Music at the Turn

Some, however, continued to nurture the old ways. Benjamin Britten’s powerful if small-scale operas, including a harrowing setting of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, sustained faith in the supremacy of the lyric stage. Deeply distressed by his first view of war-ravaged Dresden, Shostakovich — for whom the death of Joseph Stalin was an act of liberation — produced in his Eighth String Quartet a transfixing personal statement. Its mood was echoed, surely not entirely by coincidence, in the glistening, convoluted writing for full string orchestra in Krzysztof Penderecki’s wrenching Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, composed in the same year. Igor Stravinsky, who for most of his life had stood as a kind of antithesis to Schoenberg’s atonality, began after Schoenberg’s death to incorporate some of that methodology into his own work, notably the ballet Agon, arguably his last masterpiece. Even Aaron Copland, his fame secured by his "cowboy" ballets, tried his hand at a more abstract style in his 1957 Piano Fantasy. His Connotations was composed in 1962 for the opening offerings at Philharmonic Hall, the first component of New York’s Lincoln Center. The music drew far more critical admiration than the building.

76. GLASS/WILSON: Einstein on the Beach(1976)

77. REICH: Music for 18 Musicians (1976)

78. GÓRECKI: Symphony No. 3 (1976)

79. ERICKSON: Night Music (1978)

80. SONDHEIM: Sweeney Todd (1979)

81. UNG: Khse Buon (solo cello) (1980)

82. GUBAIDULINA: Offertorium (1980)

83. KURTÁG: Messages of the Late Miss R.V. Troussova (1980)

84. RILEY: Cadenza on the Night Plain (1981)

85. HARBISON: Mirabai Songs (1982)

86. MESSIAEN: Saint François d’Assise (1983)

87. CARTER: Triple Duo (1983)

88. PART: Frâtres (1980, revised 1983)

89. TAKEMITSU: riverrun (1984)

90. FELDMAN: For Philip Guston (1984)

91. BIRTWISTLE: Secret Theater (1984)

92. LIGETI: Etudes (1985)

93. LINDBERG: Kraft (1985)

94. SCHNITTKE: Viola Concerto (1985)

95. ADAMS: Nixon in China (1987)

96. CAGE: Fourteen (1990)

97. KANCHELI: Midday Prayers (1991)

98. KNUSSEN: Horn Concerto (1994)

99. TAN: Ghost Opera (1994)

100. SALONEN: L.A. Variations (1997)

The most obvious thing to be said about music in the last 100 years is that there isn’t just one thing to be said. The sonata tradition continues, grown dense with newly devised structural complexity from the Americans Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, and Britain’s Harrison Birtwistle and Oliver Knussen (who of all this group at least holds on to a sense of humor). German opera pretty much died out after Richard Strauss, but Olivier Messiaen’s spacious (if ponderous) 1983 Saint Francis couldn’t have been written if Wagner’s Parsifal hadn’t paved its way. Comic opera has spawned Broadway theater, a populous and populist brood written purely for money, but also with an occasional stage piece — Stephen Sondheim’s works, culminating in his Sweeney Todd; Leonard Bernstein’s output from On the Town to West Side Story — that suggests that artistic quality and box-office success can sometimes coexist. The collaboration of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev, in their Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, might have presaged a future for the epic-nationalist style that Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov had spawned 80 years before, but this has not yet happened. When Hitler’s proscription drove Germany’s leading composers to seek refuge in other countries, some came west with hopes of creating a new kind of musical drama — modeled, perhaps, after Wagnerdream of a "total artwork" — hand-in-hand with the film industry. The composers who succeeded best, however, were the ones who could scale their ambition down to fit the straitjacket of the Hollywood soundtrack.

The traditions held fast, but the impact of Einstein on the Beach was in its complete disassociation from any kind of musical past. Philip Glass had studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; more to the point, he had traveled extensively through the music of other worlds — India, North Africa, Central Asia — and absorbed the ways of making music out of stillness and repetition instead of sonata forms and 12-tone rows. With the poet/director/designer Robert Wilson, Glass evolved an allegory about the space age and the atomic threat, with the iconic figure of Albert Einstein (playing the violin but not speaking) as the generative force. Dance, chant (sometimes just strings of numbers repeated, repeated) and lighting effects blended into an uninterrupted five-hour musical trance. Unlike Stravinsky’s Rite of Springof 63 years before, Einstein hasn’t exactly become a repertory item; its physical proportions are too daunting. Like the Rite, however, it was like nothing that had come before.

Minimalism didn’t last very long in its pure state (with Terry Riley’s In C as its paradigm). Steve Reich, who had once played in the Philip Glass Ensemble, created one other minimalist masterpiece, the hourlong Music for 18 Musicians. John Adams’ early Shaker Loops and his stunning piano piece Phrygian Gates also belong on that list. Glass found it profitable to remain anchored in his old methods, but both Reich and Adams moved on, Reich most recently to multimedia dramatic works incorporating music and video, and Adams via the astounding "newsreel" opera Nixon in China and in a large legacy of orchestral works as often-played as anyone’s new serious music these days.