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Two paths of contemporary music: sounds from elsewhere and atonality 0:00 We haven't finished with our classification problems to see right away that sometimes they cause issues, even within a single genre, classical music. For example, there's baroque classical music.
0:35 Romantic classical music. Then you have that intermediate period which is a prelude to contemporary music, the famous French Impressionism. The great triad Fauré-Debussy-Ravel.
1:41 Contemporary music has two ways of forging a path after this impressionist music, in order to become avant-garde. Two different, even contradictory paths. Ones that consist in making ultra-modern, avant-garde music, not so much by proposing sounds that had until then been unheard, even if they seemed such to contemporaries who had been locked in a kind of sonic laziness for several generations already, but that consisted in making European ears hear sounds coming from elsewhere, sounds that were already ancient for humanity.
2:18 A musician like Olivier Messiaen, a Frenchman of the 20th century, essentially in the 1950s, makes us listen for example to Balinese gongs. Balinese gongs go back a thousand years in the musical history of humanity, but it was new for Europeans.
2:54 It's new in a relative sense. That's the contemporary, classical music that was initiated by the Russians. I'm thinking essentially of Stravinsky.
3:36 But there is also an avant-garde contemporary music that consists not in going backward, but in continuing to take yet another step forward in the direction that had been laid down by the immediately preceding music, that is, by the dissolution of tonality in Wagner. Wagner is not a contemporary musician, far from it, but he prepared and inspired the avant-gardes by dissolving what had until then been the framework, what allowed so-called classical music to perpetuate itself.
4:13 From Bach until the end of the 19th century, music never ceased to be tonal, to have equal temperament. Now, someone like Schoenberg is going to derive from the exacerbated chromaticism that Wagner puts to work for the first time in Tristan and Isolde.
5:01 Schoenberg is going to derive from this chromaticism of the late Wagner a completely atonal music.
The awakening of nationalities produces national musical schools 5:31 But that doesn't prevent contemporary music from developing in parallel through borrowing from traditional musics. And I told you that Messiaen had gone looking, in terms of traditional music, for new timbres like the Balinese gongs. You can also, without going that far, draw inspiration from traditional musics, and I told you earlier that all our countrysides in old Europe have modal musics. And there, we leave tonality, we're in the avant-garde that arises in music after music has been made — this is something historians know well, under the chapter of the awakening of nationalities, you know.
6:07 It's the era when the Hungarians free themselves from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Poles want to emancipate themselves from tutelage, sometimes Russian, sometimes German. The nation, contrary to what's happening today, is the progressive element, the element that symbolizes the liberation of peoples and not their enclosure in some kind of retreat. Yes, it depends on the era. But at that time, it was rather progress. So this awakening of nationalities produced national musical schools. Mozart is not an Austrian national musician. Mozart wrote the most beautiful Italian operas of his time.
6:41 Mozart knew French opera perfectly. Mozart even created the first great German opera with The Magic Flute. Mozart doesn't belong to a national school. At that time, it means nothing. Just as baroque music is used equally by the Italian Vivaldi, the German Telemann, or the Englishman Purcell. It means nothing. So it's interesting to see here that the awakening of nationalities in history produces national tonalities in music. All of a sudden we get Norwegian music appearing with Grieg.
7:32 Czech music with Dvořák. Each national musical tradition enriches itself and enters the classical repertoire. What until then had been rural dances heard in homes in the countryside.
8:06 All these musics had existed for a long time, but they weren't written down, and even less were they part of the classical repertoire. And now, with the awakening of nationalities, they integrate quite naturally into the classical repertoire. France and England have long been recognized as nations, that's not where the awakening of nationalities takes place; it happens among peoples who were subjugated within great empires. During a trip to the United States, the Czech Dvořák was going to be dazzled by these unheard-of sounds he discovered, of what would soon become jazz.
8:39 He hears songs of African-American slaves, he hears refrains of Native American music, and with all that, I mean, he composes this hymn to American music, the famous New World Symphony.
Bartók, exile, and the investigation into popular music 9:20 I would like to show this fertilization of the classical, this revival of the classical repertoire through rootedness in popular musics, at a more historically advanced stage, what is called contemporary classical music. It has too often had the misfortune of drifting away from the general public, which doesn't mean it isn't beautiful or of no interest. And in any case, this is less true of it than of others, for the music of that immense Hungarian composer that was Béla Bartók. But you should know that he was forced to go into exile during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s to the United States, where he led a miserable life, until the wonderful and radiant Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, learning that he was in the United States, commissioned from him this Concerto for Orchestra, which would be one of the rare works to have success in his lifetime and which would give him a little financial breathing room in the United States, which at the time was ill-prepared to listen to music as developed as Bartók's.
10:53 Bartók is someone who was first passionate about music pedagogy, and above all he conducted a very extensive survey using the recording equipment of the time. These were big machines, a bit like the filmmakers of the era who lugged around enormous cameras and cooling systems. In Bartók's case, he traveled all around the Mediterranean, including the Maghreb, to record all kinds of rhythms, modes, and sound scales. It's a work of harmony, timbres, instruments, vocalizations that were unusual in our old Europe. And this gives rise to works that have become the great classics of contemporary music — you see how history is cunning with itself — such as, no doubt, his best-known work, and rightly so, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
11:37 Already it's unusual, not the fact that there's music for strings — the string group is the one most anciently used in the classical repertoire. But it's all the more meritorious on Bartók's part to make us hear sonorities we had never heard before from the most commonly played instruments, violins, cellos, violas, the strings. But the use he makes of them is revolutionary. All the more so when he introduces them over a backdrop of percussion of a richness that classical music had done away with since the Renaissance — there is a lot of percussion in Renaissance music throughout Europe.
12:27 And which were done away with, exactly like our grammarian Malherbe cut a whole bunch of words from the French language that came from the trades, words we still find in Montaigne and Rabelais, and which disappear from the great classical language. And the celesta. The celesta has a xylophone-like sound but is played by a keyboard. It's the instrument you all know from The Nutcracker. That's the celesta.
Comparative listening: Bartók and the scherzo of Berg's Lyric Suite 12:57 The most interesting thing will be to compare, with the two examples that follow, Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the excerpt from Berg we're going to hear right after — these two expressions of contemporary classical music, between those that renew themselves by being fertilized, by bouncing off popular traditions, and those that, on the contrary, dig deeper into what was already most learned and most sophisticated in the existing classical corpus.
13:27 I'm thinking here of Berg, one of Schoenberg's most illustrious pupils, whose scherzo I'm going to offer you — that is, the most rhythmically developed passage of his immense Lyric Suite for string quartet. So we'll go directly on to Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók. Listen carefully to the number of traditional rhythms that crowd into this work of genius.
15:48 And Berg's fascinating Lyric Suite, from which I'm taking the scherzo that will follow, for string quartet, with much more limited forces.
