M Music

In political and cultural discussions, the phrase “turning point in history” is often used in connection with zero situations: above all in the general political context, under the keyword “zero hour”; and during World War I, for example in Russia, and after World War II in Western countries, first and foremost in Germany, under the keyword “zero.”

In both cases (zero hour, zero), these are terms that are used more frequently in contexts of contemporary political history and the development of the visual arts than in the context of music. However, there are many indications that the time has come to change this situation, and to use the keyword “zero” in the context of music and other fields more than has hitherto been the case in music-related and overarching music contexts.

There is an audio piece that introduces these contexts in its very first seconds with the loudly spoken keyword “Die Mauer” (The Wall). The radio play My 1989, by Georg Katzer (1935–2019), which was written in 1990 and premiered the same year, begins with this keyword. At the time the work was written, very many listeners would have recognized the voice of the man who was speaking: it was Erich Honecker (1912–1994), the longtime (and, on October 18, 1989, deposed) leader of East Germany, which was on the verge of collapse after the Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989.

Both the East German president (as defender of the Berlin Wall, built under his supervision in 1961), and later also the head of security, Erich Mielke (1907–2000)—who in the further course of the play, in front of the East German parliament, praises his “loving” surveillance of the people in his country—have their say in this radio play: as exponents of a system of rule that allows individual persons, privileged by a dictatorship, to rule over many subjects.

The search for a zero point and for new developments that start from this zero point has played an important role in many areas of historical development in the twentieth century, including in the fields of literature, the arts, and especially music. This was particularly important in the middle of the last century, at the turning point after the end of the Second World War. 1945, the year the war ended, not only marked a turning point in the field of politics, but also in the field of music and the other arts. At the time, it appeared clear what had irrevocably come to an end in various areas. What was less clear at first was how things could continue, and what new approaches would be possible.

In Germany, after its unconditional surrender in 1945, new developments began under the control of the four occupying powers. The division of Germany into three Western zones (British, French, and American) and one Eastern (Soviet) zone, which subsequently led to the division of Germany into a West German and an East German state, and the different political power relations in East and West (which were then to change fundamentally only decades later in the turning year of 1989), meant that innovative artistic tendencies were initially developed primarily in the West, and in contact with neighboring Western countries.

In the first postwar years, the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music developed into an important forum for the field of new music, where important French pioneers of the avant-garde music would make appearances beginning in 1947. The first, in that year, was René Leibowitz (1913–1972), then the leading expert on Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music (Schoenberg had been driven into exile by the Nazis; Leibowitz had survived in hiding). Next, in 1949, came Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), who had begun a renewal of French music independently of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, and whose idiosyncratic student Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) would also later play an important role in Darmstadt.

At the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1951, Olivier Messiaen aroused the interest of a young German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen. In Darmstadt, Stockhausen had heard a recording of a radically new piano piece by Olivier Messiaen, which the latter had composed two years earlier during his stay in Darmstadt: Mode de valeurs et d’intensités. In this piece, all the conventions of previous music are radically questioned and abandoned: traditional rhythms, motifs, and chords no longer exist. Each tone stands only for itself with its own characteristics (pitch, volume, duration). As a zero point, as a starting point, and as a starting point for something new, the individual tone presents itself here with its basic properties of pitch, volume, and duration.

This composition is the key work with which Messiaen made a lasting impression on many of his current and later students, including the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Belgian Karel Goeyvaerts (1923–1993), the Greek Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), and the German Karlheinz Stockhausen. Messiaen encouraged these and other composers to seek and find their own positions starting from point zero. None of his later famous students ever copied Messiaen’s radical Piano étude or any of his other music. Rather, each studied and processed it in their own way:

– Boulez was inspired to compose a piano duet that was structurally even more rigorous and radical, with precisely serially preplanned tone points (Structures, Book I, especially the first piece, written in 1951: Structures Ia);

– Stockhausen, inspired by Messiaen’s étude, composed the ensemble piece Kreuzspiel (Crossplay) in 1951, as “punctual music” with constantly changing pitches, volumes, rhythms, timbres, and wide-ranging movements in tonal space;

– and Xenakis, encouraged by Messiaen, developed formalized music based on ancient Greek music theory and modern mathematics (also in connection with architectural projects, which he realized first as a collaborator of Le Corbusier and later on his own).

The first work with which Xenakis’s new musical design ideas became internationally known was the orchestral piece Metastaseis, premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Festival in 1955. In this composition, Xenakis defines the zero point of musical construction differently than Boulez and Stockhausen had done before him: all the stringed instruments start on the same note, and then extended glissandi begin, in which each individual string player finds their own path of ascent or descent in tonal space according to strict specifications that the composer has put down on graph paper (like an architect), and which he later rewrote as a score in traditional notation, for practical reasons of performance.

In Structures Ia and Kreuzspiel, the punctual music of Boulez and Stockhausen starts from individual tone points (and in Stockhausen’s case also noise points), the basic provisions of which are predetermined according to strict construction schemes—according to rules that in many details are easier to read in the score than to hear directly. In Xenakis’s orchestral piece, however, the diverging glissandi sounds of the string instruments are clearly identifiable from the outset as a directed process. This is also apparent in the composer’s sketch, but not in the orchestral score prepared by Xenakis based on the information contained in the graphic: this is written in traditional notation and contains precise instructions for all players, and is therefore more difficult to read. In a concert introduction to his piece, Xenakis provided a neat explanation of the difference between the two scores: the graphic notation is easy to read, but not easy to play; the traditional notation is easy to play, but not easy to read.

In this orchestral piece, Xenakis clearly demonstrated that even music for traditional orchestral instruments that starts from one note (the lowest note of the violins) can be meaningful and novel.

At the time when he composed the orchestral piece Metastaseis, Xenakis did not have access to a studio with equipment that would have enabled him to realize and compose technically produced sounds. This only became possible for him in the years that followed: he composed a music tape with metamorphosed sounds of an earthquake (Diamorphoses, 1957), and he made concrete entrance music for the Philips Pavilion (designed by Xenakis) at Expo 58, the World’s Fair in Brussels (Concret PH, 1958).

It is characteristic of the music and musical thinking of Iannis Xenakis that in various pieces composed since the nineteen-fifties, the zero or starting points of the musical construction are set quite differently, yet each approach is plausibly continued in its own way. In this context, the focus on the opening note as the initial stage can go so far as to repeat that note throughout the piece, as Xenakis did in a composition for boys’ choir and orchestra in which the singers recite the entire text on one note (Polla ta dina, 1958).

Another example: after the turning point of 1968, Xenakis wrote popular percussion music whose progressions are easily comprehended by the listener, and oscillate in ever-changing patterns between periodicity and aperiodicity—for example, in Persephassa (1969), for six percussionists, or in the solo piece Psappha, of 1975.

While Xenakis’s musical constructions, which start from the zero point, often proceed from mathematical structures (for example, from the sieve theory, as the basis for structuring rhythms or tonal scales), other approaches, proceeding more strongly from inner musical developmental thinking, are found in many variants, especially in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Since the early nineteen-fifties, Stockhausen had been interested in composing technologically generated music, because at that time he believed that his rigorous structural ideas could only be realized with technologically produced sounds.

His first tape production, the concrete Étude, realized in Paris in 1952, did not meet with the approval of the Paris studio director Pierre Schaeffer. Étude remained unperformed for a long time and decades later was still only occasionally played in concert performances; however, in the end it was also included in the edition of Stockhausen’s complete works on CD. The strange career of this short piece can probably be explained by the fact that Schaeffer was neither aesthetically nor technologically sympathetic to music that in strict systematization derived from a single source set as a zero point. It was only in Cologne that Stockhausen got the opportunity to create music that consistently started from the zero point of single synthetic basic materials: sine tones. Stockhausen created such monochromatic zero-point music in 1953 with his first electronic work, to which he later gave the title Studie I.

Six decades later, in a contribution from the younger generation, a composition was created that is also formed from the simplest elementary sounds, from sine tones: the 2019 audiovisual Sinusstudie by Chinese composer Jia Liu (b. 1990). However, in Jia Liu’s work, unlike Stockhausen’s, the sine tones appear at the smallest intervals, from which, when superimposed, the most subtle tonal animations result through the interferences. In this piece, all the sine tones are in constant motion—united at the same pitch at the beginning and at the end, but in the larger context in manifold animations: with dynamic fluctuations at the beginning of the piece and with dynamically animated tones spreading throughout the tonal space; and at the end of the piece with a return to the initial stage, to the dynamically animated tone. Here, similarly to another composition written in 2020 by the same artist, with the title Ringstudie II/b, tones no longer appear in predominantly static yet constantly changing constellations of fixed tones, but in dense strata of gliding tones; in Sinusstudie the audience can follow the constantly changing tonal movements on the screen, and in Ringstudie II/b they can be followed on the computer screen as clearly contoured processes of waxing and waning.

Musical cells of wide-ranging movements of sound (which can be described as continuously moving models in contrast to the ever-changing sound constellations of “fixed” tones in Stockhausen’s electronic Studie I) have existed in radical new music since the early nineteen-fifties. The first example is found at the beginning of one of the most scandalous pieces of post-1945 music: Le Voile d’Orphée (The Veil of Orpheus). A major work written by Pierre Henry in 1953, it is the final movement of a joint composition with Pierre Schaeffer that was premiered at the 1953 Donaueschingen Music Festival, where it caused a spectacular scandal. On the one hand, it took aim at echoes of traditional opera music (favored by Schaeffer), and, on the other hand, it was also directed against the wild, entirely novel streams of sound in Henry’s closing music, which the composer made extremely loud (to drown out the noise being made by the audience), whereupon most of the audience fled from the hall.

The gliding sounds and sound trajectories of this music emerged as a consequence of music that had started from a completely different zero point than Stockhausen’s early electronic work: namely, as music of a completely new kind of continuity, the kind of music that could only be achieved with new sounds, which could only be produced in a studio, and not with human voices and traditional instruments alone.

In 1955, two years after the premiere scandal provoked by Schaeffer and Henry, another composition, albeit less controversial, caused a sensation in Donaueschingen: Metastaseis (1953–54) by Iannis Xenakis. A piece of music for a large orchestra, it begins with all the strings playing dense glissandi. All strings begin with the same note, the lowest note of the violins, and from that note each violinist plays a glissando (glide) of their own—the higher strings upwards, the lower strings downwards. After a time, all the strings stop playing at the same time, each on a different note, so that many notes are densely layered in the wide tonal space. After a time, all the strings’ sustaining notes suddenly turn into tremolo notes, which begin extremely loudly and then fade away in diminuendo until a triangle is struck, interrupting the stream of sound and creating a first major caesura.

This widely expanding opening (rhythmically enlivened by a few percussive accents played on the woodblock) is followed later, at the end of the piece, by a development in the opposite direction: the notes of a dense chord played by the strings fill the wide tonal space and move toward each other in opposite directions, before they finally meet on a common final note (which is somewhat higher than the opening note), with these rising and falling tremolos concluding the piece.

The movements in tonal space here invented by Xenakis are a first plastic model of his musical thinking, which proceeds from characteristic structural models that can change alternately in different works or groups of works. In the early orchestral piece Metastaseis, such structural models are found primarily at the beginning and end of the work, while there are also tonal structures inside that are more closely related to modernized twelve-tone music than to mathematical structural models.

In Xenakis’s later works and groups of works, often based on other mathematical structures, there are striking instances of the structuring of other aspects as well, for example, of rhythms (in percussion pieces such as the sextet Persephassa, 1969, and the solo piece Psappha, 1975), or of tone sets or scales (in the piano pieces Herma, 1960/61, and Mists, 1981). In these and other works, the listener can also perceive certain acts of structuring as artistic reactions to turning points in time, as, for example, in the glissando and noise structures of the orchestral piece Metastaseis; in the radio play Pour la paix, of 1981 (to a text by Françoise Xenakis, a writer and former resistance fighter), where they relate to visual or sonic experiences during World War II (Xenakis was active in demonstrations and in the resistance); or in Nuits (1967), a commemorative piece for political prisoners. In these and other works, models can be found of a rigorously structured, politically committed music, which invites comparison with the aspects of a political stance in the work of the ZERO artists (for example, their active resistance against the slogan “No experiments,” with which the conservative CDU/CSU parties waged their campaign for the general election to the German Bundestag in 1957, later on winning an absolute majority), or in the work of other pioneers of new music, such as Luigi Nono (1924–1990), whose strict serial music in Il Canto Sospeso (1956) presented and processed quotations from the final letters received from political prisoners.

We also find examples of strict structural innovations that are comparable in terms of music but different in terms of musical policy positions, or in which musical and political radicalism present themselves in tensions that are sometimes difficult to resolve—as, for example, in the politically committed music of Luigi Nono since the early nineteen-fifties and its transformations in his late work; since nineteen-sixties the politically determined turn away from the avant-garde in the work of Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981), who in the changed from being a former collaborator of Stockhausen’s into his opponent in the field of music; or the beginnings of a politically critical reorientation of the radio play in the work of Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008); or the beginnings of politically committed piano music in Frederic Rzewski’s (1938–2021) work; or the beginnings of a confrontation between strictly structured minimal music and speech texts critiquing contemporary times in the work of Steve Reich (b. 1936).

These and other examples indicate that many aspects found in music and in other areas of cultural life (for example, in the visual arts and in architecture, as well as in the combination of different fields in modern radio drama) that can be subsumed under the keyword “zero” can still provide many incentives for specialized or interdisciplinary research and discussion today. How important, in this context, the tension between primarily political and primarily art-immanent questions might become, and how this might be managed, would have to be clarified in further discussions and research within and outside of music and its interconnections with political and cultural life.

As an example of an important field of work in this context, here are some subject-specific and interdisciplinary aspects under the heading of movement:

In the context of music, one speaks of movement both in the narrower literal sense, and also in the figurative sense—for example, in the transition from one pitch to another, if the second pitch is close to the first, we speak of a step; otherwise, if it is farther away, we speak of a jump. Movement, not in the figurative sense but in the narrower sense, actually only occurs when one note slides over to another, in a glissando. Such a glissando, however, can be a problem for the traditional understanding of music.

In traditional notation, the glissando usually exists only as a simple line that leads from one notehead to another. In straightforward cases, such as the glissandi of the strings in the orchestral piece Metastaseis by Xenakis, this may suffice. However, it may be that more complicated tonal movements are prescribed, as, for example, in Xenakis’s composition for solo violin Mikka (1971), or in a central place in the composition Kontakte (1958–60) by Stockhausen. Here, a glissando appears in a central position, beginning in the middle register and leading downward from there in a curving movement. After the glissando has moved downward in this manner for a long time, it transforms. Similar to the gliding sound of a slowing motorcycle, the coherent gliding sound begins to disintegrate—it gradually dissolves into gliding pulses that become slower and slower over the course of the continuing movement before finally coming to rest. These pulses turn into staccato repetitions of the same note, which then—announced by a short signal with some downward staccato pulse notes—lead to a lower note, which is also repeated in staccato, and on which the two soloists (accompanying the electronic music) then also begin. This is clearly a representation of a purely intra-musical process: the transformation of the melodic (downward) movement of a gliding sound (glissando) into slowing tone repetitions and then finally into a long, sustained electronic tone.

In this connection, Stockhausen speaks of the “unity of musical time.” By this he means that sonic processes can change a lot when they are significantly accelerated (like the many electronic sounds that Stockhausen uses in his piece in rapid motion, as it were), or when they are severely slowed down (like the gliding sound that begins the central section of the piece just described, which reveals in slow motion the origins of the sounds used, most of which are highly transposed and accelerated).

In this composition and at this point, then, it is primarily a matter of purely intra-musical processes, which the composer also described in detail in a published commentary. Stockhausen did not publicly mention other meanings and contexts at the time the piece was composed—for example, the assignment of electronic sounds to a heavenly sphere and instrumental sounds to an earthly sphere. This might suggest an interpretation of the concluding part of the composition, with its dominant electronic sounds and sparse accompaniment of instrumental sounds.

Quite different from Stockhausen’s Kontakte is the problem of interpreting a computer music composition by Jean-Claude Risset, written some years later. In this piece, there are “infinite glissandi,” which might give listeners the impression of a never-ending plunge. The title of this piece might also indicate that these sounds may be heard outside of music, as the composer designated it a computer suite for the stage play Little Boy,about the first atomic bomb to be used in war, dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The problem of moving on after reaching the zero point is articulated here both within the music and in the overarching context of a historical turning point in time.