Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in ... - Aaaaarg

MUSICAL PRECEDENTS TO ELECTRONIC MUSIC 35
music, applying his technique not only to pitches, timbres, and rhythms, but to
dynamics, densities, and amplitude as well.
Webern’s life was cut short by a tragic case of mistaken identity. After
surviving the Nazi regime in Germany, he was accidentally shot dead by an
Allied soldier in 1945, five months after the end of the war, while violating a
curfew to smoke a cigarette.
The “Art of Noise” In Music
By 1910, music patrons were politely humoring the eccentric approaches to
tonality that could be heard in the works of Debussy, Ives, Schoenberg, Satie,
and others. This set the stage for the next onslaught, for which they were hardly
ready: the use of noise as an element in music. This movement began,
appropriately, with the piano. In his Allegro barbaro (1911), Bartók suddenly
began to pound loud, dissonant “chords” on the keyboard. Even more alarming,
though, were the antics of a young composition student at the University of
California named Henry Cowell. In 1912, Cowell took Ives’s tone cluster to the
next level, making it the centerpiece of many compositions. Whereas Ives had
mostly restricted his clusters to two or three simultaneous notes, Cowell banged
on the keyboard with his forearm, the flat of his hand, or a length of wood in
order to depress an entire range of adjacent keys at the same time. Going even
further, he plucked and struck the strings on the inside of the piano. His
techniques were so well developed that he published a book called New Musical
Resources in 1930 (written in 1918 when he was only twentyone) to document
his efforts. Cowell was one of the most durable members of the American avantgarde
and gained notoriety for his performances during the 1920s and 1930s.
Even more startling was the Futurist movement, which sprang up in Italy in
1909. It was conceived and organized by poet Emilio Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti (1876–1944), and while its primary focus was in the visual arts, some
of its members became interested in new musical ideas. In 1911, the composer
Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955) published a manifesto, Futurist Music. In
this work, he expressed sentiments not unlike those being put forth in Germany,
France, and the United States. He was interested in expanding the range of
harmonic music through the use of semitones and agreed with the use of a
“chromatic atonal mode,” as previously introduced by Schoenberg. He called
this the “enharmonic mode,” and although he claimed this development as “a
magnificent conquest by Futurism,” his formula does not seem to be vastly
different from theories being considered elsewhere at that time. In addition,
Pratella hoped to “crush the domination of dance rhythm” in order to create a
freer approach to tempo, and to take charge of polyphony as a way of “fusing
harmony and counterpoint.”
In 1913, Pratella introduced his music at a concert at the Teatro Costanzi in
Rome. He conducted his piece called Musica Futurista for orchestra, much to the