After 1945: serialism, new sounds, minimalism

In 1945 Europe emerged in ruins from the Second World War. For many young composers everything had to be rebuilt, musical language included, owing nothing to a past that had led to catastrophe. The following decades gave birth to radically new and often contradictory ideas: control every parameter of sound, or on the contrary leave things to chance; compose with machines, or return to a simple, repeated pulse.

Total serialism

From 1946 the summer courses at Darmstadt, in Germany, became the meeting place of the avant-garde. The young Pierre Boulez (1925–2016) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) extended Schoenberg's row and applied it not only to pitches but also to durations, dynamics and attacks: this was total serialism. Their teacher Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) had opened the way with his own modes and rhythms, and spent hours notating birdsong. The result often sounds like a constellation of points of sound, unpredictable to the ear.

Sounds that had never existed

In 1948, at French radio, the engineer Pierre Schaeffer composed with recorded noises (trains, saucepans): this was musique concrète. With Pierre Henry he took the experiment further; in Cologne in the 1950s Stockhausen built purely electronic sounds. Later the computer made it possible to analyse and transform sound from the inside. In 1977 IRCAM opened in Paris under Boulez's direction, an institute where researchers and composers work together. In the 1970s the "spectral" composers (Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail) built their music on the analysis of the overtones of a sound.

Chance and silence

In the United States John Cage (1912–1992) took the opposite stance from total control. He made his compositional choices by chance operations, invented the prepared piano (screws and rubber slipped between the strings) and in 1952 presented 4′33″: a pianist stays silent, and the music is the sound of the room. In Europe György Ligeti (with his clouds of sound, such as Atmosphères, used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Iannis Xenakis (who composed with the help of mathematics) explored masses of sound rather than melodies.

Minimalism: the return of the pulse

In the early 1960s, in New York and California, young musicians grew tired of an avant-garde they found abstract. Inspired by Indian music, West African drumming, gamelan and jazz, they returned to a steady pulse, consonant chords and the repetition of short patterns that change very slowly. In 1964 Terry Riley's In C gave each musician 53 short patterns to repeat freely.

Steve Reich (born 1936) discovered phasing with two tape recorders playing the same loop at very slightly different speeds: the two copies gradually drift apart, creating new patterns. He then transferred the process to instruments, and went on to larger works such as Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Philip Glass (born 1937) builds his pieces on repeated arpeggios that grow or shrink by one note; his opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), created with the director Robert Wilson, lasts nearly five hours.

Here is the principle of phasing in an invented example (not a quotation): two voices play the same six-note pattern; from the third bar the second voice has "slipped" by one eighth note.

M:3/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=126
%%staves {V1 V2}
V:V1 clef=treble
V:V2 clef=treble
K:Em
[V:V1] E A B e d B | E A B e d B | E A B e d B | E A B e d B |]
[V:V2] E A B e d B | E A B e d B | A B e d B E | A B e d B E |]

Pärt and the music of today

The Estonian Arvo Pärt (born 1935), after writing serial works, fell silent for several years and studied Gregorian chant and early polyphony. Around 1976 he found a style he calls tintinnabuli ("little bells"): one voice moves stepwise while another plays only the notes of a triad, like a ringing bell. Here is the principle in an example written for this lesson: the upper voice uses only the notes of the A minor chord (A, C, E) closest above the melody.

M:4/4
L:1/4
Q:1/4=60
%%staves {Tv Mv}
V:Tv clef=treble
V:Mv clef=treble
K:Am
[V:Tv] C C E E | A E E C | C4 |]
[V:Mv] A, B, C D | E D C B, | A,4 |]

Today art music is more diverse than ever: John Adams writes operas about current events, others mix orchestra with electronics, world music, jazz or film music. There is no longer a dominant "school", but a multitude of paths.

What to listen for

• Serialism: isolated notes in every register, dynamics that change with every sound, no perceptible pulse.
• Musique concrète or electronic music: recorded or synthesised sounds, often played through loudspeakers.
• Minimalism: a steady pulse, repeated patterns, very gradual changes that create a hypnotic feeling.
• Tintinnabuli: great slowness, consonant chords, silences, a meditative atmosphere.

Listening list

• Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time (1941), Turangalîla-Symphonie.
• Reich: Music for 18 Musicians; Glass: Glassworks; Riley: In C.
• Pärt: Für Alina, Spiegel im Spiegel, Fratres.
• Ligeti: Atmosphères; Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano.