Music of the Western World [antikvár]

The late twentieth century provides us with a unique vantage point as we face the past and study our musical heritage. Ours is an era of transition, in music as well as other arts, and this sense of rapid change, of how relative everything is—be it in science or culture —has taught us that our previous ideas about the history of music really only apply to the history of Western music. In the wice of this revolution in outlook—a revolution fostered by many avant-garde movements—we find ourselves just beginning to explore realms of music that until recently seemed very mysterious to us: music from the remote past, from before recorded history; and music from areas of the world beyond the influence of European culture and traditions. The composers of today have been forced to become musical anthropologists. They must study a great variety of musical systems, many of which, at an earlier time, were simply exotic objects of curiosity. A composer might draw upon them for an interesting effect, but that was all. Now of course not only composers, but audiences as well, are expected to have some famiUarity with the sounds of Indian, Asian, African, and Latin music. And witness the acceptance of jazz into the sphere of serious music in the period between the two world wars. This in itself might be considered the single most striking event in the study of pritnitive music, especially in the areas of rhythm and tone color. The study of primitive music has by now branched out in many exciting new directions, and the elements of this music have found their way into the works of some of our most sophisticated contemporary composers, from Stravinsky to Varese. And if we consider the source material for Oliver Messiaen's imitations of bird song, or Honegger's machine music, we reahze that composers have even taken us beyond the realm of human sound. The end result of this direction of experiment was electronic music, beginning first with the tape recording of natural sounds, but eventually, through the use of special equipment, moving on to the generation of "pure" sound itself. Every conceivable variety and element of sound is therefore involved in today's approach to music, from acoustical material in its raw state, through the familiar sounds of musical instruments, to the most elaborate and bizarre sounds right out of the laboratory. In a sense, then, the twentieth century has brought us back to where we began, and to a point even eariier than that, before man's appearance. This is how enormous our contemporary range of interest in music seems to be. But of course this is not a scholarly history of music, and we must ignore many of the speculations concerning the remote past, as well as the musical traditions of other cultures, simply to do justice to our subject: the development of music in the Western world from its earUest recorded period to its most recent experiments. In prehistoric and ancient times music was thought to have magical powers. Primitive peoples believed that the gods always paid heed to dances of supplication {opposite page), whereas the Bible narrates the story of how the seven walls of Jericho were toppled by the trumpets of Joshua's army (above). 15