Free for All The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music

Famously, the philosopher Adorno stated after the Second World War,

"No more poetry is possible after Auschwitz."

In the decade that followed the war,

avant-garde composers tried to prove Adorno wrong.

Their music may not always have struck listeners as poetic,

but its inner purpose was often as profound

as its expression was esoteric.

Composers are seeking emblems of the sacred,

trying to express the unsayable.

In the early years of modernism,

composers had torn up centuries-old conventions

of melody, harmony and rhythm.

After the war, they went further.

They invented a new musical language that tried to express the unsayable,

and come to terms with the horrors they'd witnessed at first hand.

Boulez and Stockhausen and Nono

and Xenakis were looking back at musical history and saying,

"You know, we want to wipe the slate clean."

For many listeners,

the new language of music was simply unintelligible, even unbearable.

The chasm that resulted between what modernist composers wanted to write

and what the mainstream audience wanted to hear,

had never been wider.

I hated it that people didn't like what I was doing,

but I was determined to go on doing it until they did.

This is the story of one of the most controversial periods

in the history of music.

Welcome to the avant-garde.

One of the most extraordinary premieres in 20th-century music

happened on a cold January night in 1941,

in the prisoner of war camp

Stalag VIII-A, in Germany.

And it was the first performance

of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time.

Messiaen had been taken prisoner during the German invasion in 1940.

He knew several musicians in the camp.

Their instruments were clarinet,

violin and cello.

He himself played piano.

Messiaen's Quartet was to prove vastly influential,

but in a way no-one present at its premiere

could possibly have imagined.

In the three decades after the Quartet's first performance,

composers taught by Messiaen -

Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis -

would reconfigure the rules of music

in one of the most ruthlessly experimental periods

in the whole history of music.

The seeds of the avant-garde movement were sown

in the cataclysm of the 1940s.

What these composers had been through

in the last years of the Second World War,

you can't help feeling that their experiences must have affected

what they wrote subsequently.

Xenakis having part of his face blown off.

Ligeti losing much of his family in the Holocaust.

Stockhausen, as a medical orderly,

witnessing indescribably horrible things.

Trying to feed water through a straw

to soldiers whose faces had melted away.

Piling body upon body in a church that had become a morgue.

There was a kind of defiance, as if they were saying,

"Well, all this lovely music

"that people created,

"and all these wonderful systems and theories,

"but, in the end, what kind of society do we have?"

The music didn't do anything at all to make it a better world.

So let's rid ourselves of all of that

and just try and make music an abstraction.

Boulez and Stockhausen and Xenakis were saying,

"Not only can we not have

"melodies and harmony that has got a,

"you know, a tonic that you always come back to,"

but also Stockhausen said,

"I can't have four regular beats in a bar

"because it makes me think of marching Nazis,

"it makes me think of jackboots."

When Fascism had first emerged, in Italy and in Germany,

it came with a high-minded promise to support and fund the arts.

The preceding three decades had seen an explosion of modernism.

Some of its practitioners now hoped

that Totalitarianism would look kindly on new music.

Modern composers did have

a thorny relationship with the general public

and they thought that total, totalitarian leaders,

in Italy as well, would give funds and support for this art form

in a way that a more democratic civilisation wouldn't.

And so, at first, at least, they had high hopes for Fascism, sadly.

And a composer like Stravinsky was still in the late '30s

going to Germany and having and conducting performances in Berlin.

And there's a regrettable meeting between him and Mussolini

when he inscribed a score with very warm greetings to Il Duce.

The Nazis' cultural policies turned out to be based on

banning works by those considered the enemies of the Third Reich.

In 1938, the Nazis put on an exhibition they called

Degenerate Music - A Reckoning.

It was a house of horrors presenting, for the last time,

music that was now to be outlawed.

Included was anything written by Jews, Communists,

or African-Americans.

Many composers played along with the regime.

Most controversially, Germany's greatest living composer,

Richard Strauss.

In 1933, he agreed to preside over the Third Reich's music policy.

Strauss was in some cases, regrettably even,

even shockingly willing to go along with the strictures of the regime.

In other cases, less so.

He dragged his feet in the matter of removing music

by Jewish composers from the repertory.

He hated the idea that Mendelssohn could no longer be performed.

The Nazis promoted the music of Aryan German composers -

Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner -

as a soundtrack for their rallies

and a touchstone for their cultural values.

But they wanted new music to have a modern, National Socialist twist.

It was Goebbels who said,

"What we need now in the '30s

"is a romanticism of steel."

It's a romanticism,

it has to be modern

but it has to be approachable.

It has to appeal to the people.

The Nazis' policy on music was uncannily similar

to that adopted in the Soviet Union,

in a rare meeting of totalitarian minds.

Stalin wanted to establish an absolutely modern,

indeed modernist musical tradition

that would reflect Soviet, socialist ideology.

So Stalin actually isn't harking back to, um, you know,

Tchaikovsky or Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov,

he wants the composers of today, Shostakovich, Khachaturian,

whoever, to, to be writing the music

that will become part of the people's consciousness

and serve Soviet ideology.

The new style became known as Socialist Realism.

I really think it was designed to be an opposition to modernism, yeah.

Because modernism doesn't have

this relation to human experience,

and therefore, it's de-humanized.

Well, if you built a state for people, yeah,

you want the people to enjoy the music,

you can't present them with this de-humanised music

because they're not going to understand it,

they're not going to love it, it will have no relation to their experience.

Therefore, you have to write something exactly the opposite.

The last worker in the factory has to be able to hum it

when he comes out of the concert hall or out of the opera house.

Socialist Realism's most famous victim was Dmitri Shostakovich,

a former child prodigy, born in 1906.

He and fellow modernists

like Alexander Mosolov,

set about creating a revolutionary new style of music

for a revolutionary new style of society.

By the early '30s,

Shostakovich had become the Soviet Union's star composer.

He wrote this wonderful opera, Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk District

and it had great success, it was feted as the first Soviet opera,

even as the first socialist realist opera

and for two years everything was great - until Stalin came to see it.

He was seen in his box at the Bolshoi Theatre

surrounded by members of the Politburo and Shostakovich

was perhaps hoping for a sign of approval and none came.

In fact, Stalin and the members of Politburo walked out

before the end of the opera and Shostakovich immediately felt very nervous.

What Stalin had been watching was a hotchpotch of love, sex,

betrayal and murder set in the last days of the Tsars.

We don't really know what he disliked so much about it

and it's more likely that he actually disliked the sexual aspect

of it and the fact how it was produced, how it was presented.

That there was a bed in the centre of the stage

and, prude as he was, he couldn't take this.

And two days later there was this terrifying editorial.

The most terrifying bad review in musical history, perhaps -

"Muddle instead of music" -

in the pages of Pravda which obviously reflected

Stalin's own sentiments, denouncing the opera as a deliberately

dissonant, muddled stream of sounds and asking whether something bad

might happen to the composer if he continued on this path.

A month later, Shostakovich was summoned to meet

a cultural commissar, who advised to rein in his style.

If he needed an example of what could happen to a composer

who defied the new policy, Alexander Mosolov,

writer of The Iron Foundry, provided one.

He resisted all attempts to make him write simpler music

and, in 1936, he was thrown out of the Union of Composers,

and thus unable to earn a living.

The next year, with Stalin's Great Purge

of counter-revolutionary elements in full swing,

his enemies in the Union contrived to get him sent to a labour camp.

Against this background of show trials and summary executions,

Shostakovich unveiled his Fifth Symphony.

A note out of place could spell disaster.

The Fifth Symphony was subtitled -

though probably not by Shostakovich himself -

A Soviet Artist's Reply To Just Criticism.

What a change of direction the Fifth Symphony was.

Not one move is in excess

and a piece which relates

so powerfully to all Russian music before then.

There are oddities in it, these quotations from Bizet's Carmen,

and possible references to Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov,

the ultimate pageants of Russian suffering.

Here was a possible hidden meaning.

Mussorgsky's 1872 opera Boris Godunov

ends with the lament to Russia,

"Flow, bitter tears," which is echoed in Shostakovich's symphony.

That's really what he was relying on -

that knowledgeable listeners would be aware of the parallels

between what he was writing and specific moments in repertoire

of the past and the politicos would not be aware of those things.

TRIUMPHANT FANFARE

Then there's this brutally triumphant finale which

people still constantly debate about to this day.

Is it a celebration of Stalin?

Is it a kind of secret denunciation

or kind of critical embodiment of the terror of his regime or

is it something in-between?

The Fifth Symphony was a triumph, luckily for Shostakovich.

In 1941, during the Siege of Leningrad,

his patriotic 7th Symphony was ecstatically received.

But after the war, he found himself

under attack by the authorities all over again.

Until his death in 1975, he was under constant threat

of further humiliation and disgrace.

But remarkably, he kept his musical voice intact,

while many others were beaten down by the oppression of the system,

Alexander Mosolov among them.

Alexander Mosolov changed his style completely, altogether.

He is unrecognisable.

There's nothing left of, of himself, of his earlier self,

after he spends seven months in a labour camp.

But Shostakovich adjusted. He never lost his style.

American composers,

writers and artists were also coming under attack.

Not for ignoring socialist realism, but for embracing it.

Do you permit us to cross-examine?

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the

-basic principles...

-That's not the question, that's not the question.

In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee

opened its own show trial -

an investigation into supposed communist influence in Hollywood.

Also in the Committee's sights was America's leading classical

composer, Aaron Copland.

Brooklyn-born, the son of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants,

Copland fashioned a series of all-American classics.

That he should find himself targeted as un-American was

one of the many ironies of the Cold War.

The seeds of the Red Scare are to be found two decades earlier,

with the election of Franklin D Roosevelt,

in the depths of the Depression.

I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.

Roosevelt's massive job creation programme in the 1930s also

included the arts, which were generously funded.

Many left-wing writers, artists and composers were put on the

government's payroll to help promote the social aims of the New Deal.

This was all perfect for Copland because, first of all,

that was his own political orientation

but it also allowed him to create this populist style that had

a little bit of a political focus

and so it makes this pieces which could be a little bit cliched -

Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, Lincoln Portrait,

the Fanfare For The Common Man.

Under the surface, you actually find some pointed political messages that

were in tune with what many American leftists were pursuing at that time.

When the Depression hit, it was such a shock for the country that

all artists, including composers,

changed their voice and they became very populist because, you know,

the country was in desperate conditions

and for some reason a kind of very personal, confrontational

avant-garde way of expressing things just didn't seem right

when people were starving in the streets, which is what they were.

As he saw the impending menace of the Depression,

of all of the political antagonism taking place in the world,

he realised, as all of his left-leaning composer friends did,

that music had to have a purpose and he took on the purpose of

creating a language that Americans could identify as American.

And he did it by putting together music which came from Jewish

music, from black music, from Latino music, from folk songs of

so many different varieties and that becomes the mixture that

Copland uses really as a political tool during the days that precede

the Second World War, to create a musical language that Americans

will recognise as being American and help them to rally together

to deal with the social, political consequences of their time.

Even a Copland ballet score about a fabled American outlaw

contained political grit amongst the nostalgia.

Billy the Kid is this renegade in this Wild West world which

is about to be overrun by capitalist forces.

The America that will soon be paved by asphalt.

And I think you can hear musical suggestions of that, as well,

particularly in the, in the slightly threatening,

although very grandiose march music that enters at the end,

you know, this is the new America, the supreme capitalist America.

When the Soviet Union and the USA were allies,

during the Second World War, the American left, while not encouraged,

had been tolerated.

But with the onset of the Cold War, that changed.

One casualty of the great red witch hunt that ensued was Aaron Copland.

He was denounced in 1949 as one of many dupes and fellow travellers when

he appeared at a leftist conference in New York alongside Shostakovich.

Being investigated by the FBI, long lists being made of his leftist

political affiliations and then most ominously being

called before Senator McCarthy's infamous committee in May of 1953.

Copland once said that if an artist is thrown into a mood of suspicion,

ill will and dread, that typifies the Cold War attitude,

he'll create nothing.

Though he carried on composing, his musical output dwindled, and

he failed to create anything that matched his pre-McCarthy era impact.

America also had communism on its mind in a Western Europe

newly liberated from the Nazi machine.

To prevent the nightmare vision of its falling into Soviet hands,

America set about rebuilding Europe's shattered cities

and her culture too.

Bizarrely, it was avant-garde music

that was to be one of the main beneficiaries

of the drive to win the hearts and minds of a free Europe.

There was a very, very strong anti-Americanism amongst the European

intelligentsia in particular which was almost pathological,

a kind of psychological necessity, if you like, to be anti-American.

And I think what the high-level strategists

in the cultural field were on to pretty quickly was that what

needed to happen was that America needed to show that, actually, there

was an elective affinity between the various countries and America,

that the cultural heritage of Europe was not being threatened by American

democratic values but in some way enhanced and fortified by them.

So avant-garde music may be unpopular

and it may be difficult, it may be squawks and thumps

and maybe most people who were involved with the cultural programmes

wouldn't want to sit and listen to any of it but they recognise it,

they back it and they recognise it straight away as something

that, for all its unpopularity, is a fantastically potent symbol

of America's cultural sophistication and of her political freedoms.

The godfather of the avant-garde was Olivier Messiaen.

After the war, he taught music in Paris and became

one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century.

Among his pupils were future titans of the avant-garde like

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis,

and later, George Benjamin.

But Messiaen was a wild card, a one-off.

Devoutly Roman Catholic,

he was the organist at a Paris church for over 60 years.

He was also an ornithologist...

..believing birds to be better composers than humans

and incorporating birdsong into his music.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH

Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch...

Ju-ju-ju-ju-ju-ju...

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

was inspired by the Book of Revelation.

"There shall be time no longer."

But its title is also a pun - the end of time,

as in conventional rhythm.

This is what made it so influential on the future avant-garde.

Nothing happens quite how you expect it to.

The rhythms just go on for slightly too long or slightly shorter

than you might expect.

The melody goes, absolutely avoids any kind of cliche

and those factors mean that it has this eternal quality that

just seems to drift on and on and on towards eternity.

It's one of the most emotional pieces of 20th century music there is.

The music of the avant-garde was rarely given at concerts,

and rarely released on record until the late '50s.

Rather, it spread through radio, academic institutions

and new music festivals.

The most important of these were

the International Summer Courses for New Music at Darmstadt in Germany,

at which Messiaen was a guest teacher.

They began in 1946, part-funded by the American military government.

A new generation of composers, all born in the 1920s,

were drawn to Darmstadt like moths to a flame,

from all over Western Europe and America.

Darmstadt was the opportunity of meeting each other and you know in

my generation we were approximately

12 years without going out of

the country where we were born and we wanted to know the other ones.

And, therefore, so I mean, it was such an atmosphere.

Sometimes, you know, with tensions, certainly.

But, I mean, it was such an atmosphere where

we were trying to know each other, to know the tradition of each other

and to see how we can also profit from these meetings.

We wanted to discover the world, simply that.

Darmstadt has to be considered

one of the American military government's great successes

and I think that when they see Darmstadt, they think,

"This is something that gives them a very specific focus

"on the kind of work that they want to be picking up on

"and they want to be asserting the merits of."

The avant-garde dusted down the 12-tone,

or serialist system developed in the 1920s by Arnold Schoenberg,

whose music had been banned by the Nazis.

It required composers to decide on a set order of notes,

in which each pitch of the 12-note scale is used only once.

These tone rows can then be turned upside down

or played backwards or both.

But this wasn't enough for the Darmstadt school.

There was this intensification and development of the 12-tone idea.

First Messiaen really setting it into motion and then being taken up

by Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and others, known as total serialism,

which means that not just the 12 pitches would be ordered according

to a row but also the durations

of the notes are longer or shorter.

The dynamic levels, from the very loud to the very soft

and all the gradations in between, and the attacks,

the style with which a particular note was

approached by the instrumental player, legato, staccato and so on.

All of these aspects of composition would now be organised.

Messiaen had written the first piece approaching total serialism

at Darmstadt in 1949 -

Scale Of Durations And Dynamics.

The summer courses at Darmstadt quickly became

a kind of shrine to the new system.

Composers withdrew to a sort of laboratory and questioned every

element of music, in a rather severe and doctrinal way, even dogmatic.

It was a hotbed of serialism when I went anyway.

It was serialism and, you know, some terrifying pieces of music.

Pierre Boulez was the first of Messiaen's pupils

to come to prominence. But his music, and that of his fellow

Messiaen pupil Karlheinz Stockhausen,

proved to be very different in character to that of their master.

Boulez and Stockhausen were embarrassed by the simplicity

and naivety of his vision and highly interested by the novelty

of some of his techniques, particularly regarding harmony,

and above all regarding rhythm, but very dismissive

of his apparently garish musical colours, some of them approaching

Hollywood and his naive obsessions with religion and with bird song.

For the composers after the war - Stockhausen, Boulez -

there was a tremendous element of rebellion in them.

Hostility toward the whole world of so-called expression.

Those of us who knew Boulez remember the tremendous power

of his anger as it was expressed in the Second Sonata.

Boulez's spikiness wasn't confined to his music.

As the avant-garde's chief polemicist, he gored,

tossed and dispatched any composer who had the temerity to

stray from the 12-tone path.

Oh, he wrote articles in a very sort of intellectual Parisian style

in the '60s that said some terrible things.

He praised Mao Tse-tung's Red Guards for their ability to destroy things.

I mean, it was a time when people said things and

he loved to provoke and also someone who is attacked,

often defends themselves by attacking first.

It was a period of provocation, yes, but provocation is a good,

a very healthy thing when it's not artificial.

When it is genuine, natural, spontaneous,

provocation is necessary.

One of the most famous pieces of polemicism he wrote

is an article written just after Schoenberg died

called Schoenberg Est Mort - Schoenberg Is Dead.

And it includes really an incredibly vociferous

critique of Schoenberg's late music. he also says in that article

that any composer who doesn't use serialism, you know,

isn't a composer.

I did not want to be provocative

just for the sake of being provocative.

I was provocative only simply because it was necessary to go forward.

While he never wrote tonal music, Boulez softened his style and

moved away from the strictures of total serialism in the early 1950s.

For me, the great moment was the Le Marteau Sans Maitre by Boulez.

It did something with music that nothing had ever done before.

It was completely radical and a very attractive one as well.

It's one of the most attractive pieces he's written.

Ein...

..zwei...

..drei...

..vier.

By far the most fruitful of all the avant-garde's experiments was

the development of electronic music,

making use of tape technology developed in Germany during the war.

The man who put it on the map was the Andy Warhol of European music,

Karlheinz Stockhausen.

He was an amazing, baffling personality,

highly technocratic on the one hand,

of course, highly attuned to the possibilities of technology

right there in the forefront of the development of electronic music.

But there's also this mystical side to him,

tending toward psychedelic hippy propensities in the 1960s.

Think nothing.

Wait until it becomes absolutely quiet inside of you.

When you have reached that, start playing.

As soon as you begin to think again, stop playing...

..and try to reach again the state of non-thinking.

Then continue playing.

A lot of his colleagues increasingly had the impression that

Stockhausen had gone a little bit mad

or at least was no longer fully in his right mind.

In 1956, Stockhausen premiered Song of The Youths

at a Cologne radio station.

Mixing the human voice with synthesized sounds,

it revolutionised electronic music.

I think Stockhausen was a great showman of a very esoteric kind

but, you know, certain pieces that he produced are spectacular pieces,

they're not easy to listen to,

to comprehend but they have a kind of childlike wonder.

He's really one of the most interesting

and bizarre thinkers of our day and pieces like Stimmung

which is sonically beautifully because it says the only

thing that's going to happen is this one overtone series and that's it.

It's animated completely by text and the text is insane.

You know the text is, you know, "I went to California, I had sex.

"Now I'm going to make some German people sing about it."

It's fair to say that,

though he was vastly influential on like-minded composers, Stockhausen's

experiments didn't always carry a mainstream audience along with him.

But that didn't matter. Thanks to radio commissions

and guest lectureships, avant-garde composers could flourish

without the need to please a paying public.

Boulez and Stockhausen were writing music which was

so abstract and so extreme

in some cases that the idea of an audience was not what

they were thinking of, they were not thinking about communicating.

It was music that means itself, that means nothing except itself.

I think that was the purpose.

Which is why they were, of course, so viciously attacked

by the Soviets, because they saw them as kind of decadent Westerners

and, you know, their music didn't have any appeal to the people.

That's not to say that the Darmstadt composers weren't

engaged in politics. Far from it.

Iannis Xenakis fought for the Greek communist partisans

against the Germans and then against the British in the Greek Civil War.

He trained not as a composer but as an architect and engineer.

Xenakis wanted to create a kind of music which was really

driven from pure scientific mathematical principles.

So if you hear a piece such as Metastaseis,

this was music that came from somewhere absolutely other

than the Romantic Austro-German tradition, it came from

the world of science, from the world of nature and mathematics.

It also, though, in its own way, has a political message because

you can listen to this piece

and you can hear your mathematical shape, your architectural shape,

but it also describes, quite simply, the sounds of war.

You can hear the screaming of shells.

You know, the shell that might have been the one that

blew half of his face off.

The most politically engaged avant-garde composer was Luigi Nono,

a leading member of the Italian Communist Party.

His music, unlike that of his Darmstadt contemporaries,

was overtly political.

In Italy after the war, most of the culture that was important

and the writers and the film makers and the musicians

felt that they needed to be close to the people of their country.

What Nono was interested in was to inform the people who listen

to his music of human suffering in many different forms.

That could be miners who were dying under the most terrible

conditions, it could be people working in factories.

Pieces such as La Fabbrica Illuminata, you know,

that's the illuminated factory,

were expressions of his political beliefs.

Now, you may think,

"Well, you know, the workers are going to love that, aren't they?"

But I think that Nono very sincerely felt that by creating music

which was, you know, really rigorous and as extreme and powerful

as he possibly could, that he would connect on an emotional level.

Nono's most celebrated piece included

quotations from the letters of executed Italian partisans.

When Stockhausen, in all sincerity,

congratulated him for having succeeded in making

the quotations unintelligible, he was highly displeased.

But he remained a dedicated serialist

for the rest of his career.

I remember Luigi Nono saying to me,

he saw an F minor chord in a piece of mine, he said, in Italian,

"You're a traitor, you're a traitor to the cause of new music."

It became an orthodoxy.

It became almost a form of totalitarianism, when you had

to be a serial composer or you basically couldn't be a composer.

I don't think it happened in, in painting or in literature.

Could be one of the reasons why the media have almost

sidelined classical music.

Because there was this period where

there was no connection with very clever and very intelligent people.

Classical music sort of lost its way.

The same thought was also beginning to occur to some at Darmstadt.

In 1958, a recent arrival,

Gyorgy Ligeti, dared to write an article attacking Pierre Boulez.

Cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of the avant-garde.

Ligeti used the phrase "character assassination" in terms

of people attacking each other and doubting each other's motives.

It reminded him too much of what he had seen back in Hungary.

Ligeti, a Romanian-born Jew who'd settled in Hungary,

had managed to escape from Budapest just after Soviet tanks

rolled in to suppress an anti-communist uprising in 1956.

He'd seen the chaos of the post-war Eastern Bloc at first hand.

My father used to tell me bedtime stories,

sitting by my bedside when I was, like, three years old, and he told

me about how, after World War II, he had to go

between Hungary and Romania,

which was already illegal in its own right, so it was always kind

of crossing the border illegally but he couldn't afford to buy

a ticket inside the train so he had to ride on the roof of the train.

And there were electrical cables going across, you know,

the train tracks.

So my father would always get towards the rear of the train

and sit on, and hang on to the roof towards the rear of the train,

and when he saw people being decapitated in the front

of the train he would duck.

So, you know, those were the kinds of bedtime stories.

During the war, Ligeti had been sent to a forced labour camp.

His father, brother and other relatives

died in concentration camps.

His mother survived Auschwitz.

The people who survived the Holocaust, I think, there is

a certain sense of invincibility that they, you know,

"If we survived that, nothing can kill us now."

And, at the same time, I know that my father was always extremely

angry inside about, you know,

his father and especially his little brother

having been killed in the concentration camp.

And when my father was very sick, near the end of his life,

he used to speak about that a lot more and, you know,

it's something that he carried with him for the rest of his life.

It really marked, you know, it...

Both the Nazis and the communists really, really influenced,

in a profound way, his way of thinking.

And you can't really understand his work without understanding

that element of, you know, of what he experienced.

Famously, the philosopher Adorno stated after

the Second World War, "No more poetry is possible after Auschwitz."

Ligeti is the absolute contradiction of that because he's someone

who came from within that appalling darkness and somehow,

through genius and imagination and courage, found an utterly

original and gloriously colourful and expressive musical universe.

There is a sensuousness in Ligeti's music which,

I think, was very much his intention.

He wanted to make beautiful objects,

strangely, eerily beautiful objects, but beautiful nonetheless.

It really opened up a new way of writing for the avant-garde.

You didn't have to write the Stockhausen or Boulez

pointillist stuff any more,

you could write this textural music that would somehow also be

absolutely true to what you wanted modern music to be.

Ligeti, like Messiaen,

wanted to introduce a spiritual quality into avant-garde music.

In the 1960s, he wrote a Requiem, and Lux Aeterna,

both based on the Latin Mass.

The 20th Century was really a great period of music

with some kind of spiritual implication

and, I think, this supplies us

with a different explanation for some of these abstract sounds -

the sense that composers are seeking these emblems of the sacred,

trying to express the unsayable.

And it found its way on to movie soundtracks,

famously 2001.

You hear the Requiem to greatly unsettling effect, suggesting

incomprehensible, unearthly other-worldly forces, but music that

nonetheless, in its seamlessness

and its sense of constantly evolving

underscores very beautifully Kubrick's grandiose cinematic style.

The two go surprisingly well together.

Having once blithely professed to ignore the mainstream audience,

avant-garde music was now began to reach an audience of millions

through the cinema door.

Avant-garde music had managed to thrive with

no help from the United Kingdom.

Like its beer,

Britain's music had tended to be mostly for local consumption.

Up until the early 1950s, the pastoral tradition

of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Delius - unkindly derided

as the Cowpat School - had ploughed its own furrow.

But a new, iconoclastic generation of British composers was emerging

in Manchester.

Not everyone shared their musical tastes.

At the university, I was thrown out of the composition course.

The professor there said, "Oh, my dear boy, you're too interested

"in these dreadful modern Stravinsky and Bartok,"

and out I was thrown.

He said, "You'll never be a composer, my boy."

We had some very primitive lectures on the history of music

and when it got to serialism,

I remember the lecturer called out notes from...

Pick a note out of 12 and once you've had it you can't have another.

So somebody else... And we went on like that and he wrote it

on the board and proceeded to write a sort of stupid piece of music.

But serialism was set to conquer Manchester,

thanks to the arrival, in the early '50s, of a student whose

father had conducted the music of Arnold Schoenberg - Alexander Goehr.

The only reason that one became aware

of what was going was that there was a very good group

of young students there, led by Alexander Goehr

and he had access to scores of Schoenberg and recordings

and whatever that we could only dream about.

British composers have often wanted to shut their ears

to what's evolving outside.

But the generation of Birtwistle and Goehr and Maxwell Davies

decided to break with that for all sorts of reasons

and they all went to the continent, they all

went to Darmstadt, they went to Paris where they heard the newest

things and brought them back here and gave them an English accent.

I once won a prize in Germany and I had to do interviews, you know,

critics and things, one after the other, and a lot of them said

did I know that my music was English? And I said,

"Well, it's the one thing that I've self-consciously tried to avoid."

Well, his early music is so rude.

It's aggressive, it's dissonant, it's harsh, it's angular.

But it has this British quality about it as well.

Hard to define, you know, it also has a prehistoric, I feel,

quality to it. There's something earthy, and something ancient,

deeply ancient about it.

I feel it inhabits a world of 1,200 years ago as much as it

does of a world of today.

The scene in the 1960s with Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies

had a tremendous amount of energy about it.

Expressionist poetry, a soprano screaming into a megaphone

and, you know, ensemble in the back playing very sort of harsh music.

It was so confident.

It was so in-your-face and it took the establishment by storm.

In 1969, one of Peter Maxwell Davies' pieces

caused a ruckus when it was boldly scheduled at the BBC Proms -

much to the surprise and dismay of its composer.

I don't think I ever set out to stir up and shock.

I was very upset

when people were shouting "rubbish!" from the audience and when people

walked out of Worldes Blis in the Albert Hall. It's very upsetting.

You try to do your best to communicate something which

means an awful lot to you in as direct and, dare I say it, as simple

a language as you possibly can, and sometimes people just don't get it.

It's their problem.

I do it honestly and I do the only thing I can do at that moment, yeah?

It's like at school when they used to

tell me I could do better. I couldn't.

The '60s avant-garde may have perplexed and upset some members

of the audience at the time, but its musical language

and attitude has now become part of the DNA of new British music.

There are people like Thomas Ades, or Turnage,

or Judith Weir, Jimmy MacMillan who use tonality plus that language

and they get absolutely wonderful, dramatic effects out of it.

But I think without that '60s music that Birtwistle and to

a probably lesser extent I put there, this wouldn't have happened.

In the next programme, the focus shifts to America

as classical music regains its audience by pumping up the volume

and getting its groove back.

This is hard core, rocking and rolling minimalist music

and it was loud and it was fierce and it was...

it made a very big impression.

To find out more about 20th-century composers

and for details of a year-long festival of events

celebrating a century of revolution in music, art and culture, go to

bbc.co.uk/soundandthefury and follow the links to The Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd