[continued]
In wishing to “liberate sound” from “mechanical restrictions,” and to replace the “interplay of melodies” with a “melodic totality,” Varèse was referring to sound in the Confucianist sense — that which one must investigate as the first step toward music — a perception of music that is fundamentally non-Western but which, since Varèse, has come to be accepted as characteristically twentieth-century. While Varèse was more concerned with complex aggregates of sounds than individual ones, with the growth potential of the interval components of nuclear ideas than a continual melodic movement, his music suggests a strong affinity with Asian music.
The influence of the tala concept on Olivier Messiaen’s rhythmic concept, evolved in the 1930’s, will be noted later. However, Milton Babbitt’s application of the set operations to rhythmic organization since the late 1940’s represents an independent Western development that is conceptually unrelated to the tala.
[Cowell] advocated a “world music,” firmly believing in a synthesis of East and West; indeed, his early use of tone clusters and his exploration of tone qualities to be obtained inside the piano may have been the result of his early exposure to Asian music. In his works, however, while achieving a level of sophistication unmatched by his predecessors, his assimilation of Asian concepts and practices failed to rise above the simplism that characterized American music of the 1930’s and ’40’s.
[Cage’s] most important work for prepared piano, Sonatas and Preludes (1946-48), is “an attempt to express in music the ‘permanent emotions’ of Indian tradition.” Here Cage is apparently referring to the sthayi bhava, the primary states of mind. In art the bhavas are the seeds that bring about the rasa, the aesthetic response aroused by emotions that are supra-sensuous. In Indian theory each of the twenty-two srutis has its own emotive value, and the rasa of a raga is determined by the sruti content of its scale tones as well as by the emphasis given to certain tones and motives — that is, the question of emotion is a structural matter that functions at various levels in a composition… Cage later turned his attention to I Ching and Zen and evolved the chance operations that he first used in 1951 in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscapes No. 4.