Dissertation Musings

The dissertation investigates key percussion works written between 1931 and 1941 by Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, and John Cage. My inquiry focuses on how changes in technology in the early-twentieth century can be linked to aesthetic developments that led to a new level of experimentation with sound in the first percussion works. Ignited by innovations such as the phonograph, sound film, and technologies of speed, this leap in the mechanical reproduction had a profound effect on ways of hearing and seeing. Some consider that photography paved they way for abstraction in painting. Similarly, the gramophone led to the emancipation of sound. In addition, I seek to contrast how machine-age aesthetics moved from being represented in a surface way in works like Antheil’s Ballet mécanique towards a deeper integration into the sonic and formal structures as found in Varese's Ionisation and the mathematically conceived forms of Cage’s three Constructions in Metal.

The goal is to explore these works in light of the larger historical forces of modernity. How was the radical notion of music based not on pitch but on sound and rhythm received? Further, how was the use of non-Western percussion instruments understood; as representing “foreign,” “exotic” sounds or objectively as a “new musical resource” (Henry Cowell). Taken together in a percussion ensemble, these various instruments constitute a musical collage perhaps echoing collage and photo collage experiments by Dada artists close to Varèse and Cage. Though percussion music has traditionally been marginalized in the study of Western music, I believe these works constitute a key moment in twentieth-century music: the transition from a harmonic basis of understanding music toward a sound-based one that opened up new paths of musical expression. Exploring how these early percussion works initiate this new paradigm in music is a key aspect of this dissertation.