THE

MUSIC REVIEW
Founded by GEOFFREY SHARP
VOL. 55, No.1 February, 1994
Editor
A. F. LEIGHTON THOMAS
Editorial Consultant
JOHN BOULTON
CONTENTS
Franz Liszt: Symphonist of the Keyboard
A Parry Miscellany: Some Manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library
Holst and Gregynog
William Tritt as Teacher
War Music and its Innovations
"Improving the Classics": Some Thoughts on the
"Ethics" and Aesthetics of musical Arrangement
Book Reviews
Correspondence
Walden Hughes.
J. Barrie Jones
Alan Gibbs
Glen Carruthers
Ben Arnold
Millan Sachania
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War Music and its Innovations*
BY
BEN ARNOLD
From the Renaissance to the present day, war music has frequently been at the forefront
of new musical development and has, in some instances, contributed innovations of
significance. While critics have often maligned music that evokes or represents the
atmosphere of wars for its quality or lack thereof (especially battle composition of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), they have also overlooked its anticipatory role in
the development of instrumental techniques and musical style. This essay will
demonstrate that war music was an early proponent of several techniques that later
became prominent in non-programmatic compositions.
The difficulties of searching for the "first" in music history-or, for that matter, in
any other field-are considerable. Leonard Meyer pointed out that "the limits of a style
or movement, particularly its beginnings, are difficult to define precisely. Styles do not
come into existence clearly and fully articulated, but tend to change in a processive way
from barely noticeable beginnings".l The same holds true for innovations. In only a
few instances can we unequivocally state that a particular composer was the first to use
a particular technique and was not noticeably influenced by some other composer. In
all probability some of these innovations were first improvised, possibly by amateur
musicians, and only later preserved on paper.
For example, The New Grove Dictionary, Eggebrecht's Handworterbuch der
musikalischen Terminologie, the New Oxford Encyclopaedia of Music and Riemann's
Musik-Lexikon credit Henry Cowell with "inventing" the note cluster. The New Grove
states that "Clusters were probably first used by Cowell in The Tide of Manaunaun for
piano [in] (1912)",2 the earliest date listed in other sources as well. Keyboard clusters,
however, appeared in at least eight compositions prior to the twentieth century and date
as far back as 1724 with Dandrieu's Les caracteres de la guerre? Hemy Cowell may
have been the first to call this technique a cluster, but he was certainly not the first to
incorporate it into a musical composition.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of pin-pointing such innovations, a number of
important musical developments seem to have their origins in war music. While these
innovations are of different types and of varying significance, as a group they illustrate
the experimental quality of war music. Table I provides a chronological listing of
certain techniques originating in music related to war. Those with an asterisk beside
them indicate that music scholars recognize them as the first compositions to employ
* Research for this article was supported in part by the University Research Committee of Emory
University.
1 Leonard B. Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 94.
2 The New Grove Dictionary of Music, s.v. "cluster".
3 Clusters have appeared in numerous earlier programmatic compositions of Jean-Fran90is Dandrieu,
Domenico Scarlatti, Abbe Vogler, Daniel Steibelt, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Bernard Viguerie, Charles Alkan and
Thomas Bethune.
Date
1528
*1624
*1624
162
4
*1673
*1673
1673
16
73
*1724
*1796
181 3
*1956
*1960
Composer
Janequin
Monteverdi
Monteverdi
Monteverdi
Biber
Biber
Biber
Biber
Dandrieu
Haydn
von Winter
Nono
Penderecki
WAR MUSIC AND ITS INNOVATIONS
TABLE I
INNOV A TrONS AND EARLY USES IN WAR MUSIC
Composition
La guerre
II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
Battalia
Battalia
Battalia
Battalia
Les caracteres de la guerre
Missa in tempore belli
Schlacht Symfonie
II canto sospeso
Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
Innovation
onomatopoetic devices
stile concitato
pizzicato
tremolo
prepared instrument
polymodality
polyrhythm
collegno
note cluster
new church music
choral symphony
text broken into syllables
expanded string techniques
The "*,, signifies the compositions generally credited as first requiring the technique or device listed.
53
particular techniques. Those without asterisks have not necessarily been substantiated
as the first but, in each case, must be considered one of the earliest uses of the device
indicated.
Janequin's La guerre is largely responsible for establishing the popularity of war-
related music, even though it was not the first composition written on the subject of
war. Howard Brown writes that La guerre "became one of the best-known pieces of the
entire century, copied by many other composers and arranged for keyboard or lute solo
and for all varieties of instrumental ensembles".4 This work is important for its creative
use of onomatopoetic devices, i.e. basses singing the word "pon" eighty-four times to
imitate the sounds of battle drums or the noise of cannon fire. In order to create the
confusion of battle, Janequin chooses several novel combinations of sounds: "trique tac
patac", "pa-ti-patac" and "chipe, chope, torche, lorgne, chipe, chope, torche, lorgne".
In the second half of the work, in which the battle is musically re-enacted, nonsense
syllables are present in 117 of the 151 bars. In one segment, nearly thirty bars pass
without a single meaningful word. Although La guerre is not necessarily the first to
include these types of verbal techniques, it is nevertheless one of the programmatic
chansons that made them rather common.
Perhaps the greatest and most influential war work in the history of music,
Monteverdi's II combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624) introduces two
innovative devices that are still used today in one form or another: stile concitato and
the pizzicato. The pizzicati beginning in bar 174 represent the blows delivered in the
battle, and the agitated style of the stile concitato with its measured tremolo in this
section creates the intense atmosphere of war. In the preface to his eighth book of
madrigals, Monteverdi writes of his "rediscovery" of this agitated, warlike style, which
he developed while studying the philosophies of Plato and Boethius:
After reflecting that according to all the best philosophers the fast pyrrhic measure was used
for lively and warlike dance ... , I considered the semibreve, proposed that a single semibreve
should correspond to one spondaic beat; when this was reduced to sixteen semiquavers, struck
4 Howard M. Brown, Music in the Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 215.
54 THE MUSIC REVIEW
the other, and combined with words expressing anger and disdain, I recognized in
thIS bnef sample a resemblance to the passion which I sought ... 5
According to the Harvard Dictionary of Music, Il combattimento di Tancredi e
Clorinda is also the first composition to include a tremolo "to express excitement and
danger ... [a technique] which ... has been used innumerable times".6 The pizzicati,
so common today and. of their original symbolic significance, also appeared
soon after MonteverdI m other Baroque works, such as Carlo Farina's Capriccio
stravagante (1627), Keiser's Adonis (1697) and Handel's Agrippina (17
0
9).
Although Monteverdi claims to have invented stile concitato, he was, in some
ways, only the first to give this fast repeated pattern a name. Both Janequin in La
guerre and in The Battle :vrote a series of fast, repeated pitches on a single note
or chord to Illustrate the passIOns of war decades earlier than Monteverdi and are
clearly forerunners of stile concitato.
other composers incorporated Monteverdi's novel techniques into their own
composItIOns relatively soon after his "discovery", the innovations found in Heimich
Biber's. Battalia. in 1673 did not directly influence Biber's contemporaries or the
generatIOns that Immediately followed. Some of Biber's innovations were hundreds of
years ahead of their time and were apparently neither compatible with existing values
nor of .advantage to other composers-two conditions, according to Everett M.
Rogers m. hIS Communication of Innovations, that affect the length of time required for
the adoptIOn and success of innovations.
7
To.descri?e the good-natured camaraderie of soldiers in camp, for example, Biber
uses eIght melodies at once in Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley
H.umor and explams: "Here all is dissonant everywhere since different songs are sung
..8 In addition, the major and minor modes appear concurrently and, at
one pomt, SIX adjacent notes of at least a crotchet in length sound at the same time in
effect creating momentary note cluster. Not only could this example be
but It also be polymetric. Although the metre is 4/4, the
fust vrolm enters m tnplets creatmg a 12/8 metre for its part.
In Der Mars. Biber instructs the double basses to place a piece of paper
under the A stnng to gIve the effect of a snare drum-one of the earliest uses of
prepare.d instruments. From bar 52 to 62 the double bass plays only one note in various
rhythmIc patterns while the violin plays repeated demisemiquaver patterns above it. He
takes Monteverdi's stile concitato a step further, turning the repeated-note idea
mto a full-fledged tremolo in the battle movement and uses fortissimo pizzicati to
represent shots. In addition Biber requests the string performers to strike their
instrument with the wood of the bows-an early use of col legno.
Biber's Battalia provides an excellent example of how composers look for novel
to express a musical programme. Without attempting to express musically the
paSSIOn of war, Monteverdi would not have invented stile concitato. Without trying to
5 Claudio Monteverdi, "Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi", in Source Readings in Music History ed Oliver
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 414. ' .
7 Harvard Dlctzonary of Music, 2nd edn., s. v. "tremolo".
Everett M. Rogers, Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach, 2nd edn. (New York: The
Free Press, 1971), pp. 17-21.
8 "Hie dissonant ubique, nam enim sic diversis cantilenis clamore solent".
WAR MUSIC AND ITS INNOVATIONS
55
capture the confusion and noise of battle, Janequin may not have conceived the idea of
onomatopoetic sounds and fast repeated notes. Moreover, because of the programmatic
nature of his Battalia, Biber was using polymodality, polyrhythms, unusual
dissonances, "percussive" string basses andfortissimo pizzicati over two hundred years
before the experimental composers of this century.
While the earlier innovations we have examined involved the human voice or
strings, the note cluster created on the keyboard was perhaps the most important
innovation that was later adopted by twentieth-century composers. The earliest use of
the keyboard note cluster I have found is in Dandrieu's 1724 harpsichord transcription
of his orchestral composition, Les caracteres de la guerre, written nearly two hundred
years before Hemy Cowell supposedly invented the technique. Dandrieu describes his
use of the cluster in the preface:
In that section of the Caracteres de fa guerre that I call "The Charge" there are several places
named "cannon shots" that are indicated only by four notes fanning a complete chord. But in
order better to express the noise ofthe cannon one may, each time, in place of these four notes,
strike the lowest notes on the keyboard with the entire length of the flat of the hand.
9
Until this century, the cluster was among the most unmusical sounds available to
musicians. It is devoid of melodic and traditional harmonic content, yet it is perhaps the
best device (and certainly one of the most common) ever configured to imitate the
sound of a bomb or a cannon. While most musicians before this century might think it
an unmusical sou,nd in a non-representational work, it might seem appropriate to them
in a battle composition. Now in the twentieth century clusters are common sonorities
with no particular representational denotation.
During the Classic period, the most important innovations of war music dealt with
changes in genres rather than in specific instrumental techniques. According to Winton
Dean, the revolutionary oratorios of M6hul and Gossec, and the massive musical
celebrations of the French Revolution, enormously influenced later French musicians.
Dean writes: "The grand operas of Spontini and the whole aesthetic of Berlioz would
be unthinkable without them".10 Several of these celebrations, which took place
outdoors so that the masses could attend, consisted of thousands of performers. At
Robespierre's Fete de I'Etre Supreme in 1794, 2,400 vocal and instrumental
performers, along with 130 pieces of artillery, formed the chorus and orchestra. This
phenomenon was magnified considerably after the American Civil War, when Patrick
Gilmore organized public concerts for "5,000 voices, 500 bandsmen and a trumpet and
drum military corps",u
Moreover, war innovations made their way into religious music. Haydn's Missa in
tempore belli (1796), which consists of heroic music replete with brass fanfares and
timpani, illustrates how the events of war have led composers to make innovations in
works other than programmatic battle compositions. H. C. Robbins Landon writes:
9 Arthur Loesser, Men, Women & Pianos: A Social History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954),
P170 .
10 Winton Dean, "French Opera", in the New Oxford History of Music: The Age of Beethoven, VoL 8, ed. Gerald
Abraham (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 28.
11 Harold Gleason and Warren Becker, Early American Music: Music in Americafrom 1620 to 1920, 2nd edn.,
"Music Literature Outline Series", III (Bloomington: Frangipani Press, 1981), p. 145.
THE MUSIC REVIEW
Its first perfonnance will have left the audience shaken in a way that possibly no religious
music had done since the days of Bach and Handel. Haydn had, with the whole Missa in
tempore belli, but of course especially in the whispering doubt of the Agnus Dei and the
rabble-rousing fanfares of the Dona nobis pacem, created a new church-music style as
immediately influential as it was to become lastingly controversial. 12
In 1813, two decades after Haydn's Mass, Peter von Winter wrote his Schlacht
Symfonie, an early choral symphony that predates the completion of Beethoven's ninth
Symphony by over ten years. Although it is in one movement, it is one of the earliest
works entitled "symphony" to include a chorus. Numerous composers of the last two
centuries, including several of the greatest symphonists, such as Mahler, Shostakovich
and Vaughan Williams, have endorsed the choral symphony.
Innovations in war music have continued in the twentieth century, although it is too
soon to see how influential many of them will be. The most important innovative
compositions of the last few decades are Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima (1960) and Nono's Il canto sospeso (1956). Penderecki expanded string
techniques through playing on the bridge and bowing the wood of the bridge at a right
angle at its right side and, as well, through playing on the tailpiece (arco) and bowing
the tailpiece at an angle of 90. In Nono's Il canto sospeso, based on actual letters
written by nine resistance fighters before their execution, the composer "broke up the
texts into words, syllables, and phonemes and allowed these to wander through the
voices-an innovation that is widely used today".13
Because composers often search for particular, meaningful sounds or effects in
their war compositions, they begin to experiment with techniques that might imitate or
represent the sounds of battle and fighting. Since we know the specific, concrete
sounds of war, composers then experiment with different sonorities or techniques in
their attempt to find musical equivalents of these sounds of warfare. As we have seen,
composers must often look outside the traditional compositional language of abstract
music in order to produce these specific sounds.
On the other hand, the "meaning" of several of these early representational devices
has become considerably weakened from their original purpose to the point where they
now sound like abstract sonorities. Pizzicati and clusters first appear to portray gun or
cannon shots; now they are only sounds in themselves. Tremolos no longer necessarily
represent fear or danger; eight dissonant voices sounding at once do not represent the
disorder of soldiers at camp but are commonplace in abstract twentieth-century music.
The history of these particular techniques illustrates the musical evolution from the
representational to the purely abstract.
While many recent innovations cannot be attributed to war music, war
compositions have quickly utilized these developments to further the realistic sounds
of war. In war compositions of the last two decades, composers have used screams,
shouts, whispering, electronically produced bomb explosions, taped machine-gun fire,
Augenmusik and various multi-media techniques. War music actually provides musical
meaning for many of these devices. Although screaming and shouting, extremely fast
12 H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: The Years of 'The Creation' 1796-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, I977), p. I75.
13 John Vinton, ed., Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers (New York: E. P. Dutton, I974), s. v. "Luigi
Nona", by Paul Hansjorg, trans. Jeanne Wolf.
WAR MUSIC AND ITS INNOVATIONS 57
and loud indeterminant sections and acute dissonances may offend our musical
sensibilities in some non-programmatic works, they may make perfectly good sense in
a war composition. Penderecki, Karel Husa, R. Murray and
Gail Kubik incorporate these and other innovations effectlVely In theIr mUSIC to
simulate the turmoil and destruction of war.
Nevertheless it is not the innovation per se but what is done with it that is
important. We keep in mind that it is difficult to give birth reach the pinnacle
at the same moment. These techniques and experiments developed In these war-related
compositions have had a significant impact on the later of and we
should credit these composers for thrusting these ideas forward Into the mInds of other
composers who later improved, developed and refined them.