Contemporary Music History: Five Composers Compared

John Cage (1912–1992)

John Cage was an American composer born in 1912 in Los Angeles. He studied alongside Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Richard Buhlig. In 1938, Cage composed his first prepared piano piece, Bacchanale. In 1951, Cage and a group of musicians and engineers produced the first music ever recorded on magnetic tape. Cage received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for "having extended the boundaries of music through his work with percussion orchestra and his invention of the prepared piano" (Guttman, 1999). These honors were bestowed in 1978 and again in 1988. Cage is also the author of Silence (1961) and A Year from Monday (1968), among many other writings produced throughout his life.

Guttman (1999) states that he personally knew John Cage — briefly — when he was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, and that the music department there "lauded him as a guiding genius while others disparaged him as a negligible buffoon." Cage's performances "were more 'happenings' than concerts, and could range from seemingly random events to a lecture about his beloved wild mushrooms" (Guttman, 1999). By all accounts, Cage was "always happy and gentle, alive with awestruck wonder of the world, and especially fascinated by its sounds" (Guttman, 1999).

The piece Cage entitled 4'33" is among his most celebrated and provocative works, in which the performer plays virtually no music at all. It was "inspired by Cage's visit to Harvard's anechoic chamber, designed to eliminate all sound; but instead of the promised silence, Cage was amazed and delighted to hear the pulsing of his blood and the whistling of his nerves" (Guttman, 1999). The piece permanently challenged conventional definitions of music and performance.

William Alwyn (1905–1985)

William Alwyn was born in 1905 in Northampton to a grocer, into a family that had no musicians but in which all members "shared a passion for literature and the visual arts" (Culot, 1985). Alwyn wrote in his autobiography: "We all shared father's literary enthusiasm and his less-knowledgeable interest in art…but neither he nor the others had much feeling for music. In this I was alone" (Winged Chariot, 1983, as cited in Culot, 1985). He further stated that he "was not cut out to be a provincial grocer" and that his time was instead divided "between music, poetry and painting" (Culot, 1985).

Upon his father's death, financial pressure forced Alwyn to take employment quickly: "The need for money was urgent so I took the first reasonably paid job that came my way, the position of music master at a residential private school in Surrey…but the strain of musical isolation became too much for me and I suffered a minor nervous breakdown…and the arrogant headmaster showed little compunction in promptly dismissing me from my post at his school. This was in November 1926…" (Alwyn, 1983, as cited in Culot, 1985). In that same year, Alwyn was appointed a professorship in composition at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) and became a flautist in the London Symphony Orchestra (Culot, 1985). He began composing music for films in 1936. Among the works acknowledged in 1939 were his Rhapsody for Piano Quartet and Divertimento for Solo Flute.

Culot (1985) notes that "1955 was an important year for Alwyn; it saw the completion of the beautifully nostalgic Autumn Legend, inspired by Pre-Raphaelite painters, and also of the String Quartet in D minor (No. 1) and the first important piano work, Fantasy Waltzes." The slow movement of the First String Quartet is described as "the emotional climax and the very core of the whole work, the scherzo providing for its physical charm" (Culot, 1985). Alwyn's later compositions, from approximately 1976 onward, were focused almost entirely on the voice.

Among the best of Alwyn's film scores, Culot identifies Odd Man Out (1947) and Shake Hands with the Devil (1959). Ian Johnson's (2005) study William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music relates that two primary features were "of fundamental importance to Alwyn": the film's dramatic function and the value of silence. Alwyn himself, in his essay "How Not to Write Film Music," wrote that "sound…can only make its effect by contrast with silence" (1954).

Comparison of Compositions

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was born in 1852 and was an Irish musical composer. He was an only son; his father, Mr. John Stanford, served as an examiner in the Court of Chancery in Dublin and as Clerk of the Crown. Both of Stanford's parents were accomplished musicians. Stanford took his B.A. at Cambridge in 1874 and wrote the music to Tennyson's Queen Mary for the Lyceum in 1876. His works include his first opera, The Veiled Prophet, followed by Savonarola and The Canterbury Pilgrims, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1884. Stanford was knighted in 1902. His instrumental works include six symphonies and many chamber compositions, among them two string quartets, as well as numerous songs and other pieces.

The work of John Cage stands apart from all other composers examined here in that he pioneered new electronic and chance-based music that had never been conceived before his time. Furthermore, Cage's fascination with silence as a compositional element set his work apart from the others in this study. William Alwyn's compositions were film-oriented and commercially directed to a degree not seen in the others reviewed. The work of Vermeulen was oriented toward orchestral performance, and his compositions contained melodies within melodies that were distinctly different in both appearance and character. Vermeulen's use of polymelodie is the defining characteristic that distinguishes him among these composers. Giannini was a neo-romantic composer whose primary output consisted of operas, symphonies, songs, and band music, with vocal and operatic writing as his particular forte. Stanford's compositions encompassed various symphonies and chamber works; however, the available sources on his life and output are comparatively limited.