” he replied.The nal triumph o noise in music wasannounced by silence. John Cage’s most widelyknown and most radical composition is 4’33”, inwhich the perormer sits at the instrument muteand motionless or the period o time identiedby the title. (There are at least six recordingsavailable. I got mine on iTunes, with WayneMarshall at the piano. It’s a good perormance.)O course, the world is never completely silent,and so what Cage’s piece highlights are theambient sounds in the concert hall, whichturns out to be a noisy place even when peopleare doing their best to be uiet. Whether 4’33”opens your ears to the music o everyday lie isa matter o taste. What’s simply act, though,is that or the rst time the idea o music hadbeen infated to encompass the whole sphere o audible phenomena. All noises became sounds.Noise has created a lot o conusion amongmusic historians, and it partially explains whyStubbs gets his euivalences wrong. For roughlyve hundred years, the history and developmento Western music had been charted along thelines o tonality. Instrumentation, industry,and aesthetics all played important roles, butthe ever-changing list o permissible tones andharmonic progressions is what made it possibleto connect Palestrina to Handel to Bach toMozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Wagner toStrauss to Schoenberg. Cage broke that causalchain or good, and so a lot o people thinkingand writing about the development o music inthe last-hal century really aren’t sure what it isthey mean by “development” (you can count mein with that group). Developing, yes, but withrespect to what?Institutions can help to make these historiesmake sense. Stubbs, who is British, opens Fear o Music in the Tate Modern, instinctively—i notexplicitly—recognizing that modern art wouldbe completely impossible without the museumsthat house it. People on weekend trips to New York don’t go to de Kooning’s

Woman 1

. They goto MoMA, where they will pay their respects—ormake uiet, cautious criticisms—to whatever thecurators have put on display. As Stubbs writes,the crowds wandering Britain’s second mostpopular tourist destination (the British Museumwins by about one million visitors per year) look“rapt with boredom.” And still they come by thethousands. The Tate is what lends the works in itscollection their cultural power. It is appropriatelyhoused in a ormer power plant.The modern museum era began in 1929, when Abby Rockeeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary quinnSullivan—the group became known as “theadamantine ladies”—thought up the Museumo Modern Art. It opened on November 7th,nine days ater the stock market crash. It movedrom place to place in its early years, but in 1940MoMA secured its position as the authority