CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918) offered audiences the antithesis of Beethoven’s thunderous hammerings. Like the Zen master who contemplates the sound of one hand clapping, Debussy imagined a piano played entirely “without hammers,” an instrument born of an ethereal world where, in Charles Baudelaire’s poetic vision, in place of percussive strikes softly intoxicating “sounds and scents swirl together in the evening air.”
Transporting us to such realms beyond the ordinary is the goal of the Alchemists. Debussy used the term himself when, as a young student at the Paris Conservatory, he was criticized for his breaches of convention. “Monsieur Debussy … has a pronounced tendency—too pronounced—towards an exploration of the strange,” reported the Académie des Beaux-Arts. “One has the feeling of musical color exaggerated to the point where it causes the composer to forget the importance of precise construction and form.” In response, Debussy declared that he was not interested in “the science of the beaver”—rejecting the notion that composers should behave like nature’s dutiful little construction workers—but rather “in the alchemy of sound.”
His secret elixir was harmony: the intermingling of several pitches all sounding at once. His harmonies did not behave according to the traditional formulas, however, which had evolved from simple beginnings in the medieval church into a complex system known as “tonality.” Debussy tossed aside these long-established rules of musical syntax, and set out on a new path.
Claude Debussy (Illustration credit 8.1)
Debussy found the inspiration for his new musical approach in the hothouse of the French avant-garde, where, on the cusp of the twentieth century, poets, painters, and musicians all fervently sought hidden “correspondences” between various sensory impressions. (The idea was not entirely new. The German Romantic writer Novalis had proclaimed, nearly a century before, that words themselves think, paint, and sing.) Their gathering place was a bookshop named L’Art Indépendant, where patrons included symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and Debussy’s favorite painter, Gustave Moreau, along with such remarkable artists as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. All worked toward a new artistic language: “liberated from convention,” said Baudelaire, and “intensely aware of mystery.” Their ideal was the dream world described by an opium-intoxicated Edgar Allan Poe, “where the sky of a more transparent blue recedes in depth like a more infinite abyss, where sounds ring out as in music, where colors speak, where perfumes tell us of the worlds of ideas.”
Mozart’s sonatas, Chopin’s preludes, and thousands of other musical works from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century are held together by the principles of the “tonal system,” in which musical tones behave like celestial bodies, with a center of gravity (like our sun), around which other tones (like the planets) revolve. The relationships between these tones are governed by varying degrees of attraction.
For example, the harmonies, or chords (stacked tones), built on the first degree of a scale (the tonic) may serve as a “home” from which the musical narrative departs (creating a sense of tension) and returns (bringing a sense of release). Certain chords, like that built on the fifth scale member (called the dominant) pull toward the tonic so strongly that they facilitate that sense of conclusion.
The key of a piece determines the tonic. In C, the tonic chord is a form of C. In the key of D, it is a form of D—every key has its own tonic, just as every small town has a road its residents call Main Street: they share the same name, even though we wouldn’t confuse one for another.
This tonal process is not just allegorical, but has a basis in nature: the chords that best convey a feeling of stability naturally arise from the physics of vibrating objects. When strings are set in motion, they produce not only a single “fundamental” tone, but also additional, weaker “overtones,” in ghostlike whispers, the strongest of which comprise what musicians call a major chord.
As musical techniques evolved over the centuries, composers increasingly devised ways to get around tonality’s most basic, restrictive formulas. By the Romantic Era (the nineteenth century), musicians became so good at this that the music often seemed to drift endlessly, no longer anchored to a particular center—a perfect musical metaphor for the age of endless yearning. Nevertheless, an underlying recognition of tonal principles continued loosely to govern the art of composition through the early twentieth century.
Musicology’s most famous guru of analysis, Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935), developed a way of charting even the most complex music within a system of simple hierarchies—as they drove musical motion inevitably toward a center—and his theories have been an important influence on many pianists, including Murray Perahia. “We should get accustomed to seeing tones as creatures,” he wrote in his Harmonielehre, because music obeys natural urges, just like those found in living organisms.
The art of perfumery, as practiced by scientists like biophysicist Luca Turin, is actually a perfect metaphor for Debussy’s harmonic world. Turin plots the arrangement of molecules in a fragrance the way a chess player manipulates pieces on a board. When these microscopic structures are blended in the right combinations in his laboratory, they fill the air with startling and inexplicable effects.
A substance called oxane gives the impression of sweat on ripe mango. Another, gardamide, is strangely redolent of grapefruit and hot horses. When Turin releases a cloud of tuberose—composed, he says, of “several hundred molecules flying in tight formation”—an evolving aromatic narrative begins: first, with a suggestion of rubber dusted with talcum, which is then replaced by something “meaty and carnation-like,” before it finally settles into the bloom of a “white flower.” Or so he told writer Chandler Burr, who dubbed him “the Emperor of Scent.”
The mysteries of sensation conjured by these vapors—as their chemical structures mingle with memory and desire—also thrive in Debussy’s complex bundles of sound. Unfailingly sumptuous, and built with as much intricate detail as Turin’s formulations, these sonorities become more than mere vibrations: they stir our imaginations with suggestions of a glint of moonlight, or the color of the ocean, or fragments of tuberose and oxane. (In a letter to his publisher, Debussy referred to his piece Reflets dans l’eau [Reflections in the Water] as representing his most “recent discoveries in harmonic chemistry.”) And they changed music forever.
Marie d’Agoult (Illustration credit 8.2)
THE IMPRESSIONIST milieu of turn-of-the-century Paris bears surprising similarities to the one engendered in America in the 1960s, when an entire generation—fueled by youthful rebellion, mystical yearning, and chemical intoxication—found itself captivated by a mad sensory swirl of music, painting, and theater. Liszt was perhaps the invisible godfather of it all. He once even enjoyed a hallucinogenic experience at a party. Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s mistress, recounted the incident during which Liszt and others smoked cigars prepared with the leaf of the Datura fastuosa: “You, Franz, were singing at the top of your voice, and, armed with a pair of snuffers, were going around the room striking the chairs which, you said, were singing out of time and tune.” (This all took place in 1836, exactly a century before the film Reefer Madness was released in a futile attempt to discourage American youth from similar wayward behavior.)
Debussy met Liszt and recalled the way he had “used the pedal as a kind of breathing.” Indeed, he found that Liszt’s poetic spirit, his harmonic innovations, and his musical depictions of flowing fountains (in pieces like Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este) all suggested a music supple enough “to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul and to the whims of reverie.”
Debussy was also impressed by Liszt’s son-in-law composer Richard Wagner, whose rich harmonies, in hyper-Romantic operas such as Tristan und Isolde, he called “the most beautiful thing that I know.” (Clara Schumann found Tristan’s over-the-top emotionalism “repulsive”; it’s not music at all, she said, but a “disease.” Yet there was no escaping its impact.) Debussy studiously absorbed Tristan’s colorful techniques, but ultimately rejected Wagner as “a beautiful sunset who has been mistaken for a sunrise.” He even poked fun at Tristan by quoting its opening bars in a light-hearted ragtime piece entitled Golliwogg’s Cakewalk. (Debussy had little love for things that were not French. On a tour in 1910, he described Vienna as “an old city covered in makeup, overstuffed with the music of Brahms and Puccini, the officers with chests like women and the women with chests like officers.” In Budapest, he found that “the Danube refuses to be as blue as a famous waltz would have us believe.”)
After all, the French attraction to elegant, polished surface textures had little in common with a German inclination toward heavy sonorities and melodramatic intensity—the difference between a light soufflé and bratwurst with potatoes. Debussy’s music was never a vehicle for raw, heart-throbbing, Wagnerian passion. It was an abstract picture in sound, constructed of shimmering cascades and swirling arabesques. And that’s why the idea of alchemy was important. Melody alone, explained Debussy, no matter how lovely, “cannot express the varying states of the soul, and of life.” To reach those ideals, he blended individual tones into dazzling, resonant combinations and set them adrift on the sea of his imagination, untethered from the old rules of musical order.
WHAT ELEMENTS went into Debussy’s new musical language? First, he drew on a French tradition of using exotic harmonies—in musician’s parlance, “extended chords” with “higher” scale members, such as sevenths, ninths, and elevenths—that extended all the way back to Baroque composer François Couperin. (Begin any major scale by counting the first note as number 1 and notes 7, 9, and 11 will be easily found. Add them to a basic major or minor chord and the sound takes on a bouquet of color.) Indeed, French composers of the early twentieth century relied a great deal on their Baroque brethren as models.
Next, he imbued his work with that sense of mystical beauty tinged with terror philosopher Immanuel Kant labeled the “sublime.” Kant found it in tall oaks, and lonely shadows in a sacred grove. Debussy drew instead on Edgar Allan Poe’s dark tales and haunting poems, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and “The Raven.” Poe was held in contempt by many of his own American countrymen, but Europeans, especially the French, found him an ideal muse. “I spend my existence in the House of Usher,” stated Debussy. His compatriot composer Maurice Ravel told The New York Times that Poe was his “greatest teacher in composition.” (For his part, Poe proclaimed that “the soul most nearly attains that great end for which … it struggles—the creation of supernal beauty”—through music. “We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight,” he wrote, “that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.”) Poe’s sad and sinister narratives—what D. H. Lawrence called his “horrible underground passages of the human soul”—shared the feeling tone of the Alchemist’s art.
Debussy also borrowed the techniques and textures of the “Impressionist” painters and transferred them to music (though neither the painters nor the musicians cared for the term “Impressionist,” which was derisive, suggesting work that was overly vague or lacking in content). Thus, the pointillist effects found in Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1886)—a scene rendered entirely through small dots of paint—made their way into Debussy’s 1903 piano piece Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain), where an incessant patter of tiny rhythmic strokes forms a larger tone painting over time. (The “golden section,” an ancient aesthetic proportion commonly found in nature—introduced to Debussy by mathematician Charles Henry—also shows up in the structure of Jardins sous la pluie and in other of his major works.)
But one of the most striking influences on Debussy and his colleagues was the World’s Fair (known as the Exposition Universelle) of 1889. Paris was electrified by this gathering (indeed, electric lights were one of the sensational novelties of the event). The city’s just-completed Eiffel Tower served as an entryway, and exhibits from around the world included a village nègre with four hundred indigenous people, an American Wild West show with Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, and gamelan music performed by an ensemble from Java. French composers were quickly swept up in this Far Eastern sound, with its unusual tunings and repetitive cycles. The effects were well suited to their longed-for atmosphere of beguilement, and they soon began incorporating various aspects of the Eastern aesthetic into their works.
WORLD MUSIC COMES TO PARIS
Music from around the world had a special allure for the French composers, and traces of many influences can be found throughout their repertoire. Intimations of gamelan are heard in Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale, which divides the musical octave into six equal parts, and the pentatonic (five-note) scale (which can be played using only the black keys of the piano). In his piano piece Pagodes (Pagodas), he even emulated the rhythmic cycle of the gamelan “great gong.” Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was similarly enchanted, even making use of an Indonesian poetic form (pantun) in his gorgeous Trio in A minor for piano, violin, and cello.
Both composers frequently incorporated the exotic sounds of other lands as well—especially Spain, in pieces such as Debussy’s Soirée dans Grenade and Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso. These suggestions of foreign places worked as powerfully in their own way as the gentle mists, natural landscapes, and distant tolling bells that permeated works like Debussy’s Des Pas sur la neige (Footprints in the Snow) and Ravel’s La Vallée des cloches (Valley of the Bells).
Out of all these ingredients, Debussy made of the piano an instrument of heightened nuance by controlling incremental tonal shadings and dynamics; using an endless variety of hammer strokes and pedal movements; finding sensuousness in lingering resonances; and breathing life into harmonies, which expanded and condensed as they traveled along the keyboard. His languorous First Prelude, Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi), is a useful illustration.
Debussy told an admirer that this piece grew from his impressions of an ancient Greek column he saw in the Louvre, carved in the form of a female figure. As pianist Paul Roberts has noted, it is a sculpture in tones, through which the composer conveyed the paradox of “immobility suggesting movement, and weight suggesting weightlessness.” The printed music demonstrates these contradictions in myriad ways.
First line of Debussy’s First Prelude
Right from the beginning, Debussy presents a riddle. Curvaceous lines above and below the notes suggest that each phrase should be taken in a single breath, creating a unified flow. At the same time, little dots by the individual harmonies command that they be played with a short articulation, ensuring that each one sounds independent and alive. A pianist must figure a way to accomplish both goals at once.
The volume of sound gently undulates like an ocean at low tide, with the music diminishing at times into a distant echo, even when hefty chords are being played in both hands. It’s another paradox: at the softest possible volume, the sonorities remain full-bodied. They are often bell-like and clear, though sometimes pungent and occasionally jazzy. The hands begin by moving in opposite directions—with plangent bass tones descending as treble harmonies reach toward the sun—then become coupled, moving en masse like weighty blocks of stone. Everything works according to Debussy’s untraditional sensibility, but the result is always perfectly cohesive, as well as haunting.
Naturally, Debussy’s approach was not to everyone’s taste. Writing in the New York Sun on July 19, 1903, critic James Huneker made no bones about his dislike of this composer and what he represented. “I met Debussy at the Café Riche the other night and was struck by the unique ugliness of the man,” he reported.
His face is flat, the top of his head is flat, his eyes are prominent—the expression veiled, and somber—and, altogether, with his long hair, unkempt beard, uncouth clothing and soft hat, he looked more like a Bohemian, a Croat, a Hun, than a Gaul … Rémy de Gourmont has written of the “disassociation of ideas.” Debussy puts the theory into practice, for in his peculiar idiom there seems to be no normal sequence … The form itself is decomposed. Tonalities are vague, even violently unnatural to unaccustomed ears.
History, of course, has been kinder to Mr. Debussy.
OTHER ARTISTS BUILT on Debussy’s lead with innovations of their own. French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) expanded Debussy’s language, inspired, he explained, by the mysteries of limitation, or rather, as he put it, by “the charm of impossibilities.” He created exotic scales by formulating several that could be transposed (shifted to another key) only a limited number of times before they repeated themselves. (As an example, the six-note whole-tone scale, in which each member is exactly a whole step away from its neighbor, can be played beginning on the note C or by beginning on the next-higher note, C-sharp—the black key just to the right of C. But when it is played again beginning on the very next available note on the keyboard, D, the tones that are sounded turn out to be the same as when the scale was begun on C. Therefore, the whole-tone scale is limited to only two distinct versions.) Messiaen’s music was constructed out of a myriad of such strange symmetries.
He also applied this limiting approach to rhythms that sound the same whether played forward or backward (and are therefore impossible to reverse) and then added Hindu rhythms and the melodies of natural birdcalls to the mix (he meticulously catalogued the songs of hundreds of varieties of birds). This may all seem heady stuff, but the effect was profoundly gorgeous. “It is a glistening music we seek, giving to the aural sense voluptuously refined pleasures,” he wrote.
Messiaen’s music was a ritual offering, a catalyst provoking what W. H. Auden called the “abstract insight” that “wakes/Among the glaciers and the rocks/The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.” In works like Quartet for the End of Time (written while in a prison camp in World War II) and Twenty Visions of the Infant Jesus (a vast masterpiece for piano), Messiaen’s lavish sounds can leave a listener dizzy with sensation.
AUSTRIAN ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) is often regarded as a composer of methodical, even mathematical, instincts rather than a weaver of spells. But his formative years were as deeply linked as Debussy’s to the world of poets, philosophers, and painters. (He was drawn especially to poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George. George, who thought of himself as a disciple of French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, shared the Impressionist interest in colors, forms, and moods rather than traditional narrative.) Schoenberg’s hunt for the principles that would lead music into the future led him to invent a system of composing in which all twelve tones are treated as equals—eliminating the basic distinction between dissonances (unstable sounds) and consonances (harmonious ones) on which Western music had rested. But this plan, an attempt to rescue music from a situation in which all the old rules already seemed to have collapsed, came to fruition late, in 1923.
Early on, his friendship with painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc placed him in the circle of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the name given to an exhibition and published Almanac (in 1911) that together aimed at rekindling the spiritual in art. Schoenberg, who was a painter as well as a composer, contributed an essay to the Almanac, in which he quoted philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on finding the essence of art in the unconscious: “The composer reveals the innermost essence of the world and pronounces the most profound wisdom in a language that his reason cannot understand; he is like a mesmerized somnambulist who reveals secrets about things that he knows nothing about when he is awake.”
Kandinsky, who introduced himself to Schoenberg by letter after first hearing his music in 1911, came to believe that the goal of painting should be a kind of eye music: “Color is the keyboard, the eye is the hammer,” he wrote. “The soul is the piano with its many strings.” The moods evoked by Schoenberg’s short, dark-hued piano works, like those of his op. 11 (1909) and op. 19 (1911) pieces, resonate, like Kandinsky’s paintings, with that inner, murky world that lies beyond normal awareness. His musical efforts transcend logic to become something a biographer of his, Allen Shawn, called “permanently strange,” for reasons that can’t fully be explained.
Schoenberg’s students Anton Webern (1883–1945) and Alban Berg (1885–1935), who formed, with their teacher, what is known as the “Second Viennese School” of composition, took very different roads. Berg’s “freedom” from traditional tonality retained connections to Romantic music. Webern, on the other hand, distilled Schoenberg’s method down to its essence, often arranging the series of twelve tones into delicately astringent melodies too difficult for the average listener to comprehend, as if the dots in a pointillist painting had become its subject matter, so magnified that the whole, organic picture could no longer be perceived. The allure of this music is felt mostly by those thrilled to know the secret order that governs it all.
THE PARISIANS AND the Viennese were not alone in their quest for music that transports. Russia experienced a similar artistic revolution. At its forefront was a bizarre composer named Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872–1915), who announced to the world that he was God.
Pianist Josef Hofmann and Alexander Scriabin, Moscow, ca. 1892 (Illustration credit 8.3)
Indeed, at the time of his death he was at work on a project called The Mysterium, intended to usher in the Messianic Age. In its first stage, The Prefatory Action, he planned to suspend bells from clouds in order to summon people from around the world to a temple in India. There, Scriabin planned to sit at the piano, surrounded by instrumentalists, singers, and dancers in constant motion. Pillars of incense and streams of colored light would enhance the effect. The libretto, describing the birth of the cosmos and the union of its feminine and masculine principles, and the music, expressing the dissolution of the ego and the cessation of time, would together awaken the audience to a higher spiritual plane. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to try it out.
What had inspired this mystical fervor? In part, it was a spiritual practice known as theosophy, founded by a Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875. But Scriabin had long entertained an interest in altered states of mind, such as synesthesia—the condition in which sounds, colors, numbers, or other sensory qualities are inextricably linked. In his view, musical tones corresponded to specific colors (C is intense red; E, sky blue; D-sharp, flesh with a glint of steel). Indeed, he actually included a part for a “color keyboard” that projected lights of different hues in the score of his Prometheus: Poem of Fire.
Like Debussy, Scriabin also fell under the sway of his country’s symbolist poets, with whom he often gathered at the Journalists Café on Stoleshnikov Lane in Moscow, or at his own apartment. Among them were Vyacheslav Ivanov (described by poet Alexander Blok as having “bear-like eyes that look out from the side of his head,” and by Scriabin as “magnificent … we are alike”) and Konstantin Balmont, who, after hearing Scriabin’s music, wrote: “Scriabin is the singing of a falling moon. Starlight in music. A flame’s movement. A burst of sunlight. The cry of soul to soul.”
CONFESSIONS OF A SCRIABIN PLAYER by Garrick Ohlsson
Though I haven’t revealed this to many people, there are two composers who seem to exert a mysterious power when I play. They seem to take over, as if they are playing me. I become the instrument. In a larger sense, we are all instruments, or vessels for great art, and some composers will filter through our personalities better than others. But there are differences. When I play Liszt’s towering pieces, I lose myself more than in other music. Suddenly he is in the driver’s seat. I feel an incredibly large presence.
It’s slightly different with Scriabin, but he also possesses me, taking me into his strange, alchemical world. At the end of a Scriabin performance, my heart is beating faster, beyond what the physical effort required. I have become intoxicated.
In lots of other music I can get into a “zone,” and feel hyper-aware of things. But with these particular composers, I actually feel less in charge, as if I’m being controlled by something very powerful outside of myself.
Scriabin’s piano playing was often bombastic, compulsive, and feverishly erratic. But it could also be transcendental. Writer and architect Alexander Pasternak recorded his impressions of Scriabin the pianist: “As soon as I heard the first sounds on the piano, I immediately had the impression that his fingers were producing the sound without touching the keys. His enemies used to say it was not real piano playing, but a twittering of birds or a mewing of kittens. His spiritual lightness was reflected in his playing: in his gait, his movements, his gesticulations, the way he jerked his head up when he spoke.”
Interestingly, Debussy had dipped into the very same musical waters that had shaped young Scriabin when, as a student, he traveled to Russia with Mme Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s secret benefactress. He was only eighteen in the summer of 1880 when she hired him to give piano lessons to her children and serve as a chamber pianist for her gatherings. Their travels included stops in Florence, Vienna (where the young composer heard Wagner’s Tristan for the first time), and Moscow, where he could fully satisfy his curiosity about contemporary music by such Russian masters as Modest Mussorgsky. But Debussy remained utterly French, and Scriabin, Russian to the core.
RUSSIA’S MUSSORGSKY by Claude Debussy
Modest Mussorgsky (Illustration credit 8.4)
Mussorgsky is little known in France and for this we can excuse ourselves, it is true, by remarking that he is no better known in Russia.… Nobody has spoken to that which is best in us with such tenderness and depth; he is quite unique, and will be renowned for an art that suffers from no stultifying rules or artificialities. Never before has such a refined sensibility expressed itself with such simple means: it is almost as if he were an inquisitive savage discovering music for the first time, guided in each step forward by his own emotions … He composes in a series of bold strokes, but his incredible gift of foresight means that each stroke is bound to the next by a mysterious thread. Sometimes he can conjure up a disquieting impression of darkness so powerful that it wrings tears from one’s heart.
La Revue Blanche, APRIL 15, 1901, TRANSLATED BY RICHARD LANGHAM SMITH
Scriabin’s earliest writings gave no hint of what was to come. His justly famous piano Etude in C-sharp minor, op. 2, no. 1, of 1887, a dusky, lyrical piece that exquisitely captures the Russian heart, suggests a composer of deep nationalistic and Romantic inclinations. The piano pieces that soon followed owed much to the delicate, introspective side of Frédéric Chopin. Yet by 1897, with the creation of a piano concerto (harshly rejected by the venerable Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), Scriabin was exhibiting signs of a search for radical new musical paths.
Scriabin’s evolving musical language used melody and chords built from unusual scales (like some used by Messiaen), resulting at times in a sound world similar to that of many late-twentieth-century jazz musicians. Indeed, the vibrant, strangely ambiguous harmony on which he based Prometheus, a combination of tones sometimes referred to as the “mystic chord,” has become standard fare in that genre. Scriabin himself referred to it more perplexingly as the “chord of the plemora,” a harmony that would unveil a hidden world beyond man’s normal comprehension.
According to one of his biographers, Faubion Bowers, the composer used to amuse his guests by playing the first three measures of his last Sonata (the Tenth), followed by the scale of G Major. “You hear,” he would say, “my music lies between the tones.” How many others perceived things in exactly the same way is an open question.
Many critics remained unimpressed with this wild, holy man of music. “As a kind of drug, no doubt Scriabin’s music has a certain significance, but it is wholly superfluous,” wrote Cecil Gray in A Survey of Contemporary Music, published in London in 1924. “We already have cocaine, morphine, hashish, heroin, anhalonium, and innumerable similar productions, to say nothing of alcohol. Surely that is enough. On the other hand, we have only one music. Why must we degrade an art into a spiritual narcotic?”
NEVERTHELESS, SCRIABIN’S “MYSTIC chord,” as well as the iridescent harmonies of Debussy and Ravel, became attractive fodder for jazz artists in the late 1950s who had grown tired of the brashness and showy virtuosity of the bebop style and sought a new direction. Pianist Bill Evans (1929–1980) and trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991) adopted these rich, colorful musical structures for their 1959 jazz ensemble recording, Kind of Blue—and sparked a revolution.
Bill Evans (Illustration credit 8.5)
What they created perfectly reflected French poet Paul Verlaine’s ideal of something “vague in the air and soluble, with nothing heavy and nothing at rest.” But the atmospherics of Debussy, Scriabin, and Baudelaire had now been transformed into a uniquely American art form. Kind of Blue became, in the words of pianist Herbie Hancock, “a doorway.” (Hancock would eventually expand that portal with his own piano wizardry on later Miles Davis recordings, such as Sorcerer and the stunningly beautiful Nefertiti. In the hands of this supremely intelligent pianist, Debussy’s “chemical” discoveries entered the jazz mainstream with a new level of range and sophistication. The mysterious, evocative chords that he used came about, Hancock once revealed, through special formulations in which some tones were placed in close proximity while others were separated by a wide expanse.)
Herbie Hancock
FRANCIS WOLFF (Illustration credit 8.6)
Both Davis and Evans had been inching toward the new aesthetic for years. For Miles, it began with a fascination with the dreamy, impressionistic Claude Thornhill band, whose sound “hung like a cloud,” according to Thornhill’s arranger, Gil Evans (no relation to pianist Bill). Collaborations between Davis and Gil Evans, such as the breezy Birth of the Cool (recorded in 1949 and 1950, but released in 1957), were also landmarks in jazz history.
Davis was influenced by several musicians who seemed to share this sensibility. One was pianist Ahmad Jamal, admired by Davis for his “concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement.” Another was Bill Evans, whose playing was described by the trumpet great as “quiet fire.” “The sound he got,” said Miles of Bill Evans, “was like crystal or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” Not surprisingly, Bill Evans had long been immersed in the music of Debussy and Ravel. (“He used to bring me pieces by Ravel, like the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand,” said Miles.) Pastel-like harmonies and an introspective lyricism became hallmarks of his style; and his contributions to Kind of Blue clinched his place in jazz history.
As usual, critics remained of two minds. Some, like John S. Wilson, found Evans’s perfumed, French-inflected approach too emotionally detached; it was, he said, not really jazz at all, but “more like superior background music.” Pianist Cecil Taylor less kindly called Evans “merely a cocktail pianist.” Yet venerable jazz writer Nat Hentoff viewed the pianist differently:
His narrow back hunched over the piano, Evans, after a few minutes, gives the impression of having entered the instrument. The body we see is simply a husk waiting to be filled again when the set is over. It is the distilled quality of Evans’ intensity that I am trying to convey … Those who complain that Evans is too removed from his audience, that he makes no overt signs to draw them into his music, are simply not willing to give that music at least a little of the concentration Evans does. Communication is there, and don’t shoot the piano player if you’re blocked.
There is no question that he exerted a tremendous influence on the next generations of jazz artists, as exemplified by the elegant pianism of contemporary players like Andy LaVerne (b. 1947) and Bill Charlap (b. 1966).
THE GENIUS OF BILL EVANS by Bill Charlap
Bill Evans’s music was spiritual and transporting, but very much the expression of a private world. There is a video on which he talks to his brother Harry about the collective unconscious and the creative spirit, and he was clearly interested in breaking down barriers to consciousness through music. That’s part of the alchemy he created. Of course he was also meticulous, disciplined, and intense. But one of the first things people respond to in his music is that spiritual depth.
Part of it comes from his sense of harmony and touch—which derives from Nat Cole, Teddy Wilson, Bud Powell, and Art Tatum, but also from Brahms, Chopin, and Debussy. He is a “rhythmitizer” as well—every great artist is. Yet, there is less of a raw feeling to his playing than you often find in jazz, more of a European sense, and that makes it different from the hard-driving sound of Powell or Cedar Walton.
Bill Charlap with singer Tony Bennett (Illustration credit 8.7)
One of the important facets of Bill’s art was the way in which he developed material—in the manner of a completely literate and technically accomplished composer. This aspect informs his interpretations of other people’s songs too. For him, it was not just a matter of adding new, pretty harmonies to a standard; it had everything to do with structure and formal design, along with intuition. He said himself that it didn’t come easily to him. And that was a good thing: he had to put together every little piece of the puzzle, and this helped him form a unique musical language. But as Bernstein said of Beethoven, though he may have toiled mightily to get it right, he knew when he got it.
Musical patterns that lent Debussy’s music a sense of opaqueness, like the symmetrically built whole-tone scale, which seems to have no real beginning or end, had shown up in earlier jazz piano works, like Bix Beiderbecke’s impressionistic In a Mist (1927), as well as in quirky European takeoffs on early jazz styles, like Paul Hindemith’s Foxtrot (1919), not to mention the slightly jazzy and harmonically ambiguous Grey Clouds of Franz Liszt (1881). (Beiderbecke was also a trumpeter, whose sensuous, sultry sound was described perfectly by musician Eddie Condon as “like a girl saying yes.”) But the sophistication and harmonic intricacy of Bill Evans’s elegant renderings were matched by perhaps only one other musician in the jazz pantheon: Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974), a great bandleader and one of America’s best modern composers in any genre.
Duke Ellington in a rare informal pose (Illustration credit 8.8)
Ellington reinvented himself throughout a long, distinguished career, which began with a pampered childhood, piano lessons with a Mrs. Marietta Clinkscales (!) and performances at high-school parties—where he learned that tickling the ivories can impress the girls mightily. “I ain’t been no athlete since,” he declared after discovering how effective his piano playing could be on the opposite sex.
The piano was an important influence on his compositional style, which combined blocks of harmonies moving as they would under the fingers of a jazz keyboardist with the painterly sensitivities of an Impressionist. He had a gift for blending the colors of instruments, and, most importantly, a talent for exploiting the particular sounds and personalities of his ensembles’ individual members. The result was unique.
After arriving in New York, he and his band The Washingtonians worked their way through Harlem’s top nightspots, from the Orient Café and Club Barron to the Club Kentucky, where they would run into such celebrities as George Gershwin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Irving Berlin. One night at the Club Kentucky, remembered Ellington sideman Sonny Greer, “movie star Tom Mix, in full cowboy outfit, sat in on drums.” Before long, Duke was turning out landmark works like East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, where the growls and wah-wahs of the trumpets conjured a musical atmosphere that became known as “jungle music.” Later, his increasingly sophisticated writing in large pieces such as Black, Brown and Beige (at its premiere, Ellington was presented with a plaque of appreciation signed by thirty-two eminent musicians, including Aaron Copland, Walter Damrosch, Benny Goodman, Fritz Reiner, Leopold Stokowski, and Paul Whiteman) and a string of sacred works earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination. The Pulitzer commission turned him down (causing the entire music committee to resign), but Duke remained stoic: “Fate is being kind to me,” he said. “Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young.”
Billy Strayhorn (Illustration credit 8.9)
Fame did not remain elusive, however. Duke’s highly collaborative process with band members, and especially with pianist/arranger Billy Strayhorn, a student of the French Impressionist tradition who became his musical alter ego, resulted in ingenious compositions and recordings hailed by musicians and critics around the world. In March of 1971 he was inducted into the Swedish Academy of Music, the first writer of nonclassical music to be made a member of the two-hundred-year-old institution. At his seventieth birthday party, hosted at the White House by President Richard Nixon, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At that event he summed up his life’s philosophy. “I am reminded,” he said, “of the four freedoms Billy Strayhorn created for our sacred concerts … I use those four moral freedoms by which Strayhorn lived as a measure of what we ourselves should live up to. Freedom from hate. Unconditionally. Freedom from self-pity. Freedom from the fear of possibly doing something that would benefit someone else. And freedom from the fear of being better than one’s brother.”
Thelonious Monk (Illustration credit 8.10)
Perhaps that explains why, when he told audiences, “I love you madly,” they believed him—and loved him madly, right back.
Yet another compelling style in the Alchemist tradition emerged in the hands of pianist McCoy Tyner (b. 1938), who absorbed the floating sounds, exotic scales, and static ambience of the French school and reframed them into a hard-edged, rhythmically gripping style. Tyner, especially in his work with another Kind of Blue sideman, saxophonist John Coltrane, added rawness and fervor to the chemistry, generating music of primal intensity.
Finally, there was the stunningly original musical alchemist Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982). His sound world bore little resemblance to Debussy’s; nevertheless it entranced, mostly through a sense of utter strangeness. Monk undermined listeners’ expectations with quirky dissonances, craggy rhythms, and a highly unusual way of handling silence, which became as tangible in his musical world as “negative space” is in an abstract painting. (Monk’s wife, Nellie, described the combination of disruptive rhythms and highly percussive attacks as “Melodious Thunk.”)
DUKE ELLINGTON by Oscar Peterson
He thrived on spontaneity. He recognized not one single thing in life, musically speaking, as an insurmountable challenge. He was a great one for always saying, “Oh, don’t worry about it. You can do it. You’ll get the gist of it as we play it …”
Strangely enough, there was a very unique phenomenon that took place when you played with Ellington. Regardless of the apprehension you may have had starting in, somewhere along the line, almost in a subliminal manner, you would be swept up and engulfed in this musical tidal wave. And, before you knew it, you, too, were a contributing factor to that tidal wave …
Edward Kennedy Ellington was able to do this because he was a man of great tenderness, kindness, and affection. I’ve heard him go to the microphone hundreds of times and give the speech about how much he loved the audience and how much the band loved the audience. And I found myself believing it because I know that, in the times that I spent with Duke personally, I never heard him utter one derogatory word about anyone. That’s a very strange thing in this world today—for anyone, not just people in the music field.
I think if I had to pick out two of the most outstanding qualities of his playing, the first would be the harmonic sense that he had in playing behind someone, playing with the band and filling in maybe only two beats. The voicing or the choice of chords that he decided to use in just that short space would add so much to the composition that it was just unbelievable. It was marvelous to hear.
The second aspect of his playing in which I reveled was the type of runs that he would play. These runs were so spontaneous and unorthodox that if as a pianist I was to take them apart and start practicing them, they would be very difficult to play … But Duke played them with complete abandon, because he felt them at the particular time that he played them; he just believed that they could be played and he’d run them. If you mentioned them to him afterwards, he wouldn’t even remember what he’d played.
FROM “In Memoriam—Duke Ellington, ‘The Man’: Reflections by Oscar Peterson,” IN Sound Magazine, NOVEMBER 1974
Despite his musical idiosyncrasies and notoriously bizarre behavior (which sometimes included falling asleep at the piano or dancing in circles in the midst of a performance), Monk was embraced by the greatest musicians of his era. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. The music, like the man, was a study in odd, erratic behavior. But it easily swept listeners up into its own, compelling realm.
THE IMPRESSIONISTS and their descendants could hold us spellbound with harmonic beauty. But the Alchemist’s toolkit also included other ways of sparking a state of wonder. While Debussy dreamed of a piano without hammers, American composer John Cage’s (1912–1992) “prepared piano” seemed to contain an army of them. In place of the usual warm, round tones, Cage’s instrument offered percussive thumps, wild twangs, and clanging bells, as if aliens had invaded its mechanism and added their own otherworldly noisemakers.
John Cage preparing a piano, ca. 1960
ROSS WELSER (Illustration credit 8.11)
These effects were achieved by inserting objects such as screws, bolts, or pieces of rubber between the piano’s strings. The result was reminiscent of Indonesian gamelan—the sound that had intrigued Debussy at the 1889 World’s Fair. But Cage arrived at his alchemy in exactly the opposite manner of Debussy, who extended the world of harmony through intricate new formulas. In Cage’s world, the sonorities, with their ambiguous pitches, made the very idea of harmony irrelevant.
John Cage first used his “prepared piano” technique in 1938, when dancer Syvilla Fort asked him to supply music for a choreographed work. It has since been adopted by many others, from classical composer George Crumb to rock stars like the Velvet Underground (1967), the Grateful Dead (1968), and David Bowie (1979).
How does one prepare a piano? On the inside cover of his Sonatas and Interludes, John Cage offers a map of the piano strings and instructions for where to insert various objects. But the descriptions of the materials are fairly vague. Cage prefers it that way, as his recollection of his first attempts makes clear. In a foreword for Richard Bunger’s The Well-Prepared Piano in 1972, he relates the story:
Having decided to change the sound of the piano in order to make a music suitable for Syvilla Fort’s Bacchanale, I went to the kitchen, got a pie plate, brought it into the living room, and placed it on the piano strings. I played a few keys. The sound changed, but the pie plate bounced around due to the vibrations, and, after a while, some of the sounds that had been changed no longer were. I tried something smaller, nails between the strings. They slipped down between and lengthwise along the strings. It dawned on me that screws or bolts would stay in position. They did. And I was delighted to notice that by means of a single preparation two different sounds could be produced. One was resonant, the other was quite muted. The quiet one was heard whenever the soft pedal was used … When I first placed objects between piano strings, it was with the desire to possess sounds (to be able to repeat them). But, as the music left my home and went from piano to piano and from pianist to pianist, it became clear that not only are two pianists essentially different from one another, but two pianos are not the same either. Instead of the possibility of repetition, we are faced in life with the unique qualities and characteristics of each occasion.
This approach to musical sound was a natural development for Cage. He realized early on, he confessed, that during his student days, while studying with Arnold Schoenberg, “I had never … had any feeling for harmony. For this reason, Schoenberg told me I would always come to a wall.” He leaped over that wall by putting aside traditional elements like harmony and re-evaluating the very nature of musical experience. It began with a spiritual journey.
Around 1950, Cage remembered, he was “very confused and disturbed. I couldn’t take the concept of art as communication from one person to another as being true.” He searched for clarity through Eastern philosophy and studied the works of Aldous Huxley, Sri Ramakrishna, and Zen master D. T. Suzuki. Through them he developed a new goal: the cultivation of a “sober and quiet mind, like Daniel in the lion’s den or Jonah in the whale. We’re in the same situation—acoustically at least—every day,” he claimed. That is, we are inundated with noises that disturb. The way to escape this situation, he decided, was to make an internal adjustment. “It became clear that a sober mind would be free of likes and dislikes,” he concluded, “and open to the rest of the world which is, so to speak, divine influence.” The key was to stop resisting the uncontrollable.
It was a radical break with past notions of the nature of music. Igor Stravinsky once wrote that “the murmur of a breeze, the rippling of a brook, the song of a bird” were merely “promises of music; it takes a human being to keep them: a human being who is sensitive to nature’s many voices, of course, but who in addition feels the need of putting them in order.” John Cage felt no such need. He embraced all sounds—from the ambient noise of a room full of people to the fire engines housed across the street from his Manhattan loft, which often wailed in the middle of the night. He stood the musical world on its ear with a piano work entitled 4´33˝, during which a pianist sits silently for that length of time, enabling an audience to become aware of the “music” of everyday sounds around them (from the coughs and sniffles of listeners in the hall to the rush of traffic outside). In its first performance in 1952 in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor simply raised and lowered the piano’s lid to signal the work’s beginning and end.
The transportive quality of his music came about through its intensification of the moment, whatever that moment might bring, without concern about aspects of musical craft like form, rhythm, or harmony, which now became secondary considerations. Cage tossed coins, for example, to select the musical parameters of a piece through random passages in the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). He composed a work for twelve radios in which the sounds are dependent on what programs happen to be airing at the time of the performance. He shocked listeners into a concentrated state of attention, and the possibility of awe, without ever losing the element of mystery that was, for him, all-important. Like his friend and colleague composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987), Cage believed in a music beyond intellect. “What was great about the fifties,” explained Feldman, “is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.”
Aside from that first prepared piano piece for Syvilla Fort, his best-known works in the genre are the playful, ear-opening Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948). There were precedents, of course, like the Janissary effects on instruments of Mozart’s time. Closer to his day, turn-of-the-twentieth-century composer Erik Satie, idolized by Cage, wrote Le Piège de Méduse, a piece that called for sheets of paper to be placed on the piano strings. Indeed, many composers, including Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos, Maurice Ravel, and American maverick Henry Cowell, similarly tampered with the piano’s sound in various compositions throughout the 1920s. Cowell (1897–1965) was the most adventurous of the group; Cage was his student for a time, and called him “the open sesame for new music in America.”
Among Cowell’s innovations was the “tone cluster,” produced by hitting the keyboard with a full fist or an arm. In The Aeolian Harp, he played the piano by stroking its strings, evoking, as in the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem of the same name, “such a soft floating witchery of sound/As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve/Voyage on gentle gales from Faery-Land.” In The Banshee, he scraped the strings to emulate screeches and howls; these approaches together became known as the art of “string piano.”
Terry Riley (Illustration credit 8.12)
CAGE AND COWELL both exerted a huge influence on composers interested in writing the kind of music that opened a window on the “now,” the ephemeral moment. These included musicians like Terry Riley (b. 1935), whose rhythmically insistent 1964 work In C (for an ensemble of about thirty-five musicians, though fewer or more are acceptable) is often considered the first composition of the minimalist school; Steve Reich (b. 1936); Philip Glass (b. 1937); and John Adams (b. 1947). They all transfixed their listeners’ attention with short, repeated patterns that change gradually over time.
In Reich’s work Piano Phase of 1967, for example, interlocking musical patterns drift out of “phase” with each other like a chain of railroad cars that became disengaged while rounding a curve. No longer slavishly yoked, they separate and form new, ever-changing spatial relationships.
To Reich, the slowness of these unfolding changes was crucial. “To facilitate closely detailed listening, a musical process should happen extremely gradually,” he wrote. The experience, he explained, should resemble “placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them.” Glass was greatly influenced by Indian raga, and Reich by African drumming (as well as by his admitted difficulty in mastering some of the traditional Western musical techniques; in that sense, both Cage and Reich built strengths from their perceived weaknesses).
MINIMALISM’S FOREFATHER
Erik Satie instigated some of the concepts that have become trendy today, such as “ambient music” and “minimalism.” He proudly created a kind of furniture music, sounds that simply hung in the air without demanding attention, and also wrote pieces intended to go on forever (or nearly forever), such as a Perpetual Tango that looped without end, and a piece called Vexations (c. 1893) which is intended to be repeated 840 times in succession.
There is no record of Vexations being performed during Satie’s lifetime, but it was played in full on September 9, 1963, at the Pocket Theatre in New York by a tag team of pianists that included John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici, James Tenney, Joshua Rifkin, and Howard Klein, the New York Times reviewer who had been sent to cover the event. According to Cage, however, Klein’s exuberance unfortunately outweighed his ability to hit the right notes. The performance lasted from 6 p.m. to 12:40 p.m. the following day. John Cale reported that admission to the event had been five dollars, but those attending received a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they remained, and anyone staying to the end was entitled to a twenty-cent bonus. Only one person sat through the whole thing, an actor named Karl Schenzer. (That feat garnered him an appearance on the television game show I’ve Got a Secret.) Pop artist Andy Warhol told writer George Plimpton that he attended the performance of Vexations at the time he was editing his film Sleep, which became famous for its repetitive structure.
However, the minimalist idea actually appears throughout musical literature in various ways. Seventeenth-century composer Henry Purcell wrote a Fantasia Upon One Note, in which a tone is sustained throughout the entire work. Maurice Ravel’s Boléro consists of a melody and rhythmic tattoo that repeat and build over the work’s entire length before reaching a final, blazing climax. The composer was shocked by how popular this work became. “I’ve written only one masterpiece—Boléro,” Ravel told composer Arthur Honegger. “Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.” Ravel’s La Valse, in which a lilting ballroom waltz gathers energy and eventually assumes gargantuan proportions, has similarly minimalist qualities. The composer called it “a fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.”
Even the skillful Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923–2006), who declared himself “the extreme antithesis to John Cage and his school,” inevitably acknowledged Cage’s importance. Ligeti’s complex, gorgeously crafted sound world made him a favorite in the repertoires of many late-twentieth-century artists. Yet his Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes simply set the mechanical timekeepers in motion and, in a Cage-ian tip of the hat to nature, allowed each to wind down at its own rate.
Ligeti’s objection to Cage and his followers, he explained, was that “they believe that life is art and art is life … my artistic credo is that art—every art—is not life. It is something artificial.” The minimalists would be hard-pressed to disagree. Their trancelike effects arise not from embracing the randomness of the moment, like Cage, but by carefully manipulating a listener’s focus, inducing what psychologists call “entrainment,” so that he or she surrenders to the power of rhythmic repetition and a fascination with forms that linger and mutate like slowly drifting clouds. (One motivation for the emergence of the minimalist style was no doubt a perception that abstract contemporary music, in turning away from the dance roots of more accessible styles, lacked the visceral impact that can be achieved through rhythm.)
John Cage pointedly marked the difference between his approach and that of Steve Reich. “He made his ‘process’ music so that anyone listening to it could follow it—could understand what is going on,” explained Cage. “He wants people to understand what’s happening, whereas I want people to be mystified by what’s happening—as I am mystified by the moon or by the change of weather. The reality of our life is a mystery.”
A DIFFERENT ASPECT of music’s eternal mystery—the ancient idea of a harmony of the spheres—occupied musicians like La Monte Young, who abandoned the piano’s modern tuning in favor of pure resonances that occur in nature. (On a modern piano, these natural harmonies must be “tempered,” or adjusted so that they will blend well, in order to avoid harsh collisions which would occur when playing much of the standard repertoire.) Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano (begun in 1964), his seminal work, can exceed six hours in length, its long drones enveloping a listener as the music journeys from softly meditative moments to maelstroms of sound, often with stunning, unearthly effects.
Abandoning the modern system of “equal temperament” makes possible a wider sound world, leading some composers, like the irascible renegade Harry Partch (who built his own assortment of instruments with unique tunings), to declare the ordinary piano “twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom.” Experiments in tuning have always occupied a place in musical history, from the ancient Greeks onward, often in the hope of uncovering the secrets of music’s magical powers. Many musicians regard these issues with deep seriousness. However, for some, like American pioneer Charles Ives, who wrote a work for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, thus creating a scale with twenty-four rather than twelve notes in an octave, tuning was simply another playful element in the composer’s toy box. (Similarly, even George Gershwin found the possibilities delightfully fascinating. He collaborated with microtonal composer Hans Barth on a quarter-tone version of the second of his Three Preludes for a Carnegie Hall concert in 1930.)
ONE OTHER APPROACH to transcending the ordinary was familiar to fans of Liszt and Paganini: mind-boggling virtuosity. Displays of superior musical technique were central to the concept of musical alchemy in the eighteenth century, when counterpoint—the art of combining melodies together in a musical texture of intricate juxtapositions, with parts often fitting together like pieces in a vexing puzzle—was likened to the philosopher’s stone. In the right hands, it seemed a dark science touched by the divine, a skill beyond the ability of mere mortals. Some believed that its practitioners cultivated this art in “secret laboratories.” (The Dresden Kapellmeister Johann David Heinichen, in a 1728 treatise, reflected the general sense of fear generated by imitative counterpoint—like that found in a fugue—when he compared it to irrational superstition, and called its enthusiasts fanatics.)
That fascination with musical virtuosity as something touched by the otherworldly, as many believed of the music making of Paganini and Liszt, continues to this day. Audiences can regard it with the astonishment of desert wanderers confronted with the parting of the Red Sea. American composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912–1997) stirred such jaw-dropping reactions beginning in the 1940s, with his Studies for Player Piano. These pieces transformed a quaint parlor instrument, whose rolls filled with punched holes allowed families to hear great piano performances in their own homes, into a medium for music technically beyond the ability of mere mortals to execute. In Nancarrow’s works, musical lines shoot by like lightning; phrases run, skip, dance, and collide at different speeds; bursts of energy seem to threaten to tear the instrument apart.
“We had a player piano in the house when I was a child,” he said of his upbringing in Texarkana, Arkansas, “and I was fascinated by this thing that would play all of these fantastic things by itself. And so from then on I had this way in the back of my mind.” In late 1939, he read in Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources a proposal to use the player piano for the performance of difficult rhythms. It gave him just the push he needed.
PIANOS THAT PLAY THEMSELVES
An early player piano (Illustration credit 8.13)
Before it became the plaything of avant-garde composers, the player piano, with a built-in mechanism for reproducing performances that had been prerecorded, was a valued home-entertainment center. It enabled families, even those lacking musical skills, to enjoy “live” performances of their favorite pieces on demand.
The origins of the instrument date back at least to the eighteenth century, when Haydn and Mozart composed pieces for mechanical organ. The mechanism was adapted to pianos, and Muzio Clementi (in his role as piano maker) offered a “self-acting pianoforte” in London around 1825. A French patent was granted to J. B. Napoléon Fourneaux for a pneumatic piano in 1863; another patent was granted in the United States in 1881 to John McTammany, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, inventor. The German company Welte produced an improved model in 1887. Before long, the Pianola, a version created by American Edwin Scott Votey in 1895, became all the rage.
Word spread. There was even a player piano on Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 expedition to the Antarctic. Igor Stravinsky composed an Etude for Pianola in 1917, and Paul Hindemith offered up a Toccata for Mechanical Piano in 1926. Such artists as Claude Debussy, Alfred Cortot, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arthur Rubinstein, and George Gershwin all made piano-roll recordings.
By the end of the twentieth century, many piano manufacturers were offering electronic, digital versions of the player piano that eliminated the need for clunky paper rolls. Nevertheless, QRS Music Technologies, a firm founded in 1900 in Chicago, continued offering music rolls until December 31, 2008. The last new-issue piano roll that came off the assembly line was the company’s 11,060th, a version of “Spring Is Here” by Rodgers and Hart recorded by pianist Michael T. Jones.
Nancarrow’s late work employed canons (in which a melody is overlaid upon itself using staggered entrances, as in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frère Jacques”) with a previously unrealized level of complexity. In his Study No. 40, for example, twelve different superimposed melody lines each move at a different tempo. (It’s worth noting that the eccentric English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji [1892–1988], who was credited in the Guinness Book of Records as writing the longest piano work in history, created impossibly difficult pieces that contained nearly as many notes as Nancarrow’s. Amazingly, several pianists, including the equally eccentric John Ogdon, managed to record Sorabji’s mammoth Opus Clavicembalisticum, written in 1930.)
Today, Nancarrow’s focus on super-performance continues in the music of composer Noah Creshevsky (b. 1945), who calls his approach “hyperrealism.” Creshevsky, whose background included studies with famed French teacher Nadia Boulanger and composer Luciano Berio and a close association with composer Virgil Thomson, had always been fascinated by the idea of transcending human limitations. “I had an uncle,” he remembers,
who did magic tricks. And I hounded him about how he did them. When I finally learned the answers, I was disappointed, because the tricks became commonplace. Boulanger talked about this: How we lose the wonder of childhood and, as artists, have to recapture it somehow in a new, “informed” second childhood. Music ought to be magic, and I’m always aiming for something that goes beyond the ordinary—I don’t even want to be able to put my finger on it.
I take materials that are recognizably of this world—real instrumental and vocal performances—and exaggerate them electronically, creating performances that normal human beings are incapable of producing. As a student, I remember hearing compositions by Liszt that were criticized for their empty virtuosity, but I was always intrigued by that supreme degree of technical accomplishment. My music pushes virtuosity to new levels, resulting in sounds that are lifelike and yet not real.
I like that point which hovers between reality and the magical.
It’s a good description of that ineffable state to which the Alchemists aspired, where music and enchantment find common ground.