A photo from the 1931 German Radio Exhibition in Berlin.  The original caption reads:

“Was man auf der Berliner Rundfunk-Aussstellung sehen wird! Eine Radio-Tabakspfeife, welche das angenehme des Rauchens mit dem des Radiohörens verbindet.”  (“What you’ll see at the Berlin Radio Exhibition!  A radio-tobacco pipe, which combines the pleasure of smoking with that of listening to the radio.”)

Judging by the look on this fellow’s face, it seems there might be something other than tobacco in that pipe.

April 28, 2010, 3:00pm

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Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet, third movement, “Andante” (1931)

From the album Chamber Works

One of the most important and neglected musical figures of the early 20th century, Ruth Crawford associated with the “ultramodernist” circle of American composers in the 1920s, including Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger.  These composers championed a radical break with European musical traditions, and thus represented an alternative to the dominant neoclassical orientation of composers such as Aaron Copland and Walter Piston.

Crawford composed her String Quartet in 1931, while she was studying in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Upon returning from Europe, she married Seeger, and in 1936 the couple move to Washington, D.C., in order to work on New Deal projects for the preservation and dissemination of American folk music.

The remarkable third movement of this quartet is bereft of anything that could be called a melody. The music begins with gently surging tones in close proximity, weaving together to form a hypnotically dissonant sound-fabric.  As the piece progresses, the strings move slowly upward in pitch and the music gradually becomes louder and more discordant.  The tension built up by these grating sonorities finally explodes the texture: a violent, expressionistic outburst is followed by a sudden downward cascade of tones, as if a cord had snapped and the slow upward ratcheting were undone in an instant.  The movement ends as it began, with ominous pulsations in the low strings.

Comparable only to the contemporary work of Varese, this music anticipates the later development of “sound mass” or Klangkomposition by Xenakis, Ligeti, and Penderecki in the 1950s and 60s.

February 16, 2010, 10:50am

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Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement, “Pastorale” (1936)

From the album Music for Any Instruments

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is a lamentably under-appreciated German composer who throughout his creative life sought to synthesize the most advanced strains of European musical modernism with other, more popular elements, whether political songs, Middle Eastern traditional music, or Afro-American jazz.

In the 20s Wolpe encountered Ferruccio Busoni and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and spent some time at the Bauhaus, where he was deeply influenced by the school’s utopian and inter-media aesthetics.  In 1933 Wolpe studied with Anton Webern, whose highly analytic approach to twelve-tone composition is reflected in much of Wolpe’s later work.  After emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, Wolpe took a series of teaching positions in the eastern part of the country, including Director of Music at Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956.  He remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life.

Suite im Hexachord, written for oboe and clarinet, is a fine example of Wolpe’s ability to infuse the supposedly severe and “intellectual” method of twelve-tone composition with playfulness and lyricism.

January 04, 2010, 10:23am

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Hanns Eisler: “Keiner oder alle”

From the album Keiner oder alle: Kampfmusik

The music of Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) traverses a staggering range of musical styles.  In the early 1920s he studied with Schoenberg and Webern in Vienna and wrote severe, atonal chamber music in a vein comparable to the works of the so-called “Second Viennese School.”  As the 1920s progressed and Eisler witnessed the political turmoil of the increasingly fragile Weimar Republic, he began to distance himself from what he perceived as the apolitical nature of contemporary concert music.  His turn away from the weighty aestheticism of the Schoenberg school is shown in his work Zeitungsausschnitte (“Newspaper Clippings,” 1925-26), in which Eisler used banal texts such as wedding announcements as texts for a set of concert songs ironically evoking the expressive tradition of the German Lied.

Soon Eisler’s desire to weld his musical production with his leftist political convictions led to a break with Schoenberg and a burgeoning friendship with Bertolt Brecht.  The two would collaborate on numerous projects over the course of their lifetimes.

From the late 20s on, Eisler was dedicated to composing political music.  He wrote many pieces for workers’ chorus, including “Keiner oder alle,” based on a poem by Brecht and composed in the early 1930s.  Like many leftist German intellectuals, Eisler fled the country after the Nazis took power and ended up— via the New School of Social Research and the Mexico Conservatory— in Hollywood, where he took a teaching position at the University of Southern California.

In 1947, Eisler was brought before the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities and questioned about his Communist sympathies.  Despite an attempt to intervene on his behalf by an international team of notables, including Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Aaron Copland and Jean Cocteau (all these men being no doubt suspiciously “pink” from the perspective of McCarthy and company), Eisler was expelled from the United States in March 1948.  (These events were commemorated by Woody Guthrie in his song “Eisler on the Go.”)

Eisler resettled in Berlin and became a citizen of the new, Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic, for which he wrote the national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Arisen out of Ruins”), in 1949.  He continued to compose prodigiously until his death in 1962, working on various forms of “applied music” for political and pedagogical ends, as well as on new collaborations with Brecht.

The chorus of “Keiner oder alle” contains the following call to solidarity:

Keiner oder alle.  Alles oder nichts. / Einer kann sich da nicht retten. / Gewehre oder Ketten. / Keiner oder alle. Alles oder nichts.

In translation:

No one or everyone. Everything or nothing.  / You alone cannot save yourself.  / Weapons or chains.  / No one or everyone.  Everything or nothing.

December 16, 2009, 5:29pm

Carlos Chavez, Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (1937)

“The present age, with its fertile agitation, its incredible social injustices, its portentous scientific development, is perfecting, in electricity, its own organ of expression, its own voice.  This, clarified and matured, will become the legitimate art of our era, the art of today.”

October 09, 2009, 5:49pm