Rage Towards the Machines
Chaos makes interesting bedfellows with innovation. The period of turmoil in Russia during World War I brought uncertainty in government. The early 1920s allowed composers free cultural reign for a time, until the reorganization of state influence over public affairs would weave its watchful eye back to the sounds of stage and symphony. The 1941 Pedrillo (named after the American Musicians Federation president at the time) Recording Ban created a vacuum that is often attributed to the rise of bebop and swing. (Kenny Clark mentions bebop initially being referred to as modern jazz in Paul Du Noyer’s 2003 The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music). “Jazz in New Orleans, The Postwar Years through 1970” by Charles Suhor goes to great lengths discussing the advent to new ideas whilst evading the watchful eyes of cultural acceptance. The advantage of disorder can stoke the flames of modernism by missing the boat of measurement against popular standards.
It’s not to say that new ideas are reliant on governmental chaos to flourish, although there is a body of evidence supporting its existence. There are examples of cultural success stories that support the opposite, as well. By avoiding chaos, some composers achieved fame at the cost of what some may say was the Avant-garde nature of their creations. Igor Stravinsky and Serge Rachmaninoff are famous Russian composers that were not particularly welcomed in Russia. Stravinsky had been exiled permanently, and both ended up doing much of their work from homes in Hollywood. The state music associations in the newly formed Soviet Union considered Modernism part of the classism that communism sought to destroy. While it took about 5 years for the USSR to dismantle the alphabet soup of unions supporting various artistic and compositional endeavors to the watchful eyes of the state in a consolidated committee of musicians, the time it took them to decide on how to represent the country’s identity allowed for a number of fruitful experiments. Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky would go on to use influence from important composers of the late romantic period, like Wagner and Chopin, and incorporate classical modernism deviations from traditional meters, tonality and form. While gaining world-wide popularity, the really weird stuff stayed behind in Russia.
Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges” and Dmitry Shostakovich’s “The Nose” are two examples of Radical Modernism that show what an exceptionally good segment of governmental disorder can get you. Both these compositions are incredible deviations from the standards of their time. While they may just be dismissed as “performance art” or the abstract today, I would argue that they would still be examined with high curiosity if they were given first treatment in our current world stage. Both of these pieces occur in a period of reorganization in the Soviet Union notable for its search of identity. Surreal that this search would ultimately end in Socialist Realism, (a vague and constrictive expression that was subject to constant criticisms of its product by nature of its definition), but pioneers that were given free reign to explore do enormous good for those who follow.
Another category of the Modernism in the early 1900s that is usually considered a side note of the period is Futurism. Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo are two common names attributed to the art. I gained an interest in Russolo because of his abstract concepts for instrumentation. Much of Futurism relied on the rejection of standard practices and Russolo went all out in his compositions using the Intonarumori (a collection of experimental musical instruments). A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico in Paris resulted in violence from the audience. The outbreak of war shortly after precluded any subsequent showings, and it wouldn’t be until the 1920’s that he would get a chance to exhibit his musical ideas. His instruments reminded my of my first impressions of Dubstep, and the concepts of Futurism help the evolutions of music into area of the abstract, including the contrasting philosophies that would emerge in electronic music of the American East and West Coasts. New ideas of instrumentation helped bridge the gap to electronic acceptance in the practice of crafting sound into song. So strange that it would germinate from an acoustic source.
This is a nice springboard into the topic of electronic music emergence in the early 20th century, but the groundwork laid by Modernism has a bounty of roads to travel. Look for more interesting tinkering into this arena this week as I consider the minds of Bela Bartok, Charles Ives, along with Jazz and Rock artists as we carve our ways to the fascinating world to innovators in San Francisco that brought us “modular” controllers for producting oscillations and frequency manipulators, to the creators of the Mini Moog and the more familiar keyboard controllers for electric music.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reproduced Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Italian Futurism. If you’d like to hear what the edges of Modernism in the early 1900s sounded like, have a listen, then go make some new music today with whatever you find around the house. History will thank you for it.