In America, John Cage had put together his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, and Miles Davis would go into the studio for the Birth of the Cool sessions. And Pierre Schaeffer made his Cinq études de bruits for tape, incarnating musique concrète, and heralding an era of technological exploration with sound.Īnd that was just Paris.
All of this music happened, or was happening, or was being composed in Paris in 19: Pierre Boulez's explosively iconoclastic Second Sonata (mere adjectives, however sauced with consonants, can't prepare you for the unremitting violence of this music, a violence that is consciously done to the past, ripping up what had become the debased tradition of western music in a searing search for something new - Tamara Stefanovich plays it in London on Sunday) Olivier Messiaen wrote his outrageous and orgiastic orchestral vision of the redemptive power of sensuality in the Turangalîla Symphony while Francis Poulenc composed one of his most beguiling works, the irresistibly melodic melancholy of his Piano Concerto. The chance to hear Gruppen (twice in the same gig, with the London Sinfonietta and the Royal Academy's Manson Ensemble on Sunday night), Gesang der Jünglinge, Kontakte, and Klavierstück IX in the same weekend is already pretty well unmissable there's all that and Nono, Boulez, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as talks, introductions, films, and an assorted cornucopia of infotaining delights to give you as many ways in as possible to the joys and discoveries of the post-war world of music.īut before the heroic phase of post-war modernism really got into its stride and assumed its rather behemothic presence in the way the stories of music after 1945 have been told, I wanted to share a wee snapshot of the extraordinary diversity of the way musicians responded to the variously blasted, ruined, permanently-changed landscapes and cityscapes around them, and the utterly transformed worlds of politics, relationships, social interactions - and musical possibilities - the war left in its wake.ĭespite what's become the hegemony of the modernist narrative, at no previous time in musical history do you find the same diversity of approaches to what the job of putting one note next to each other might mean. Today, The Rest Is Noise festival gears up for one of the most exciting weekends of this year-long exploration of 20th century music at the Southbank Centre, above all with a thrilling celebration of Stockhausen's most brilliantly, brutally, cosmically uncompromising pieces from the 1950s and early 60s.
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