1.14 Making music modern  (Page 8/9)

In progressive 20th-music, silence began to be treated as a musical material in its own right. Its musical information is limited: All we can analyze is how long it lasts. But, in seeking to heighten ambiguity, this limitation became a strength. We can read many possible meanings and inferences into silence: It is a hesitation, an interruption, a“trap door”into the unexpected.

To John Cage, silence marked a musical event over which the composer had no control, which could function as a“window”into other sounds. His Imaginary Landscape No.4, is scored for twelve radios. The performers move the frequency and volume dials according to precisely timed instructions. Cage has no control over the resulting sound: It depends entirely on what is being broadcast that day. At one performance, none of the frequencies marked in the score coincided with stations in that location, resulting in a completely silent performance.

The greater the use of silence, the greater the ambiguity.

Noise

If silence is the“absence of sound,”then noise is“indiscriminate”or“indistinguishable”sound, in which it is impossible to tell the pitches or what instruments are playing. Classical music is generally purged of noise. Exceptions such as the following are rare:

To progressive 20th-century composers, the inherent ambiguity of noise became very attractive.

Composers incorporated noise in their music in numerous ways. Some brought the outside world into the concert hall. For instance, to create his electronic composition Finnegan’s Wake, the John Cage recorded sounds in the Dublin neighborhood where a scene from Joyce’s novel occurred; he then layered these in a complex collage.

Other composers asked for standard instruments to be played in non-traditional ways. In his string quartet Dark Angels, George Crumb has the amplified quartet run their fingers rapidly up and down their fingerboards, creating a sound meant to evoke the frantic buzzing of insects.

As with silence, the more noise, the greater the ambiguity.

Ambiguous notation

The furniture from IKEA comes in a box, with a manual on how to put it together. There is room for individual touches: But the over-arching goal is to create a piece of furniture that matches the instructions.

Classical music also comes with detailed instructions. A classical score typically specifies the instrumentation, pitches and rhythms, speed, dynamics and articulations. Not everything is marked with equal precision, leaving room for interpretation. However, the purpose of the score is to create a recognizable performance: Much more is shared between interpretations than differs. For instance, compare two performances of Beethoven’s Bagatelle, Opus 126, no.1.

Modern composers sometimes sold their furniture with the barest of instructions. Compare the following two recordings.

Hard as it may be to believe, those are actually two performances of the same work: Earle Brown’s December 1952. How can that possibly be? The instrumentation is different. The musical content—the pattern of sounds and silences--is totally different. Not a single detail is the same. The first performance lasts just 45 seconds. The second is actually only an excerpt of a 6-minute performance.