PROFILES OF MODERN COMPOSERS

Author: Göran Bergendal
Year: 1967
Publisher: J. A. Lindblads Bokförlag
Language: Swedish

The Swedish musicologist Göran Bergendal spent most of his adult days promoting contemporary Swedish art music and spreading knowledge and awareness about serious music to the general public. During his tenure at the now defunct Rikskonserter Foundation and his advisory capacity at the state-owned Caprice Records and Swedish Public Radio, he worked relentlessly to unite the composers of the time with a moderately enthusiastic Swedish audience. One of the tools in his toolbox was writing. His most famous publication was “33 svenska komponister” from 1972 which contains easily accessible biographical articles about some of the most notable (and most promising) Swedish composers. However, 5 years prior to that, he had tried the format in a less celebrated but equally worthwhile book titled “Moderna tonsättarprofiler” (not available in English but translated it would be “Profiles of Modern Composers”).

In this book, Bergendal provides short articles of about 8-10 pages each about 15 classical composers and three jazz artists that he claims changed the face of music in the 20^th century. The book can be read as a complement to Axel Hambaeus book “Mästare i tonernas värld” from 1933 which occupies itself with composers from Bach to the break of the 20^th century. Bergendal argues that modern composers are just as important in our era as Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn or Dvorak were in theirs and wants us to read “Moderna tonsättarprofiler” as a continuation of Hambreaus’s work.

The texts are written in an educated but casual form, with some linguistic manoeuvres sounding a bit dated to a modern ear. The articles usually give a short introduction to the life of the composer and then move quickly into his (they are all men) output and a simple analysis of his music. The cross-references to other composers, some of whom are also represented in this collection, are plentiful and help to put the musician and his work into a global context. Each of the articles is thus a pleasure to read.

What is particularly interesting to observe 55 years on is Bergendal’s choice of composers.

He starts off with Maurice Ravel who was, perhaps, the most conservative of the whole lot. However, sensitive to foreign influences as he was, he may have been the first European composer to incorporate the nascent jazz sound into his music, most famously his piano concerto in D major for the left hand, commissioned by the piano virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein.   

Russian music is represented by Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Prokofiev while leaving out the brilliant Dmitry Shostakovich. Although personally, I am a huge admirer of Prokofiev’s ingenuity, I will concede that Shostakovich probably had a more important impact on Russian and European music which is why I am not sure about this choice.

Bergendal then continues to the Magyar Béla Bartók and his lonely search for acceptance despite being repeatedly rejected by audiences, each time for a different reason. What surprised me was Bergendal’s silence on Bartok’s importance as an educator through his widely influential “For Children” suite of some 80 piano pieces of varying difficulty for the youngest musicians.

Moving on, Bergendal dwells for quite some time on Arnold Schönberg and his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Their cooperation in the “Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen” which for a few years after the First World War gave them the space they needed to introduce their music, particularly the twelve-tone-technique, to the stages around Vienna, is given ample space across here articles. It is perfectly warranted. Theirs was the first serious and coordinated challenge to the musical form, including harmony, melody and tonality, and would transform the way serious music would sound for the next half a century.

Since both the writer and the expected readers were Swedish, it is understandable that the Swedish composers would be over-represented in the book. Bergendal chose to include three of them in his book: Hilding Rosenberg, Karl-Birger Blomdahl, and Lars-Erik Larsson. All of these brought the modern musical influences, such as the twelve-tone-technique, to Sweden but none of them made any decisive contributions to the evolution of serious music globally, although the latter wrote some amazing music that is still played by orchestras worldwide, such as the Pastoral suite and God in Disguise.

Paul Hindemith, in Bergendal’s narration, is the study of a young revolutionary who bit by bit loses sight of the future and falls back onto the ancient and traditional. This is something Bergendal obviously laments and so the article on Hindemith is perhaps the one where the author’s own opinions and preferences shine through the most obviously. The article ends with the bitter words “Hindemith amassed much wisdom during his life, /.../, but he had apparently forgotten all about his merry 20s and stupendous 30s”.

Moving on to Benjamin Britten, who is presented as a friendly fellow with a talent for music and for making friends. His Aldeburgh festival, which he co-organised with his life partner Peter Pears and which is still an annual event, hinged entirely on Britten’s connections and his ability to persuade world-class performers such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Sviatoslav Richter to come to this small coastal town in Suffolk.

The three jazz musicians in this collection are Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Charlie Parker. These articles are written by Krister Malm whose expertise in this genre apparently far exceeded Bergendal’s. Apart from their contributions to their musical field, their lives were also a struggle against racism and bigotry. When a British music critic compared Duke Ellington’s music to Stravinsky and Ravel, Ellington’s agent Irving Mills who was trying to sell the band as “music from the jungle” was apparently furious. Serious music was simply not the black man’s domain at the time and reviews like that could hurt Mills’ business.

The final three articles are dedicated to Edgard Varése, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage. Whereas the avant-garde until that time had fought hard to liberate music from established rules based on rhythm, harmony, keys, etc, Varése, Stockhausen and Cage each in their own way worked to abandon the sounds from the known musical instruments as such. Varése’s use of loud but ill sounding contraptions such as foghorns, Stockhausen’s electrical instruments, and Cage’s experiments with silence as the backdrop to the natural sounds around us are a few ways in which instrumentalists of the time were challenged.

It is an obvious flaw that composers of much greater importance, such as Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Shostakovich were omitted in favour of less influential names, but it is easy for us to say in hindsight. Therefore, I was thrilled to step into the 1960s for a while and take in what a distinguished Swedish musicologist considered to be the most important work being done in his field by his contemporaries.  I recommend this book, not primarily to music lovers as there are probably far better biographies about each of these composers out there, but rather to those interested in the modern history of music while it was unfolding.