Chords and discords: Choral music of our time
In 1898 Charles Ives set Psalm 67 to music. The piece begins with an eight-part bitonal chord, the men singing in four parts in G minor and the women in four parts in C major. In The World of Twentieth Century Music, David Ewen describes what this portended: “Before Stravinsky, Ives worked with polyrhythms; before Bartók . . . discords; before Stravinsky and Milhaud . . . polytonality; before Schoenberg . . . atonality; before Alois Hába . . . quarter tones; before Henry Cowell . . . tone clusters; and long before Boulez, he introduced music of chance.”
Some listeners haven’t wanted to hear Ives’s work or that of any 20th-century composer, preferring the music of previous centuries. Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring even provoked a riot in Paris in 1913. The path of 20th-century music was perhaps inevitable, however, given the wars, mass killings, power struggles, and brutality of the times. Dissonance and jagged rhythms were natural outcomes of the cracking of foundations and strident battles of a world in destructive conflict. Composers reflected a culture that could not nestle in false cushions of a past nostalgia without denying its own existence.
Arnold Schoenberg went into seven years of silence (1915 to 1923) to figure out how to proceed and emerged with 12-tone method, which made all pitches equal. Olivier Messiaen wrote Quartet for the End of Time while a German prisoner of war between 1940 and 1942, utilizing the musicians in the prison camp: a violinist, clarinetist, cellist, and himself as pianist. And from 1959 to 1961 Krzysztof Penderecki lamented war’s destruction in his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, with its searing agony of 52 strings that do not play lyrical lines.
