There is little hope of giving a tidy account of composition in the second fin de siècle. Styles of every description—minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, New Complexity, Spectralism, doomy collages and mystical meditations from Eastern Europe and Russia, appropriations of rock, pop, and hip-hop, new experiments in folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far East, Africa, and the Middle East—jostle against one another, none achieving supremacy. Some have tried to call the era postmodern, but “modernism” is already so equivocal a term that to affix a “post” pushes it over the edge into meaninglessness. In retrospect, modernism, in the sense of a unified vanguard, never existed. The twentieth century was always a time of “many streams,” a “delta,” in the wise words of John Cage. What follows is an aerial tour of an ever-changing landscape.
Composing remains, as Thomas Mann’s Devil says, “desperately difficult.” Although vast quantities of music are being written down day by day—national websites display lists of 450 composers in Australia, 650 composers in Canada, several thousand in the Nordic countries—few of them have found an audience outside a relatively limited clique of new-music fanciers. Some specialize in “music for use,” writing for church choirs or collegiate wind bands or the soundtracks of video games. The majority make a living by teaching composition, and their students usually become teachers themselves. They may sometimes ask, with the title character of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, “What is it for?” They have read in books that their fore-bears humbled kings, electrified crowds, forged nations. Sooner or later they realize that modern popular culture has no place for a composer hero. The most celebrated composers are sometimes the unhappiest; György Ligeti, in his last years, was reportedly haunted by the feeling that he would be forgotten after his death, that he had outlived the age in which music mattered.
Perhaps Ligeti was right; perhaps classical composition is being sustained past its date of expiration by the stubborn determination of those who perform it, those who support it, and, above all, those who write it. More likely, though, a thousand-year-old tradition won’t expire with the flipping of a calendar or the aging of a baby-boom cohort. Confusion is often a prelude to consolidation; we may even be on the verge of a new golden age. For now, the art is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in his Preludes for Piano—a city that chants beneath the waves.
After Europe
“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said to Sibelius in 1907. “It must be all-embracing.” Now classical music is the world; it has ceased to be a European art. You can use new works to draw a map of the globe—from the orchestral pieces of the Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe, which draw on the sounds and rhythms of the Australian outback, to R. Murray Schafer’s radical music-theater cycle Patria, which can only be performed in the forests and lakes of the Canadian north. A comprehensive list of significant voices in contemporary music would include Franghiz Ali-Zadeh of Azerbaijan, Chen Yi of China, Unsuk Chin of South Korea, Sofia Gubaidulina of Russia, Kaija Saariaho of Finland, and Pauline Oliveros of the United States. Composition has also ceased to be predominantly male; the preceding six composers are all women.
In one of the primal scenes of modern music, Debussy fell in love with Javanese and Vietnamese ensembles at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. Appropriately, the first internationally renowned composer to emerge from Asia—Tōru Takemitsu—found his voice by listening to French music. Toward the end of the Second World War, soldiers and civilians on the Japanese home front constructed networks of underground bases, in anticipation of an invasion that never came. Takemitsu was stationed in one of these dugout fortresses in 1944, all of fourteen years old. Although no music aside from patriotic songs was permitted at the base, one day a kind-hearted officer ushered the child-soldiers into a back room and played them some records, using a windup phonograph with a bamboo needle. One disk had Lucienne Boyer singing “Parlez-moi d’amour.” Takemitsu listened, he later said, in a state of “enormous shock.” After so much sunless, soulless labor, that winsome chanson opened a world of possibility in his mind. Ever after, he honored the moment as the birth of his musical consciousness.
Largely self-taught, Takemitsu first studied Debussy and Messiaen, then moved on to Boulez and Cage. He refined his technique not only in concert works but in scores for various masterpieces of postwar Japanese cinema, including Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes. In the former he seduced the ears with popular airs, in the latter he raised goosebumps with Xenakis-like string glissandos and electronic noise. Like Messiaen, Takemitsu felt no need to choose between the sweet and the harsh. In the sixties, inspired partly by his film work, he added Japanese instruments such as shakuhachi flute and biwa lute to his Western-based ensembles. By the time of his early death, in 1996, Takemitsu had forged a late style that was precise in design, rich in timbre, tonal on the surface, mysterious at the core. He compared his music to a “picture scroll unrolled.”
Chinese music has been operating at a high level of sophistication for several thousand years. The bianzhong bells of Marquis Yi, which rested undisturbed in a tomb for twenty-four hundred years before being uncovered in 1978, are meticulously tuned in twelve-note octaves, close to the modern Western chromatic scale. Nonetheless, in the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese composers defected from native traditions toward the West. They initially emulated Russian composers, and, a little later, Debussy, whose pentatonic harmony sounded as familiar to the Chinese as it did to Takemitsu in Japan. Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai’s absorbing history, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, offers a telling anecdote about the conversation between East and West. Some years ago, an American visitor to China commented that one composer’s music sounded like Debussy’s. The composer answered in irritation, “No, this piece doesn’t resemble Debussy! Not at all! Debussy resembles me! Debussy resembles China!”
When Mao Zedong and the Communists took power in 1949, composers found themselves in a recognizable predicament. Like Hitler and Stalin, Mao fancied himself a patron of the arts, and he meddled incessantly in the cultural sphere, zigzagging between liberalization and repression. In the “Let a hundred flowers bloom” period of the late fifties, Western-style orchestras, opera houses, and conservatories multiplied, and composers such as He Luting tentatively tried out early twentieth-century styles. Then, in late 1965, Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, incited the anti-Western crusade of the Cultural Revolution, and a wave of terror engulfed every sector of society. Jiang Qing had strong ideas about music, although they added up to no coherent system. As Rhapsody in Red recounts, she expressed at various times a dislike of the sound of the trombone, a preference for Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony over the unscientifically “fateful” Fifth, and an admiration for Aaron Copland’s film score The Red Pony. In the spirit of proletarian solidarity, “bourgeois” artists were subject to vicious public humiliation, and some chose suicide as a way out.
An astonishing incident took place on Chinese television. He Luting, who had drawn fire from a proletarian-minded critic for defending the music of Debussy, was subjected to a physically abusive interrogation but refused to apologize. “Your accusations are false!” he shouted. “Shame on you for lying!” No composer ever made a braver stand against totalitarianism. He Luting lived to the age of ninety-six.
At the height of the madness, conservatories were closed and orchestras shut down. The few composers who continued working were confined to the task of perfecting Jiang Qing’s “shining-star models” of Communist musical theater—ballets and operas such as Red Detachment of Women, The Red Lantern, and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (a title later ironically appropriated by Brian Eno). These works were thuggishly simple in design, relying on a kitschy