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8 - Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
David Nicholls
Edited by
Nicholas Cook  and
Anthony Pople
Nicholas Cook
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Anthony Pople
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Summary

Rich with a wealth of harmonics, the tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder – until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song …

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments … it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give it a rhythm within or beyond the reach of the imagination … we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide …

John Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ (?1940)

Prologue: Brave New Worlds

If one major facet of nineteenth-century music was its obsession with the subjective Romantic legacy of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) – of the ‘sublime master’ whose ‘high self-possession [is] inseparable from true genius’, who ‘leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite’ and seals into his work ‘wonderful enchanting pictures and apparitions… with magic power’ – then its antithesis is found in the increasingly objective scientific scrutiny to which music was subsequently subjected. The best-known example of such scrutiny is The Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), first published in German in 1863 and in English translation in 1875; the dissemination period of Helmholtz’s work thus rather amusingly coincides with that of Wagner’s later operas, including Tristan und Isolde (first performed 1865), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (both 1876). Helmholtz was a scientific polymath: his principal contributions to the study of music lay in such areas as the anatomy of the ear, the physiology of hearing, wave patterns, tuning systems, and especially the analysis of overtones in relation to timbre and such acoustic phenomena as combination tones. When first published, The Sensations of Tone provoked controversy (especially in its English translation, which was not always true to the original) but overall it provided a very solid base for later developments.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 210 - 227
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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