Easy Listening? The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music

Over the course of the 20th century, classical music went through a dramatic revolution.

Composers abandoned conventional rules of music.

Tunes were out, abstraction was in.

It was a very extreme time in music.

Composers felt they had to say something very radical

to wipe away the past.

As the century progressed, music was taken to the very brink of destruction.

Listening to it makes my head wanna explode.

We're trapped in a theatre of pain.

Where could music go after that

but to crawl from the wreckage and welcome back melody, beauty and audiences?

Classical music sort of lost its way.

But you now see the whole thing has turned a bit of a full circle.

It was as if the whole wonderful world of tonality was given back to me.

I think you can see 20th-century musical history as a kind of

odyssey and a return home.

Suddenly, this sumptuously rich sound world emerges,

and it was a sound that people were drawn to.

This is the story of the triumph of the tune.

One late summer evening in 1952, a small crowd of music lovers

gathered in a woodland for a concert of new work by some of the most radical composers of the day.

It featured a piece by 40-year-old American John Cage.

The son of an inventor, Cage would become one of the most inventive forces in 20th-century music.

And on that night, he stunned his audience into silence

with one of the most audacious artistic gestures of all time.

This is the Maverick Concert Hall,

it's a little kind of barn in rural New York just outside Woodstock.

Since the 1920s it's been a performance space for classical music

and the famous premiere that took place here

was John Cage's 4'33"

played by David Tudor.

Tudor came out, sat down at the piano,

closed the lid over the keys and

stayed that way for 4 minutes and 33 seconds

without ever making a sound.

"I have nothing to say and I am saying it," John Cage famously remarked.

He had a lifelong fascination with silence.

And his 4½ minutes of "nothing" has become one of the most infamous pieces in music history.

Daring, controversial and, some might say, ridiculous.

In 4'33" you're being asked to tune into the sounds around you,

to tune into your environment and to, um,

yeah, to... to understand the world in a different way.

It's about opening yourself up to music that is full of emptiness or full of silence.

It's still so incredibly refreshing to musical culture and to your own

ears and thinking about what music is.

Cage was a sort of happy warrior of the absurd.

It's sort of amusing to me

because there's even highly respected composers who believe

Cage's silent piece is the most... the most,

I guess, historically important work since The Rite Of Spring.

Um... To me, that's like, absurd.

When people would say to Cage,

"Anyone could have done it." Cage would say, "But they didn't."

In life, as in art, Cage championed freedom of expression.

He was a Zen Buddhist, a philosopher and a painter.

His teacher, the father of modernist music, Arnold Schoenberg,

called him "an inventor of genius".

He restlessly questioned the sound of music.

He used household screws and bolts to make pianos sound metallic and percussive.

In Cage's hands, anything could become a musical instrument.

Even an amplified cactus.

PIANO-KEY-LIKE SOUND

Cage did have a big influence. His philosophy, his ideas, maybe even more than his music.

It really questioned the orthodoxies of modern music.

People had lived through a decade of rather dogmatic, rather harsh music.

And there's this... How can I put it?

..rather naive American

with these open ideas, presenting them in a very unpretentious way,

but very new ideas. It really challenged people.

Mr Cage is a musician, he is a composer.

He teaches a course in music at the New School here in New York.

Mr Cage, if you whisper your secret to me, we'll show it to those folks out there.

APPLAUSE

Well, now that's very interesting and there must be more.

John Cage liberated music. I think he was a real visionary.

He was able to ask these simple questions in such

a brilliant, effortless, elegant way.

Ask the question - What is music? What is art?

He changed the game.

Cage was unafraid of ridicule.

APPLAUSE

No other modernist composer would ever have performed on a prime-time game show.

But he was deadly serious about his art.

In 1951, he created one of the most challenging of all solo piano pieces -

Music Of Changes.

A scattershot tour de force, its seemingly chaotic

random sound is the result of Cage letting fate decide the order of the notes,...

..in a kind of compositional game of chance.

He wanted to surrender control, any trace

of individual expression.

Cage had these charts that he was working with as he was composing

Music Of Changes. Charts of sounds, durations of notes, dynamic levels.

He then made the decision to flip coins to see what would happen next.

And he had the I Ching,

the Chinese divinatory text, with him.

And he used it to decide what should come next.

It was actually a very time-consuming process.

This was not a case of a composer just throwing up his hands

and splattering notes across the page.

He was deadly serious about it.

Cage is not a very interesting composer to me because

the music that starts with his

abandoning of a more traditional way of decision making

and his adoption of chance, most of that music is unlistenable. And, um,

I think that the abandonment of decision making,

and the abandonment of natural intuitive gestures,

renders the music completely meaningless.

Cage was the main composer for America to say,

"Let's explore totally new things here."

"We can blow out the box and imagine and start again."

That vision, that uniqueness of idea,

really spawned a whole lineage of innovation in American music.

In the 1950s, avant-garde music had been dominated by hardcore European composers

and the rigid style of music known as serialism.

But with his free-thinking attitude, Cage was making America the new centre of revolution and innovation.

He became a father figure to a whole generation of American modernists.

First and foremost, a six-foot tall, 300lb,

wise-cracking giant of a man by the name of Morton Feldman.

There was a sense with Feldman,

you know, at first, he seemed a kind of a satellite to Cage.

One of these hangers-on who were always seen in Cage's company.

And it just took a little while, I think,

for... for people to perceive the depth of... of what he was up to.

He was an ambitious man, talkative, spoke in a thick New York accent.

Just a fantastic personality.

And the contradiction that people always talk about

is between that rather rambunctious personality

and the music, which does seem so otherworldly

and detached and withdrawn from the street,

from the world of the street.

Feldman strode the pavements of Manhattan like a high-fiving colossus.

But beneath the exterior bluster lurked an inner calm.

In a fast-car culture of mass consumerism,

he sought to counteract the noise and din of streets around him

with music that fused the silences of Cage

with delicate notes barely louder than a whisper.

Morton Feldman was a New York composer.

Um, but his music couldn't be less New York.

It seems to distil all the noise of the world around us into

a stately, quiet,

highly crafted tapestry of sound.

So quiet, so still.

It's almost like it's making a kind of quiet sense of the world.

It's a refuge from everything that American culture valued.

Everything that seemed superficial and fast

and... and money-driven and everything.

So you retreat into this other kind of music that has a completely different set of values.

With Feldman, everything was beauteousness.

He took the Cage language, basically, and made it sensual.

On many occasions, I was in a room when he was composing.

And he sat at the piano with his big board and table there,

and he would play a chord and he would say,

"Yeah, I got the chord, I got it."

"Then it comes to me. Antique cymbal."

"Two piccolos."

And so the pieces were being composed in the same

very, very slow time stream in which we perform them.

A very accurate impression of that space,

that ecstatic beautiful space in which he was.

Peace. Tranquillity. A beautiful space.

Feldman's music soothed the savage beast that modernist music had become.

His introspective abstract music had become popular with New York's thriving artistic community,

especially its abstract expressionist painters such as

Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

And when Rothko was commissioned to paint new works for a chapel in Texas,

Feldman was inspired to write an accompanying piece that began as a meditation

but ended up as an elegy.

It was written for these dark and mysterious paintings that seem to have

some spiritual intensity that you couldn't possibly put a name to.

Then Rothko committed suicide. Feldman was very close to him,

and so the piece turned into a memorial for him.

Like so many other of Feldman's pieces, its procession of sounds,

almost at the threshold of hearing, and that goes on sort of creating

this very powerful atmosphere.

MELODIC VIOLA

Then something very extraordinary happens in the final minutes.

The viola begins playing this little melody,

with a sort of a Hebraic flavour,

which actually turns out to have been composed by Feldman when he was a teenager

during the Second World War.

And brings up the possibility that there is

another level of mourning in this piece.

Is it, in some sense, a memorial for the Holocaust?

It's a piece that, I think, increasingly

has a very high stature in the 20th-century repertory.

Feldman's music was hypnotic.

He once described it as "tripping on chords".

TRIPPY MUSIC

Its trance-like sound was in tune with an explosive shift in 1960s American culture,

one that would have a profound effect on its home-grown classical music.

Great swathes of America

were becoming far more European and far more permissive

at that time. Greenwich Village came to the fore.

And, of course, what New Yorkers called "The Coast", ie California.

And this is what leads in the 1960s to the counter culture.

Drugs, Beat poetry and Eastern philosophies.

Zen, Buddhism, Taoism and all of those things.

And these were all regarded as alternative ways to the truth.

Nowhere more summed up the counterculture than the city of San Francisco,

where, in 1964, a 29-year-old native Californian named Terry Riley

took John Cage's ideas of chance and indeterminacy and gave them a tune.

I was working as a ragtime piano player at the Gold Street Saloon in San Francisco.

And one night on the bus driving into work, I heard the whole thing,

just in my head, just developed, like, almost the whole piece, I could see develop.

And so I went home, the next morning, I wrote, you know, I wrote the piece, essentially, in a day.

I've hardly changed a thing since that first inspiration came.

And when I showed it to the first few friends I showed it to,

everybody kind of laughed and thought it was really a silly idea.

HETEROPHONIC REPETITIVE MUSIC

Riley's breakthrough piece - In C - is made up of 53 short musical fragments

to be played by any number of musicians, for any length of time,

moving from one to the next as the mood takes them.

The structure of Riley's In C is so brilliantly simple.

First of all, you can see the entire musical material on a single page.

The procession through the piece is a kind of snake following its own tail.

So the effect is this sort of glorious unpredictable and yet predictable polyphony.

The wonderful thing about it is that In C is absolutely identifiable as itself.

You can't mistake it for anything else.

Yet every performance of In C is vastly different from others

than a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to itself.

ABSTRACT VOCALS AND PERCUSSION

I thought that Terry had sort of, er,

given a joyful middle finger to academic seriousness.

You know, In C is kind of the ultimate hippie piece, you know.

Where everybody gets around and they don't have to be very good. As long as they can play a few notes

on their instrument they can be part of it.

There's a joyful quality to it and it had that infectious beat to it.

It came out of nowhere

and really did signal a major stylistic shift.

Riley's single-page composition quickly gathered a cult following among a hip young audience,

for whom the avant-garde was nothing to be scared of.

In C found its way to the streets of downtown New York,

where experimental music was thriving.

Not in the classical world

but in the wild sonic meltdown of radical jazz.

During that period, the new directions of jazz

was happening. We were hearing it. You could hear it very easily.

I became very friendly with that community and I enjoyed the music.

I could embrace it, embrace it as a listener.

At that point in jazz history, you have John Coltrane playing

beautiful melodic material, and sometimes just screaming noise

through the saxophone.

Wonderful. Thrilling. And that was absolutely

revolutionary, especially against the backdrop in concert music.

He was going full tilt the opposite direction.

Inspired by the spontaneity of free jazz, young composers such as Steve Reich

and Philip Glass shook up the highbrow culture of classical music.

They took the gradually shifting patterns and pared-down language of Terry Riley's In C

and transformed the musical landscape of America.

Their sound was insistent, repetitive

and unashamedly harmonious.

And it soon became known as minimalism.

When I first heard minimalism,

it was as if the whole wonderful world of tonality was given back to me.

The kinds of things I love listening to on Top-40 radio as I drove around in my car.

The things that I loved about James Brown's music.

It was wonderful. It felt like getting it all back again.

When minimalism came along,

it was an intensely alienating experience

for a lot of listeners who first encountered it.

This was no more to their liking

than the avant-garde music that had come before.

It had a hard edge, it was relentless.

It took the form of, you know, a very simple tonal idea

being repeated again and again and again until it becomes a kind of endurance test.

Minimalism was fuelled by the speeding energy of late '60s and early '70s New York,...

..where pop art and rock music were collapsing the barriers between

popular and serious culture.

It was do-it-yourself, in-your-face,

and a rejection of the elitist culture of modern classical music.

The downtown composers, the minimalists,

they kind of rejected the uptown musical institutions of the big concert halls,

the opera houses. And it was a kind of alternative musical subculture.

When I go back and play the music now,

I feel the energy of that time.

It's in my fingers and it grabs me and it takes me right back to that, there's no question about it.

The son of a record store owner,

Philip Glass studied classical composition in New York and Paris.

But with the development of his radical new sound, came a new development in classical music.

Composers forming bands.

I had come back to New York from being in Paris, I'd lived there for a number of years.

I love Paris because the French musicians I knew wouldn't play my music.

They said, "Ce n'est pas la musique."

They would look at it and say, "We can't play this, it's not music."

I went home. I called my friends who I'd gone to school with, some of them.

And we just went and did it.

We weren't even allowed in the concert halls.

We were finding new audiences.

We did a lot of concerts in lofts and in galleries and in cafeterias.

In all kinds of... I mean, any place we could.

And the artists and dancers and filmmakers and the poets,

they became our audience, and we became their audience.

Philip, since his band was heavily amplified,

and sort of did have the appearance of a rock concert

because it was so loud, people felt they were in a totally new universe.

And what they were hearing was absolutely new

and that it had a kind of mythic aura to it.

I learned a lot from the rock and roll guys.

This is hardcore minimalist, really, rocking and rolling minimalist music.

And it was loud and it was fierce and it made a very big impression.

When I wrote in the music the instructions for the players,

I just wrote "fast and loud".

That's what... That's... I mean, that's very very simple.

No, and then the repetitive goes... it goes without saying.

I had wonderful headline reviews in those days.

One of my favourite ones was, I think it was the Daily News or maybe it was The Post in New York,

and the headline was, "Glass invents new sonic torture."

But minimalism wasn't simply classical music swapping its tuxedo for a leather jacket.

It marked a seismic shift in the listenability of modern music.

Composers such as Glass and Reich broke free

from the straitjacket of 12-tone and serialist composition

that had dominated the classical avant-garde.

A music utterly lacking in minimalism's simple harmonies and steady rhythms.

DRUMMING

Classical music finally got its groove back.

I think it fell to my generation not to do something...

Not to make a revolution, but to return to normalcy.

I had to write 12-tone music, everyone had to write 12 tone music.

This is back in the late '50s, early '60s.

There's no way you're going to tap your foot to any of that.

And it's considered naive to even think that way.

What I'm saying is, is that

to eliminate the basics of the music that you find in jazz,

that you find in West African drumming,

that you find in music for centuries,...

..pulsation, regular pulsation,

is to ignore something which people crave.

What Reich is doing is...

Is that he wants to find a way of getting

rhythm and pulse back into Western contemporary music.

Drumming is built on one rhythm that's extended for, you know, 80, 90 minutes.

It's absolutely about finding the extraordinary richness of the very simplest things of music.

But it also has an infectiousness.

The same thing repeated but slightly different.

It changes your sense of perception, your sense of time passing

it changes your way of hearing.

You get taken to another place. Nothing wrong there.

By the end of the 1970s,

minimalist composers had taken a vast new audience to another place.

Selling records in quantities unheard of in serious modern music.

But not everyone was digging it.

Where many heard a blissful return to tonality,

others wondered, quite literally,

where it was going.

Well, I feel minimal.

If you... If you...

If you have a piece which is based on a single chord,

after a while, you say, "Yes, now I know."

Can you go further? And it does not go further.

Minimalism doesn't have nice tunes.

Pure minimalism is almost anti-melodic, and it's also extremely static and it's meant to induce,

I'd say, a sense of trance.

I wouldn't call it tonal at all.

Because tonality involves concepts of cadence, concepts of motions,

that are missing from this music.

Intentionally missing from the music.

Minimalism was very controversial when it first arrived.

You know, some of it really was kind of mind-numbingly repetitive.

I can't bear to hear some of the classic pieces of minimalism.

I just, you know, I look to see where the exit is.

But it was... There was something vibrant and thrilling about it.

I mean, I liked the minimalists

right off the bat. I think what made

people the craziest about the minimalists is that

they made music on their own that people wanted to listen to

and would pay cash money to have on an LP in their house.

Right? Which is, like, kind of amazing, right?

It shouldn't be amazing but, I think, in 1979, it was kind of amazing.

I think that the reason people criticise minimalism is because

it's popular. So if somebody who doesn't really know that much about classical music likes Philip Glass,

well, they must not really know what's good

and Philip Glass must not be a good composer.

But I totally disagree with that correlation.

As minimalism conquered America, in Europe its reception was more muted.

The hardcore modernists of serial music

were suspicious of its reliance on the old taboo of melody.

But minimalism did have one remarkable and perhaps surprising impact.

In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, it entered the realm of the sacred.

It influenced a composer whose music combined the pattern and repetition of the minimalists

with the silences of Cage and the stillness of Feldman.

I would say, for me, Arvo Part is the most important living European composer.

His music strikes me as just, you know,

extremely, emotionally, profoundly honest moving music.

Overpoweringly beautiful.

The craftsmanship, the honesty

and the authentic religious conviction that these pieces embody

are, in a sense, a tonic in our generation.

But Part's tonic was born from extreme circumstances.

In Soviet-occupied Estonia, where he studied at the Tallinn Conservatory,

religious faith was a bigger taboo than any modernist musical movement.

By turning to sacred composition in the late 1960s,

he was risking his life for his art.

It was a very hard time.

Terror and fear reigned in that country.

And every individual's life was in danger.

But those who followed their own voices

ended up in prison.

I had always been seeking the way

to a new kind of music which could nourish my soul.

And yet, it was shamelessly explained to us

in those totalitarian atheistic countries that,

of course, there were once great composers -

Bach, Mozart, Schubert, but they all had the same failing.

They were religious.

They were devout.

When his early pieces were banned by Soviet censors,

Part stopped writing music altogether.

Gradually re-emerging in the late 1970s with a spartan chiming sound

intended to convey pure religious emotion.

Arvo Part's story is an amazing story about

a career that starts off as a real kind of musical and political even religious protest.

And then, after a period of reflection, he finds the music, he calls it tintinnabulation.

That, for him, was a really important epiphany.

And what he found in this, what he calls tintinnabulation, is something that, on the surface,

is something that seems familiar. And yet, the way it moves

is incredibly systematic, the way he actually puts one chord with the other.

And the rules that he asks of the collections of notes that we're familiar with,

are extremely rigorous and austere and ascetic.

But if you listen to it, it has an objectivity and a stillness and a serenity.

And, yeah, a love that is very profound, I think.

I think, for Arvo Part, minimalism

actually became a way to create

an emotional environment with the listener.

I think, for Arvo Part, for whom God is so important

and for whom religion is so important,

um, music has that ability

to build that connection. We all feel that.

You know, I can... I can imagine how that issue for Arvo Part,

of how to get emotionality back, you know, after modernism,

was the primary issue of his life.

Within years, a strain of stripped-down devotional music

exemplified by Part, came to be known as "holy minimalism."

and struck a chord with a worldwide audience.

But, like the American minimalism of Glass and Reich,

this unprecedented commercial success divided opinion in the world of classical music.

Was it purely due to its easy-on-the-ear nature?

Or was it indicative of modern music finally regaining its soul?

Arvo Part's music was a sound that people were drawn to.

And, suddenly, these Arvo Part records were selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

And some people have said that this was sort of a superficial phenomenon

of bourgeois people wanting to acquire a patina of spirituality.

And, sure, that could be true in some cases.

But there's also, I think there's... there's a deeper longing,

yearning there in this culture,

which is starved for sacred images.

And Part answers that need.

I think it's also true to say that the 20th century,

particularly in the last part of the 20th century,

has had more effort to produce a sacred music than the 19th century.

I mean, you have people like Stravinsky,

you have people like Arvo Part, you have people, I suppose, like me.

I mean, all in search of a spiritual vision of some kind.

Born in London in 1944,

John Tavener became a boy wonder of 1960s British music.

The first classical composer to be signed to the Beatles' record label.

Right from the start, his music had a religious leaning.

His breakthrough work, The Whale, was the biblical story of Jonah and the whale told in a modernist

experimental style.

I had suddenly been introduced to modernism and I listened to Boulez, I listened to Stockhausen.

And was very excited by it.

But it's not something now, towards the end of my life, that I can see

was a productive path for art.

I don't love the torment in the music.

I don't really want to remember anything

that shows the ugliness of the human condition.

We see it all the time, for God's sake, we don't need it.

We need to be... We need to be lifted.

John Tavener specifically became interested in the Greek Orthodox faith.

Was inspired by the chants, by the music of that church.

He was incorporating that kind of bell-like simplicity

into all of his music.

And every piece of music became a kind of devotional act.

In his 1987 piece, The Protecting Veil, Tavener said that he was

"trying to capture some of the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God."

And though its contemplative ecstatic conviction might seem out of step with the late-20th century,

it made this modern-day mystic a household name.

I don't understand the success or otherwise of my music, I never understand it.

I think what inspired The Protecting Veil was the concept of the eternal feminine.

That is what people perhaps long for, the tender,

the compassionate, the loving, and beauty also

is a bit missing in 20th-century art and 20th-century music.

I was at the first performance of John Tavener's Protecting Veil.

It's a very very slow, very long

very expressive pared-down minimal cello concerto.

With the orchestra providing kind of shimmering bell-like harmonies.

It was in 1988, it was at the height of the Thatcher '80s.

I think it's interesting that that piece came to enormous popularity at that time.

I guess, one view is just that people latched onto this pure

spiritual simplicity of this music

as a counterpart to the brash culture of Thatcher's Britain.

More than any modern composer,

Tavener's music has seeped into the public consciousness.

His choral works have become staples of religious worship.

And when his 1993 piece, Song For Athene,

was performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales,

it was heard by a global audience of over 750 million.

There is an audience which adores this music.

The difficulty and danger with this music, of course,

is that it's then used in comparison to other music from the 20th century.

Because, in some ways, it is easier to understand.

I can understand more easily what John Tavener is attempting to achieve

in a piece which is simple harmonic blocks in a line over the top,

than I can in a piece by Stockhausen.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find the answers

to that more challenging music.

Modern classical music had finally ceased to alienate its audience.

But that didn't mean the avant-garde was left for dead.

Back in Paris, the city where Claude Debussy first threw open the floodgates

for a century of musical reinvention,

an underground bunker had been forged.

A scientific laboratory

equipped to blast music from the end of the 20th century into the 21st.

This was the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique.

Better known by its sci-fi abbreviation IRCAM.

When IRCAM was established in the 1970s, to some extent,

it was a way of re-establishing Paris as a centre of contemporary music.

It was a utopian ideal of a place where composers

and technicians

and allied thinkers could experiment with new technical possibilities.

It was very simple. It was to make a Bauhaus for music.

And what was going on in Germany in the '20s, for painters, architects, designers.

The idea, I think, was to do that for music.

To find new musical tools to refresh the musical language.

It's been a very important phenomenon

in the last 30-40 years of music.

IRCAM was the brainchild of one of the giants of 20th-century modernism,

the French composer Pierre Boulez.

After 30 years at the frontline of the musical avant-garde,

he'd become switched on to a new musical tool.

I was soon enough to recognise the importance of the technology,

computer technology.

That was at the very beginning, in '75 already.

And I organised IRCAM around this new technology.

And I said I would like to conceive a big studio

that people can stay there, experiment freely.

I was invited by Pierre Boulez to come to IRCAM and to work on

what were entirely new machines, computers for music. Such a thing hadn't existed before.

And to see what one could make from them.

I found the dry cold mechanical sound of most of what I heard coming out of them,

er, uninteresting musically.

And my challenge, the one I set myself,

was somehow to try to make these tools sing.

SPEAKS FRENCH

A musical prodigy, George Benjamin had a long association with music in Paris,

having studied there aged 14 with the great composer Olivier Messiaen.

APPLAUSE

The work he created at IRCAM, Antara,

fused the white heat of computer technology

with the very ancient sound of traditional instruments.

George Benjamin has always been a composer who's fascinated by sound.

But he ended up being most influenced by some sounds that he heard outside of IRCAM.

The buskers, the Peruvian panpipe players who were there every day.

He recorded the sounds of their panpipes and treated them on the computers of IRCAM.

And made sounds which were integrated into a live orchestra.

People were mystified by it at first because, in the '70s and the '80s,

electronic pieces had lots of very sort of extrovert metallic sound effects,

and lots and lots of drones and a bit Star Wars like.

In terms, not the music, but in terms of sometimes some of the sort of sound effects.

My ambition was that you wouldn't hear

there were plugs involved, it would sound natural.

The electronic advances of IRCAM offered late-20th-century music

an almost limitless potential for new sounds and instrumentation.

But classical music didn't take a trip into outer space.

Technology was a resource, not a revolution.

There was life in the old dog yet.

Wagner was asked, "What's the best way to proceed as a composer?"

His answer was, "Make new. Do something new."

When I was studying to be a composer in the '70s, there was an idea that, "Can anything be music?"

Music hesitated on the edge of that for quite some time.

In the end, composers have gone back to instruments,

sometimes involving technologies of computers, electronics.

But, in the end, the mystery of blocks of wood

and these little bits of metal, the flutes and violins,

the mystery of them survives and continues to thrive.

I find that a rather beautiful thing.

For much of the 20th century, modern music had sought to wipe away its past.

Each new revolutionary movement a rejection of the one before.

By the '80s and '90s, no new movement had emerged since minimalism.

And modernism in the arts had given way to postmodernism.

Music, like culture, became a pick-and-mix smorgasbord of styles.

Where the past and the present, as in the music of John Adams,

were harmonically reconciled.

I think I'm one of the first kind of post-stylistic composers, you know.

I was deeply influenced by minimalism at the beginning.

But I was also influenced by everything from, you know,

Beethoven piano sonatas to Jimi Hendrix.

You know, I'm, I guess, a Romantic.

I want to be able to make music that had

highs and lows like a Mahler symphony.

Um, so right from the start, I was already pushing the envelope.

And, as some critics said of me, I was already

corrupting, you know, a wonderful new style.

So that was... That was, you know... I took some beating.

John Adams took this idea of extreme minimalism in music

and kind of melded it

with the great tradition of Western classical music.

So you hear Schoenberg,

you hear Brahms and Beethoven,

and you hear the musical theatre tradition,

the American songbook, it's a kind of postmodern view.

But it's the view of someone who

has looked at this music, has looked at all the things that have gone on

in the last 100 years, I suppose, of music,

and has said, "I'm gonna create a music for our times."

What he's done with, particularly these great operas

that he's written in the last 30 years or so,

Nixon In China, The Death Of Klinghoffer,

he's provided ways that we can express the big events of the 20th century in music.

It's the kind of vision that Verdi might have had, the sort of realism

of expressing historical events through opera.

But I don't think there's another composer who's doing that thing

on such a grand scale and with such mastery as John Adams is.

And so, after 100 years of rule breaking, bloody-minded complexity,

space-age noise and the battle between beauty and brutality,

classical music is alive and well.

Symphonies, chamber music, opera,

they all stood up to a century of torment and unrest

and survived a journey to hell and back again.

I think you can see 20th-century musical history

as a kind of odyssey and a return home.

Similarly, there were a lot of people who were relieved to find

that composers of the late-20th century,

Steve Reich, Arvo Pert, John Adams,

were embracing tonality again, you know, finally.

You know, we've returned home after this long wandering.

But then, once you're home, you may want to go out again.

And you find, you know, a lot of the music worlds,

like the world of humanity is,

is one of many languages, and they coexist.

In the early-21st century,

the whole audience for classical music has changed.

When the modernist revolution was first unleashed,

it shocked the bourgeois elite in the world's most reverential concert halls.

Today, it might just as likely be heard at a music festival

or even in a South London car park.

And with the benefit of age, it may even, finally, have lost its power to shock.

During the '50s, certainly when I was a music student,

one could hear the pitter-patter of little feet as soon as there was a new piece in the programme.

And they were just... They were beating a path out the door.

Um, and I think that, you know, in a time now when John Adams has been around for quite a while,

Phil Glass and Arvo Part have been around for a while, I've been around for a while,

my concerts are filled with blue-haired ladies in the old sense

and blue-haired ladies in the new sense.

And I think that's the way it should be.

I'd say, for the last 20 years, we're living in a situation

where a lot of young people are very interested in what's going on in music. They go to concerts,

they steal all the recordings that they like.

LAUGHS

They download all the recordings that they like.

And there is an audience and the audience is making itself known.

Where are we now? We've had so many revolutions

and interesting experiments and new resources brought into music,

we hardly need to invent anything new.

It's all there.

What we're all hoping for is Mozart, I guess.

The 20th century has accelerated shifts and movement

in every form of culture, society, technology.

So that everything is happening faster,

at a faster rate than it ever has.

Which leads to the question of what will happen in the next 100 years.

That's the most intriguing question, I think, for what we sort of loosely call classical music.

The movement from Schoenberg through to where we are now, and particularly

actually those hills in the middle, is the most extraordinary journey,

the most intense quick accelerated, er, movement

that has exploded out into the most extraordinary strands of music.

I don't think anyone could have feasibly imagined that would happen.

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