Robert P. Commanday, Editor
Ann Basart, Guest Editor

From my 1999 vantage point, the music of the second quarter of the twentieth century is astounding above all for its mix. Jazz continues its inroads into the classical world, thus speeding the crumbling of the wall between serious and popular that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie had erected and labored to maintain. Maurice Ravel's fascination with blues harmonies shines forth in his elegant Piano Concerto (1931). In Berlin, Kurt Weill and the poet Bert Brecht stirred their preachments into a pot already aboil with jazz, ragtime, and atonality, producing the sizzling 1930 agitprop opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Four years later Virgil Thomson and the sibylline poet Gertrude Stein wove their Four Saints in Three Acts out of a much politer jazz plus hits from a Baptist Sunday-school hymnal. George Gershwin's attempt, in his 1935 Porgy and Bess, to meld a vivid blues style into a grand-opera format was uneasily received at first, and the work grew to masterpiece stature only slowly. Eight years later, the arrogant, jazzy rhythms of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town signaled a huge forward step in literary and musical quality for the Broadway show, a breaking-down of the wall of snobbery between musical theater and opera.

The American Colin McPhee traveled to Bali and came home to compose music inspired by the rhythmic patterns of the Indonesian gamelan. Brazil's Heitor Villa-Lobos produced amusing amalgams of his native folk rhythms and the austere outlines of Bach. Closer to home, Roy Harris proclaimed his symphonies as illustrative of the hard fastness of the prairie soul. Aaron Copland succeeded somewhat better, with his own fashionings of authentic or contrived American tunes in his cowboy ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo, and the eloquent Appalachian Spring.

All this happened within the context of an even greater upheaval, one which probably helped shape some of these other changes -- the great communications explosion and its impact on the availability of music. By 1930 radio listeners coast-to-coast could hear live broadcasts by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera; by 1950 they could also watch them on television. In 1926 the process of recording was greatly advanced by the development of electronic technology to supplant the acoustic horn; in 1948 the long-playing record made it possible to survey the realm of masterful- and not-so-masterful-pieces in remarkable likenesses of the original performances. Consumerism�s exalted catchphrase, "high fidelity," which had first appeared in record advertising in the acoustic-horn, scratchy-disk days of 1920, was by 1950 the great domestic obsession (and remains so today).

The spread of broadcasting also established music as an unparalleled political resource. In Adolf Hitler's Germany, Carl Orff turned medieval German songs into musical poster art to help celebrate his nation�s past. Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union made good use of its composers -- the great Serge Prokofiev and Dimitri Shostakovich among them -- to spread the Communist word, and came down hard on them when they strayed in the direction of originality.

In previous centuries, the construction of the first public concert halls and grand opera houses, offering accessibility to an ever-broadening social spectrum of consumers, had greatly influenced the development of grander, noisier, and more flamboyant music. In our own century, the infinitely greater expansion of access through recordings and broadcasts seems to be having the same effect, infinitely magnified. The results are still being measured.

1951-1975
51. Stravinsky: The Rake's Progress (1951)
52. Carter: Quartet No. 1 (1951)
53. Cage: 4'33" (silent) (1952)
54. Boulez: Le Marteau sans Maître (1954)
55. Britten: The Turn of the Screw (1954)
56. Stockhausen: Gesang der Jünglinge (1956)
57. Stravinsky: Agon (1957)
58. Copland: Fantasy (Piano) (1957)
59. Henze: Kammermusik (1958)
60. Shostakovich: Quartet No. 8 (1960)
61. Riley: In C (1964)
62. Babbitt: Philomel (1964)
63. Xenakis: Eonta (1964)
64. Penderecki: St. Luke's Passion (1965)
65. Ligeti: Requiem (1965)
66. Partch: Delusion of the Fury (1966)
67. Reich: Come Out (1966)
68. Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon (1966)
69. Schnittke: Violin Concerto No. 2 (1966)
70. Nancarrow: Studies for Player Piano (1968)
71. Stockhausen: Kurzwellen (1968)
72. Berio: Sinfonia (1969)
73. Crumb: Ancient Voices of Children (1970)
74. Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3 (1973)
75. Harrison: Suite for Violin and American Gamelan (1973)

To John Cage, composing music meant redefining music. One of his first teachers, Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, tried to stanch his creative juices by telling him that he was more an inventor than a composer. Cage took it as a compliment. He invented the notion of creating music by pounding on resonant junkyard objects, by "preparing" a piano (i.e., imposing bits of hardware among the strings) to alter its tone quality, of allowing 4 minutes and 33 seconds� worth of the ambient room noise around a silent performer seated at a piano to stand for the entirety of a titled (and even published) piece.

In 1951 Cage established the Project for Magnetic Tape in New York, encouraging composers to create music out of taped sounds collected the world over. Magnetic tape had been invented in Germany in the 1930s. By the 1950s, armed with electronic sound-producing and sound-processing equipment -- and, not many years later, reinforced with the ancillary marvels of computer technology -- a composer could state with justification that the previous two millennia of music represented only the base of the mountain of possibilities. Cage's "Project" was more a gathering place than a laboratory, but the technology for the latest (of many) musical revolutions was already in place, or soon would be: in Cologne and Paris, at Stanford University, MIT, and Columbia.

Actually, there had been some attempt to redefine the very sound of music long before Cage. As early as 1914 the "Futurist" poet/painter/composer Luigi Russolo had built huge room-filling machines to produce an array of harsh, mechanized cacophony that he and his Italian cohorts had proclaimed "the music of the future." Unfortunately (you might say) Russolo's machines and most of his musical sketches were destroyed during World War II. After that war, several composers in France -- Pierre Henri, Henri Schaeffer, and, for a time, the young Pierre Boulez -- had used the recently-invented tape recorders to process natural sounds, overlaid upon themselves or otherwise transformed into the designs of what came to be called "musique concrëte." There experiments would soon be supplanted, however, by the broader potential in the range of sounds produced by electronic means and processed by computer.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of music's most ardent redefiners, used the vast electronic facilities of West German Radio at Cologne to produce his Gesang der Jünglinge, a work of symphonic proportions constructed entirely out of synthesized sounds plus the processed voice of a boy soprano. The Hungarian expatriate György Ligeti worked at Cologne for a time, and then succeeded in duplicating some of tape-music's marvelously atmospheric sounds with live performers. Some of the ethereal swooshing in Ligeti's spellbinding Requiem found their way into Stanley Kubrick's 2001, a Space Odyssey, where they underscored the Spaceship's journey to Jupiter through psychedelic space.

In California young composers -- among them Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, and Terry Riley -- worked at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, blending poetry, visual art, and electronically produced sounds into a unique multimedia art. Their guru was the Michigan-born Robert Erickson, whose own music often included natural sounds (waves pounding the coast, a brooklet in the Sierra) blended with instruments.

A building-filling electronic installation, set up in New York and funded by Columbia, Princeton, and the Bell Laboratories, attracted hordes of composers young and old, including the venerable twelve-note evangelist Milton Babbitt, whose immensely appealing Philomel used synthesized sounds to describe the maiden of legend transformed into a nightingale. Not many years later, Subotnick used a synthesizer designed by Donald Buchla, not any larger than a dining-room tabletop, to compose his Silver Apples of the Moon.

The electronic facilities shrank in size (and in price) as their versatility expanded. Subotnick would soon move on to the California Institute of the Arts (founded with money from the estate of Walt Disney, if you're ready) and develop one of the pioneer college-run electronic-music curricula.

Whether admittedly inspired by John Cage's libertarian proclamations, or off on their own, composers in these years seemed hell-bent to redefine music as something it never had been. Freedom rang. To La Monte Young, a proper musical experience might consist of watching a violin burn in an East Village loft, or enduring a single tone sustained for two weeks. Stockhausen, not long after the implicit rigidity of his electronic pieces, turned 180 degrees to invoke principles of chance in his "happenings," quasi-theatrical events to bear out the Cageian dictum that "music is whatever we say it is." His Kurzwellen had live musicians improvising on the spot to whatever happened to be emerging from a shortwave radio at the time of performance.

One young American, Terry Riley, dreamed up a trance-inducing piece called "In C," in which any number of performers played a series of short fragments at any speed and at any length; a performance might last 20 minutes or three hours. Another, Steve Reich, concocted an extended piece in which a short spoken phrase, "come out to show them," was repeated on multitrack tape with the tracks gradually oozing out of phase to create a huge onslaught of sound. A new word, "minimalism" (borrowed, like so much of music's vocabulary, from the visual arts), stood for their kind of music: maximum impact created out of a minimum of material, repeating and gradually -- even imperceptibly -- changing.

Wherever you tuned in, there were new sounds. The Greek-born Iannis Xenakis, renowned both as a composer and as a disciple of the great architect Le Corbusier, devised music that did, indeed, seem in its undulations to suggest physical structures -- proving Goethe�s famous dictum that architecture is frozen music. Lou Harrison -- like Cage a one-time Schoenberg student -- flooded his music with the bright jangle of the Indonesian gamelan. Conlon Nancarrow, an American expatriate working in Mexico, composed music for player piano, punching out the paper rolls by hand and thus creating rhythmic complexities beyond the reach of any "normal" pianist.

George Crumb�s haunting Ancient Voices of Children (based on Garcia Lorca's poetry) used small tuned stones as part of its "orchestra." Crumb's Black Angels, written in 1970 as a Vietnam protest, subjected a string quartet to violent over-amplification -- grinding, gnashing, intensely disturbing -- to send its outcry skyward. (The young David Harrington, sitting out the draft in Canada, was inspired by this music to form a string quartet dedicated entirely to playing and commissioning twentieth-century music. That quartet, the Kronos, has at this writing brought something like 400 works into existence, performing for the most part before turn-away crowds.)

The self-taught hobo-turned-composer Harry Partch devised fantastic, colorful pieces that employed scales of 43 tones (instead of the "normal" twelve), and built his own fantastic, colorful instruments to play them. Luciano Berio's exhilarating Sinfonia included one movement in which a vocal ensemble (originally the Swingle Singers, whose early fame grew out of their recordings of Bach declaimed as scat) declaimed selections from various activist writings while the orchestra performed a collage compiled from familiar symphonic works of the past.

It was a time, too, of striking contradictions. John Cage and his disciples proclaimed the notion of "anything goes." The element of randomness, of "chance," motivated others as well, notably Poland's Witold Lutoslawski, whose Second and Third Symphonies contained episodes that freed the players in certain passages to improvise (within, of course, a stipulated time-frame). In sharp contrast, the young Frenchman Pierre Boulez had reexamined the Schoenbergian principles of strict twelve-note organization, discovering that Schoenberg�s disciple Anton Webern had taken the notion of strict serial organization into matters of organized tone-color and rhythm as well as the notes.

Boulez earned his early fame with Le Marteau sans maître: poetry by René Char intoned by a soprano with a chamber ensemble (a conscious tribute to Schoenberg's seminal Pierrot Lunaire), remarkable also for the way that recurrences and structural details in both words and music are rigidly worked out as a kind of audible mathematics. Boulez would go on to found his famous Parisian Institute for Acoustic/Musical Research and Coordination (IRCAM), a hotbed for experimentation in the ways the computer, the live musician, and the electronically-generated sound might join in this whole redefinition process.

Some composers, of course, found new things to say in old ways. Benjamin Britten's powerful if small-scale operas, including a harrowing setting of Henry James's Turn of the Screw, sustained faith in the supremacy of the lyric stage. Deeply distressed by his first view of war-ravaged Dresden, Shostakovich -- for whom the death of Joseph Stalin was an act of liberation -- produced in his Eighth String Quartet a transfixing personal statement. Igor Stravinsky, who for most of his life had stood as a kind of antithesis to Schoenberg's atonality, began after Schoenberg's death to incorporated some of that methodology into his own work, notably the ballet Agon, arguably his last masterpiece. Even Aaron Copland, his fame secured by his "cowboy" ballets, tried his hand at a more abstract style in his Connotations, composed in 1962 for the opening offerings at Philharmonic Hall, the first component of New York's Lincoln Center. The music, at the time, drew far more critical admiration than the building.

1976-2000
76. Glass/Wilson: Einstein on the Beach (1976)
77. Reich: Music for 18 Musicians (1976)
78. Gorecki: Symphony No. 3 (1976)
79. Kurtag: Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova (1976)
80. Erickson: Night Music (1978)
81. Sondheim: Sweeney Todd (1979)
82. Ung: Khse Buon (solo cello) (1980)
83. Gubaidulina: Offertorium (1980)
84. Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain (1981)
85. Harbison: Mirabai Songs (1982)
86. Messiaen: Saint Fran�ois d'Assise (1983)
87. Carter: Triple Duo (1983)
88. Takemitsu: riverrun (1984)
89. Feldman: For Philip Guston (1984)
90. Birtwistle: Secret Theater (1984)
91. Ligeti: Etudes (1985- )
92. Lindberg: Kraft (1985)
93. Schnittke: Viola Concerto (1985)
94. Pärt: Te Deum (1986)
95. Adams: Nixon in China (1987)
96. Cage: Fourteen (1990)
97. Kancheli: Midday Prayers (1991)
98. Knussen: Horn Concerto (1994)
99. Tan: Ghost Opera (1994)
100. Salonen: LA Variations (1997)

Now, at century's end, a multitude of strands become visible. The most obvious thing to be said about music in the last 100 years is that there isn't just one thing to be said. Was that also true in 1899? No; looking back a century or so, I make out three or four, maybe four-and-a-half, separate strands, no more: the German/Austrian sonata/ symphony/ concerto/ string-quartet tradition, the German operatic tradition, the Italian opera, and the epic-nationalistic style of Eastern Europe, which put new musical languages into Western European frameworks. As leavening the "half" would be the comic-opera tradition, which skimmed ideas from the Germans and Italians but flourished even better among the French and English.

Survey our own century, now. The sonata tradition continues, grown dense with newly devised structural complexity and abstract inner messages from the Americans Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, Britain's Harrison Birtwistle and Oliver Knussen (who of all this group at least holds onto a sense of humor). German opera pretty much died out after Richard Strauss, but Olivier Messiaen's spacious (if ponderous) 1983 Saint Francis couldn't have been written if Wagner's Parsifal hadn't paved its way. Comic opera has spawned a populous and populist brood, Broadway theater written purely for money but also an occasional stage piece -- Stephen Sondheim's works culminating in his Sweeney Todd, Leonard Bernstein from On the Town to West Side Story -- that suggest that artistic quality and box-office success can sometimes coexist.

The collaboration of film-maker Serge Eisenstein and composer Serge Prokofiev, in their Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, might have presaged a possible future for the epic-nationalist style that Mussorgsky�s Boris Godunov had spawned eighty years before, but this has not yet happened. When Hitler's proscription drove Germany's leading composers to seek refuge in other countries, some came West with hopes of creating a new kind of musical drama -- modeled, perhaps, after Wagner's dream of a "total artwork" -- hand-in-hand with the film industry. The composers who succeeded best, however, were the ones who could scale their ambitions down to fit the straitjacket of the Hollywood soundtrack.

The traditions held fast, but the impact of Einstein on the Beach was its complete disassociation from any kind of musical past. Philip Glass had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; more to the point, he had traveled extensively through the music of other worlds -- India, North Africa, Central Asia -- and absorbed the ways of making music out of stillness and stasis instead of sonata forms and twelve-tone rows. The minimalist works of Terry Riley and La Monte Young were also part of the mix.

With the poet/director/designer Robert Wilson, Glass evolved an allegory about the space age and the atomic threat, with the iconic figure of Albert Einstein (playing the violin but not speaking) as the generative force. Dance, chant (sometimes just strings of numbers repeated, repeated), and lighting effects blended into an uninterrupted five-hour musical trance. Unlike Stravinsky's Rite of Spring of 63 years before, Einstein hasn�t exactly become a repertory item; its physical proportions are too daunting. Like the Rite, however, it looms large among the century�s defining works. Like the Rite, too, it had come out of nowhere.

In its pure state (with Terry Riley's In C as its textbook paradigm), minimalism didn�t last very long. Steve Reich, who had once played in the Philip Glass Ensemble, created one other masterpiece in the style, the hour-long Music for 18 Musicians. John Adams�s early Shaker Loops and stunning piano piece Phrygian Gates also belong on that list. Glass found it profitable to remain anchored in doctrinaire minimalism, but both Reich and Adams moved on: Reich most recently to multimedia dramatic works incorporating music and video; Adams, via the astounding "newsreel" opera Nixon in China sometimes awash in its own brilliance, to a large legacy of orchestral works as successful and often-played as anyone's new serious music these days.

The musical buffet is well-stocked at century�s end. Over here is the curious mix of the so-called "holy minimalists," Estonia's Arvo Pärt and Poland's Henryk Górecki, with music that looks far back into history and tries -- often with stunning effect -- to reconcile the austere pre-tonal harmonies of the Middle Ages with a contemporary awareness. Over there is the growing influence of the Pacific Rim, with China's Tan Dun and Chen Yi, Cambodia's Chinary Ung, and Japan's Toru Takemitsu casting their shadows over their eager American admirers Lou Harrison and Terry Riley. Among us also, the smiling countenance of John Cage encourages all comers to continue to dare, to question. His old friend and disciple, the late Morton Feldman, hands off his four- and six-hour concoctions of few notes and many silences, and rewards our patience. An extraordinary generation of Russians -- Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and the Georgian Giya Kancheli -- bursting out of captivity after the end of Soviet artistic repression, turns out symphonies, quartets, and operas that cram these venerable forms with music of extraordinary vitality that, once again, sounds like nothing else in this wide musical world.

I was attracted to California, twenty years ago come September, by the new-music scene here: the electronic music at CalArts and Stanford; the mix of acoustic instrumental virtuosity and natural sounds at UC-San Diego as taught by Robert Erickson (whose Night Music is one of only two works on my "100" list unavailable on disc); the Monday Evening Concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum, with their tradition reaching back to 1939; Ojai, with its unlikely mix of Pierre Boulez's music in a rural setting; the Los Angeles Philharmonic's ongoing service to new music, more ardent than the work of any other American orchestra I know, via the "Green Umbrella" concerts and similar projects. With the noble music patrons Betty Freeman and Judith Rosen I helped produce in-home concerts of new music, which got me to shake hands with György Ligeti, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Morton Feldman . . . you name 'em.

That was actually my second California incarnation. In the first, I studied music at UC-Berkeley during the days of Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch, with Darius Milhaud a few miles away at Mills College. I helped start KPFA, the first-ever venture into public radio. We put Harry Partch's music on the air, and when the rapturous phone calls came in after a live studio performance of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (music still terra incognita in 1949), we simply had the players repeat the performance on the spot.

Indulge me with a few other memories. Shaking hands with Bartók in Boston after the world premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra. My first hearing of Mahler's Ninth, conducted by Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall (and a revelatory later performance conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini). Pushing my car with its dead fuel pump into an illegal parking space in order to get to the Metropolitan Opera House for the premiere of Einstein on the Beach (and finding it neither towed nor ticketed five hours later). Discovering for the first time the music of Schnittke and Gubaidulina, on tape in a Soviet information office in Boston. My first hearing of Bob Erickson's Night Music, on a tape in his office. The ovation after Esa-Pekka Salonen's LA Variations at the Music Center. Sitting for four hours on a chair carved out of stone at the Ace Gallery, for Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston and not remembering having moved a muscle.

I�m not a composer -- the world isn't ready -- but I've spent most of my life close to creative people, and I think some of their sweat has rubbed off. I know that if I go to a new-music concert in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York, I'll run into lots of old friends; when I went to a Kathleen Battle recital at UCLA a few weeks ago I ran into nobody I knew. Among living composers, I listen to György Ligeti's music with the greatest pleasure. (Whoops! I had promised to avoid superlatives.) I found Salonen's 1997 LA Variations -- the other as-yet-unrecorded work on my list -- enormously appealing and reassuring: complex, sometimes even gritty, music that has the same sense of confident propulsion that I hear in Ligeti.

Of the twenty-five composers in this final quarterly listing, twenty are still active -- including, at age 90, the astonishing Elliott Carter. If there were room for No. 101 in this list, it would surely be some brand-new work by the immensely talented young Brit, Thomas Adës, still in his twenties, whose opera Powder Her Face is currently making the rounds. Rather than defining the century now slouching to its end, his success so far stakes out the solid ground on which to plant our hopes for the future. Onward!

(Alan Rich is the music critic of LA Weekly and the former chief music critic of Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, and Los Angeles Herald Examiner. His recent books include the four volumes of "Play-by-Play" [Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, including cd's of complete works] and "American Pioneers" in Phaidon's 20th-Century Composers series.)

©1999 Alan Rich, all rights reserved