“Words and Music” might seem a strange
name for an instrumental recital, and yet the importance of language asserts
itself in various ways in the work of the composers presented tonight. Most
obviously, Matt Aucoin uses the poetry of Paul Celan as a starting point for
his Celan Fragments, as well as verse
of his own for Poem. Leoš Janáček was
famous for collecting speech melodies and following distinctive patterns of the
Czech language in rhythmic declamations. Morton Feldman, rather disparaging
about other composers of his day, turned instead to his contemporaries in
literature and painting. An attention to metrics and prosody was instilled in
György Kurtág by the Hungarian pedagogue Lajos Bárdos, who tasked Kurtág (along
with fellow student György Ligeti) with notating poetic meters as musical
rhythms and analyzing music in terms of poetic feet. In his notebooks Kurtág
observes that the beginning of his String Quartet is a dactyl, and the opening
of Signs a trochee.
The relationship between words and music
has ranged from complementary to contentious. Oftentimes the absence of one
heightens the perceived meaningfulness of the other. At least part of the
mythology of Kurtág in Hungary from the 1970s on was derived from his reticence
to speak publicly about his music, leading one critic to commend his “ethical
stance that makes it imperative for [him] to communicate everything that can be
said in music, and only that when he has found the appropriate form for it.”
The specter of musical absolutism follows
the various twists and turns of our program tonight (largely dominated by
composers of the modernist persuasion). The very claim to a musical-ethical
stance implies the possibility of a musical practice that is truthful or honest
to its particular historical moment. In both the German tradition of Webern’s Vier Stücke and its inward-looking
expressionism, and the Eastern European contingent of Kurtág and Janáček, there
is an implicit philosophical position taken toward the possibility of truth in
art. Morton Feldman was perhaps most explicit about this:
Like
the tailor, the composer everywhere is always busy with the yardstick. He
doesn’t have the problem of truth. What I mean is, he doesn’t work with the
impossibility of ever reaching it, like the painter or the poet. For the
composer the truth is always the process, the system.
In this statement, Feldman is largely
reacting to musical formalism, which dominated American and European academies
of new music at the time. Rather than accepting the dominance of serial
techniques as progressive truth, Feldman questioned the very possibility of
truth in art.
Feldman’s “Spring of Chosroes” (on the
program today) takes its title from an elaborate carpet purportedly made for
the sixth century Sasanid King Chosroes I. Irregular patterns detail its
imaginary design. A texture is woven through crossed and displaced metrical
units. At times the same note values will be re-spelled, implying a difference
that is not necessarily audible. The result is a virtual consistency that never
repeats itself.
In the oscillation between Webern’s
German “inward” sensibility and the Eastern European predilection of Janáček
and Kurtág toward the social (in its various forms), it is unclear where
Feldman falls. In her book on Kurtág and Ligeti, Beckles Wilson takes a quote
from Václav Havel (philosopher, writer, and first president of the Czech
Republic) to discuss the necessity of an impossible truth in Hungarian music:
‘Living
the truth is…woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the
repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an
inauthentic response.’ If, in the West, it became necessary to question the
idea of purity in – say – ‘perfect’ fifths, then here in the East it was
imperative to hypothesise that it could still exist. And yet, of course, it was
equally imperative to fail to reach it.
Perhaps Feldman retained some of the
Eastern European mentality even after his parents moved from Kiev to New York. In
his prose he demands from the composer an authentic approach to the
impossibility of truth: a modernist stance (assuming the possibility of
authenticity) with a postmodern outlook (acknowledging the impossibility of
reaching truth). It is perhaps this insistent demand for authenticity within
its impossibility that is irregularly woven through the “Spring of Chosroes.”
***
While almost all the pieces on tonight’s
program exhibit modernist tendencies, musical formalism is markedly absent.
Even Vier Stücke (1910) by Anton
Webern (whose later serial works inspired the formalist tendencies of the next
generation European avant-garde) was written in the earlier “Expressionist”
period. As noted by music historian Richard Taruskin, expressionism was in fact
a heightened form of romanticism, updating the romantic “inwardness” of a
unique subjectivity with the “inner occurrences” of the unconscious. The German
philosopher Theodor Adorno described the early atonal works as psychoanalytic
“dream transcripts.” If sympathetic to his view, one might hear Vier Stücke as containing a “truth,” the
abandonment of traditional harmony signaling the alienation of the modern
subject.
Given the inward-looking tendencies of
the German school, it is unsurprising that Hungarian musicians and theorists
would look to social engagement as a viable alternative.
György Kurtág navigated a thin line
between the Soviet political policy demanding sociality in art and the commitment
to a properly musical truth. While in 1962, his premiere of the “Eight Piano
Pieces” caused critics to accuse Kurtág of neglecting to “make the world a
better place,” by 1968 he was described by musicians as a composer on a
“merciless search for truth,” speaking directly “to the Hungarian person
today.” The signal moment of his elevation to a composer of canonical status within
Hungary was the 1975 portrait concert at the Liszt Academy. As music historian Beckles
Wilson points out, it was partially his position as a respected teacher and
coach that imbued him with a sense of mystical authority among musicians and
performers.
While affirming Kurtág’s place in the
canon of Hungarian composers, the concert neglected to mention certain of
Kurtág’s contemporary influences such as The New Music Studio, a group of
Hungarian composers championing Western European and eventually American
avant-garde works by composers such as Webern, Varèse, Cage, and Wolff.
Wilson is slightly critical of Kurtág’s
venerated position perhaps because it was constructed on the basis of both his progressive
resistance to the Soviet ideology and
his traditional commitment to social engagement, exhibited in his work as
pedagogue. In fact, Kurtág inhabited a more complex position staked out between
mainstream political policy and a committed avant-garde.
This complex dynamic between
experimentation and tradition as well as Kurtág’s status as teacher has much to
do with the highest respect (usually reserved for deceased composers) he has
earned among performers. Wilson points out that the minimal complexity in Games “enforces a maximilisation of
performative investment.” Besides Games,
his Seven Songs to Dezso Tandor’s Poems
for soprano and violin op. 12, is explicitly pedagogical in nature: one of the
songs is entitled “so we never get out of practice,” and much of the musical
material draws from the idiom of instrumental studies (varied arpeggios,
scales, moto perpetuos). Again
quoting Wilson, “its music is engaged with the physical realities of learning
to play the violin; meanwhile, its text provides a commentary on learning how
to live.”
Kurtág’s Tre Pezzi for violin and piano exhibits a pedagogical awareness of
the violin idiom. The first movement begins with open strings, moving only
gradually away from them. In the second movement, an alternating E harmonic is
articulated on the top two strings, as if the violinist is tuning the
instrument. In the third movement, slow scales on the lowest string recall
similar studies by Paganini and Bach.
Perhaps what shapes Kurtág’s appeal for
performers is as much his understanding of the menial and repetitive tasks
required to master the instrument as much as his deep knowledge of the
canonical repertoire. That he was not on the forefront of the avant-garde in
Hungary is in a certain way unsurprising, as the repetitive task of learning to
play an instrument lends itself only slowly and subtly to experimentation. Today,
when the demanding training of the virtuoso classical performer is beginning to
feel like a cultivated vestige of a by-gone age, the music of Kurtág
unequivocally affirms our adherence to this somewhat blind tradition.
It is no wonder then that we might relate
to the aphoristic statement set in his Kafka
Fragments: “My prison cell, my fortress.”
***
It is most fitting that Kurtág would formulate
his own notion of musical truth not in his own words but through those of
Kafka. While Feldman railed against “academic” composers who set truth as
equivalent to formalist procedures, Kurtág’s response comes in his more
ambiguous “Homage-message to Pierre Boulez,” in which he sets to music the
following note from Kafka:
The true path goes by way of a rope that
is suspended not high up, but rather just above the ground. Its purpose seems
to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.
The true path for Kafka/Kurtág is more an
obstacle than a pinnacle: something to resist rather than traverse. Yet the
title of the movement does not in certain terms prescribe this as the only way
to fail: it is as much an expression of admiration (homage) as admonition
(message) for Boulez, whose attempts at total serialism presumably suspend the
rope up high.
Earlier I drew the parallel between
Kurtág and Janáček in terms of their supposed outward orientation toward the
social. In reality, this orientation was filtered through very different social
circumstances. Janáček was until his sixties known only as a regional Moravian composer.
Like Feldman, he insisted on the particular against systematic music that
“depends on just notes and ignores man and his surroundings.” This orientation is
exemplified by his ethnographic focus on Czech folk music, and his obsession
with musical elements of human speech.
A further obsession made its way into Janáček’s
music: the chronoscope, which was originally developed for measuring reaction
times. In 1922 Janáček wrote, “I have the Hipp chronoscope. It measures time
for me down to the thousandth of a second. I narrow my consciousness down to
this minuscule time span.” Janáček’s friend, the writer (and literary executor
for Kafka) Max Brod, made much of the composer’s “supernormal sensitivity to
minima,” claiming his music fulfilled Flaubert’s maxim that “through little gaps
one perceives precipices.”
Two elements of Janáček’s own speculative
reasoning might guide our listening to the Violin Sonata (1915): his notion of spletna as the brief dissonance
occurring as the memory of one chord overlaps with a following one, and his idea
that speech melodies revealed the “subliminal thoughts and emotions unexpressed
by words alone.”[1]
The first element has to do with Brod’s characterization of “supernormal
sensitivity to minima.” Rather than the “emancipation of dissonance” that
concerned Schoenberg, Janáček was interested in the dissonances already
existing as artifacts of the expanded present moment. The second element
concerns the limits of signification: the notion that musical elements of
speech contribute a subliminal layer of thought and emotions. It was through
this attention to the minimal time-scale and the limits of signification that Janáček
developed a distinctive modernist voice.
Another element of Janáček’s modernism
was his search for truth in the impossible. His collection of speech melodies
could not articulate the subliminal thoughts lost to signification; his most
detailed measurements of the temporal properties of speech would never re-gain
the evanescence of the present moment.
***
Janáček’s speech melodies adding thoughts
and emotions to signifying language might be another way to describe the prosodic
function of performance itself. The score is notated; the performer’s art is
one that moves into the realm of parsing and inflection. Yet with Janáček’s
music, composition is already performative, as it models itself on the
particulars of an individual’s speech.
In Matt’s Poem, which he wrote for me while we were still in college
together, the solo violin performs poetic gestures such as rhetorical
interjections or self-corrections. Much of Poem
works itself out by feeling, extension—I have the impression that it is very
much concerned with the process of its own making. While writing Poem Matt was working on his thesis, a
collection of poems called After Music.
Poem then—as the title suggests—is a
work that wanders over the border between music and poetry, an “after music”
that is not yet comfortable referring to itself as such.
Another poem of Matt’s, “Swallows,”
enacts the passage from words to music, reaching toward its other as “these
twining parallel blindnesses.” In tracing the motion of a flock of swallows, we
move from the detail of the part (the “bright-black eyes”) to the precision of
the multiple (“fleet illegibles”). In either case, there is an exact
disintegration of the one, the singular: the “absent entirety flickers.” The
movement of the swallows is both a metaphor for documenting memory, and the
memory itself.
The Celan
Fragments are an on-going series of minimal exercises, perhaps akin to
Kurtág’s Games. While not explicitly
pedagogical, they often require a certain re-learning of the body. In the
setting of one of Paul Celan’s untitled poems, the violin uses the opening line
as armature for a seven-note, descending arpeggio: “Unlesbarkeit dieser Welt”
(“Illegibility of this world”). The figure then repeats itself, mirroring the
movement given in the poem: “You, clamped / into your deepest part, / climb out
of yourself / for ever.” The musical setting spurs a cyclical motion of the
violinist closing in on him/herself, and opening up (or climbing out) again to
re-set for the next iteration.
If anything unites the pieces on our
program tonight, it is perhaps Beckle Wilson’s observed parallel in Kurtág’s Seven Songs: that of learning to play an
instrument (in Kurtág’s music) and learning to live (in Tandor’s words). Not
only learning an instrument such as the violin, but re-learning—as Janáček
attempted to do—the passage of time through the chronoscope, or the gaps in
language through the notation of speech melodies.
Learning an instrument requires a
mediation between the general and particular, between theory and practice.
There is no one formula, but also not the absence of formula; there is the
understanding that a singular truth, a rope suspended up high is inadequate,
but also an acknowledgment that the alternative of no rope at all (even to
stumble over) is equally a mistake. In this sense it is very much the case that
learning an instrument, or learning through an instrument of music or language,
is not a mere metaphor for learning to live, but becomes the experience of
living itself.
Celan, whose poetry is another
re-learning of language and life after the Holocaust, seems to urge us forward
with the line: “You, clamped / into your deepest part, / climb out of yourself
/ for ever.” The move is from an inward sensibility to an outward-looking one,
from a maximilized modern obsession with the romantic inwardness or Innigkeit to a postmodern acknowledgment
of the plurality of truths. The postmodern gives us not one path but many, not
one determining subject, but its overriding infra-individual uncertainties. It
seems possible now to celebrate postmodernity as leaving behind the inward-looking
self of the modern sensibility.
Yet, to dwell momentarily on Celan’s
line, it is not merely an injunction (or simply an observation) to “climb out
of yourself,” but also the acknowledgment that this action continues “for ever.”
The movement that escapes the self is affirmed by poetry and music as its very
impossibility in life; this is a truth that we can consistently stumble upon.
Rather than making claims to a musical absolutism in which “everything…can be
said,” rather than positing an un-problematic musical ethics in the already
composed, maybe we can find some form of truth in a commitment to learning and
re-learning the instruments through which we perceive and make the world. Taking
a cue from Flaubert, we might say that music does not fill in where words fail,
but rather reveals, in its gaps, the precipices.
[1] Taruskin,
“Speech-Tunelets,” from Chapter 7 of 20th Century Volume of the
Oxford History of Western Music
