But Is It Music? (1945-1989) In Their Own Words: 20th Century Composers

MUSIC: "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" by Sir Edward Elgar

As the 20th century dawned over Europe,

concert halls were a haven of tradition and emotional expression.

The operas of Wagner and Puccini,

the symphonies of Brahms and Beethoven

and both the pomp AND circumstance of Elgar were delighting

audiences who knew where they were with classical music.

But all that was soon to change.

SHRIEKING AND SCREAMING

In a series of shocking advances,

classical music was transformed beyond recognition,

mirroring the violence of world events

and innovation of the technological age.

In this series, we will unlock the BBC archives to re-awaken

the voices of some of the century's greatest composers.

..Dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah!

It should crackle with sharpness.

Together, they give a first-hand account of a revolution in sound.

Sorry, you're getting louder already. Do keep it quiet, please.

Absolute hush.

-Four o'clock in the

-BLEEP

-morning I was up doing this.

Why don't you deliver these messages?

In this episode, we hear from the generation of composers

coming of age in Europe and America in the wake of the Second World War.

Faced with the crisis of creating art in a post-war age,

these composers took music to its very limits,

before bringing it back into the mainstream again.

Using all of these, we can build up any sound we can possibly imagine, almost.

But not the sort of melody people would perhaps hum in the bath.

There is a sort of inner humming.

I don't think I can quite compete with the Beatles. They have a slightly larger public than I do.

Classical music always means something that happened

a long time ago, and this music's happening right now.

Great Britain. 1945.

With the country in ruins and a population forever changed

by the horrors of war, a new cultural landscape was emerging.

A month after VE day, Sadler's Wells Theatre in London

opened its doors with a very British opera.

It was a work that matched the desolate mood of the country,

and it propelled its 31-year-old composer from the bright young thing

of British music to a major figure on the world stage.

Benjamin Britten is one of the most important British composers

to have worked. In particular, his contribution to opera

is absolutely vital.

The scene - a fishing town at the end of the 19th century.

The occasion - an important one for British music.

London's famous Sadler's Wells Theatre is opening

for the first time since the Blitz with a new work

by the young British composer Benjamin Britten, his first opera.

Peter Grimes is an intense psychological drama

based on a poem by George Crabbe.

Grimes is a gruff outsider,

living in a claustrophobic Suffolk fishing village

where the provincial locals torment him with false accusations of murder.

# ..My sorrows dry

# And the tide will turn

# ALL: Grimes!

# Peter Grimes...! #

Peter Grimes was a watershed. The reception of it by the audience

was immediate. It hit everyone in the solar plexus.

There's no question that it turned Britten

from being the promising young composer that he had been,

into a world-class superstar.

Though a relatively challenging work,

Peter Grimes remained classical music as people understood it

and offered reassurance that culture could continue in a post-war world.

# Fond memory bring the light

# Of other days around me... #

Britten very rarely discussed his music on television.

But he made an exception in 1968

when he revealed that his composing career started precociously

early, despite there being very little music at his school.

There was no music at all.

That's not quite true. At the end of each term, on the last evening,

we sang some songs.

-That was nice.

-That was very nice.

That was the limit of our music.

How come when you were nine, you wrote an oratorio,

-and I believe you wrote an aria for God in C Minor.

-Yes, yes.

I hoped it was a key He'd like!

The social isolation felt by Peter Grimes

had many parallels in Britten's own life.

Britten was gay at a time when homosexual acts were illegal

and spent the war in America as a conscientious objector.

He was also culturally isolated, by opting to live

outside the London scene,

a choice he explained in a BBC radio interview.

Why do you choose to live in Aldeburgh rather than in London

-or some other...?

-I find big cities distracting.

I find I like, I've always liked,

the country life since I was a child, particularly the sea,

and I have very deep roots in Suffolk,

and I cannot work and live without roots.

Benjamin Britten's a nice man. He do come on the beach in the wintertime

if you're fishing and he'll stop and have a word with you.

Ain't got nothing about Benjamin Britten, he's a very nice man.

Bringing the mountain to Mohammad,

Britten founded a music festival in his hometown in 1948.

The Aldeburgh Festival, which is still going today,

was thriving when BBC News visited Britten at home

to hear more about his pet project.

I think it expresses the tastes of two or three of us

who have the pleasure and luck to live in Aldeburgh.

Peter Pears and Imogen Holst and myself have rather strong,

perhaps individual tastes in music, and the Aldeburgh Festival

really comprises music and art of all kinds that we like.

Luckily, after 12 years, we've built up a nice audience

that likes the same kinds of things as we do.

And if I may put it this way, everybody mucks in at Aldeburgh, do they?

I'd like to emphasise that fact. It's not by any means

just our festival, the few who select the programmes,

everyone in the whole town -

everyone is perhaps too great a word -

but most people are involved with the festival in some way or other.

The amount of work that is done by the ordinary man and woman

in the street is incredible.

I cater for my local trade. I don't even stop to think about

what visitors might want.

If I haven't got what they want, that's just too bad.

In any case, they come in and their attitude is, "Have you got so-and-so?"

You'd think it was Fortnum & Mason, not the village shop.

Someone unlikely to pop in for a pint of milk was the Queen,

who visited in 1967 to open a new building for the burgeoning festival.

I have much pleasure in declaring open

the Maltings Concert Hall And Opera House.

# God Save the Queen. #

Britten was quite guarded in television interviews,

but a few months after the Queen's visit,

the BBC went behind the scenes of the Aldeburgh Festival

and captured a candid portrait of Britten

as he rehearsed his new work, The Building Of The House.

Same place, please.

Quite a new mood.

Shh. No, no...

Sorry, you're getting louder already. Do keep it quiet, please.

Absolute hush.

Chorus, your first entry may seem in this very lively acoustic to be rather confusing.

Keep going at the same speed that we've been going on.

# Accept the Lord the... #

You see? At figure five, "What men do build,"

it's just a natural warmth as you go up. Don't let it

flower into a sort of Tosca-like sound. Keep it quite hushed.

If people can't hear what I say, can you complain? I'll try and support

my voice. Straight in at four, please - "Accept."

That's good!

I've heard a lot of composers being rather rude about Britten, actually.

He's not a composer that every other composer admires,

in the way that, let's say, everyone admires Stravinsky.

I think that's partly because his music is almost deliberately non-intellectual,

and he does some very, very simple things,

which work when he does them, and I think possibly other composers

are a little sniffy about it, because it's the kind of simple trick

that you can't really get away with unless you're Britten.

I have a particular inclination as a composer to want to write music that is useful.

And if someone asks me to do something,

my inclination is to want to please them.

While the austerity of Britten's music provided a fitting soundtrack

to post-war Britain, across the Atlantic, it was party time.

America was triumphant, brash and full of optimism.

The musical accompaniment to these buoyant times

was some of the best show tunes ever written,

courtesy of the most successful American composer

and conductor of the 20th century, Leonard Bernstein.

# New York, New York

# It's a hell of a town...! #

The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Bernstein made his name

in the '40s with the musical On The Town and the ballet Fancy Free.

But his craving for respect as a concert composer tormented him

throughout his life.

Leonard Bernstein's reputation has changed completely since he died.

Bernstein was then primarily a showbiz composer,

and people sort of, "Yes, yes, he's also written symphonies

"but that's not in the same field," but now people are realising

that his symphonies are in fact also important music,

and his piano concerto, otherwise known as The Age Of Anxiety,

these are pieces admired and enjoyed by audiences all round the world.

Bernstein talked to Humphrey Burton about The Age Of Anxiety

on the BBC arts programme Workshop.

Based on a poem by WH Auden,

the piece is a symphony for piano and orchestra,

but Bernstein couldn't resist the show tunes that made him

beloved of Broadway audiences.

I can't play it, it's very difficult. My God!

It's terribly difficult and some of our best pianists can't play it, so why should I?

-Anyway, this is the scherzo, this is the party.

-It has a pop song in it.

Well, it was a song I'd written originally for my first musical,

which was called On The Town, and the song was to have been called -

it was never used - but it was to have been called

Ain't Got No Tears Left.

You won't believe that, but that was really the title.

It went sort of like this.

Anyway, it did finally appear in the Age Of Anxiety in the scherzo,

this way.

My left hand won't work right.

Anyway, that becomes a rather major part of the scherzo,

as does this odd section.

The Age Of Anxiety is one of several symphonies

Bernstein wrote in a career that spanned nearly 50 years.

I'm rather fond of that.

He also wrote operas, choral works, concertos and chamber pieces.

But what he's most famous for is the score to West Side Story,

the 1957 Broadway musical that became a multi-Oscar winning film.

It's just a shame they spelt his name wrong on the poster.

# I like to be in America

# OK by me in America

# Everything free in America

# For a small fee in America. #

Bernstein's most remarkable appearance on our screens

came in 1985, when BBC cameras captured a dark side

of the genial composer as he conducted a recording

of West Side Story with superstar singers Jose Carreras

and Kiri Te Kanawa.

Bernstein is, probably at some points in that documentary,

at one of his lowest ebbs that I've ever seen.

I think a lot's been spoken about why is he so angry with the singers,

and I think what's being played out is the anguish within himself,

and perhaps this sense that by hiring the top operatic singers

to sing West Side Story, he will finally prove to the world

that it's a serious piece of music.

# ..With a shock

# Phone'll jingle... #

No.

You're ahead of me. Pepe, watch me, not the music.

And if you make a mistake, we'll go back.

You know this. When you look at the music, you sing wrong words.

Just look at me.

Jose? Coming. Coming.

Say it, "Coming."

John! Please don't do this!

Don't give elocution lessons over the microphone, OK?

Maddening.

32.

32. Come on. Call it.

-Something's coming.

-Take 130.

I don't have numbers, Maestro, I'm sorry about that.

I'll sing it for you.

# Comin' to me. #

131.

# Comin' to me. #

# Could it be? Yes, it could

# Something's coming, something good

# If I can wait

# Something coming... #

You went to G Major instead of F Major.

Also, "If I can wait", you're not waiting.

You're ahead.

Maybe we should break and listen to it?

Why not? Why not?

-Take a break.

-Take 10.

Carreras was very generous and said

he didn't mind being pilloried for a moment

because at least the public saw what the sweat and tears was

that went into making a record like this. What would one give

to have Richard Wagner rehearsing the Ring back in 1876,

to have heard what he said, or heard Brahms,

so we are lucky television has archived, as it were,

Leonard Bernstein in a way that very few composers have been archived.

By clinging to conventional sounds and making classical music

accessible to millions, Bernstein and Britten gave the impression that

music in the post-war world would be the same as it had ever been.

But a new generation of artistic rebels had very different plans.

Determined to find new sounds to match a rapidly changing world,

they threw out not only the baby with the bath water...

..but got rid of the bath itself.

Every convention of music was called into question,

as contemporary classical music became less at home in concert halls

and more a form of performance art.

The godfather of this experimental age worked in the same

1950s New York as Bernstein, but to very different ends.

As a student, John Cage was taught composition by the firebrand

of early 20th century music, Arnold Schoenberg.

The two ultimately fell out. Cage was convinced

that music could be more than a system of strict rules.

He freed himself from pesky constraints like melody,

instruments and, in one infamous case, sound itself.

John Cage is, of course, incredibly fascinating as an artist,

as a thinker and as a composer.

It is fitting that this radical pioneer was the son of an inventor.

In his late 20s,

Cage was asked to write the music for a dance called the Bacchanale.

When playing by the rules failed to produce the percussive

African sound he needed, Cage turned to his tool box for a solution

and created what he called the prepared piano.

I thought what was wrong was not me but the piano.

So I went into the kitchen and I got a pie plate and I put it on

the strings, and I saw I was going in the right direction,

but the pie plate bounced around, so then I got

a wood screw, with grooves on it.

Then I put nuts that were larger than the screws themselves

so they would rattle.

For some reason, I knew that it was better

not to have a collection that was entirely beautiful,

but that it was nice to have some things in the collection

that were distinctively not as beautiful as the others.

That gave a kind of breadth.

Under the influence of Eastern philosophies,

Cage increasingly removed human control from classical music,

resisting the romantic 19th century view of the artist

as an almost divine vessel of inspiration.

I came to the intention of making my work non-intentional,

because I had no desire to express my ideas or my feelings.

I wanted rather to open my mind

to what was outside of my mind.

And so I had to become free of my...

likes and dislikes.

Instead, he put his composition in the hands of chance.

He would decide each note using Zen Buddhism,

the ancient Chinese book of i-Ching,

and even the toss of a coin.

Or, in the case of this piece from 1957 - a wind-up toy.

PIANO "RESPONDS" TO TOY'S MOVEMENTS

I found he was lovely.

Very easy-going, of course. That's the thing.

You try to find out what he wanted and he'd say,

"Whatever makes you feel happy." You know!

And you think, well, no, I really wanted to know,

but he won't say!

But the only thing he did want to be really exact about

were the timings on the stopwatch. Those were important things.

When the BBC's Omnibus programme conducted an audiology experiment

on a range of British celebrities in 1972,

Cage's music produced extreme reactions.

This is Japanese Macbeth music, I would say.

Very spooky!

Yes, well, this music goes with being strapped into a chair

with things tied to your heart.

And lights shining in your eyes.

Ouch.

In limiting his control as a composer,

and giving sounds a life of their own,

Cage produced works that strained the definition of music.

His most famous piece is also the one he considered

his most significant.

But to some, it is an audacious act of musical fraud.

Four Minutes, Thirty Three Seconds was composed in 1952,

when Cage was 40 years old.

It instructs the performers not to play their instrument

for the entirety of the piece's three movements.

And it sounds like, literally, nothing on earth.

The piece sparked a revolution in experimental music,

but two years before his death in 1992,

Cage was still being forced to explain his work.

What's the thinking behind 4'33"?

It's the making a situation where one generally listens,

to make it silent,

so that you can hear that there are sounds all the time.

Would you describe it as music?

Yes, because there are sounds to hear.

And to hear the ambient sounds as music,

opens the possibility to having music around you all the time.

Some people say that the music of Cage is less interesting

than his thoughts and writings about it.

And, of course, this can be argued.

But definitely he was a necessary counterpart

to all these extremely rigid discussions

of styles and aesthetics of the time.

He was almost like a clown in a court

saying things that you're not supposed to say.

Cage inspired a whole era of experimentation

in which every element of music was transformed.

The French leader of this avant-garde age

was Cage's erstwhile friend, Pierre Boulez.

However, where Cage sought to free music,

Boulez wanted to control it.

It's hard to imagine the world without Pierre Boulez.

As a composer, his music made an absolutely seismic impact

in the 1950s and '60s.

His way of thinking about music has been just unimaginably important.

In 1942, at the age of 17, Boulez was studying mathematics,

when he decided to pursue music instead, and moved to Paris.

Boulez was a purist in search of a new musical language,

and his early works were fiercely intellectual pieces,

governed by complex structures.

His music speaks a different language altogether.

And, at its best, it is an iridescent, poetic, erm...

strange and beautiful world that he invents in his works.

In one of the earliest of Boulez's many appearances on the BBC,

he visited the Workshop studio to conduct part of his piece

called Pli Selon Pli.

As a young firebrand, Boulez was an enigma,

both musically and personally,

so his television interviews afforded a valuable insight

into what made him tick.

Your music has been described, I think,

as mathematical, erm, computer music.

Well, that is very exaggerated. I mean...

I think it IS exaggerated, but these words have been used.

Now, the point I really...

Because people are...are...not aware how complex are the computers,

-I guess.

-Yes!

I am against this cliche that emotion and intellectual

cannot, er, be together.

When I first heard about Boulez,

it had a lot of the mystique of the impenetrable about it.

And he is an arch modernist,

and there is great complexity

and great intellectualism in his music,

but it's also incredibly sensual.

I am just wondering if there were a couple of hints you can

give us to understanding the language that you use.

Is there one final comment that you could make to help us

understand your musical language here?

Just forget all about explanation and just hear what you want,

and maybe you will find your way and when you don't find your way today,

maybe it will be tomorrow.

Two years later,

the BBC profiled Pierre Boulez

as he rehearsed and performed his eight-minute piece, Eclat.

May I hear that once?

PIANO / UPPER REGISTER

You see, that is too indistinct. Can you...?

PIANIST PLAYS AGAIN

Yes... begin, er, not too loud... but equal.

PLAYS AGAIN

No, there is no accelerando.

PLAYS AGAIN

Yes.

When I am hearing the combination of tones which sounds good,

I can just let the sound die.

I can appreciate the sound until the last moment.

One is not in a hurry to hear the music,

but one can just wait its own pleasure.

The same programme captured a peek into the solitary private life

Boulez led at his home in Baden Baden.

Have you been married?

No. No. No.

-Engaged?

-No. Also not.

Are you interested in the family life?

No, not at all. I must say, no, I am really, er...one person.

I cannot live, really, with family.

I cannot... I could not consider it.

While Boulez was using traditional instruments

for his musical experiments,

his German counterpart started afresh

with a very different raw material - electricity.

HUMS OF DIFFERENT TONES

I find it just a marvellous that nowadays

we can make sounds that we have no names for.

It means that all the magic that had been lost comes back.

LOW TONE

Like Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen studied with French composer

Olivier Messiaen.

Stockhausen was a musical visionary

and pioneer of electronic music

scarred by a disturbing childhood.

His mother was murdered by the Nazis because she was mentally ill.

His father went to the Eastern front

and never came back.

He, himself, was a stretcher-bearer behind the lines,

seeing horrific, terrible things,

all before his 18th birthday.

So when he emerged from all of that,

he was absolutely driven to be an artist,

to make the world a better place through his art.

And also not to wipe the slate clean.

He said that he couldn't write music which was four beats in the bar

because it made him think of jackboots.

He couldn't have traditional kinds of harmonies

because that had all that German history,

the weight of all that on its back.

In 1953, the 24-year-old Stockhausen

moved to the newly-established

Electronic Music Studio in Cologne.

He was determined to emancipate music from the prison of tradition.

The new sounds Stockhausen was creating

could not be represented by crotchets and quavers,

and his graphic scores looked more like visual art than music.

INTERWEAVING ELECTRONIC SOUNDS

INTERWEAVING VOICES

In a work like his 1968 piece Stimmung,

it was the human voice

that Stockhausen transformed,

changing the way it was used in Western music.

SINGER VOCALISES

The piece, which means Tuning,

is based on just one note,

and lasts over an hour.

Unsurprisingly, there were many who had difficulty embracing

Stockhausen's radical approach to music.

But the charismatic composer was not deterred.

Everything is melody.

If we try to integrate all the sound material.

But not the sort of melody people would perhaps hum in the bath.

There is a sort of inner humming.

It doesn't...

It can't be...materialised with the vocal cords.

But even the vocal cords can do a lot of things.

Why not? Certainly, I can make...

VOCALISES "NON-MELODICALLY"

Et cetera. You're doing it with noises.

And even if it would escape completely my physical possibilities,

it creates certain total impressions in our...

in our...

electric system...

and it begins to work.

I don't think, of an evening,

I would ever sit down and listen

to a piece by Stockhausen,

as opposed to anything else.

That's not because I don't think his music is great,

because I think it really is. It's simply because...

It's music of spectacle.

And Stockhausen is particularly interesting

because of what he dares to do.

He does the un-doable. He sends string quartets up in helicopters,

and that is just the start of it.

The old guard of composers was less than impressed

by the new era of avant-garde music.

What do you feel about the scene, then?

Do you feel the receding of the tide has left desert sands behind?

I think the receding tide will leave a lot of dead fish, myself!

And not very large fish.

Name a few fish.

I have to think people like Stockhausen, probably,

will be left gasping for breath.

I hope so, anyhow.

In spite of sceptics overseas,

Stockhausen was chosen to represent West Germany

at the 1970 World Fair in Japan.

His music was performed for five hours a day

in a spherical pavilion.

The Japanese would come in...

You see? They are very polite! LAUGHTER

It's true! ..and sit down.

And then it would start, the lights would go off.

It would start, and you saw in the hall -

I could always see it from the control desk...

LAUGHTER

LAUGHTER REDOUBLES

They would go like this!

Et cetera.

So even if they had never heard new music, it was exotic stuff.

As their music is exotic stuff to us.

Nevertheless, new music, old music - little importance.

What is important is, when they went out, they went out...

LAUGHTER

And I was very happy.

He did have a kind of guru-type status.

He became very important for musicians

across all sorts of disciplines.

People talk about him from all sides of the artistic spectrum.

So he really was a kind of a prophet in his own time.

SPARSE WOODWIND

Across all the arts,

Britain was slow to embrace the continental avant-garde.

But Boulez and Stockhausen's influence did cross the Channel

to two very different audiences.

Boulez found admirers among the music students of 1950s Manchester,

including Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies.

They shared his rigorous, intellectual approach to new music.

What Harrison Birtwistle

and Peter Maxwell Davies were doing in Manchester was they were

basically the first generation of composers who were

quite consciously wanting to create an avant-garde in Britain.

Both Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies are now knights of the realm

and among Britain's most celebrated composers.

However, Peter Maxwell Davies started his career

as something of a musical rebel

and his early work frequently shocked audiences and critics.

CACOPHONOUS PERCUSSION

RESONANT CYMBAL

When the BBC's Monitor programme

profiled a 27-year old Maxwell Davies,

he had an uncompromising attitude towards his style of new music.

DRIVING TYMPANI

A lot of people have criticised me

for writing music in which they find no meaning.

I take for granted that what I write has got a meaning.

I think a composer should be able to take that for granted,

otherwise he should not be in the business at all.

What does keep me awake at night is the method of expression,

the technique of composition.

This I think, is the composer's first concern.

For the most part, these modern sounds remained

the preserve of a niche and adventurous audience.

But that was all to change, as the British musical avant-garde

broke through into the mainstream from a most unexpected quarter.

Do you think that sounds like a robot, Dave?

-Probably a bit less of this.

-Maybe.

I think we ought to have more top because we're losing intelligibility.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was created to supply

soundtracks for radio and television programmes.

Orchestral music simply wasn't right for the increasingly popular

psychological dramas and science fiction.

So the Radiophonic Workshop turned to technology

and non-instrumental sounds for their atmospheric scores.

Their most famous piece has been striking fear

into the hearts of millions for years.

MUSIC: Doctor Who Theme

The genius of the Radiophonic Workshop is that

in terms of avant-garde sound design

or thinking about electro-acoustic possibility,

what they are doing is absolutely as sophisticated as anything else

that's happening anywhere in the world,

it's just millions of people are hearing them.

Anyone who's old enough to have heard

the roots of the Radiophonic Workshop directly

were exposed to radical electro-acoustic composition

as part of our daily lives and nobody thought twice about it.

ELECTRONIC BEEPING

In a 1969 programme about modern music, composer Daphne Oram

explained how her stealthy experiments in electronica

contributed to the creation of the Radiophonic Workshop.

In 1957, I was asked to do some incidental music

for a television play.

And I did this in Broadcasting House by getting together,

in the middle of the night,

all the tape recorders that I could find in the studios,

collecting them together in one studio and working until they

had to be put back next morning,

sleeping a little bit and then coming back in

to do my normal chamber music work.

So, then it grew from that.

In an edition of Tomorrow's World from 1965,

Delia Derbyshire, a co-creator of the Doctor Who theme,

explained how the Radiophonic Workshop

created their radical sounds.

In doing so, Derbyshire inadvertently revealed

that British techno music has its roots in the bowels of the BBC.

Using these, we can build up any sound we can imagine, almost.

We spend quite a lot of time trying to invent new sounds

that don't exist already, that can't be produced by musical instruments.

But we don't always go to electronic sound generators

for our basic sources of sound.

If the sound we want exists already in real life, say,

we can go and record it.

The sound I want for the rhythm of this piece is a short, dry,

hollow, wooden sound I can get from this.

HOLLOW TAP

And then the sound for the punctuating chords,

I want the sound of a short wire string being plucked.

HIGH PITCHED TWANG

That's the speed we record it in the studio.

So we get the lower sounds from the rhythm by slowing down the tape.

DEEP BONG

And the higher sounds by speeding up the tape.

HIGH PITCHED TAPPING

These particular pitches we can record on this machine here.

And then all we have to do is cut the notes the right length.

We can join them together on a loop and listen to them.

RHYTHMIC MELODY

And then with the higher notes as a rhythm.

Again, we join them together on a loop

and play it in synchronisation with the first tape.

RHYTHMIC TAPPING

And over this we can play the sound of the plucked string,

which can be either in the form of the loop, like this...

CONTINUOUS NOTE

That's in synchronisation.

Or in the form of a band.

SERIES OF CHORDS

What the Radiophonic Workshop is really about is about a way

of hearing the world.

It's about a way of viewing all sound as pregnant

with musical expressive possibility.

And then having the technology or developing the technology

- they developed so much of that technology themselves -

to then realise the things they wanted to do with sound.

That's exactly what the early studios in Cologne or America

were doing the same thing.

# You've got to get me to the world on time

# You've got to get me to the world on time... #

The pop culture explosion of the 1960s saw the Beatles and Beach Boys

replace Brahms and Beethoven on turntables throughout the land.

One classical composer managed to straddle both worlds

with a little help from his friends.

John Tavener was a musical prodigy.

He was 22 years old when he wrote The Whale,

the piece that made his name when it debuted in 1968.

Where John Tavener begins is at a crucial intersection.

He's at Highgate School at the same time that school choir

is recorded singing the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten.

A few years later he signed to the Beatles' Apple Records

for his very wonderful and crazy work, The Whale,

and it's a sensation.

DRAMATIC CHORAL MUSIC

DISCORDANT BRASS

And you realise that he is that bridge in those few years

from the old world of British music to the new.

And it's a time where the boundaries are much looser

between concert and pop music.

JANGLING PERCUSSION

He became a sort of trendy figure before, you know,

composers were used to doing that sort of thing. They just didn't.

So he was someone rather unusual.

At the age of 27, Tavener allowed cameras to follow him

for an episode of the BBC's One Man's Week.

The programme reveals being a classical pop star is a tough life,

involving lounging in the garden

and cruising around in a luxury car for inspiration.

A great deal of my summer is spent lying on my back in the garden.

I find that I need a great deal of time to sit,

not necessarily to think,

but things tend to grow at the subconscious

and I work only in very short spurts for very short periods of time,

very intense periods of time but a great deal of the year is spent

- in the summer months, anyway - lying on my back in this garden.

I insist that I must leave time for me to be able to live well,

which perhaps my puritanical forefathers

might have disapproved of.

I doubt whether they would have approved of my taste in cars.

I've driven this one for nine months

and I use it often as a place to think about my work,

driving up and down the motorway.

There's something about the largesse of the car which allows

my mind to expand more freely than it would in a Mini.

I've no time for the romantic attitude that the artist

has to go out and starve.

That, for me, is worse than a castration threat.

I would like to see performances of music in country homes,

in churches, in caves.

In fact, anywhere but concert halls.

Pop festivals, for instance, they have a certain atmosphere

which one doesn't get in these rather dreary concert halls.

Tavener even allowed cameras into his social life,

which was a heady cocktail of dinner parties,

falsetto singing and drunken badminton.

I've known everybody seated at this table

since I was a student at the academy and although we all know

a considerable amount about music, we never talk about it.

I think we're usually far too drunk to discuss anything sensibly anyway.

HE SINGS IN FALSETTO

HE LAUGHS

-Try again!

-THEY LAUGH

At the same time as Tavener was hob-nobbing with rock royalty,

the minimalism movement of 1970s America was doing its own bit

to bring modern music back from the outer reaches of experimentation

and alienation, attracting larger, more populist audiences.

Minimalism symbolises so much about why 20th century composition doesn't

really exist within the categories of classical pop or whatever.

Two of the masterminds of minimalism were Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Theirs was a simple, repetitive musical language.

The opposite of the complexity of Boulez and Stockhausen.

Unlike most composers,

neither Reich nor Glass wrote music within the world of academia.

They became two of the most successful composers

of the late 20th century while funding their composing work

with a variety of odd jobs around New York.

Reich worked for the post office and a removals firm

while Glass spent time as a plumber and taxi driver.

I think making one's living outside of royalty

and commissioned income was probably very healthy

and there's something very important in the jobs they did - taxi driving

and furniture removals - they are urban jobs.

He had music that spoke of the city.

It spoke of the difficulties of the city.

There were huge discussions all over America about race issues

and this was a music that spoke to that directly from the streets.

Steve Reich has won a Pulitzer Prize for his music

and has been described by the New York Times

as America's greatest living composer.

And it all began with a tape loop of just once sentence,

spoken during the Harlem Riots of 1964.

# I had to, like, open the bruise up

# And let some of the bruise blood come out to show them

# Come out to show them

SENTENCE REPEATS

It's a tape piece.

It uses the voice of a black kid who was arrested for murder.

# Come out to show them... #

SENTENCE REPEATS

I was approached by a man of the name of Truman Nelson,

who said he understood I did something with tape

and would I be willing to edit this pile of tapes that he

had of boys, police, mothers and so on and so forth, for a benefit.

And out of this stack of audio tape lasting maybe ten hours,

I heard this one phrase, "come out to show them"

- dee dum ba-duh dum -

which sort of grabbed my ear and said, "That's the one."

# Come out to show them... #

Following his early experiments with tape loops,

Reich investigated whether the phasing effect created

with tapes was possible with live performers.

In 1967, in desperation, the desperation of, say,

a mad scientist trapped in a laboratory,

I felt this tape thing can't be done by people.

Somebody can't get in unison with another repeating pattern

and gradually increase his speed until he's one beat ahead of it.

That's indigenous to tape recorders. People can't do that.

But on the other hand I felt this was a fantastic process.

This is a very interesting way to make music.

THEY CLAP IN UNISON

One man's minimalism is another man's monotony,

but Reich explained to the BBC's Saturday Review programme

why his music is harder to create than you might think.

If something is repetitious, as my music obviously is,

if the pattern itself is flat footed - oom pa-pa, oom pa-pa -

you are going to get bored and all the criticisms

that are made of this kind of music suddenly become valid.

To keep it alive, to keep it so that your ear is engaged,

you've got to make it for the listener and yourself

that it isn't clear where the beginning of the phrase is

and where the end of the phrase is and where the downbeat is.

In rehearsal, the rhythmic problem that we do have is where's one?

Where's the first beat in the measure?

And that's a good problem to have.

CONTINUOUS NOTE

REPEATED PIANO MELODY

It's not about writing very complex scores but thinking about

very complex ways of interacting with one another.

Rhythmic patterns that shift very subtly.

And that are incredibly difficult to coordinate

but whose effect is sensuous and marvellous to listen to.

I would hate to be involved with any of these groups

that do nothing but minimalism. It would drive me absolutely nuts.

I mean, there's no sort of input for creative imagination.

You're just, sort of, a motor, like a mechanical instrument.

You might as well be one.

Not everybody is going to like what I do

and it isn't one of my ambitions

that I'm going to satisfy everyone in the world.

It would be a foolish ambition to have.

Steve Reich's continuing importance is to show how porous

the divisions are between different kinds of music.

The things he's doing with repetitive beat based music

have had a profound influence on jazz musicians, on pop musicians,

on electronic artists for the last 30 or 40 years.

# Crazy, crazy, crazy... #

PHRASE REPEATS

Somehow, from Reich's obscure beginnings with tape loops

came a musical sound that struck a chord with the mainstream.

Harvard graduate John Adams had no interest in engaging

with the complicated musical language of the 20th century.

He wanted to write accessible, popular classical music.

Minimalism offered him the perfect tool for this enterprise.

Adams took minimalism to the max.

What Steve Reich started with small groups of musicians,

Adams continued on a larger scale, with full orchestras.

There's vibrancy to his music that I love. I love hearing it.

I love feeling, when you hear his symphonic works in particular,

that it's an organism on stage, that it's just absolutely moving

and sheer physical movement of the players.

You look at people playing John Adams, they're smiling.

And there's something exciting about that to me, as a composer.

Like Copland and Bernstein before him,

Adams wanted his work to capture the spirit of America

and appeal to the biggest possible audience.

I felt there were the tremendously powerful roots of feeling,

enjoyment and meaning in American music

and that the problem was that serious composers were simply unable

to utilise that because it was verboten.

When his major work, Grand Pianola Music premiered in 1982,

it was met with boos from those who thought the bombastic piece

was vulgar and sticking two fingers up at more challenging music.

I used to apologise for the piece every time I did it,

saying I really should take this piece behind the barn and shoot it.

But I no longer apologise for it. I revel in it. I enjoy it.

I think it expresses me, it expresses my experience as an American...

as an American musician and I think it's a lot of fun as well.

But the minimalist who has most successfully straddled

the worlds of classical music and mainstream pop is Philip Glass.

He rejects the idea that there is such a thing as contemporary

classical music at all.

I never think of it as being any kind of music, this or that, anyway.

I think it really is concert music.

I think that's a better way to describe it

because classical music means something that happened

a long time ago and this music is happening right now.

Glass has written operas, symphonies,

concertos and BAFTA-winning film soundtracks,

as well as collaborating with artists

from Doris Lessing to Ravi Shankar.

A particularly genre-defying collaboration came in 1989,

and gave an indication of just how far contemporary classical

composers had come since the days of Britten and Bernstein.

That was the top ten single, Hey Music Lover

by Mark Moore and his healthy-looking S'Express.

If you buy his latest single, you might be as surprised, as I was,

to find the B-side is a remix of the A-side

by the contemporary American composer, Philip Glass.

Philip, were you surprised to find yourself working with S'Express?

I think I actually said, "What is a remix?" Then I said, "What do I do?

"What do I get to do? What are the rules?"

It turned out to be pretty open, pretty freeform in that way.

We're going to hear what you did to Hey Music Lover.

# I feel, I feel

# Yeah

# I feel, I feel

# Yeah. #

My music has never been in a simple song form.

Like an ABA song with a bridge and all that.

In the way that when I heard Mark's music I recognised right away

that this was a kind of non-narrative song music.

So, it's very much the way I was thinking about music for a long time.

So, I had... There's an aesthetic sympathy to it I felt right away.

One of the things that's the most interesting, I think,

for the composer is this is the way composers pay homage to each other.

Thank you, Phillip Glass and Mark Moore. I hope it goes on forever.

While remixing S'Xpress is not the pinnacle of Glass's musical

achievement, the collaboration remains the logical culmination

of a century defined by a continual and restless

questioning of where, if at all, the boundaries of classical music lie.

The thing that's different in the 20th century is that composers

seem more fearless to break through these boundaries

or think what was previously unthinkable.

Historically that tends to be some of the most extreme music

but that's not always true.

There are composers like Britten who are rethinking things

in a different way that works within the institutions they were set up.

But the extremes of what the avant-garde in Europe and America

were doing or the minimalists,

I mean, they were thinking musical unthinkables.

And that becomes a defining trait of some of the music we value the most.

And from where we are now, the beginning of the 21st century,

everything has changed but everything is still changing.