An Added Degree Of Complexity

I remember as a child, at the end of the war, tuning in the family radio set at random and discovering a piece of music that captivated me. It was unfamiliar modern music, made of heterogeneous elements that somehow seemed to form a whole. It turned out to be Olivier Messiaen's Petites Liturgies. I immediately knew this music was my own. It supported my intuition of ‘modernity’ and made me understand what I found too simple, what bothered me in the airs from light opera and operettas that my father used to strum on the mandolin. In the Messiaen piece, a chorus of women's voices chants a strange, repetitive incantation with unusual intervals, amid an undescribable blend of birdsongs and chaotic sounds. I loved this complexity which combined opposite forms that traditionally were in separate categories: a singing voice, which to everyone signifies the essence of music, and noise. I was still unaware that in Europe and the United States, at the time the war was ending and in the immediate post-war period, several composers had independently decided to experiment with mixing music and noise in astonishingly fresh works: Pierre Schaeffer and his concrete music, John Cage and his prepared piano, Stock-hausen, Berio, and many others.

While pondering the Jungian concept of the transcendent function I understood why these works were sparked simultaneously. They were an unconscious response to the disaster of the war and the terrifying dissociation it had engendered. The mixture of opposites, the heterogeneous blend of music and noise - of ‘noble elements’ and ‘crude components’, as the alchemists would have said, fulfilled a compensatory function. The post-war composers were in a sufficiently critical conscious position to accommodate the new material coming from the unconscious intuitively. This is why their various works all expressed a new listening attitude, a new concept of musical forms and aesthetics, including, within a more complex structure, music