This week saw competing conferences on atomic weapons and disarmament, one in Washington and one in Tehran. One can only hope some day for a “disarmament” race. For many, the threat of a nuclear catastrophe is ever-present in the back of our minds, like the hum of a light bulb. The nuclear age has certainly has certainly had a profound effect on music and has created currents which reverberate to this very day. In fact, just five years ago the opera Dr. Atomic premiered. The opera, by the American composer John Adams, focuses on the work of Robert Oppenheimer one of the inventors the atomic bomb. I will not be discussing that work today, however. In fact, you're not going to like the two selections I will be addressing. You will not like them because they are ugly. Like anything bitter, you're not supposed to like them, and that's the point. The first work is Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). The second work is German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of Children) (1955). Penderecki's Threnody is an intense and passionate work for 52 string instruments. The instruments often are called upon to play different pitches simultaneously. Can you visualize the volcanic clouds of ash that are in the news these day? This music creates discordant “clouds” of sound. Sometimes the instruments play very high which suggests screaming. At other times the instruments pitches gradually slide up and down evoking the wailing of sirens. In the end, this “sonic sculpture” is very a powerful testament to the unimaginable and the unrepeatable. As Penderecki himself said: “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.” Five years before Threnody, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed Gesang der Jünglinge. It is an assemblage of sounds on audio tape. Some of the sounds are completely synthetic, created in the audio lab, and have no basis in the natural acoustical world. Other prerecorded sounds, namely the singing of children are interwoven into the texture. But even the sounds of children singing is distorted. When I play this music for my students, some begin to giggle nervously because they don't know what to make of it. It just sounds like a jumble on noise. Then I offer my interpretation of this piece. This was written in the mid 50′s, in the depths of the cold war and nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. I recall as a child in the 60′s having to practice drills at school where we would assemble in the halls and put our heads down (as if that would do anything in the face of an atomic attack!). To me, what Gesang offers is a devastating juxtaposition between the technology and innocence. It is a creation written in the shadow of Hiroshima. Notice that it doesn't even take humans to perform this piece, just one person to press a button. Is this the sound of a technological tsunami sweeping over and consuming our future? This is my understanding, and if my students were laughing when they first heard this music, by the end of my discussion they weren't laughing any more. Many people feel that music of the 20th century music became too abstract, too cerebral, too technical (or ‘technological'). Composers have reacted to this and within Western art music there has been a pulling away over the past decades to a style that seems somehow more expressive, more “humane.” Perhaps this reflects a “musical disarmament.” Now perhaps we can convince world leaders to take their cues from music. BM
