Twentieth-century music has been pointed the finger at for its unenjoyability by ‘conventional’ classical music lovers. Composers, on the one hand, have attempted to reject past musical traditions and, on the other hand, embraced and reinvented them. There have been extensive controversies on this topic, and I would like to share my opinions on this. Again, I am taking the perspective of a recorder player to make a brief analysis, and I hope that it will not be an overly narrow approach.
For recorder players, twentieth-century music is a massive part of their repertoire. Such a music form, however, would be seemingly contradictory to the tradition of recorder playing for people who know some history of the recorder. Admittedly, no matter the physical appearance or the sound of a recorder (refers to a baroque recorder in general), if played correctly, the recorder does not seem to fit in the world of twentieth-century music.
Appearance-wise, people (myself LOLs) would probably deem that instruments for such music ought to ‘look cool (less elegant, less old, and more complex)’ and be partially ‘metallic (contains metal elements, e.g. keys)’, if not entirely, or at least less woody. I do believe that is because twentieth-century music is often reckoned revolutionary and rebellious, and the characteristics mentioned above (particularly the ‘metallic’ part), which are products of industrialisation and modernisation of instruments that seem contradictory to the past, would fit perfectly in such context. The recorder looks fairly plain and lacks those elements, to be frank. How could it be related to twentieth-century music?
Sound-wise, the recorder has got a sweet and pure sound which is considerably different from the sound that musicians who embrace twentieth-century music desire. What composers and musicians would typically prefer for such music are things like electronics, percussions, or ordinary instruments with ‘things’ (which can barely be specified because they can be literally anything you can think of) installed. John Cage (1912–1992) is one of the ideal examples. What John Cage composed in his Sonata No.VI from Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is that by adding additional, unconventional, metallic (albeit not all) elements, such as screws and rubber, to a typical instrument, piano, new, percussive, and ‘sizzling’ sounds are then produced to make the music bizarre yet intriguing.
Nevertheless, it is the recorder’s simplicity and flexibility that makes this instrument so loved by composers who embrace twentieth-century music. The structural parts of the recorder are mostly exposed, unlike other modern woodwind instruments with keys covering the holes. That allows the player to manipulate the instrument fully and produce various sounds that the player wants, e.g. windy and percussive, by shading and leaking the holes and the labium (the part where the sound is created on the recorder) or hitting the body of the recorder with a ring or the player’s bare hands and knuckles. Thanks to recorder’s sensitivity to air amount and pressure, pitch and sound colours can be altered, and overtones and unique articulations can be produced with ease. Players can even sing while playing the instruments to make the music homophonic and polyphonic.
I was not trying to blow the recorder’s trumpet, instead, I was trying to see how past musical traditions are rejected and embraced and reinvented from the ‘recorder perspective’.
Above is a famous piece, Gesti (1965), composed by Luciano Berio (1925–2003) and dedicated for Frans Brüggen (1934–2014), a renowned and legendary recorder player. It is so influential that it is somehow like the twentieth-century-music Bible to recorder players. The piece is graphically notated, and, in the piece, the three fundamental elements of recorder playing, namely air, tongue, and fingers, are altogether compartmentalised in the beginning, then come together again, and are scattered eventually. Special sound effects such as flutter-tongue are all over the piece and are actually experimental and astonishing!
Later composers who composed music for the recorder are also strongly influenced by the piece. In this piece, we can see those past musical traditions, such as traditional performance practice and music notation are no longer praised, encouraged, or used; but meanwhile, past musical traditions, e.g., the use of the traditional musical instrument, techniques, musical elements, like rhythms and dynamics, and venue and attire for performance, are still embraced. With partial components of both traditional and untraditional music cultures, composers reinvent classical music in their way, exploring new possibilities.
Indeed, twentieth-century music is not that enjoyable under the framework of classical music but I believe that it is unfair to twentieth-century music. Twentieth-century music is an entirely new form of music. Such music deserves a totally different approach to be appreciated as if we do not judge Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings by the aspect of mannerism nor Baroque painting. It is crucial to adopt a new system of enjoying and criticising such music so that people who are/are not musically trained can together enjoy twentieth-century music.
