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p70 ...But why do I ascribe such significance to them [these lectures]?... It is simply this: that Adrian heard these things then, they challenged his intelligence, made their deposit in the vessel of his feelings. and gave matter to feed or to stimulate his fancy... The reader must perforce be made a witness of the process; since no biography, no depiction of the growth and development of an intellectual life, could properly be written without taking its subject back to the pupil stage, to the period of his beginnings in life and art, when he listened, learned, divined, gazed and ranged now afar, now close at hand. As for music in particular, what I want and strive to do is to make the reader see it as Adrian did; to bring him in touch with music, precisely as it happened to my departed friend. And to that end everything his teacher said seems to me not only not a negligible means but even an indispensable one.
Suddenly this is reminding me of the preface to The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. We are getting exposition on the hero from a narrator standing between the author and the fictional subject of the work.
And so, half jestingly, I would address those who in that last monstrous chapter have been guilty of some skipping: I would remind them of how Laurence Sterne once dealt with an imaginary listener who betrayed that she had not always been paying attention. The author sent her back to an earlier chapter to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. After having informed herself, the lady rejoins the group of listeners and is given a hearty welcome.
I believe that would be a reference to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, though I had forgotten the passage. Yes, it is.
p71 The passage came to my mind because Adrian as a top-form student, at a time when he had already left for the University of Giessen, studied English outside the school courses, and after all outside the humanistic curriculum, under the influence of Wendell Kretschmar. He read Sterne with great pleasure. Even more enthusiastically he read Shakespeare, of whom the organist was a close student and passionate admirer... He [Kretschmar] opened to him the ample page of world literature; whetting his appetite by small foretastes, he lured him into the broad expanses of the Russian, English, and French novel; stimulating him to read the lyrical poems of Shelley and Keats, Holderlin and Novalis; gave him Manzoni and Goethe, Schopenhauer and Meister Eckhart... Obviously he had too little sleep, for his reading was done in the night hours. I did not refrain from confessing my concern to Kretschmar and asking him if he did not see in Adrian, as I did, a nature that in the intellectual field should be rather held back than urged forwards. But the musician, although so much older than I, proved to be a thoroughgoing partisan of impatient youth avid of knowledge, unsparing of his strength. Indeed, the man showed in general a certain ideal harshness and indifference to the body and its “health,” which he considered a right philistine, not to say cowardly value.
“Yes, my friend,” said he... “if it is healthiness you are after -- well, with mind and art it has not much to do, it even in a sort of way opposes them, and anyhow they have never troubled much about each other... And besides, I find nothing more tactless and barbarous than nailing a gifted youth down to his ‘immaturity’ and telling him in every other word: ‘That is nothing for you yet.’ Let him judge for himself!...”
And so we have, again, the relationship between health on the one hand and thought and art (matters of the intellect) on the other.
p74 ...”The chord as such is no harmonic narcotic but polyphony in itself [this is Adrian speaking], and the notes that form it are parts. But I assert they are more, and the polyphonic character of chords is the more pronounced, the more dissonant it is. The degree of dissonance is the measure of its polyphonic value. The more discordant a chord is, the more notes it contains contrasting and conflicting with each other, the more polyphonic it is, and the more markedly every single note bears the stamp of the part already in the simultaneous sound-combination.”
p76 “Bach’s problem,” he [Adrian] said, “was this: how is one to write pregnant polyphony in a harmonic style? With the moderns the question presents itself somewhat differently. Rather it is: how is one to write a harmonic style that has the appearance of polyphony? Remarkable, it looks like bad conscience -- the bad conscience of homophonic music in face of polyphony.”
p77 [after a passage about the German lied ...But Schubert’s always twilit genius, death-touched, he liked above all to seek where he lifts to the loftiest expression a certain only half-defined but inescapable destiny of solitude, as in the grandly self-tormenting “Ich komme vom Gebirge her” [“I come from rocky mountains steep”] from the Smith of Lubeck and that “Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege, wo die andern Wandrer gehn” [“Why do I avoid the highways/That other wanderers travel”] from the Winterreise, with the perfectly heart-breaking stanza beginning:
Hab’ ja doch nichts begangen
Dass ich Menschen sollte scheu’n.
[I have truly done no wrong
That I should shun mankind]
These words, and the following:
Welch ein torichtes Verlangen
Treibt mich in die Wustenei’n
[What foolish desire
Drives me into the wastelands?]
I have heard him speak to himself, indicating the musical phrasing, and to my unforgettable amazement I saw the tears spring to his eyes.
Apparently our translator (H. T. Lowe-Porter) either thought these lyrics were so unimportant that they were not worth the trouble of translating; or that we, reading this German book in English, still knew enough German to translate these ourselves. Un-boh-lievable! (CommunityChannel reference.)
p78 [Adrian on the Overture in C of Fidelio ] “...Tell me, what do you think about greatness? I find there is something uncomfortable about facing it eye to eye, it is a test of courage -- can one really look it in the eye? ... I incline more and more to the admission that there is something very odd indeed about this music... A manifestation of the highest energy -- not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether -- where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather as its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei [ “imitating God”. The religious concept of finding virtue by imitating God.] -- I am surprised that it is not forbidden. Perhaps it is. Anyhow that is a very nice point -- in more than one sense of the word. Look: the most powerful, most varied, most dramatic succession of events and activities, but only in time, consisting only of time articulated, filled up, organized -- and all at once almost thrust into the concrete exigencies of the plot by the repeated trumpet-signals from without...”
Does Immanuel Kant address music? I can’t recall. I would agree that while we really know nothing of “the thing in itself” in general, when it comes to music there can really be no doubt. One can debate the underlying reality of a cat, but not of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Of course, this is a point Nietzsche was all over in The Birth of Tragedy -- the sensory primacy of music. Music speaks to us more directly than anything else -- though I suppose you could make an argument for pheromones and other “things” that address our body beneath the software of our minds. Our minds may doubt the reality underlying these attractions, but there is no doubting the attraction itself. I Lust therefore I Am is, if you think about it, a better proof both of our existence and of the existence of “something” besides ourselves. It thwarts solipsism in a way Descartes’ (spits) popular phrase does not.
Smell
I’m also re-reading one of my favorite books, A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman and ran into an interesting idea in the very first chapter, on smell, “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.” She even picks the same example of this that I would have chosen, the experience of being in a citrus grove in spring. The effect is overwhelming and glorious but how would you describe either the scent itself or the effect it has on you?
But isn’t music also mute in this sense? How would you describe the experience of hearing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, for example? Could you describe the music in any way except with reference to other music? And your description of the effect hearing this music has on you would be as inarticulate as the description of the citrus orchard. (I should perhaps admit here that I'm essentially blind to the tone poem... music does not make me "see" a painting or landscape. I may enjoy the music, as music, but I cannot make the connection to a visual realm).
I am reminded here of Foucault and Bataille (and their fellow travelers) and their attempts to experience and communicate that which is beyond words. The experience of both hearing music and smelling particular odors are profound, immediate, and unmistakable. Here’s Ackerman again, “Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them... ” That I salivate when I smell garlic, is undoubtedly a learned, conditioned, response. But the experience of sensing those particular chemicals in the air, for that has to be the foundation of odor, is innate. When we smell we distinguish molecules floating in the air around us. If we were to develop a descriptive language for smells it would have to be with reference to elements and chemical compounds. We would be learning to do chemistry with our noses.
“In the tenth century, in Japan, a glitteringly talented court lady, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, wrote the first real novel, The Tale of Genji, a love story woven into a vast historical and social tapestry, the cast of which included perfumer-alchemists, who concoct scents based on an individual’s aura and destiny. ” So my insight into smell as chemistry isn’t exactly groundbreaking. I know I’ve heard The Tale of Genji mentioned as the first novel, but how appropriate -- but not at all surprising -- that it was a woman who first began producing these little Creations. So gluttonous are we for story that even the endless variety of stories in Devi’s Dream (our reality) is insufficient so we must, in our turn, dream still more stories. If you’re asking about the “meaning of life” one obvious answer would be the creation of story. To view God as a novelist clears up many problems -- the problem of evil, for one.
But I’m wandering away from smell and music. Here Ackerman quotes a perfumer talking about creating a new scent:
“You always have an image in your head. You can actually smell the accords, which are like musical chords. Perfumery is closely related to music. You will have simple fragrances, simple accords made from two or three items, and it will be like a two- or three-piece band. And then you have a multiple accord put together, and it becomes a big modern orchestra. In a strange way, creating a fragrance is similar to composing music, because there is also a similarity in finding the ‘proper’ accords. You don’t want anything being overpowering. You want it to be harmonious. One of the most important parts of putting a creation together is harmony. You could have layers of notes coming through the fragrance, yet you still feel it's pleasing. If the fragrance is not layered properly, you’ll have parts and pieces sticking out, it will make you uncomfortable, something will disturb you about it. A fragrance that is not well balanced is not well accepted...”
...”when I first saw Picasso’s Guernica, it was disturbing. I was horrified and fascinated at the same time. It was disturbing, but also deeply moving. Perfumes do that, too -- shock and fascinate us. They disturb us. Our lives are quiet. We like to be disturbed by delight...”
In those last sentences I see the need both for dissonance and for story. Given the nature of this book, I have to include one last quote from the perfumer above, even though it would fit even better in chapter XIX,
“...I would like to make a perfume some day so seductive to men that no woman could be resisted. It would be the most incredible thing I could do in my life. This is not a professional feeling. It’s strictly a female thing.”
[Ackerman] “The whole world would become unsafe.”
“Yes!” she says with relish.
Music
Ackerman also writes about music in her section on Hearing:
p219 For a long time, western music was homophonic, or “same voiced,” which doesn’t mean that only one person sang at a time but rather that there was one melody line or voice, and the rest of the music was harmony supporting it. Usually the main melody was the highest pitched, and identified the piece. Plainsong, the religious music of the fourth century, required no musical accompaniment at all; one voice sang the simple melody in Latin words. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I decided to govern music making; as a result, the Gregorian chant evolved, which was sung in unison. In the Middle Ages, people made the extraordinary discovery that many tones could be made at once without cancelling one another out or resulting in mere noise, and polyphony was born. It seems impossible that it could have taken so long to reach that now-obvious conclusion. But music is not like vision. If you mix blue and yellow together, you lose the individual colors and make a new one; tones, on the other hand, may be combined without losing their individuality. What you end up with is a chord, something new, which has its own sound but in which the individual tones are also distinct and identifiable. It’s not a blending or. as one might expect when one hears a number of people talking at once, just noise, but something of a different order. A chord “is something like an idea,” philosopher of music Victor Zuckerkandl [follow the link!] writes, “an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.” For colors to stay separate without blending, they have to occupy space next to one another. They can’t occupy the same space. But notes can occupy the same space and remain separate. As Zucherkandl reminds us, polyphony “coincided with the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the birth of harmony with the culmination of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science and mathematics: that is, the two great changes in our understanding of space.” This may seem an odd observation, given the fact that vision is a spatial art, and music a temporal one, which “unfolds in time,” a dynamic art that uses many devices, including syncopation, in which notes appear like hobgoblins where you don’t expect them, and vanish just as startlingly; or like repetition, which snatches us back to an earlier pattern or flings us forward as if on the crest of a wave. “Music is not just in time,” Zuckerkandl writes. “It does something with time. . . . It is as if the even flow of time were cut up by the regularly recurrent sounds into short stretches of equal duration: the tones mark time.” They stain time, then they reassemble it into small groups like so many lengths of cloth that have been dyed separately. At least our western music does; we’re used to measured time in music. When polyphony came in, the only way it could make sense was if each of the voices kept the same time. But if we look back about 1,500 years or so, we find unmeasured time in music. A Gregorian chant, like poetry, simply improvised time...
Ackerman also writes about music in her section on Hearing:
p219 For a long time, western music was homophonic, or “same voiced,” which doesn’t mean that only one person sang at a time but rather that there was one melody line or voice, and the rest of the music was harmony supporting it. Usually the main melody was the highest pitched, and identified the piece. Plainsong, the religious music of the fourth century, required no musical accompaniment at all; one voice sang the simple melody in Latin words. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I decided to govern music making; as a result, the Gregorian chant evolved, which was sung in unison. In the Middle Ages, people made the extraordinary discovery that many tones could be made at once without cancelling one another out or resulting in mere noise, and polyphony was born. It seems impossible that it could have taken so long to reach that now-obvious conclusion. But music is not like vision. If you mix blue and yellow together, you lose the individual colors and make a new one; tones, on the other hand, may be combined without losing their individuality. What you end up with is a chord, something new, which has its own sound but in which the individual tones are also distinct and identifiable. It’s not a blending or. as one might expect when one hears a number of people talking at once, just noise, but something of a different order. A chord “is something like an idea,” philosopher of music Victor Zuckerkandl [follow the link!] writes, “an idea to be heard, an idea for the ear, an audible idea.” For colors to stay separate without blending, they have to occupy space next to one another. They can’t occupy the same space. But notes can occupy the same space and remain separate. As Zucherkandl reminds us, polyphony “coincided with the building of the great Gothic cathedrals, and the birth of harmony with the culmination of the Renaissance and the beginning of modern science and mathematics: that is, the two great changes in our understanding of space.” This may seem an odd observation, given the fact that vision is a spatial art, and music a temporal one, which “unfolds in time,” a dynamic art that uses many devices, including syncopation, in which notes appear like hobgoblins where you don’t expect them, and vanish just as startlingly; or like repetition, which snatches us back to an earlier pattern or flings us forward as if on the crest of a wave. “Music is not just in time,” Zuckerkandl writes. “It does something with time. . . . It is as if the even flow of time were cut up by the regularly recurrent sounds into short stretches of equal duration: the tones mark time.” They stain time, then they reassemble it into small groups like so many lengths of cloth that have been dyed separately. At least our western music does; we’re used to measured time in music. When polyphony came in, the only way it could make sense was if each of the voices kept the same time. But if we look back about 1,500 years or so, we find unmeasured time in music. A Gregorian chant, like poetry, simply improvised time...
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