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[continued from p190]
My tendency is to skip much of the talk about Adrian’s music, except where it connects to important things to come (or where, as here, it also reminds me quite vividly of one of the annoying writers covered in the previous blog)
[Zeitblom] “You are thinking of Beethoven.”
“Of him and of the technical principle through which a dominating subjectivity got hold of the musical organization; I mean the development, or working out. The development itself had been a small part of the sonata, a modest republic of subjective illumination and dynamic. With Beethoven it becomes universal, becomes the centre of the whole form, which, even where it is supposed to remain conventional, is absorbed by the subjective and is newly created in freedom. The form of variations, something archaic, a residuum, becomes a means by which to infuse new life into form. The principle of development plus variation technique extends over the whole sonata. It does that in Brahms, as thematic working-out, even more radically. Take him as an example of how subjectivity turns into objectivity. In him music abstains from all conventional flourishes, formulas, and residua and so to speak creates the unity of the work anew at every moment, out of freedom. But precisely on that account freedom becomes the principle of an all-round economy that leaves in music nothing casual, and develops the utmost diversity while adhering to the identical material. Where there is nothing unthematic left, nothing which could not show itself to derive from the same basic material, there one can no longer speak of a ‘free style!”
This is starting to remind me of someone from my previous blog, who is it? Raymond Roussel! Here is a quote from James Miller’s book, quoted in my blog, about Roussel,
The invention of new language-games was something of a mania with Roussel, who elaborated his extraordinary and often sinister fantasies with the deadpan humor, and mock-scientific attention to detail, of a Rube Goldberg... Roussel submitted himself to a variety of arbitrary but rigorous rules for composing his poems and novels. Obsessed with puns, he liked to build narratives around homophonic structures: words and entire sentences that sounded identical, yet had completely different meanings...
p191 “And not of the ‘strict style’ in the old sense, either!”
“Old or new, I will tell you what I understand by ‘strict style.’ I mean the complete integration of all musical dimensions, their neutrality toward each other due to complete organization.”
“Do you see a way to do that?”
“Do you know,” he countered, “when I came nearest to the ‘strict style’?”
I waited. He spoke so low as to be hard to hear, and between his teeth, as he used to when he had headache.
“Once in the Brentano cycle,” he said, “in, ‘O lieb Madel.’ That song is entirely derived from a fundamental figure, a series of interchangeable intervals, the five notes B, E, A, E, E-flat, and the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony are determined and controlled by it, in so far as that is possible with a basic motif of so few notes. [This is where he wrote Esmeralda’s name into the score.] It is like a word, a key word, stamped on everything in the song, which it would like to determine entirely. But it is too short a word and is itself not flexible enough. The tonal space it affords is too limited. One would have to go on from here and make larger words out of the twelve letters, as it were, of the tempered semitone alphabet. Words of twelve letters, certain combinations and interrelations of the twelve semitones, series of notes from which a piece and all the movements of a work must strictly derive. Every note of the whole composition, both melody and harmony, would have to show its relation to this fixed fundamental series. Not one might recur until the other notes have sounded. Not one might appear which did not fulfill its function in the whole structure. There would no longer be a free note. That is what I would call ‘strict composition.’”
“A striking thought,” said I. “Rational organization through and through, one might indeed call it. You would gain an extraordinary unity and congruity, a sort of astronomical regularity and legality would be obtained thereby. But when I picture it to myself, it seems to me that the unchanged recurrence of such a succession of intervals, even when used in different parts of the texture, and in rhythmic variations, would result in a probably unavoidable serious musical impoverishment and stagnation.”
p192 “Probably,” he answered, with a smile which showed that he had been prepared for this reservation...
“And it is not so simple either. One must incorporate into the system all possible techniques of variation, including those decried as artificial; that is, the means which once helped the ‘development’ to win its hold over the sonata... In addition to being a fundamental series it [the twelve-note word] could find application in this way, that every one of its intervals is replaced by its inversion. Again, one could begin the figure with its last note and finish it on its first, and then invert this figure as well... A composition can also use two or more series as basic material, as in the double and triple fugue. The decisive factor is that every note, without exception, has significance and function according to its place in the basic series or its derivatives. That would guarantee what I call the indifference to harmony and melody.”
“A magic square,” I said. “But do you hope to have people hear all that?”
[A reminder of the concept of visual music from an earlier chapter, the way music appears to the eye on the page] ... If by ‘hearing’ you understand the precise realization in detail of the means by which the highest and strictest order is achieved... no, that way one would not hear it. But this order one will or would hear, and the perception of it would afford an unknown aesthetic satisfaction.”
“Very remarkable,” said I. “The way you describe the thing, it comes to a sort of composing before composition. The whole disposition and organization of the material would have to be ready when the actual work should begin, and all one asks is: which is the actual work? For this preparation of the material is done by variation, and the creative element in variation, which one might call the actual composition, would be transferred back to the material itself -- together with the freedom of the composer. When he went to work, he would no longer be free.”
p193 “Bound by a self-imposed compulsion to order, hence free.”[Roussel]
“Well, of course the dialectic of freedom is unfathomable. But he could scarcely be called a free inventor of his harmony. Would not the making of chords be left to chance and accident?”
“Say, rather, to the context. The polyphonic dignity of every chord-forming note would be guaranteed by the constellation. The historical events -- the emancipation of dissonance from its resolution, its becoming ‘absolute’ as it appears already in some passages of the later Wagner -- would warrant any combination of notes which can justify itself before the system.”
“And if the constellation produced the banal: consonance, common-chord harmonics, the worn-out, the diminished seventh?” [so I was right about increasing dissonance in music back in the last blog]
“That would be a rejuvenation of the worn-out by the constellation.”
“I see there is a restorative element in your Utopia. It is very radical, but it relaxes the prohibition which after all already hung over consonance. The return to the ancient forms of variation is a similar sign.”
“More interesting phenomena,” he responded, “probably always have this double face of past and future, probably are always progressive and regressive in one. They display the equivocalness of life itself.”
“Is that not a generalization?”
“Of what?”
“Of our domestic experiences as a nation?”
“Oh, let us not be indiscreet! Or flatter ourselves either. All I want to say is that our objections -- if they are meant as objections -- would not count against the fulfillment of the old, the ever repeated demand to take hold and make order, and to resolve the magic essence of music into human reason.”
“You want to put me on my honour as a humanist,” said I.“Human reason! And besides, excuse me; ‘constellation’ is your every other word. But surely it belongs more to astrology. The rationalism you call for has a good deal of superstition about it -- of belief in the incomprehensibility and vaguely daemonc, the kind of thing we have in games of chance, fortune-telling with cards, and shaking dice. Contrary to what you say, your system seems to me more calculated to dissolve human reason in magic.”
p194 He carried his closed hand to his brow.
“Reason and magic,” said he, “may meet and become one in that which one calls wisdom, initiation; in belief in the stars, in numbers. . . .”
I did not go on, as I saw that he was in pain...
We spoke little on the rest of the way home, I recall that we paused by the Cow Trough [a pond]...
“Cold,” said Adrian, motioning with his head; “much too cold to bathe. -- Cold,” he repeated a moment later, this time with a definite shiver, and turned away.
SZ [AL?] seeks to combine the archaic with the revolutionary within the strictest possible form. First mentions of a 12-tone system. To learn more about Schönberg’s 12-tone system, go Here or Here. [Or you could check out Vi Hart's Twelve Tones video Here.]
Ackerman on music
[From A Natural History of the Senses] p203 ...From the outset, our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds. Our instruments have evolved from a deep inner delight in music, but one that has boundaries. Much of what we hear strikes us as dissonance or as noise, and what falls within a certain range we find sweet, intellectually satisfying, and mellifluous...
p208 There are still many questions to be answered about music and emotion. In his fascinating book on music theory, The Language of Music; Deryck Cooke, for example, offers a musical vocabulary, spelling out the emotional effects a composer knows he can create with certain sounds. But why is this so? Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with “mournfulness” and to a major seventh with “violent longing” and to a minor second with “spiritless anguish” because we’ve formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or is it something more intrinsic in our makeup? Listen to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and you’ll hear pent-up, soaring, frustrated emotion of an intensity that may drive you to distraction. Yearning overflows the music like the meniscus on a too-full glass of wine, and this is how Wagner himself described the work:
. . . a tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honour, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living -- longing, longing, unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, an anguish forever renewing itself; one sole redemption -- death, surcease, a sleep without awakening.
... When he wrote the “Gloria” [in the Missa Solemnis], Beethoven underwent a volcanic, shriek-to-the-heavens joy, but instead of dancing around in delight, he “felt the need to convert it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable, and reproducible form of energy,” as Cooke describes it, “a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might hear, and still hear over and over again after he was dead and gone.” The notes he jotted down “only ever were and only ever will be a command from Beethoven to blow his eternal shout for joy, together with a set of instructions . . . exactly how to do so.” When we proclaim that artists live on in their work, we’re usually referring to the emotional steppingstones that lead through their lives, their disembodied moods and obsessions, but most of all their senses. Beethoven may be dead, but his sense of life at that moment lives in his score at this moment, at any moment...
p211 A single chord is a calling card and, at that, a mighty simple chord, based on universally shared mathematics. This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks and the music of the spheres. There has always been a connection between music and mathematics, which is why scientists have often been inordinately fond of music, especially of composers such as Bach. The composer Borodin was first and mainly a scientist, who discovered a method for combining fluorine and carbon atoms to produce new compounds. We’re indebted to his inspiration for Teflon, Freon, and a variety of aerosols [written before “aerosols” was a term requiring ambiguous comment]. His hobby was composing music... Some West German physicists are studying the relationship between musical composition and the mathematics of fractals [and a time before the reunification of Germany]. Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the fifth century B.C., notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string [another reminder of string theory], and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios... This revelation, that mathematics was secretly determining the beauty of music, must have seemed just one more indisputable proof to the mathematically minded Greeks that the universe was an orderly, logical, knowable structure...
p213 ... For the past 2,500 years or so, Western music has been obsessed with one polyphonic arrangement of tones, but there are many other arrangements, each as profoundly meaningful as the next and yet incomprehensible to outsiders... According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Words are arbitrary. There’s no direct link between them and the emotions they represent. Instead, they lasso an idea of emotion and drag it into view for a moment. We need words to corral how we feel and think; they allow us to reveal our inner lives to one another, as well as to exchange goods and services. But music is a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share. Though most foreign words must be translated to be understood, we instinctively understand whimpering, crying, shrieking, joy, cooing, sighing, and the rest of our caravan of cries and calls... What sort of response can a few notes of music awaken? Awe, rage, wonder, restlessness, defeat, stoicism, love, patriotism. . . .
p215 Of course, there is an odd sense in which music can’t really be heard at all. Much of musical composition is tonal problem solving on a very complex scale, an effort undertaken entirely in the mind of the composer. Not only is the orchestra not necessary for that creative feat of legerdemain, it most likely will produce an inferior version of the music the composer imagines. How could Beethoven write the Ninth Symphony so brilliantly when he was deaf, people wonder. The answer is that it wasn’t necessary for Beethoven to “hear” the music. Not as sound, anyway. He heard it flawlessly and much more intimately in his mind. Everyone touched by a piece of music hears it differently. The composer hears it perfectly in the resonant chambers of his imagination. The general audience hears it emotionally, without understanding its craft. Other composers hear it with an insider’s knowledge of form, structure, history, and incunabula. The members of an orchestra -- arranged according to instrument -- hear it boomingly, from “inside,” but not as a balanced work...
p211 A single chord is a calling card and, at that, a mighty simple chord, based on universally shared mathematics. This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks and the music of the spheres. There has always been a connection between music and mathematics, which is why scientists have often been inordinately fond of music, especially of composers such as Bach. The composer Borodin was first and mainly a scientist, who discovered a method for combining fluorine and carbon atoms to produce new compounds. We’re indebted to his inspiration for Teflon, Freon, and a variety of aerosols [written before “aerosols” was a term requiring ambiguous comment]. His hobby was composing music... Some West German physicists are studying the relationship between musical composition and the mathematics of fractals [and a time before the reunification of Germany]. Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the fifth century B.C., notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string [another reminder of string theory], and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios... This revelation, that mathematics was secretly determining the beauty of music, must have seemed just one more indisputable proof to the mathematically minded Greeks that the universe was an orderly, logical, knowable structure...
p213 ... For the past 2,500 years or so, Western music has been obsessed with one polyphonic arrangement of tones, but there are many other arrangements, each as profoundly meaningful as the next and yet incomprehensible to outsiders... According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Words are arbitrary. There’s no direct link between them and the emotions they represent. Instead, they lasso an idea of emotion and drag it into view for a moment. We need words to corral how we feel and think; they allow us to reveal our inner lives to one another, as well as to exchange goods and services. But music is a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share. Though most foreign words must be translated to be understood, we instinctively understand whimpering, crying, shrieking, joy, cooing, sighing, and the rest of our caravan of cries and calls... What sort of response can a few notes of music awaken? Awe, rage, wonder, restlessness, defeat, stoicism, love, patriotism. . . .
p215 Of course, there is an odd sense in which music can’t really be heard at all. Much of musical composition is tonal problem solving on a very complex scale, an effort undertaken entirely in the mind of the composer. Not only is the orchestra not necessary for that creative feat of legerdemain, it most likely will produce an inferior version of the music the composer imagines. How could Beethoven write the Ninth Symphony so brilliantly when he was deaf, people wonder. The answer is that it wasn’t necessary for Beethoven to “hear” the music. Not as sound, anyway. He heard it flawlessly and much more intimately in his mind. Everyone touched by a piece of music hears it differently. The composer hears it perfectly in the resonant chambers of his imagination. The general audience hears it emotionally, without understanding its craft. Other composers hear it with an insider’s knowledge of form, structure, history, and incunabula. The members of an orchestra -- arranged according to instrument -- hear it boomingly, from “inside,” but not as a balanced work...
You will, I hope, appreciate why I’ve quoted this here, but I also have to say something critical about what Ackerman says. As true as this passage undoubtedly is, it is not the whole truth. As with art in general, the composer’s understanding of the music he is creating is not the only valid way of understanding that creation... especially over time. The resonant emotions may possibly remain the same, but the effect or interpretation of those emotions are likely to change. Would a perceptive German listener have heard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde the same way in 1947, when Doctor Faustus was published, as when it was originally performed? Music, and also the German spirit Wagner mined, had changed over the decades.
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