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In both the post-war periods, there were stylistic and aesthetic

changes away from the music of the pre-war eras. These
changes included the development of Neoclassicism and Anti-
romanticism after World War One, and the young post-war
avant-garde in Europe and indeterminacy in the USA after
World War Two. How similar or different are the reactions to
each war? Choose one trend that came to prominence after
each war (e.g. Neoclassicism plus the European post-war avant-
garde of the 1950s) and analyse whether meaningful
comparisons can be made: did composers from each period
react to these terrible conflicts similarly? What was different?
Limit your discussion to no more than 12 years after the end of
each war.

POST WW-1
History

Neo-Classicism (Anti-Romanticism)
Huge impact on artists - Unprecedented war - over 9, 000, 000 soldiers died
Everyone personally experienced something.
A lot of people were injured - influx of soldiers who were mamed, mutliated and
mentally ill - shell shock - beggars.
Large areas of farms, buildings, town land was destroyed.
Populations starving and getting smallpox.
Germans - massive instability after the war - Kaiser was forced to resign - socialist
republic suppression.
1 US dollar = billions of German francs - those who had saved their money were
ruined.
Technology had led to killing power - new way of thinking.
People started to see their delusions - militaristic delusions - rejection of aspects of
pre-war society.

Music Context

Why should art be about the merely personal?

 What was the use of expressionism's exaggerated displays of emotion and violence.
Self-indulgent - no interest in this.
1912 - before the war cubism developed. But in 1918 is was seen as self-indulgent.
Line over colour, structure over decoration.

Cock and Harlquinn - Jean Cocteau

o Primary document of French Anti-Romanticism
o Argued that Romanticism was complex and pretentious, full of convolutions,
dodges and tricks, blamed German influence.
o Anti-Romanticism in France is also Anti-German. Particularly blames
Wagner.
o Called Satie a model for the way forward for composers.
o Sick to death of flabbiness and fluidity - Satie is simple, clear.
o Did not like Debussy - vagueness, mist. What we need is everyday music.
o Music for everyday and everybody, not for elites.
Les Six
Goal: Music that reflected their actual experience of life, not some supposed spiritual
depth that lay behind the surface of things.
Rehabilitated the ideas of Frenchness (debussy), and talked about a new French art.
Darius Milhaud
o Engages with popular music (Coctaeu said 'engage with popular music')
o Huge vogue for America in France at the same time. Artists would go see
Westerns. America was a place of newness - Rise of America as an industrial
and military power.
o It was a place with out traditions - very new country - fascination with it.
o 'Existing in a fresh pulsating present' - notion of not being held back by the
past.
o Attraction to dance music. (Syncopated white jazz music)
o Physical rather than the metaphysical - kinetic - you can move.
o 'La Creation du Monde' - four voice jazz fugue - polymetre.
o Jazz but filtered through Stravinsky rhythms.
Stravinsky
o l'Histoire du Soldat
Anti-romantic ensemble size: only 7 players
"Jazz band" (but substitutes bassoon for saxophone!)
Ragtime and tango sections
o Octet (1923)
Wind instruments - precise tone colour. Strings have a softer attack
and associated with Romanticism.
Different classical forms (March, Polka, Waltz, 'Bach')
Imitating aspects of pre-Romantic music (mostly Classical and
Baroque)
"My octet is a musical object. My octet is not an emotive work byt a
musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient
in themselves. This sort of music has no other aim than to be sufficient
in itself. In general, I consider that music is only able to solve musical
problems; and nothing else, neither the literary not the picturesque,
 can be in music of any real interest. That play of the musical elements
is the thing." - Stravinsky 1924.
See New Objectivity
There was music that looked back tot he past, and music that was restrained and has
formal clarity.
New Objectivity (New Thingness) - Neue Saclichkeit
o Neutral titles, 'fabricated' forms, pleasure in the actuality and qualities of the
art object (no longer expression of ther composer's soul or psychology, or of a
mystic beyond)
Paul Hindemith
o Perishability - music that is created for right now.
o Kammermusic Nr. 1
o Kinetic quality, physicality and motion, rather than sentiment and psychology
o News of the day - zeitoper - "opera of its time"
Germany in the Weimar Republic (post WW1)
o Adgitprop - trying to get people to have a political response to the art.
Designed to stimulate political thought/action.
o The Threepenny Opera - a huge hit.
o Impoverished moral values around them.
o Hanns Eislet - Schoenberg's favourite student
"Solidarity Songs" - Worker songs - marches, rallies, meetings,
Simple, good rhythms.
Not expressive - wants the listener to get the meaning of the words.
George Gershwin - 1920s America: the Jazz Age

POST WW2

Three major developments responding to or coming out of World War Two

1. Integral (or total) serialism among the post-war avant-garde in Europe e.g. Stockhausen,
Boulez, etc.

Rejecting the music of the past in favour of a completely new start.

Intense seeking of the new.
Extreme levels or pre-compositional organisation

2. The development of electronic music, based on tape technology developed in WW2.

3. Indeterminacy, initially in the USA (The New York School)

Indeterminacy: the composer relinquishes control over aspects of a piece.

This can be in the process of composition, resulting in a score that is more or less
fixed (indeterminacy of composition) or in the notation of the score that you can't
predict the exact sounding result from the notation (indeterminacy of
performance).
John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown.
Chance composition / Aleatory composition (random, by chance)
Cage
Sonatas and Interludes - not indeterminate. Indeterminate comes in the early
50s.
Basis of the philosophy is Zen Buddhism - popular in New York in early 40s and
50s.
Remove the ego and remove the composing persona.
Buddhism 'acceptance'.
Take what it is for what it is - accept sounds (NEOCLASSICISM and NEW
OBJECTIVITY)
Distance the composer and the performer from the music - NEOCLASSICISM.
Starts using chance operation - uses the I ching the book of chances method of
predicition - uses coins. Uses it to make If you can't forsee what will happen as a
composer, you're accepting that result. Chart of different music things. Casts the
I Ching to see the order of the music.
o Inderminate of composition, but determinate in notation.
o Time space notation - big numbers are the tempi, adn the space is when
you do something.
o Ended up being very hard for the piano - John wasn't happy about this.
Concert for piano and orchestra - you choose what to play
CAGE DOES NOT WANT IMPROVISATION - don't get caught up in the vogue of
profundity - accept what is happening.
The point is not to do what you want - the point is to respond.
NOT EXPRESSING YOURSELF - getting involved in a free spontaneous act
(NEOCLASSICISM)
Contrast with european avant garde - looking for new ways to organise music and
expand what was considered musical material - sound can be music if you put
into an organised thing.
Cage - noise is HEARD as music
Both are looking for the unheard, and new. But both meaning something quite
different.
4'33'' - John Cage loved noise - concept was to make stretches of time that he
could put any sound in - empty containers - freedom about what he put in each of
them.
Robert Rauschenberg (artist) - white canvas - 'hypersensitive screens' - 'airports
for the lights, shadows and particles'
SILENCE IS AN ILLUSION - the point is to listen to noise - and NO ONE is
controlling it.
Living takes place each instant - just encounter the sound.
"For living takes place each instant, and that instant is always changing. The
wisest thing to do is to open one's ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly
before one's thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or
symbolical" - Cage 1952.
Cage distinguishes between "that old music you speak of which has to do with
conceptions and their communication, this new music, which has to do with
perception and the arousing of it in us." We are naive enough to believe that
words are the most efficient form of communication."
 Rauschenberg (artist)- found things around New York - would bring them back to
his studio and turn them into art. Object was changed by its context and became a
new thing.
Cartridge Music - transparency sheet would come together
Indeterminacy Lectures - speaks in a minute - empty container with words.
How to make people free, without them becoming foolish.

Morton Feldman

Wrote pieces that don't have the radical freedom.

Shapes aspects of them, and leave other aspects to the performers.
Comparisons to visual arts - Jackson Pollock - All about the passionate making of
these painting. Foundational, revered works.
Feldman wanted to get away from preciseness - visceral, raw, immediate experience
of sound - some pieces would use little boxes - would indicate dynamics, when things
were happening, what instrument would be played. But box was a register -
performer could play any note in that register.
More about texture - not after a precise harmonic effect.
You experience this kind of splash of paint - colour, texture and physicality.
You have to experience the work in complete immediacy.
Durations I
o Everything is specified besides duration - instrumentation, mutes, chords, but
everything is a notehead - the performers play them when they want.

Earle Brown

Jazz musician background - impro not a problem

Writes music where everything is fixed
But the conductor in the performance indicates in the performance who is going to
play what when - conductor's decisions governs interdeterminacy.
Alexander Calder (artist) - Mobile - you experience it in different ways at different
times.

Interdeterminacy in Europe - not interested in getting rid of egos.

Stockhausen
Boulez - virtuoso pianists would choose the best bits.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati - graphic scores.

Similar REACTIONS:

Neoclassicism: Indeterminacy:

Moving away from self-indulgence. Remove the ego and the composing
Less focus on the individual. (Anti- persona (Buddhist values)
Expressionism and Romanticism) Empty containers that Cage could put
Emphasis on structure and form. sound in.