The Music of Louis Andriessen by Yayoi Uno Everett - chapter 2 'Formative years'

Toward textural music, area, and improvisation

On page 40: ‘Andriessen glowingly praised Berio’s works that demonstrate his interest in phonetics [Circles (1960), Passagio (1961-62)], Henri Pousseur’s rational system for harmonic analysis, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s self-analysis of Gruppen for three orchestras (1955-57), and Pierre Boulez’s striking forum that defended the significance of Debussy for modern music.'


In response to this, Andriesse was collecting is devices for his toolbox. He felt that engaging with the music of these composers was the right thing to do and that will help him with his music.

On page 40: ‘he expressed his excitement over theatrical innovations by Berio and Mauricio Kagel: << As is evident from these widely-differing productions, the theatre plays a role in music which no one had expected. The movement of the musicians as a means of dramatic expression; the movement of the actor as an expression of time passing; the contact with another; or the co-existence of as many different expressions as possible>> (Andriessen 2002a: 113-14; 2002b: 117)

On page 41: ‘Referring to the micro polyphonic textures that were current in those years (inspired by Ligeti, Xenakis and Stockhausen), Andriessen called this manner of textualizing an instrumental block heterophony; a composite texture sustains an unchanging harmonic region that, in spite of the microcosmic rhythmic changes within individual parts, hangs together as one gestural unit. This heterophonic texture - an aggregate of notes that defies conventional rhythmic or metric organisation - appears in many different guises in the pieces Andriessen wrote during the 1960s, and eventually developed into the sustained ‘sound continua’ texture he introduces in Contra Tempus. While proportional notation was used throughout, every musical gesture was precisely written out in the manner of Xenakis’s Pithoprakta (1958) and Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras (1955-57).
This type of notation dominates two different versions of Ittrospezione III that was completed in the following two years. <<concept I>> (1964) is for two pianists, clarinet, horn, glockenspiel, trombones, guitar and bass, and is about five-and-a-half minutes in duration while <<concept II>>(1965) presents an extended version with two pianists, clarinet, horn, vibraphone, tenor saxophone, and bass, although the writing for the piano remains the same in the two versions. 

On page 44: “Inspired by American experimental composers such as Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and John Cage he wrote Registers (1963), replacing conventional musical notation with a whole array of graphic symbols.”

On page 45: “The indeterminate notation in Register can be traced to similar techniques found in Morton Feldman’s Projections I (1950), Stockhausen’s Zuklus (1959), György Ligeti’s Volumina (1961), and so forth. Unlike Earle Brown’s Folio (1952) or Available Forms I (1961) that introduce a mobile conception of form, Andriessen controls the temporal realisation of musical gestures as a fixed entity.” — See Andriessen 1963d

Collage and syncretism

“Collage of techniques”

Pieces of music to hear: “Stockhausen’s Telemusik, Makoto Shinohara’s Memories, and van Baaren’s Musica per orchestra - all written in 1966.


On page 46: “Andriessen's first collage work consist of a set of pieces he wrote for two pianos called Souvenirs d’enfance (1966). The musicians are free to make their own arrangement from twenty-eight loose pages of music contained inside a box that include a twelve-tone étude, a graphic piece, clusters, a samba, quotations from Stravinsky’s orchestra music, three blank pages for the pianist to compose our their own music, and so forth (Andriessen 1968a: 179)."

“In assembling a multitude of stylistic allusions and musical quotations in block juxtaposition, Andriessen set out to write a collage piece that exemplifies what is truly ‘styleless’, without one style dominating any other. The composer compares this stylistic collage to the musical reality of postwar society, when people were free to ‘zap through the collected stations of different tuners’ (Schönberger 1996a: 16)”

On page 54: “While the rhythmic subdivisions of the pulse are synchronised within each layer, Andriessen continually varies the pattern of subdivision (e.g. triple changes to duple in the trumpets/trombones) through cross-accents and cross-rhythms, to energise the composite texture.  As in Messiaen’s polyrhythmic notation, the written meter (2/4 in this case) serves merely to coordinate the three layers rather than to articulate a perceptible pulse.)

In response to this - everything has a point of comparison. How composers I am interested in use their technique or others composers’s technique?

Still on page 54: “This is immediately followed by a self-quotation from the atonal two piano parts of Ittrospezione III (concept II). This stark juxtaposition of the pre-tonal and atonal segments produces a jolting effect. After two rounds of competition between the piano interpolations and the Machaut fragment, the brass and violins enter with the remainder of the Machaut quotation, closing with a double leading-tone cadence on C#. The sub-sequent passages in movement III recycle the textures from the previous movements in the following order: the chord clusters from movement II, followed by the superimposition of pre-tonal and atonal musical idioms, a brief recapitulation of movement I, and then concluding with the section for trombones and trumpets in a two-part atonal chorale."

On page 55: “Movement IV opens with the graphic notation of short ascending glissandi in the trombones with the instruction to ‘change timbre with mutes, flutters, etc.’ It represents the extreme end of ‘sound continua’ what verges on pure textural music, reminiscent of the graphic notations introduced in the writings for strings by Penderecki and Lutoslawski.”

On page 56: “ 'Everything produced in the prenatal stage is merely a foreshadowing of the future’ … Schöenberg's statement “clearly is not meant to undermine the significance of compositions that demonstrate the process of growth and awareness that accompanied Andriessen’s musical journey through the 1960s.”

“It was not until Contra Tempus that Andriessen began to apply precompositional constrains to his music by prescribing numerical rations to the length of internal movements. From Ittrospezione II onward, there is a growing tender to empty heterophonic and chorale textures that culminate in Contra Tempus.”

On page 57: ”The most powerful influences are frequently those that remain unspoken, influences that lie dormant within the depth of one’s unconscious. As the Darmstadt core began to disintegrate and split off into many different compositional orientations, Andriessen identified most with theatrical composers like Berio and Henze who promoted music as a form of social and political engagement. Improvisation became a key element in guiding his compositional orientation to transgress stylistic boundaries between atonality and free jazz. In the process, his music acquired an aesthetic and ideological foundation that challenged the ultra-modernists’ claim of autonomy based on their denial of the historical past.”