Michael Nyman: Collected Writings

Pwyll ap Siôn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317096849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

For over three decades Michael Nyman's music has succeeded in reaching beyond the small community of contemporary music aficionados to a much wider range of listeners. An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman's success lies in his writings about music, which preoccupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During this time Nyman produced over 100 articles, covering almost every conceivable musical style and genre - from the Early Music revival and the West's interest in 'world' music, or from John Cage and minimalism to rock and pop. Nyman initiated a number of landmark moments in the course of late twentieth-century music along the way: he was one of the first to critique the distinction between the European avant-garde and the American experimental movement; he was the first to coin the term 'minimalism' in relation to the music of (then largely unknown) Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and later Philip Glass; the first to seriously engage with the music of the English experimental tradition and the importance of Cornelius Cardew, and to identify the importance of Art Colleges in nurturing and developing a radical alternative to modernism; and one of the first writers to grasp the significance of post-minimalists such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and to realize how these elements could be brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own creative endeavours, which was formulated during the late 1970s and early 80s. Much of what transformed and defined Nyman's musical character may be found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited and annotated for the first time, and including previously unpublished material from Nyman's second interview with Steve Reich in 1976. There is also much here to engage the minds of those who are interested in pre-twentieth century music, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz, or Bruckner and Mahler's symphonic works.

PART I
Reviews, Criticisms and
Short Prose Writings

Section 1 1968–1969

‘Blocks of Granite’ (The Spectator, 12 July 1968, p. 63)

At a time when anyone making the attempt to comprehend ‘new music’ is faced with a labyrinth of seemingly mutually exclusive techniques and idioms, the position of Olivier Messiaen is both enigmatic and paradoxical in its relationship to tradition and renewal.

His music is traditional yet draws on many non-western musical traditions. He is a committed composer, a devout Catholic, whose works are often unfashionably descriptive and programmatic. He notoriously lacks a sense of humour, which makes his organist’s fondness for chains of luxuriously chromatic chords, Delius-fashion, the more blatant. His melodies and textures are not fragmented in the manner of the so-called post-Webern composers, yet he creates highly coloured and shifting patterns of sound out of birdsong, in contexts which are nothing if not avant-garde.

This attempt to ‘explain’ the prodigious and controversial originality of Messiaen, now in his sixty-first year, is prompted by the enlightened alternative ending to the Oxford-based Sixth English Bach Festival which was provided for Londoners in what amounted to a complete Messiaen sub-Festival.¹ Concerts of representative piano, organ and choral works were crowned by a truly inspired feat of programme planning which brought together three orchestral works central to the understanding of Messiaen’s creative development.

These three works, L’Ascension, Turangalîla-Symphonie and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, point a not too misleading parallel, bear a relationship to each other similar to the string quartets of Beethoven’s early, middle and late periods, and it is not without significance that they were written at intervals of roughly 15 years – in 1933, 1948 and 1964 respectively. In all three the musical material is in a heightened sense descriptive, expressing the texts or titles with which Messiaen is wont to label his movements. The music has the function of meditation or commentary; yet it is obvious that the different languages the three works speak do not result from a mere difference of programme, nor from a Stravinskyan assumption of stylistic masks. The overwhelming lyricism of Turangalîla-Symphonie – a celebration of human, not divine, love; a vast ten-movement reinterpretation of the Tristan and Isolde legend – has its roots in L’Ascension, just as Turangalîla uncannily foreshadows the materials, techniques and treatment of Et exspecto. Yet one feels that the partisans who reacted so volubly to the emotional message of Turangalîla at the Festival Hall on Friday would, had they been allowed to applaud, have expressed similar reactions to Et exspecto at Westminster Abbey on Saturday. It would be fascinating to know how Beethoven’s audiences reacted to Op. 132 after Op. 59.

The physical grandeur of the Abbey, with its nobly echoing acoustic, was a near-ideal setting for Et exspecto, scored for woodwind, brass and percussion and intended, according to the composer, for ‘churches, cathedrals, and even performance in the open air and on mountain heights’. Yet despite the fact that the playing of the Orchestre Philharmonique de l’ORTF under the rather detached direction of Charles Bruck,² actually belittled the physical grandeur of the work (as it did also of Turangalîla), the dying-away of the pause-notes in the ‘solos’ for gong and tam-tam, and of the final tutti chords of the first, third and fifth movements, seemed to symbolise, by making one aware of the breaking-down and decay of sound in silence, the whole new concept of musical time and space which is one of the most important features of recent music.

Messiaen’s innovations in this field are largely rhythmic in origin, for whereas the forward drive of the music of, say, Beethoven, partly depends on the complex interrelationship of basic beat, individual rhythmic patterns and harmonic movement, Messiaen destroys one’s sense of pulse by extremely slow tempi; and by giving equal stress and value to different note-lengths, often creates with very fast or very slow notes the characteristic texture of an orchestrated or ‘coloured’ rhythm. This technique is present somewhat more than embryonically in the first and last movements of L’Ascension, where the melody becomes a series of parallel chords. Form is created not by ‘development’ but by juxtaposing blocks whose textures move but are at the same time static and hieratic. (Church-bell sequences give the same sort of effect.)

In Et Exspecto the blocks Messiaen handles are of granite – and one should perhaps draw attention finally to the last movement, ‘And I heard the voice of a great multitude’, where the whole wind band, uniformly loud, move in gigantic, slow chords, while a series of gongs beat faster notes all with the same insistent intensity. The effect is overwhelming. However, with less matter of fact direction, and without lapses of ensemble disconcerting in music which relies so much for its effect on communal rhythmic precision, the work’s true stature would have been more manifest.

‘The Sound of Music’ (The Spectator, 9 August 1968, pp. 201–2)

There was a time when the Juke Box Jury panel passed judgment on the ‘backing’ to a particular song;³ nowadays, pop groups are distinguished by their ‘sound’. An important word in music, surely, but not much in evidence in the public discussion of recorded avant-garde music at the ICA last week.⁴ There was much talk of noise becoming music when properly ‘organised’, and there was also the gem from Mr Hans Keller (after Schoenberg) that ‘good’ music remains ‘good’ no matter what instrument it is played on and that ‘good’ music, if loud, does not lose its value if played softly.

This half-truth – reflecting a general puritanism towards sound itself – passed through my mind at the Varèse-Stravinsky Prom later in the week. The Rite of Spring certainly works as a piano duet (as Barenboim and Ashkenazy demonstrated at the Brighton Festival) but a similar arrangement of any piece by Varèse is unthinkable. Varèse, who died three years ago at the age of 79, was obsessed all his life with sound – sound sources, sound material and the projection of sound in space. To him music was organisation of, not in, sound. He was continuously frustrated by existing musical systems, whether tonal – when he first learned his scales he objected that they all sounded alike – or serial, which he described as hardening of the arteries. Equally, he resented the tempered system, in which the octave is divided into 12 mathematically equal semitones, and the limitations of conventional instruments. He stopped composing in 1937, needing electronic means to achieve his aims. His lectures of that time read like a prophetic manifesto for today’s musical priorities and problems. His Poème Electronique, presented at the 1958 Brussels Fair as part of a light-sound show with Le Corbusier, partly realised his intentions of ‘liberating sound’.

His Arcana for an orchestra of 140 musicians sounds as aggressive and uncompromising today as it did in 1927, for Varèse uses sound as a ‘hot medium’, packed with urgent, mostly loud, information. The mind and ear are not seduced but assaulted by masses of brash, dissonant primary colours. This is the music of the steel and concrete age. ‘I don’t care about reaching the public as much as I care about reaching certain musical-acoustical phenomena ... to disturb the atmosphere’, he said.⁵ The Prommers were not reached, partly because of the music itself, because the Blue Meanies successfully destroyed the music in their manipulation of the Albert Hall echo⁶ – this was not the right space for Varèse’s time-scale – and partly because a conductor of the genius of Boulez appeared not to have communicated the essence of the music to the orchestra.

This music can be understood only on its own terms and not in terms of other people’s music, or instrumental writing – although Stravinsky himself has been at pains to stress his ‘contribution’ to Arcana. Varèse’s forms are always the outcome of the manipulation of precision-turned sound blocks, in which instrumental register and colour, attack and dynamics are all-important, and which are set in motion by rhythmic dislocation. It is, in part, the rate at which these masses succeed one another that makes Arcana sound so new. It still seemed very unfamiliar to the orchestra – I had the impression of an expert pianist at sea with material which he claimed to be unpianistic.

In this context, The Rite of Spring sounded like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. It has suffered a change of Prom status in the past few years – whereas in the past it was served up to end a normal ‘meat-and-two-veg’ concert, it is now pitted against other modern ‘giants’ – last year it was Stockhausen’s Gruppen. It is still something of a ‘cause’ – to some it proves they don’t dislike ‘modern music’ completely; to others it shows that Stravinsky was once a composer; and for some who disapprove of his escape to neo-classicism, it comes in handy to perform along with the recent serial works. If it no longer shocks, it still excites and titillates, and rhythmically it is still staggering (as Boulez himself demonstrated in a lengthy article in 1951).⁷ But the time-scale is so old-fashioned, with its slowly unfolding tunes, its striking motives repeated and varied to build up a well-defined ‘section’. It’s like the silent movies where the explanatory titles are left on the screen too long – the modern eye is capable of faster assimilation. Varèse in the ’twenties showed a very modern eye in the ‘tempo’ of his music.

As sub-plot, the Prom included three smaller pieces – Stravinsky’s The King of the Stars, composed just before the Rite, a fascinating and ‘unplaceable’ work in the Stravinsky canon; his recent Requiem Canticles; and Varèse’s Ionisation for 13 percussionists, 37 instruments. Written in 1931, this was an attempt to escape the tyranny of fixed pitches and is a fascinating synthesis of rhythms and a new sort of thematicism brought about by the interplay of timbres and ‘free’ pitch levels. It is the climax of Varèse’s percussion writing (all his scores have important structural parts for percussion) and one of the starting points for John Cage’s percussion pieces. Requiem Canticles is unmistakably Stravinsky – the images are now sparer, the repetitions briefer, and the texture more austere. The gestures are superb; only to my ear all the notes are wrong.

Meanwhile, back at the ICA, we were confronted with a panel of experts all seemingly out of their individual elements and rather bored with the whole thing. It was a sort of unentertaining, avant-garde Juke Box Jury in which the only relief was provided by some comically obsessive statements from the floor. I wonder what the point of these ‘symposia’ is – although the audience made up largely of non-musicians seemed to find this one useful since the proceedings, as the chairman was proud to announce, lasted over three hours. This needed stamina for some of the music was rather pointless. There were two generally acknowledged ‘hits’, one of which, Morton Feldman’s King of Denmark is an extraordinary piece in which a solo percussionist, in this case Max Neuhaus,⁸ creates a world of soft and delicate textures by striking his instruments only with his fingers. As with all Feldman’s music, one could concentrate because of the low dynamic level on the actual sound of sounds. Unfortunately nobody asked Mr Keller if it would have been as effective or as ‘good’ music, had the volume been raised.

‘Enter Birtwistle’ (The Spectator, 30 August 1968, p. 299)

It has been left to Harrison Birtwistle to hold the fort for ‘progressive’ English music this week. While the Proms are indulging in a Walton mini-festival, Edinburgh is given over to a rather superfluous Britten retrospective. Meanwhile the two performances of Birtwistle’s opera Punch and Judy at Edinburgh (the first since its première at Aldeburgh in June) and the first hearing of his Nomos for orchestra at the Albert Hall on 23 August – by far the most notable of this year’s Prom commissions – mark the arrival of Birtwistle as a composer.

If he has taken longer in the process than his so-called Manchester School associates, Alexander Goehr and Peter Maxwell Davies,⁹ it is partly through lack of opportunity, but mainly that his earlier works, though not by any means miniatures, are cast in the form of vocal and instrumental chamber music. His first orchestral piece, Chorales (1960), which had to wait seven years for performance, showed that Birtwistle’s main problem – a big one – was how to control, both technically and formally, the exuberant fertility of his imagination. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s borrowed dictum ‘there is hope in honest error: none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist’ is not inappropriate here.¹⁰

It was perhaps too soon for Birtwistle to have learnt any lessons from Chorales, when, in 1965, as a study for Punch and Judy, he composed Tragoedia. This was an instrumental piece using as a framework ritual aspects of Greek drama, which served to focus Birtwistle’s style by coupling a new vertical strength to his proven lyrical flexibility. It is not uninstructive to reflect on the number of times that Greek drama and music have been misinterpreted with positive results – after all, wasn’t there a group of hack theorists in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century whose errors led them to invent opera?

Nomos is Birtwistle’s first large-scale piece since Tragoedia to create successfully its own self-supporting ‘span’ – a structure which continuously grows and is not dependent, as many of his earlier pieces largely were, on closed musical forms. First reactions to the dedicated performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis, were to the aural perspective of the work – ranging from the delicate ‘Chinese’ tinklings of harp and pitched percussion to uncontrolled outbursts of brass and violent build-ups of the full orchestra. But repeated listenings enable one to grasp the slow inner rhythm, and the way in which Birtwistle builds his fascinating ‘span’ by an essentially lapidary process.

The title Nomos refers to the musical accompaniments of the Greek epics, and it is only when one sees the piece as a heroic narrative that its formal proportions become clear. Much as I dislike literary analogies – Birtwistle’s music always has an archetypal feeling, so that Nomos does not tell a story but all stories – the positioning and phasing of the caesuras suggest the end of a heavily deed-laden paragraph, after which the tale is taken up again. The narrative themes undergo a continual shift in meaning and the opposition of forces – the division of the orchestra itself is rethought, into self-contained but interlocking groups of instruments – creates an inner tension which is not completely resolved when the music finally peters out somewhat perfunctorily. But, in the last section, we perceive a new reality as the music has been raised one level – in that only the four amplified wind instruments are left playing material which a non-amplified quartet started originally.

Birtwistle has also successfully resolved the line...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Foreword by Michael Nyman
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I REVIEWS, CRITICISMS AND SHORT PROSE WRITINGS
• PART II ARTICLES, ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS AND LONGER PROSE PIECES
• Appendix Michael Nyman’s Collected Writings in Chronological Order (1968–1982)
• Index