Robert Schumann – Liederkreis, Op. 39 (1840)
I’ve loved Schumann’s Dichterliebe (also 1840) ever since I first heard it during my sophomore year of college. The easiest way for me to convey why is with an anecdote. A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by W.H. Auden for a class I’m taking on contemporary opera. Part of Auden’s argument was that emotional ambiguity is impossible in music because “whatever is sung is the case” — that is, because the emotional impact of music is so direct and immediate that listeners can’t take a distanced or critical approach to it. I can hardly even express how wrong I think this position is. Not only is emotional ambiguity possible in music, but it’s one of the things I value most in a piece. And when I raised that point to one of my classmates, his immediate reaction was: ”Yeah, hasn’t he heard ‘Ich grolle nicht’?” — “Ich grolle nicht” being, of course, one of the songs from Dichterliebe. And pretty much every song in the cycle is like that: perfectly balanced between tranquility and melancholy, or between ecstasy and heartbreak. ”Smiling through tears,” as the professor who introduced me to it would say.
I got to know the piece through the recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel. The other piece on that CD is the Op. 39 Liederkreis (I’m specifying the opus number because there’s another song cycle with the same title — which just means “song cycle” — that was published as Op. 24). I remember starting to listen to it once, finding it much less evocative than Dichterliebe, turning it off, and then forgetting about it. But last week my composition teacher recommended that I check out the song “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”) as a possible model for a piece I’m working on, so I figured it was time to give the whole cycle another listen.
(Aside: I’m writing this in my office at school, and someone is playing “Im wonderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the Wonderfully Beautiful Month of May”), the first song from Dichterliebe, in the next room!)
This time, too, my first impression was that Liederkreis is less emotionally sophisticated than its companion. The first few songs in particular seem very straightforward — beautiful, to be sure, but lacking the sense of mystery that draws me to Romantic lieder. But things get stranger later in the cycle. Although the poems, taken from Joseph von Eichendorff’s novel Premonition and Present (1815), don’t add up to a clear narrative, themes begin to emerge. The narrator repeatedly associates himself with birds, makes references to traveling in a foreign land, and implies that there is something sad or sinister about the natural world. Most strikingly, Eichendorff repeatedly associates marriage with pain. At the end of “Auf einer Burg” (“In a Castle”), a wedding procession passes by, the bride inexplicably weeping. In “Im Walde” (“In the Woods”), the narrator again sees a wedding procession, and when it has passed, it leaves behind an eerie nighttime landscape that makes the narrator shudder “im Herzensgrunde,” literally “in the root of his heart.” By the end of the piece, the third song, “Waldgespräch” (“Forest Conversation”), seems to have taken on a new meaning. It initially comes across as a fragment of a fairy tale, the kind of thing everyone in Germany was obsessed with in the first half of the 19th century: the narrator encounters the witch Lorelei in the forest and she lays a curse on him: ”You will never again leave these woods!” But she also says that her heart has been broken by the treachery and cunning of men. Is the image of the weeping bride an echo of Lorelei’s pain? Do the cycle’s numerous references to foreign lands mean that the protagonist is lost in the forest the whole time, that the curse lasts for the entire cycle? Is that why, in “In der Fremde” (“In a Strange Land”), his beloved is dead? Is that why, in “Frühlingsnacht” (“Spring Night”), he weeps with joy when the moon, stars, trees and nightingales murmur, “She is yours, she is yours?” Has Lorelei sentenced him to an incomprehensible dream-world as a punishment for the crimes of his sex?
The music also becomes more ambiguous as the piece goes on. In the later songs, there’s often a direct contradiction between the emotional content of the text and that of the music. When the text of “Im Walde” moves from wedding to strange silent landscape, for example, the music registers the change only with brief ritardandi, while its harmonic language remains cheerful; when the narrator sings about shuddering in the root of his heart, there’s only a single chromatic note, a C natural in E major, to hint at the pain he’s feeling. ”In der Fremde” is the other way around, or seems to be at first: a poem about the mysterious beauty of nature is given a rapid minor-mode setting full of nervous grace notes. It’s only at the end, when it’s revealed that the narrator’s beloved is dead, that the song’s tone makes sense. And “Wehmut” (“Melancholy”) is actually about this sort of emotional layering: with utter tranquility, the narrator sings, “Then all hearts listen and everyone is glad / Yet no one feels the sorrows, the deep pain in the song.”
As for “Zwielicht,” the song that got me interested in the cycle in the first place, it’s not exactly emotionally ambiguous, but it certainly is creepy. The narrator is consumed with dread as twilight falls, and warns the listener that you should never trust your friends or let your deer graze alone at this strange, liminal hour, because danger is waiting, and “much is lost in the night.” The setting is spare, full of disquieting cross-relations and aching 3-2 suspensions over V chords. At times it reminds me of the more melancholy Scarlatti sonatas, especially the one in B minor, K. 87. At the end of the song, the word “night” is accompanied by a iv7 chord with an unusual, almost jazzy voicing: from low to high, E-E-G-A-C-A. The top A is doubled by the voice, but it soon moves to a G, creating a mild dissonance with the piano. Unsettling.
Four more early electronic pieces
Richard Maxfield – Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered Over the Ocean) (1959). Six minutes of bleeps and bloops. There doesn’t seem to be any additive synthesis going on; it’s all pure sine tones, which is to say the most colorless sound material available. It was his first electronic piece, so I don’t want to be too harsh, but I really get nothing out of it, even with the help of an evocative title.
Luigi Nono – Omaggio a Vedova (1960). On the other hand, this is Nono’s first electronic piece and it’s a hundred times more sophisticated than Sine Music. Stylistically it reminds me a bit of the Evangelisti piece I wrote about in my last post, but its focus is overwhelmingly on clangorous sounds rather than floating ones; the overall impression I get is of enormous steel machines in a giant warehouse. Particularly striking is the passage starting around 3:40, in which the sound field is overtaken by a wild, thrashing ball of filtered noise, which then sputters out into silence. It’s certainly the most visceral moment I’ve heard in a Nono piece, though to be fair I don’t know very much of his music. The title is a reference to the painter Emilio Vedova, who often designed sets and costumes for Nono’s operas, and I can certainly hear an affinity between these violent slashes of sound and Vedova’s violent slashes of color. (Also, I’d really like to see some of those Vedova paintings in person!)
Kenneth Gaburo – The Wasting of Lucrecetzia (1964). We now return from Milan to the US, specifically the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign. If Omaggio a Vedova sounded like an otherworldly factory, The Wasting of Lucrecetzia sounds like a dance band from another planet. As far as I can tell, the piece is be built from layers upon layers of screaming voices, drums and saxophones, sometimes played back at normal speed, but sometimes — more and more often as the piece continues — sped up to a frenetic chipmunk-squeal. At the end some of the layers drop out, leaving the piece to conclude with a barrage of rhythmic, high-frequency, insectile buzzing. I had no idea anything like this existed in 1964. It sounds like an outtake from a Faust album, or a particularly experimental Olivia Tremor Control side project.
Kenneth Gaburo – Lemon Drops (1965). I always like it when a composer tries something new in each piece. While Lemon Drops does share The Wasting of Lucrecetzia‘s textural density and use of instrumental samples, its mood and sound world are completely different. This time Gaburo combines layers of improvisatory atonal lines played on what sounds like a Wurlitzer with electronically generated sounds — mostly bloopy bass notes but once, just over halfway through the piece, a jarring mid-register warble that sounds like it was probably created with a Buchla synthesizer. Despite its meandering quality and the overwhelming density it builds to by the end, it’s a surprisingly satisfying piece. Its methods of construction are totally different, but its character reminds me of the similarly overstuffed music of Brooklyn sound-collagist Noah Creshevsky.
Carl Maria von Weber – Clarinet Concerto #1 in F Minor, Op. 73 (1811)
This is the only Weber I’ve heard aside from some excerpts from Der Freischütz (1821) that I listened to for a college music history class. All in all, I’d say it comes across like a competent work by a minor composer, with occasional moments of excellence and quite a bit of “OK, that’ll do.” Like many works by minor composers, it often feels like an amalgam of elements taken from more inventive predecessors and contemporaries: the first movement in particular could be summed up pretty neatly as a combination of Beethoven’s storminess, Mozart’s melodic language, and Schubert’s orchestration. There are some unusual formal touches, including the fact that the movement’s most dramatic climax occurs after the recapitulation has finished (leading one commentator to conclude that it’s not actually in sonata form — a claim that I think reflects a far too reductive view of what sonata form is, one that’s not borne out by the repertoire) — but the material is generic enough that it doesn’t leave a lasting impression.
The other two movements have more to them. The slow movement’s main theme has a typically Germanic wistfulness to it, like a Schumann character piece that’s meant to suggest a nostalgic memory of childhood. That material is set off against two other kinds of music: a return to the first movement’s F minor, full of Sturm und Drang but signifying nothing, and a striking chorale-like passage played by only the solo clarinet and the horns. The chorale returns briefly at the end, but oddly, the F-minor passage happens only once. There’s also a surprising transitional passage that links the horn chorale to the return of the main theme: three sustained horn notes, each followed by an isolated pizzicato chord. It sounds more like a scene change in an opera than a transition in a piece of instrumental music; the F-minor music’s disconnection from the rest of the movement also suggests operatic, or at least narrative, thinking.
The third movement is a clownish rondo, full of Rossini-esque twiddling, sudden interruptions and deliberately clunky dancing-elephant appoggiaturas. It’s also got a minor-mode section that unexpectedly achieves a real sense of pathos, and some surprisingly triumphant climaxes. If there’s one thing it’s clear that Weber is good at, it’s building to a fortissimo explosion.
Hey, wait a minute. Forgettable tragic first movement, affecting second movement, sarcastic finale… did I just listen to Schubert’s Fourth Symphony (1816)?
Ludwig van Beethoven – Cello Sonata #5 in D Major, Op. 102/2 (1815)
Well, it certainly sounds like late Beethoven. It’s not as meaty as the late piano sonatas (1814-1822), or as profoundly bizarre and radical as the late string quartets (1823-1826), but its approach to form and mood has a lot in common with those pieces. Some typical late-Beethoven gestures that appear in the piece:
• A moment of strange, mysterious quiet. Specifically, in the second movement, where a lush, sensuous passage in D major is suddenly interrupted by a return to the movement’s spare opening, stripped down even further by the removal of the cello: just simple, somber chords in D minor.
• The unexpected emergence of a long, lyrical melody over an off-kilter accompaniment texture. Specifically, right after the passage I just described: those simple, somber chords are offset by stately dotted-rhythm arpeggios in the cello, and eight bars later, those arpeggios are transferred to the right hand of the piano, while the left hand plays triplets. The superimposition of rhythms gives the piano part an unsettled quality, while the cello melody floats above, undisturbed.
• A transitional passage that doesn’t clearly belong to one movement or another. Specifically, the ascending scales, first in the cello and then in the piano, that anticipate the opening of the third movement.
• A fugue. Specifically, the finale. It’s an upbeat movement that reminds me somewhat of Handel (Beethoven’s favorite composer at the end of his life), but the bit where the scalar subject is reduced to isolated three-note interjections is pure Beethoven.
• Perhaps most importantly: a first movement that just barely manages to fit within the boundaries of sonata form. It’s not that it lacks a clear exposition, development and recapitulation, or that you can’t find first and second key areas; it’s that it completely lacks the intense forward drive that had Beethoven had helped establish as the sonata-form norm a decade earlier. The exposition keeps changing its mind about what it’s doing. A dramatic opening piano flourish, a cadential formula, a decisive cello arpeggio — then a sudden shift and the music is quiet and lyrical, marked dolce. Three bars later, the music becomes chromatic and bass-heavy, the texture reduced to almost nothing but parallel octaves; then there’s an eruption of heroic contrapuntal music, but it’s cut off abruptly after only four bars. Toward the end of the exposition, single bars of heroic march music are dropped into a passage that’s otherwise simple, lyrical and focused on triplets. The development section refuses to push toward a retransition, preferring instead to spin its wheels, repeat itself, get stuck on particular harmonies and figures. And at the end of the movement, Beethoven suddenly interrupts himself, modulates from G major to Db major in a tense passage built over unceasing left-hand sixteenth note oscillation, and then gets back back by moving an entire chord up a semitone, without any voice-leading tricks to eliminate parallel fifths and octaves.
There are a few ways to perform a score like this. You can play it with the character of a middle-period Beethoven piece and dramatize the contrasts, like Pierre Fournier and Wilhelm Kempff do; the result is jerky and discombobulating, like an early Romantic John Zorn. Or you can do what Adrian and Alfred Brendel do: smooth everything into a lazy dream, like an early Romantic Debussy, so that the movement sounds not like a series of abruptly juxtaposed scenes but like someone reminiscing about times past, letting their thoughts wander from memory to memory. My dad has been talking recently about how he feels like the late Beethoven quartets have the structure of thought, and I think you could say something similar about the first movement of this cello sonata.
Josquin des Prez – Praeter rerum seriem (early 16th century)
I never know what to write about pieces like this. There’s no weird chromaticism or shocking texture changes — just beautifully written six-part vocal polyphony. More than 400 years after Pérotin, there’s still a bit of chant turned into a cantus firmus, sung in ultra slow motion while the other voices play around it — but now the cantus firmus appears not only in the tenor but also in the superius, and the play of the other voices is largely built out of little canons. (Hey, that sounds like a piece of architecture, doesn’t it?) At times the combination of long held notes, harmonic stasis and frequent points of imitation create a texture that sounds awfully like someone singing through delay and reverb effects. In fact, I recently heard a piece for sax quartet that intentionally imitated the sound of a delay pedal — Aristides Llaneza’s The second time I have looked out the window (2010) — and the effect wasn’t that different from what Josquin achieves.
The motet’s text is about the mystery of the virgin birth, and the music’s melanch0ly air seems to reflect Josquin’s sadness at being unable to fully understand the workings of the universe: ”Who can fathom the profundity of your labor’s beginning and its end?” At the end, there’s something of an answer, but it’s one of those mystical answers that doesn’t really answer anything: when the text refers to God having “ordered everything with such perfection,” the music switches to triple mensuration, a symbol of divine order since the Middle Ages. It’s surprising how much continuity there is with Medieval music, here in this piece by the first composer ever to take the brash, arrogant, artist-comes-first attitude usually associated with Romanticism.
Cipriano de Rore – Calami sonum ferentes (1555)
Two things I know about Rore: One, he was a crazy experimentalist that Monteverdi called “the founder of the Second Practice,” and two, he’s supposedly responsible for the existence of text-painting in 16th-century madrigals. Only one of those things is evident in this piece — the first thing I’ve actually heard by him.
Calami sonum ferentes is a Latin madrigal, a setting of a poem by Catullus. The meaning of the text is somewhat opaque to me — unlike Renaissance intellectuals, I know very little about Classical literature, and the references to various places in Rome are lost on me — but as far as I can tell, the gist of it is: “I’m miserable, and I don’t like listening to people play cheerful Sicilian music. Muse, come inspire me and make me feel better!” Rore’s setting is not what you’d normally think of as “madrigalistic”: he’s working with text on the paragraph level, reflecting Catullus’s dark mood, rather than on the individual word level, like Luca Marenzio setting the word “occhi” (“eyes”) to two whole notes that look like eyeballs staring off the page in Occhi lucenti e belli (1582). But it certainly does qualify as “crazy experimentalism.” First of all, it’s for four bass voices — a very difficult ensemble to write for without muddying the harmonic waters, but Rore manages it. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s by far the most chromatic piece of music I’ve heard in the entire span of time between the Ars Subtilior and Gesualdo. It opens with a four-part canon based on a theme that consists almost entirely of half-steps; unlike in highly chromatic Baroque music, there’s no attempt to fit the half-steps into a tonally functional chord progression. I guess to Renaissance listeners with progressive tendencies, it probably just sounded like a series of consonances related by highly expressive intervals, but to my modern ears, accustomed to tonal harmony, it sounds both startlingly disjunct and intriguingly awkward, full of uncomfortable third relations like G major followed by D# minor. Nothing that isn’t familiar from Gesualdo’s madrigals, I guess, except that this was eleven years before Gesualdo was even born.
Actually, the ultra-chromatic opening isn’t my favorite part of the piece. What spoke to me more was a passage that comes later. It starts on the words “me adi” (“visit me,” addressed to the Muse): an F major triad falling to E major by way of A minor, repeated twice to create a pained augmented second between the high-register G# at the end and the low-register F at the beginning. And then a passage in which Catullus writes about his wretchedness and Rore gets chromatic again, but this time it’s not just ascent by half-step: instead, all of the parts slide up and down, sometimes with a slight delay but often simultaneously, so that whole triads are shifted around by half-step: G major, F# major, G major, Ab major, G major. It’s an utterly bizarre and eerie effect. I don’t know if it conveys wretchedness, exactly, but it certainly makes it clear that our protagonist is not the kind of person who enjoys light-hearted Sicilian music.
Henry Purcell – Keyboard Suite in G Minor, Z661 (published 1696)
My knowledge of Baroque dance suites is limited to Bach and Handel, and my knowledge of Purcell is limited to Dido and Aeneas (1689), the famous “Trumpet Tune and Air” from The Indian Queen (1695), and a couple of trio sonatas I played in a chamber group in high school. So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and check out a Purcell keyboard suite. This one is from a group of suites published a year after Purcell’s death under the charming title of “A Choice Collection of Lessons” — apparently the first keyboard collection printed in England to be dedicated to a single composer. The score I found online is actually a scan of a handwritten copy from 1705, which is a pain and a half to read thanks to obsolete conventions like six-line staffs (sometimes extended to as many as nine lines where modern notation would use ledger lines) and the use of sharps rather than naturals to indicate raising a note that’s flatted in the key signature. The beats are also not even close to lined up, although I don’t know if that’s an obsolete convention or just plain sloppiness on the copyist’s part. At least it’s educational, since I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in college about the history of notation.
As for the piece itself, it’s not too different stylistically from the Bach and Handel suites written a few decades later. It’s not as texturally or rhythmically varied — no gigues, no fugal passages — but it follows the familiar Prelude-Almand-Corant-Saraband pattern, with all the dances in bipartite form, fairly contrapuntal, and generally abstracted enough that you wouldn’t want to try to actually dance to them. By far the most striking aspect of the piece is Purcell’s free treatment of dissonance and cross-relations, especially in the Prelude and Almand. He often has a te in the right hand at the same time as a ti in the left, even if the te doesn’t resolve down by step immediately. At one point in the Prelude he has le in the right hand at the same time as a la in the left, and at another point the left hand plays a fast ti-la-te-sol-la, with the te serving no real harmonic function, presumably being there just for color. These aren’t the kind of dissonances that Bach uses. They don’t sound like the elegantly handled deviations of a master planner; they’re more idiosyncratic and “half-baked” than that. Actually, more than anything else they remind me of the keyboard sonatas of Sebastiàn de Albero — sort of a low-rent Scarlatti who’s actually pretty good in his own right — though that could be my ignorance of Baroque composers who weren’t born in 1685 speaking.
Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel (1971)
Just two posts after I wrote about Nono’s A Carlo Scarpa, here’s another piece inspired by architecture — specifically a non-denominational chapel in Houston built in tribute to and designed in collaboration with color-field painter Mark Rothko. I bet it would be fun to dig up more architecture-inspired music — off the top of my head all I can think of is Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores (1436) and, more loosely, Debussy’s Pagodes (1903), but I’m sure there’s a lot of it — and see how various composers handle the representation of buildings. Certainly Feldman’s approach is very different from Nono’s: while both pieces are spare and spacious, Feldman’s is more intuitive, more sensuous, more timbrally distinctive, less violently formalist (the pitch limitations Nono imposes on himself in that piece are downright perverse), and as far as I’m concerned, a lot more musically compelling.
The piece is in five sections that are played without pause. The first introduces the basic material, floating as if suspended in a room full of water: single celesta chords, wordless choral harmonies, slow abstract viola lines, bass drum and timpani rolls. Almost everything is quiet, understated, eerie, and mutedly dissonant. At one point Feldman shifts away from chromaticism: suddenly the celesta is playing F minor triads with added seconds, and the mood becomes less eerie and more mournful, almost Pärt-like. In the second section, a two-note ostinato appears in the timpani, creating tension even as the music gets quieter. In the third, the dynamics drop to “ppppp” and “barely audible,” as the high voices of the piece’s two choirs trade notes, sustaining a single shimmering harmony for almost three minutes. In the fourth, the texture is reduced to solo viola, solo soprano and timpani; the viola’s lines are atonal and lyrical, while the soprano’s are modal, repetitive and chant-like. The overall impression is one of things slowly disappearing.
All of the above is very beautiful. I’ll admit that it’s sometimes hard for me to focus on such spare music, but I can find a lot to appreciate in Feldman’s use of timbre, space and harmony, and I can imagine how powerful the music would be if I were hearing it while actually sitting in the Rothko Chapel. Still, the first four movements pale in comparison to what Feldman does in the fifth. If things are slowly disappearing, what happens when everything is gone? Something unexpected: a vibraphone playing a simple, childlike, diatonic four-note figure over and over again, and on top of that is suspended an E-minor melody that sounds like something out of the slow movement of a Dvořák string quartet. It’s a melody that Feldman wrote as a teenager, and it shifts the tone of the piece from contemplative to nostalgic. And then those dissonant choral chords reappear, now superimposed on the vibraphone ostinato, which never stops. The effect is haunting — especially if you consider that Rothko, a good friend of Feldman’s, had killed himself a year earlier.
Richard Strauss – Don Quixote (1898)
When I wrote about Till Eulenspiegel, I mentioned that Strauss had to be pressed to say anything too specific about the program, and that I didn’t think knowing the details of the story added that much to the music. Don Quixote is conceived very differently: this time Strauss does everything he can to evoke specific images as vividly as possible, so that at times you can follow the narrative without even knowing the titles of the movements. (A summary, complete with weirdly defensive remarks about the music’s ability to stand on its own, can be found here.) What I find particularly fascinating is the wide variety of solutions he finds to the problem of musical representation. Sometimes he mimics real-world sounds orchestrationally, the most astonishing example being the use of dissonant brass fluttertonguing to evoke the bleating of sheep. Sometimes he goes even more literal than that and actually includes the thing represented in the orchestra, like the tambourine that represents a country woman playing the tambourine. Sometimes he combines the two: the ride through the air is depicted by wild harp glissandi, chromatically whistling flutes and violent wind and string arpeggios — plus an actual wind machine. But elsewhere he takes a more abstract approach, representing something not by mimicking its sound but by evoking its shape (a slow, cycling major-seventh-chord arpeggio to suggest the turning of windmills) or its character (the solo cello that personifies Don Quixote, by turns heroic, mournful, contemplative and discursive).
I think the encounter with the sheep is the most impressive section, the most successful at telling a story and conveying sarcasm rather than simply depicting the story’s props and characters. The sheep bleat (brass flutertongues), then Quixote comes charging in (triumphant strings, led by the solo cello). The fluttertongues get louder, the bleating more pained, while underneath the strings create a repetitive accompaniment texture based on the Don’s fanfare. Soon the brass fades out: the sheep have been driven away. And then we have a victorious fanfare, complete with timpani and cymbal accents. Don Quixote has vanquished the enemy!
The piece is pretty ingenious all around. My only real criticism is its length — specifically the length of the recitative-like passages where Don Quixote is conversing with Sancho Panza or reminiscing about Dulcinea, in the form of meandering, sparsely-accompanied solo cello music. I’ve never been convinced by music that’s supposed to represent conversation, because the thing that makes a conversation interesting is its content, not its form. Listening to a musical depiction of a conversation is like listening to two people talk in a language you don’t understand a word of — it might sound nice at first, but it gets boring pretty quickly. I actually think Don Quixote would work spectacularly well as the score to a silent film, and then the conversational passages would make more sense: while they don’t have a lot of musical interest on their own, picture them accompanying a heavily made-up actor with an expressive, unusual face, and suddenly they take on another layer of meaning.
One other thing: in the introduction to the piece, Strauss switches abruptly from D Major to Ab Major without any modulation, and then switches back just as abruptly five measures later — a move that seems to announce that functional tonality has reached its limit. Later in that section, the music becomes so densely layered, with so many different kinds of material happening at different rates of motion, that it seems like the orchestra is about to burst open. I don’t feel this way about the rest of the piece, which dilutes the radicalism of its most radical moves by presenting it as storytelling, but to my ears that introduction screams “Art form in crisis! Massive revolutionary change is right around the corner!” — and it makes me wonder why anyone was surprised when Ives, Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, Bartók and Stravinsky showed up.
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