Kurt Günther, Der Radionist (1927)

Max Radler, Radiohörer (1930)

June 18, 2011, 1:00am

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Erwin Schulhoff: Bassnachtigal (1922)

From the album Divertissement / Concertino

Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was a Czech composer of German-Jewish descent whose compositions from the 1920s represent a relatively rare musical manifestation of the Dada movement of Weimar Republic Germany. His highly imaginative works from this period include the early piano piece In futurum (from his 1919 set of piano pieces, Five Picturesques), consisting entirely of rests of varying rhythmic values (see below); the Sonata Erotica for Solo Mother-Trumpet, which features an explicitly notated fake orgasm for soprano voice; and Das Wolkenpumpe (The Cloud Pump), a set of short chamber songs based on an absurdist text by the Dada poet Hans Arp.

In 1929 Schulhoff completed an ambitious operatic tragicomedy based on the story of Don Juan, entitled Flames. Combining musical elements of 19th-century German opera, jazz, and Gregorian chant, this boldly polystylistic work flopped in its premiere and disappeared from the repertoire until a 1995 revival.  In 1932, Schulhoff wrote a massive cantata on the text of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, a work that signaled his adoption of the doctrine socialist realism propagated in the Soviet Union under Stalin. A simplified, monumental mode of composition would characterize the remainder of his music, in which programmatic symphonies featured prominently. Doubly damned as a socialist and a Jew, Schulhoff was imprisoned by the Germans in 1941 and died the following year in a Bavarian concentration camp.

Schulhoff’s 1922 composition Bassnachtigal (Bass-nightingale) entrusts a virtuosic birdsong to the voice of the typically unlyrical contrabassoon, a gesture at once absurd and touchingly sincere in its attempt to transcend conventional musical associations. The composer penned a short prefatory poem to accompany the score, beginning with the lines, “The divine spark may be present / in a liver sausage or in a contrabassoon.”

Schulhoff’s “silent piece” In Futurum

May 14, 2011, 5:26pm

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Carlos Chavez: Energía for nine instruments (1925)

From the album Xochipilli, La Hija de Colquide Suite, Tambuco, Energia, Toccata

Along with Julián Carrillo and Silvestre Revueltas, Carlos Chavez was one of the leaders of Mexican musical modernism in the early 20th century. Chavez was a spirited “public intellectual” of modern music, writing copiously for the popular press, collaborating with Edgard Varèse in organizing the Pan-American Association of Composers, and conducting for 21 years the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, the country’s first permanent symphony orchestra. As director of the national conservatory in Mexico from 1928-1933, Chavez oversaw wide-ranging reforms in curriculum, including the study of indigenous musical traditions and a compositional focus on “new musical possibilities.”

Chavez’s position as an visionary of musical modernism was cemented by his 1937 book Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity, which stemmed from a series of writings first published in El Universal in Mexico City in 1932. Although Chavez wrote compellingly of the unlimited possibilities of “electric music,” he did not make use of them in his own work. In this respect, Toward a New Music can be compared to Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetics of Music (1907), another influential piece of writing on music technology by a composer who never touched the stuff himself.

Composed for an unconventional chamber ensemble of piccolo, flute, bassoon, horn, trumpet, bass trombone, viola, cello, and double bass, Energía was commissioned in 1925 by Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild, but not premiered until 1931. Evoking by turns the raw outbursts of German expressionism and the dissonant counterpoint of the American “ultra-modernists,” Energía is strikingly unique in its complete disavowal of repetition. The work fulfill’s Chavez vision of “a music that continually evolves from itself, the entire piece constituting a single, long, main theme.”

March 28, 2011, 12:28pm

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Kurt Schwitters: “Third Part: Scherzo—Trio—Scherzo”

From the work Ursonate (1922-32)

A crucial landmark in 20th-century sonic art, Kurt Schwitters‘ Ursonate is likely much better known by poets than by musicians. It is perhaps the most famous exemplar of sound poetry, an explicitly performative genre of verbal art that operates in a domain between conventional poetic recitation and the nonreferential expression of music. In the words of contemporary poet Steve McCaffery, the object of sound poetry is the “liberation and promotion of the phonetic and subphonetic features of language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavors.”

The sound poem was very much in the air in the early 20th century, to the extent that Schwitters’ Ursonate represents not so much a pioneering work of the genre but rather a kind of classical apex of its mature form. This is signaled even by the title of the work, which references the musical genre of the sonata, on whose carefully balanced form Schwitters’ poem was deliberately modeled.

The Ursonate was developed over a ten-year period from 1922 to 1932, the year in which its “score” was first published. Schwitters’ score consists of a precisely notated invented language complete with indications for tempo and volume. Like a musical score, Schwitters’ notation leaves much to the discretion of the performer, and many interpretations of the work have been made over the years. Schwitters’ own performance of the Ursonate resurfaced in 1992 through the hands of the Dutch composer Dick Raaymakers. The date of the performance is unknown.

The complete Schwitters performance, in its 40-minute duration, is a unique and powerful experience, though not for the faint of heart.

March 06, 2011, 7:44am

Paolo Buzzi: “Stravinsky” (c. 1922)

The nebulous bursts,

The semibarbarous surges

clad in the colors of Eastertide,

and he sings and dances, mystically,

and in dancing he plunders

alders, birches, larches.

All is fairtime and market and the merry-go-round

and the barrel organ is crammed with the noisemaker

and it is raining pure vodka

and fireworks are set off

to the sparks of a pipe

and the orchestra is flaming in the wood.

A fiddle-bow Catherine-wheel, all,

and trumpets spurt skyrockets

up to the constellations

and the drums are cracking

and the tom-toms slap the stars

with terrible golden blows.

All turns to dizziness,

the moujik idiocy

vomits divine cacophonies,

the night grows sad with stars

sluggish as living chains upon the steppes.

Peace!  It is Night, O Black Earth!

But the music surges rowdily forth

from the red and inextinguishable crater.

February 12, 2011, 12:00am

László Moholy-Nagy: “Mechanized Eccentric”

From The Theater of the Bauhaus (1925)

Though better known for his work in visual art, photography, and design, the Hungarian modernist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was a visionary polyartist whose radical constructivist approach to aesthetics touched on virtually every possible medium, including music and theater.

According to Richard Kostelanetz, Moholy-Nagy “envisioned certain technological innovations still not achieved, such as mobile loudspeakers suspended on overhead wire tracks, and recognized the availability of all materials, including ‘film, automobile, elevator, airplane, and other machinery, as well as optical instruments, reflecting equipment, etc.’”  Moholy-Nagy’s idea of the “Mechanized Eccentric” was conceived as a “concentration of stage action in its purest form,” a “humanless environmental field of lights, sounds, films, odors, music, mechanized apparatus, and simulated explosions.”  All this in the 1920s!

This “Sketch for a Score for a Mechanized Eccentric” was originally included in volume 4 of the “Bauhaus Books” series in 1925.  The book was translated into English and published as The Theater of the Bauhaus in 1961.

October 29, 2010, 4:48pm

Birth of the Radio Play: Hans Flesch’s Enchanted Radio 

Broadcast in October 1924, just a year after the start of regular radio operation in Germany, Enchanted Radio (Zauberei auf dem Sender) was the creation of Hans Flesch (1896-1945?).  Flesch was a pioneer of radio art in 1920s Germany.  From 1924 he was the artistic director at Southwest German Radio in Frankfurt.  In 1929 he became the director of Berlin Radio, where he commissioned the famous “blind film” Weekend from filmmaker Walter Ruttmann.  After being imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1933 and working later as a doctor in German military hospitals, Flesch disappeared in the vicinity of Berlin in 1945.

Anticipating the realistic premise of Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds, Enchanted Radio depicts a broadcast gone horribly wrong.  A disgruntled magician wreaks havoc on the station: the regular program breaks down into confusion and noise.  The supervisor, attempting to restore order, is tormented with an auditory illusion: he hears a distorted rendition of the song “Hab’ ein blaues Himmelbett,” and is incredulous that no-one else in the studio claims to have heard it.  Flesch puts in the mouth of the deranged supervisor the question at the heart of the new medium: “Is it possible that music could fill the air, although no one plays it?”  A technical malfunction prevents the technician from stopping the broadcast, casting an allure of auditory voyeurism over all these bizarre happenings: we are “listening in” behind radio’s invisible curtain.

At a time when radio was an untested technology, Flesch challenged the implicit conventions of the medium and confronted listeners with the fascinating and disturbing implications of radiophonic listening.  Although the original broadcast is lost to the ether, Flesch’s radio play was produced and recorded in 1962 by the radio station of the German state Hesse.  

Photo reproduced from Daniel Gilfillan’s book Pieces of Sound, p. 47.

September 10, 2010, 2:25pm

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Hans Haass: Fugue in C Major (1926)

From the album Piano Music without Limits: Original Compositions of the 1920s

Experimental music for the player piano is usually associated with the work of Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who beginning in 1948 worked for many years in obscurity in Mexico before being discovered and championed in the late 1970s and 80s. (Nancarrow was featured here in August 2009.)  But in fact the history of original, “unplayable” music for player piano goes back much further, to the first decades of the 20th century. Although the earliest pieces date from the late teens, the majority of compositions in this vein were written in the 1920s, in the experiment-happy environment of Weimar Republic Germany.

The period’s dominant mood of “new objectivity,” as well as the general adulation of the machine in both capitalist and socialist thinking, led to a fascination with so-called “mechanical music.”  This could mean anything from gramophone recordings to new electronic instruments, but it was perhaps best exemplified by the player piano, which was able to reproduce with utter precision and superhuman ability virtually anything that was demanded of it.

At the new music festivals in the towns of Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden in 1926 and 1927, a handful of works for player piano were premiered by Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and other composers.  These pieces were deliberately composed to take advantage of the mechanical potential of the instrument (specifically, a model of player piano known as the Welte-Mignon), apart from all conventions of piano technique derived from the physical nature of the human hand.  The paper rolls which stored the musical information were created not through live recording, as was customary, but by hand-pricking each tiny perforation in order to exactly determine the pitches, durations, tempo, and dynamics of the music.

One of the pieces premiered in 1927 was this Fugue in C Major (also known as theCapriccio Fugue) by Hans Haass, an accomplished composer and concert pianist who had became a director of recording for Welte-Mignon in 1925.  He recorded over 300 rolls of popular and classical music, and knew as well as anyone the capabilities and limitations of the machine.  According to player piano expert Jürgen Hocker, Haass’ pieces for the Welt-Mignon are the among the most adventurous and depart radically from the conventions of piano composition.  

Though recognizable as a fugue thanks to its omnipresent theme and consistent imitative polyphony, this composition is really a showpiece for the unique effects of the medium: breakneck tempo, simultaneous use of the entire keyboard, and ultra-fast runs and trills which overload the ear’s ability to distinguish individual notes, creating what Hocker calls “clouds” and “hurricanes” of sound.

(Note: This post is based on my dissertation research on music technology in early 20th-century Germany.  More music and information on this fascinating period will be forthcoming over the next two years.)

July 22, 2010, 2:35pm

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Julián Carrillo: Preludio a Colón (1924)

From the album Julian Carrillo (date unknown)

Born in Mexico City in 1875, Julián Carrillo is a fascinating and little-known composer of the 20th century.  Around 1895, Carrillo began using his violin to experiment with microtonal intervals— distances between notes smaller than the semitone or minor second which is the smallest difference between two pitches in the conventional Western system of tuning.  The realization that a virtually infinite world of tones lay dormant between the notes of the equal-tempered scale took on revelatory significance for Carrillo, who christened his discovery “el sonido trece” (“the thirteenth sound”).  Carrillo’s experiments in microtonality were among the first efforts in what would become a major strain of new musical investigations in the 20th century— perhaps first brought to public awareness by Ferruccio Busoni in his Outline of a New Aesthetics of Music, written in 1907.  (N.B.: The link is to the 1911 translation of the text, which is faulty, but alas, the only English version available.)

Carrillo’s music met with great public success during his lifetime.  Championed by Leopold Stokowski from the 1920s on, his works were premiered in several cities in the United States.  In 1930, Carrillo returned to Mexico from abroad and formed the “Orquesta Sonido 13,” a group dedicated to his microtonal compositions.

He had a set of 15 microtonal pianos built for him and exhibited at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels— the same event which saw the famous Poème électronique of Varese, Xenakis, and Corbusier.  Carrillo’s “metamorphic pianos” were admired by other microtonal composers such as Alois Hába and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

Carrillo also developed a new system of notation meant to rationalize musical production and make it easier to write microtonal intervals.  Like the many other efforts in this vein undertaken in the 20th century, Carrillo’s innovations did not catch on.

The title of this piece translates as “Prelude to Columbus.”  It is written for soprano, flute, guitar, violin, octavina, and harp.

December 09, 2009, 5:31pm

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Josef Matthias Hauer: “VII. Suite for Orchestra, 1st movement” (1926)

From the album Symphonic Works

The Viennese composer Josef Matthias Hauer is one of the stranger characters in 20th-classical music.  He beat Arnold Schoenberg to the discovery of twelve-tone composition by a couple of years when he published his piano piece Nomos in 1919, and he later anticipated the emergence of algorithmic thinking in music with his Zwölftonspiele (“Twelve-tone games”), in which the compositional structure is derived in a systematic way from the intervalllic structure of the “tropes” (complementary hexachords forming a complete twelve-tone pitch set).  But in spite of these would-be claims to fame, Hauer remains a marginal figure.  Even now, recordings of his music are hard to come by.

In contrast to the music of the Viennese School, which (with the partial exception of Webern’s later works) in spite of its rejection of tonality remained deeply indebted to the musical syntax of the Austro-Germanic tradition stemming from the 18th century, Hauer’s twelve-tone music is largely unmoored from conventional classical-romantic phrase structure.  Its constantly flowing, meandering melodies suggest a kinship with the Fortspinnung principle of Baroque music, in which the continual evolution of melody is paramount.  Together with the atonal harmonic language, this gives Hauer’s music a delightfully manic quality reminiscent of a  perpetuum mobile.

October 23, 2009, 4:29pm