`I don't know," Beethoven once remarked, "what music is." If Beethoven didn't know, perhaps we shouldn't feel too bad about the fact that 200 years down the road, we still don't seem to know what music is; worse, as the 20th century draws to a cacophonous close, we often don't seem to know what is music. For Beethoven and his contemporaries, the essential mystery at the heart of music was offset by the cultural certainties which surrounded it; music had a place in society, and a set of recognisable forms - and, by extension, formal limits. Certain composers (notably, of course, Beethoven himself) pushed and pulled and worried at these limits, and as Beethoven's successors were increasingly gripped by the romantic notion of the tortured artist pitted against an uncaring world, the limits were stretched in all sorts of unexpected directions; but before 1900, nobody seriously attempted to blow them out of the water. Our century took the intricate patterns of melody, harmony, rhythm and form which had been woven over 1,300 years of musical tradition and, like a toddler on the rampage with a scissors and Sellotape, chopped, ripped and reassembled with reckless - and sometimes inspired - abandon.
As a result, music has moved out of the concert hall and into every nook and cranny of contemporary life. It's what you hear at the end of a telephone line when the person you want to speak to isn't available. It's Riverdance and rap and a concerto for vacuum cleaner and orchestra. It's harder to escape from than it was in Beethoven's day, but no easier to define - in fact, thanks to the fragmentation caused by the unprecedented explosion of musical activity in the first half of this century, the terms with which we now struggle to preserve some sort of formal demarcation lines (classical, rock, popular, art) have become almost comically imprecise.
The musical century opened with a riot: an audience incensed by music it couldn't listen to and couldn't understand. The furore caused by the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris in 1913 now provokes no more than a wry smile; the idea that the well-heeled concert-goers of today might jump up out of their seats and start screaming abuse at musicians and at each other is, frankly, unthinkable. Since the 1950s, rebellion has been the preserve of popular culture. Chasms, apparently unbridgeable, have opened up - not just between art music and popular music, but between all varieties of music in between. Art music audiences flock to Verdi and Mozart but avoid contemporary music like the plague. Popular music has itself split into a dozen different genres, many of them mutually antagonistic. To search for a thread through all of this - a clear line from Stravinsky to the Sex Pistols - smacks of insanity. So fasten your seat belts: it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Debussy, Schoenberg Stravinsky
The 20th-century musical explosion began not with a bang, but with the languid sound-scapes of Claude Debussy. An unlikely revolutionary, you might think; but that's only because his dreamy cadences are so easy on the ear that we've forgotten just how radical was his reworking of everything his predecessors had held dear. Traditional harmonies, romantic melodies, classical forms, Debussy did away with them all; wasn't it he who insisted that "a century which has aeroplanes should have its own music"? A familiar figure in the teeming night-time streets of turn-of-the-century Montmartre, Debussy was a regular attendant at the Tuesday meetings of a group of poets which included Mallarme and Verlaine, and was familiar with the paintings of Monet and Renoir. It was the cutting edge of Western art culture, but it was the kindest of cuts; theirs was the art of mist and suggestion, of shadows flitting across sun-dappled spaces. Within a year of the death of Queen Victoria and the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Debussy had fashioned Maurice Maeterlinck's strange and unsettling symbolist play, Pelleas et Melisande, into an opera unlike anything that graced the stages of the world before or since. Eerie, sinister, ephemeral, an extraordinary combination of heightened emotion and understated simplicity, Pelleas paved the way for music to move into another dimension; but, strange as it is, no one could claim Debussy's music is alien or impossible to listen to. Such claims were reserved for the composers who followed.
Many people hold Arnold Schoenberg responsible for the death of Western art music; others say it died with Stravinsky. Yet neither of these "murderers" saw himself as anything other than just another composer working at the centre of the European classical tradition. "I am a conservative who was forced to become a radical," declared Schoenberg (his tongue, perhaps, only slightly in his cheek), while Stravinsky told a group of students: "Be a revolutionary if you must, but never be an anarchist. Not even the nicest anarchist." Looking back from the lofty vantage point of half a century or so, it's easy to place the two composers at opposite ends of the musical spectrum: Stravinsky, like a hyperactive Pied Piper, leading his merry band of supporters on a creative swoop through three centuries of music, forcing the familiar sounds through a sort of Stravinskian sieve so they emerged re-energised and reinvigorated, Haydn oratorios turning into the Symphony of Psalms, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro mutating into The Rake's Progress, while a grim-faced Schoenberg keels the pot, boiling the magic potion of melody and harmony until nothing is left with which to make music but the 12 unappetising lumps of the chromatic tone row, to be doled out with ever-stricter instructions as to how they should be combined.
Unquestionably, Schoenberg's has been the more radical influence; once he had abandoned first the notion of a "home" key, then the idea of an organic "tune", there was no going back; the sound of art music had changed for good. Composers might reject Schoenberg, but they couldn't ignore him - especially when Stravinsky, too, abandoned the pounding rhythm and dry neo-classical humour of his early and middle years, and defected to the 12-tone system in the late 1950s.
Twelve equal notes bobbing contentedly along on their stave; the two giants of the first quarter of the century united in their views of compositional theory; how secure, how straightforward the course of Western music must have seemed, 50 years ago. In fact, of course, instead of uniting under the Modernist banner, composers began a flurry of experiment that would result in a bewildering array of compositional styles from impressionism through expressionism to neo-classicism to futurism, experimentalism, serialism, post-Webernism, electronic music, aleatoric music, minimalism, neo-romanticism, post minimalism and postmodernism. None of this music could be said to constitute easy listening; some of it was downright infernal. Audiences began to look around for alternatives and, as luck would have it, another kind of revolution was in the offing.
Technology and other traumas
`Wow: (n) a slow variation in pitch caused by variation in the speed of the turntable. Flutter: (n) low-frequency tremor caused by defects in the turntable." Wow and flutter. It's a measure of how far recording technology has come that, for those of us accustomed to the squeaky-clean sound-world of digital compact disc, wow and flutter are but dim and distant memories. Before 1920, all music was live music; by the mid-1920s some 100 million records a year were being manufactured in the United States. The significance of the statistic is staggering. Recordings give the listener total control. You don't like the slow movement of the symphony? Then skip it. You like this song? Then listen to it, and as soon as it's finished, listen to it again, and again, and again. You don't like Schoenberg? Never mind; here's some nice Tchaikovsky instead. (And if you don't like Tchaikovsky, stick around - rock'n'roll is just around the corner.)
The zip fastener was invented in 1923, the aerosol spray in 1941. In between came the biro, instant coffee and the dawn of a new musical era. In the prosperous and confident America of the post-war years, young men and women who had previously assumed that to grow up was to grow to resemble their parents, were discovering they could cause a good deal more of a social splash - and have a great deal more fun - by looking completely different. The drop-waisted dress and the bob haircut represented more than just a fashion trend; they heralded a new age of man. From now on children would no longer grow into adults, they would grow into teenagers. They would have their own clothes, their own books, their own music; a self-referential cultural world into which, by definition, adults were not welcome.
By the end of the century youth culture would have exploded into a mass-marketing phenomenon, driving a wedge between popular culture and "high art", with devastating consequences for art music, in particular. But few people would have predicted such an outcome when, in 1917, the first jazz record by The Original Dixieland Band caused a sensation both in America and in Europe. Early jazz bands took the harmonic structures of classical art music and overlaid them with the melodies of the light classical and ballad traditions. Nothing particularly sensational about that - until the mixture was fused with the syncopated rhythms and improvisatory ideals of West Africa and black Latin America to create a heady, sensual sound that scandalised white conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Sermons were preached and barriers were raised, but it was too late - white teenagers had discovered black music, and it was only a matter of time before the chord progressions and tonalities of "jump band" rhythm and blues and the gospel-based vocal styles of blues "shouters" were fused, in turn, with the beat of honky-tonk piano to produce music so overtly sexual that it made jazz seem as innocent as a minuet.
The early practitioners of this music were a motley crew. Chuck Berry was a hairdresser in Saint Louis, Missouri. Bill Haley, whose 1954 hit, Rock Around the Clock, was to be a musical landmark for generations to come, was a country and western bandleader from Pennsylvania.
But it was a truck driver from Memphis, Tennessee who, though he was no songwriter or pop philosopher, took popular music and made of it a screaming, pulsating, testosterone-soaked affair which put paid to any lingering notion that it might be possible to bridge the musical generation gap. Initially, the effect of Elvis Presley's pelvic gyrations was to cause young girls to swoon and their mothers to recoil in horror, but once the teenage genie was out of the bottle, it became clear that rock'n'roll was about more than just sexual freedom; it was about social empowerment. As Mikal Gilmore writes in his study of the cultural disruption caused by rock music, Night Beat, rock'n'roll showed "it was capable of inspiring massive generational and social ferment, and that its rise could even have far-reaching political consequences . . . [rock'n'roll presented] black musical forms - and consequently black sensibilities and black causes - to a wider (and whiter) audience than ever before." Once it had found its audience, rock'n'roll went from strength to strength. Earlier forms of popular music - Tin Pan Alley, big band swing - had done the same, ebbed and flowed as fans gravitated first towards them and then, in search of sound pastures new, away again. Rock music, however, was destined to follow a rather different course; its audience would grow along with it, and the music would expand its aesthetic accordingly. Elvis raised the issues, but it was up to others to raise the stakes. Within a decade, it was done.
The art of rock'n'roll
The 1960s: regarded by some as the high point of popular culture, revised and reviled by others, rock historians can't ignore the decade any more than historians of classical art music can ignore Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The years began as the age of innocence, with social and political developments in the United States - the election of John F. Kennedy to the US presidency, the space travel programme, the burgeoning civil rights movement - helping to create a climate of optimism and opportunism, a feeling that anything was possible. But alongside that optimism, an increasingly sophisticated young electorate, dissatisfied with the official version of events, was paying less attention to the gyrations of its singers and greater attention to the form and content of the songs.
The swing-along sounds of Dixieland jazz were refined and developed by a steady stream of sophisticated musicians, from Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington through to John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Gil Evans who, though working in an improvisatory medium, would produce works of sufficient quality and timelessness to rival those of the classical repertoire.
And between them, Bob Dylan and The Beatles - the former from the acoustic-folk end of the popular spectrum, the latter from the clap-happy teen-idol side of the tracks - would sharpen the earthy, blunt instrument they had inherited into an articulate, intelligent music which appealed not just to screaming teenagers but to adults as well. Albums such as Blood on the Tracks and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band not only left rock music with a legacy of songs which would, in time, be declared classics of their kind - they declared, for once and for all, that rock'n'roll was now art. And if rock'n'roll had become art, then art music was in trouble.
Art music under attack
Research has, for reasons best known to itself, shown that the sound of fingernails scratching on slate is an international sound phobia. The noise is not particularly loud, nor does it signify danger; it is simply, for most people in most places, excruciating. Cynics might say that as the end of the millennium approaches, contemporary art music produces much the same reaction. Today's composers can only look back with envy at the days when colleagues who had scored a hit at the opera house would be carried shoulder-high through the streets - for the second half of the 20th century, such popular acclaim has, with a few almost accidental exceptions, been reserved for the purveyors of popular culture.
We have already noted the role of rock music in offering an acceptable alternative to those who wanted to think about music, but not too deeply; while rock was developing that acceptable face during the 1950s and 1960s, art music was rapidly becoming unacceptable to all but the most specialised, musically educated audiences. In theory, it was terrifically exciting. Having unpicked the fundamentals of tonality, rhythm and form, composers could make music out of anything, and the more radical of them proceeded to do just that, from Edgard Varese's steely sci-fi sound-scapes to John Cage's 1954 piano "composition" in which a pianist came out, sat at the piano for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds doing absolutely nothing, and left again. It was interesting, thought provoking; amusing, even. But was it music? Audiences voted with their feet, and not in the affirmative.
The violinist Yehudi Menuhin recalls in his memoir, Unfinished Journey, how, having commissioned a violin sonata from the American composer Ross Lee Finney for the opening of the American pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Fair, he included it in a programme which he and his sister were to give in London shortly afterwards. "It being a rather difficult 12-tone piece, we inserted it between safely familiar works, the sharp filling in the sandwich. About a week before the concert my London manager reported disappointing ticket sales. My tactic was to remove Ross Lee Finney from the advertised programme and replace his sonata with Beethoven's Kreutzer. The tickets straight away sold out." At the concert Menuhin "gently admonished" the capacity audience. "We announced we would play the Kreutzer, and so we will," he told them. "But first you must listen to Ross Lee Finney." The tactic smacks of a bribe, and so it was - get the horrible, discordant stuff out of the way first, and you'll be rewarded with a nice, tasty chunk of Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Some 20 years later, audiences are still being bribed to take their new music "medicine", to the point where, if it's difficult for composers of contemporary art music to get an airing for new pieces, to get those same pieces played for a second or third time is pretty much out of the question.
Where did it all go wrong? True, a good deal of late 20th-century art music is hard for the listener to get a handle on. Unlike classical tonal music, it deliberately avoids repetition and breaks down the structure in which is it easy to recognise "home", in the musical sense, as consonance following dissonance. But such difficulties do not in themselves explain the widespread, blanket rejection of new music by an audience which might reasonably be expected, 300 years after the birth of J. S. Bach, to be broadminded, musically experienced and tolerant. Why do audiences assume that contemporary pieces will be dissonant, shapeless and most likely meaningless rather than - as is, in fact, often the case - exhilarating, challenging and even, sometimes, beautiful? The existence of a huge body of recorded music from the 18th and 19th centuries must, surely, be partly responsible. With an almost unlimited quantity of reasonably familiar music out there waiting to be heard, listeners have a cast-iron excuse for shirking the unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable. Once the principle of shirking is established, it becomes enshrined in box-office figures and programming plans - a vicious circle which, since mid-century, has been spiralling nastily out of control. The existence of a well-defined body of popular music may also have played its part. A generation of music-lovers which has imbibed hook-based pop songs with its breakfast cereal will tolerate any amount of messing around with rhythm and form, but will be extremely reluctant to swallow the wide intervals and nervy melodic patterns of late 20th-century art music, fleeing instead to the safety of Vivaldi, Brahms and REM.
Not fusion, but fission
The story of music in the second half of the century has thus become one not of fusion, but of fission. The initial split between art music on the one hand and popular music on the other has been mirrored by a myriad splinterings into various layers of "isms" and sub-genres. In the 1970s and early 1980s the pop world was strung out between disco, which eventually - Michael Jackson's 1982 album, Thriller, the biggest-selling album in pop history, notwithstanding - collapsed under the weight of its own meaninglessness, and punk, in which the self-loathing of a generation glowed red-hot for a few brief years before burning out. The same rock writers who had, when writing about Elvis Presley and The Rolling Stones, enthused about primeval emotions and raw danger, could wearily dismiss the audience at a Sex Pistols concert as time-warped punks who simply wanted to act out the surface images of revolt. Is rock'n'roll growing up, or just growing old? By the end of the 1990s there is neither a popular mainstream to speak of, nor has there, for the past 20 years, been a superstar band which commands the kind of universal respect The Rolling Stones took as their due.
Boy bands, heavy metal bands, bands that consist of a DJ, a handful of records and a clutch of electronic equipment; all rotate in more or less parallel universes around a plodding middle-of-the road centre fed by dreadful retro radio stations playing a non-stop diet of the blandest music of the past four decades. The latter is, finally, being recognised as a danger rather than an irritant. If rock music isn't careful its audience will, in time, be as stubbornly resistant in their way to new music, as classical audiences - and then what? Will music in the coming centuries be a museum art, the discs spinning in their glass cases, Mozart and Madonna and Bach and Bowie, and nothing new under the sun?
Towards a new musical style
In his book Life's Grandeur, the scientist Stephen Jay Gould castigates the insatiable desire for innovation which has, he believes, brought late 20th-century music in the developed world to the point of crisis. We have, he reckons, done it all. "Suppose the mile run had disappeared as a competitive sport as soon as 100 people covered the distance in less than four minutes," he writes. "Given an ethic that exalts perennial originality in style of artistic composition, the history of classical music . . . " may fall into such a domain. "Perhaps," he concludes, "we have already explored most of what even a highly sophisticated audience can deem accessible." He even quotes the remark made by our old friend Beethoven to a disgruntled musician who wondered aloud whether the Razoumovsky Quartets could be defined as music; "they aren't for you, but for a later age". To draw such a conclusion is to fatally underestimate the human race's need to make music - to create tunes that punters can, however tunelessly, whistle as they leave the theatre. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr is much nearer the mark when he declares that music has been crucial to human culture since prehistoric times and may even, in a post-scientific age, be performing some of the functions which were formerly the province of the great religions: "Music is a source of reconciliation, exhilaration, and hope which never fails."
As we near the end of a musical century which has, in its way, been even more extraordinary than the classical and romantic centuries which preceded it, there is much to deplore on both the rock and classical fronts. The dearth of significant female voices, for one thing; women composers still represent an exotic rarity on the classical scene, and despite the much-touted "girl power" of the past decade, women in rock are still largely corralled into whatever areas the male powers-that-be have deemed appropriate. The almost total absence of voices from outside the American-European mainstream is another; and we have seen how the existence of an enormous, stodgy centre has been gradually pushing new voices further and further into the outer reaches of the musical universe.
But there is also much to celebrate. Though there are still huge chasms to be bridged, certain barriers are being quietly dismantled. When the violinist formerly known as Nigel Kennedy declared, less than a decade ago, that he no longer wanted to wear a monkey suit and play the music of dead composers, he was thought to be behaving like a spoiled teenager; but the subsequent success of classical chamber ensembles who clothed themselves in Issy Miyake and collaborated with Elvis Costello show that he may, instead, have been pointing the way to a new kind of communication between audience and performer, a new kind of musical style into which composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage and Michael Nyman have been quick to tune.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a halo of mainstream celebrity descended on the shoulders of an unlikely assortment of classical types: the tenors Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo; the Polish composer Henryck Gorecki; and the essence of eccentric Englishness, John Tavener. With their concert at the Caracalla Baths outside Rome during the World Cup Finals in 1990, the tenors nimbly hopped on board a fin-de-siecle cultural bandwagon which was to place footballers on a level with rock stars and supermodels as icons of popular culture, and bring opera back from the sidelines - if only temporarily - as a suitable pursuit for trendy folk. Following a modest amount of radio exposure, Gorecki's third symphony - its slow movement based around a haunted, haunting vocal line - made a brief but spectacular foray into the pop charts. The jury is still out as to whether Tavener's rhapsodic 1987 cello concerto, The Protecting Veil, is a masterpiece or a mistake; but it remains a piece that can fill, rather than empty, concert halls all over the world. An unlikely assortment, perhaps, but they do have one musical element in common: melody. Stephen Jay Gould may be right; western art music may never again produce the sort of melodies which Handel, Haydn and company churned out by the yard. But as long as we can produce tunes, even scraps of tunes - the delicately-etched phrases of Takemitsu's piano pieces; the two-bar orchestral introduction to Bittersweet Symphony, itself a sampled version of The Rolling Stones' The Last Time, which introduced The Verve to every ear within reach of radio and television; the cheeky, three-note motif out of which the drum'n'bass outfit The Vengaboys have fashioned one of the catchiest songs in living memory - humanity won't be silenced. On the contrary, we'll rattle and hum right into the 21st century, and beyond.
