The Shuffle Effect Postmodern composers shuffled tunes long before the iPod era.
By Menon Dwarka Illustration by Serge Bloch
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George Rochberg String Quartets Nos. 3, 4, 5 & 6 Concord String Quartet New World Records What cannot be denied is Rochberg’s exquisite, idiomatic string writing and unerring command of form and time scale. —Jed Distler / ClassicsToday.com
32 • spring 2010
f you’re like most enthusiastic listeners, you probably own a portable MP3 player and listen to your favorite tunes as you commute, exercise or relax at home. And you’ve probably read magazine articles on how these gadgets have changed the world, from crippling the record industry and rendering the sale of CDs and DVDs irrelevant, to offering independent music producers (hip-hop artists and chamber music groups alike) instant access to a market previously held by four or five multinational corporations. But could the iPod have an impact on the composition of classical music? Specifically, could a composer’s ability to easily and randomly “shuffle” bits and pieces of his previous works — serious and casual, early and later pieces — create novel associations, spark new creative decisions or affect his choice of material? The answer is “of course,” since this jumbled approach to music making has already been investigated by many classical composers, in particular twentieth-century artists who explored what is now called postmodernism. Though the term is almost intentionally vague, one thing can be definitively said about postmodern music: all of its composers shared an ahistorical approach to their material, believing that the entire canon of Western music, with all its various styles and epochs, could be shuffled to create something new. These compositions tend to fall into two categories: those that mix styles of music from movement to movement and those that mix styles within a movement.
A work in the latter category resembles something closer to a remix, complete with cross-fades, splice cuts and dreamlike chaos — as in the Scherzo movement from Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia or Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 — while the former comes closest to the experience of listening to a shuffled iPod. George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, from 1971, is a work that exemplifies this former polystylistic approach, though Rochberg actually went one step further: instead of simple stylistic mimicry, he appropriated the specific voices of other composers. The movements of this quartet don't just sound Romantic or modern in style, they actually sound like lost pieces of Beethoven and Bartók. How did this composer end up intentionally writing in someone else’s style? During the years after the war, within the ranks of serious composers, a high priority was placed on technique, and Rochberg’s early music was characterized by a severely disciplined form of serialism. But in 1964 he was confronted by the death of his son, and the composer found himself unable to express his grief in his chosen idiom. His compositional voice slowly went mute. He would find it again only by examining the very nature of style in music. The function of a new work often dictates which stylistic choices are open to its composer. An international style, embodying traits of austerity, symmetry and harmony, might be better suited to a Roman Catholic Mass from the Renaissance period, while a piano virtuoso in the post-Napoleonic era