Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
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Janequin's art reminds us that there exists an acoustic universe outside the human soul, one that consists not merely of nature sounds but also of human voices speaking, singing, and giving sonic flesh to everyday life as well as to festive occasions. He reminds us that the composer can give a great musical form to that "objective" universe.
One of Janacek's most original compositions: The Seventy Thousand (1909): a piece for mens chorus about the fate of the Silesian miners. The second half of the work (which should be in every anthology of modern music) is an explosion of shouts from the crowd, shouts that tangle together in a fascinating tumult: a composition that (despite its amazing dramatic emotional charge) comes curiously close to the madrigals that, in Janequin's time, turned the street cries of Paris and London into music.
I think of Stravinsky's Les Noces (written between 1914 and 1923): a portrayal (the term Ansermet uses as a pejorative is actually quite appropriate) of a village wedding; we hear songs, noises, speeches, shouts, calls, monologues, joking (a tumult of voices prefigured by Janacek), accompanied by an orchestration (four pianos and percussion) of fascinating harshness (which prefigures Bartok).
And I think of Bartok's piano suite Out of Doors (1926), the fourth part: nature sounds (the voices of frogs at a pond, it seems to me) suggest to Bartok rare and strange melodic motifs; then into these animal tones merges a folk song that, human invention though it is, lies on the same plane as the frog sounds; it is not a lied, that song of the Romantics meant to display the "affective activity" of the composer's soul; it is a melody come from the outside as a noise among other noises.
And I think, too, of the Adagio of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto (a work of his last, his sad, American period). The hypersubjective theme, ineffably melancholy, alternates with a second, this one hyperobjective (which incidentally recalls the fourth part of the Out of Doors suite): as if a souls sorrow could find consolation only in the nonsentience of nature.
I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud). I remember the gloomy years I spent in Bohemia early in the Russian occupation. I fell in love then with Varese and Xenakis: those pictures of sound-worlds that were objective but nonexistent spoke to me of a life freed of human subjectivity, aggressive and burdensome; they spoke of the sweetly nonhuman beauty of the world before or after mankind moved through it.
Melody
I listen to a polyphonic chant for two voices from the twelfth-century School of Notre-Dame in Paris: underneath, in augmented note values, as a cantus firmus, an ancient Gregorian chant (a chant that goes back to an immemorial and probably non-European past); above it, in shorter note values, unfolds the polyphonic accompaniments melody. This embrace of two melodies belonging to two different eras (centuries
apart) has something marvelous about it: like reality and parable at once, here is the birth of European music as art: a melody is created to go in counterpoint with another, very old, melody whose origins are almost unknown; so this new one is there as something secondary, subordinate, it is there to serve; though "secondary," it is this voice that brings to bear all the invention, all the labor, of the medieval musician, whereas the melody it accompanies has been taken unchanged from an antique repertoire.
This old polyphonic composition delights me: the new melody on top is long, unending, and unmemoriz-able; it is not the product of some sudden inspiration, it did not spring forth as the direct expression of some state of mind; it has the quality of an elaboration, a "craftsman"'s work of ornamentation, a work done not to let the artist open his soul (show his "affective activity," to use Ansermets term) but to let him, in all humility, embellish a liturgy.
And it's my impression that until Bach the art of melody would keep that quality the earliest polyphonic composers gave it. I listen to the Adagio of Bach's E Major Violin Concerto: like a kind of cantus firmus, the orchestra (the bass instruments) plays a very simple theme, readily memorizable and many times repeated, while the violin melody (the focus of the composer's melodic challenge) soars above, incomparably longer, more various, richer than the orchestras cantus firmus (to which it is nonetheless subordinate), beautiful, spellbinding yet elusive, unmemorizable, and for us children of the second half, sublimely archaic.
The situation changes with the dawn of the Classical. Composition loses its polyphonic nature; in
the sonority of the accompaniment harmonies, the autonomy of the various singular voices disappears, and disappears still more as the great innovation of the second half-the symphonic orchestra with its thickness of sound-gains prominence; the melody that was "secondary," "subordinate," becomes the main point in composition and dominates musical structure, which incidentally undergoes a complete transformation.
Then the character of melody changes too: no more is it the long line that runs through an entire piece; it can be reduced to a phrase of a few measures, a phrase that is very expressive and concentrated, and thus easily memorizable, that can catch (or provoke) a direct emotion (more than ever before, music is set a great semantic task: to capture and musically "describe" all the emotions and their nuances). This is why the present-day audience applies the term "great melodist" to the composers of the second half-to a Mozart, a Chopin-but rarely to Bach or Vivaldi and still less to Josquin des Pres or Palestrina: the current idea of melody (of what constitutes beautiful melody) was shaped by the Classical aesthetic.
Yet it is not true that Bach is less melodic than Mozart; it is only that his melody is different. The Art of Fugue: the famous theme
is that kernel out of which (as Schoenberg said) the whole is created; but that is not the melodic treasure of The Art of Fugue; the treasure is in all the melodies
that arise from this theme and form the counterpoint to it. I like very much Hermann Scherchen's orchestration and recorded interpretation; for example, Contrapunctus IV, the fourth single fugue: he conducts it at half the customary speed (Bach did not prescribe the tempi); immediately, at that slow tempo, the whole of its unsuspected melodic beauty is revealed. That remelodization of Bach has nothing to do with roman-ticization (no rubato, no added chords in Scherchen); what I hear is the authentic melody of the first half, elusive, unmemorizable, irreducible to a brief phrase, a melody (an entwining of melodies) that bewitches me by its ineffable serenity. Impossible to hear it without great emotion. But it is an emotion essentially different from one stirred by a Chopin nocturne.
As if, behind the art of melody, there hid two possible intentionalities, contrary to one another: as if a Bach fugue, by bringing us to contemplate a beauty of being that is outside the subjective, aimed to make us forget our moods, our passions and pains, ourselves; and as if on the other hand Romantic melody aimed to make us plunge into ourselves, feel the self with a terrible intensity, and forget everything outside.
Modernism's Great Works as Rehabilitation of the First Half
The great novelists of the post-Proust period-I have especially in mind Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, or, in my generation, Fuentes-were highly sensitive to the nearly forgotten aesthetic of the novel previous to the nineteenth century: they incorporated essayistic
reflection into the art of the novel; made composition freer; reclaimed the right to digression; breathed the spirit of the nonserious and of play into the novel; repudiated the dogmas of psychological realism in creating characters without trying to compete (like Balzac) with the etat civil-with the state registry of citizens; and above all: they refused any obligation to give the reader the illusion of reality: an obligation that reigned supreme throughout the novels second half.
The point of this rehabilitation of the first-half novelistic principles is not a return to this or that retro style; nor is it a simpleminded rejection of the nineteenth-century novel; the point of the rehabilitation is more general: to redefine and broaden the very notion of the novel; to resis
t the reduction worked by the nineteenth century's aesthetic of the novel; to give the novel its entire historical experience for a grounding.
I do not mean to draw a facile parallel between the novel and music, the structural issues of the two arts not being comparable; but the historical situations are similar: like the great novelists, the great modern composers (Stravinsky and Schoenberg both) determined to encompass all the centuries of music, to rethink and remake the scale of values of its whole history; to do this, they had to extricate music from the rut of the second half (by the way: the term "neoclassicism" commonly pinned on Stravinsky is misleading, for his most decisive excursions into the past reach into eras earlier than the Classical); from which comes their reticence: as to composition techniques originating with the sonata; as to the preeminence of melody; as to the sonic demagogy of svmphonic orchestration; but from which comes, above all: their refusal to see music's raison d'etre exclusively as an avowal of emotional life, an attitude that during the nineteenth century became as coercive as did the requirement of plausibility for the novel.
Although that inclination to reread and reevaluate the entire history of music is common to all the great modernists (if it is, as I believe, the mark that distinguishes great modern art from modernist trumpery), still, it is Stravinsky who expresses it more clearly than anyone else (and hyperbolically, I would add). That, by the way, is the focus of his detractors' attacks: in his effort to root himself in the whole history of music they see eclecticism; a lack of originality; a failure of invention. His "incredible diversity of stylistic procedures… amounts to an absence of style," says Ansermet. And Adorno, sarcastically: Stravinsky's music is inspired only by music, it is "music about music."
Unfair judgments: for while Stravinsky, like no other composer before or after him, did turn for inspiration to the whole span of music, in no way does that lessen the originality of his art. And I do not merely mean that the same personal traits are always visible beneath the shifts in his style. I mean that it is precisely his vagabondage through musical history-his conscious, purposeful "eclecticism," gigantic and unmatched-that is his total and incomparable originality.
The Third (or Overtime) Period
But what is the significance, in Stravinsky, of this determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?
As a young man, I would answer without hesitation: to me, Stravinsky was one of those figures who had opened the doors onto distances I saw as boundless. I thought he meant to summon up and mobilize all the powers, all the means available to the history of music, for the infinite journey that is modern art.
The infinite journey that is modern art? Since then, I've lost that feeling. The journey was a short one. That is why, for my metaphor of the two game halves of music history, I've imagined modern music as a mere postlude, an epilogue to the history of music, a celebration that marks the end of the adventure, a sky ablaze at the end of the day.
Now I do hesitate: even though it is true that the time of modern music has been so short, even though it has lasted only a generation or two, and has thus really been no more than an epilogue, still, by reason of its enormous beauty, its artistic importance, its entirely new aesthetic, does it not deserve to be considered an era complete unto itself, a third for overtime) period? Should I not revise my metaphor about the histories of music and of the novel? Should I not say that they happened over three periods?
Yes, I do revise my metaphor, and all the more willingly as I am deeply, passionately fond of that third period, that "sky ablaze at the end of the day," fond of that period which I believe I myself am part of, even if I am part of something that is already finished.
But to return to my question: what is the significance of Stravinsky's determination to encompass the whole span of music? What is the point?
An image hounds me: according to a popular belief, at the moment of his death a person sees his
whole life pass before his eyes. In Stravinsky's work, European music recalled its thousand-year history; that was its final dream before setting out for an eternal dreamless sleep.
Playful Transcription
Let us distinguish two things: on the one hand: the general trend for restoring forgotten principles of music of the past, a trend that runs through all Stravinsky's work and that of his great contemporaries; on the other hand: the direct dialogue that Stravinsky carries on with Tchaikovsky, then with Pergolesi, then with Gesualdo, and so on; these "direct dialogues," transcriptions of this or that old work, in this or that particular style, are a procedure of Stravinsky's own that we find in practically no other of his composer contemporaries (we do find it in Picasso).
Adorno interprets Stravinsky's transcriptions thus (I emphasize the key terms): "These notes"-the dissonant notes, alien to the harmony, which Stravinsky uses in Pulcinella, for instance-"become the marks of the violence the composer wreaks against the idiom, and it is that violence we relish about them, that battering, that violation, so to speak, of musical life. Though dissonance may originally have been the expression of subjective suffering, its harshness shifts in value and becomes the sign of a social constraint, whose agent is the style-setting composer. His works have no other material but the emblems of that con-straint, a necessity external to the subject, having nothing in common with it, and which is merely imposed from the outside. It may be that the widespread effect of these works of Stravinsky's is due in large part to the fact that inadvertently, and under color of aestheticism, they in their own way trained men to something that was soon methodically inflicted on them at the political level."
Let us recapitulate: a dissonance is justified if it expresses "subjective suffering," but in Stravinsky (who is morally guilty, as we know, of never discussing his sufferings) that very dissonance is the sign of brutality; a parallel is drawn (by a brilliant short circuit of Adorno thought) with political brutality: thus the dissonant chords added to Pergolesis music prefigure (and thereby prepare) the coming political oppression (which in this particular historical context can mean only one thing: fascism).
I had my own experience with the free transcription of a work from the past when, early in the 1970s, while I was still in Prague, I set about writing a variation for the theater on Jacques le Fataliste. Diderot being for me the embodiment of a free, rational, critical mind, I experienced my affection for him at the time as a kind of yearning for the West (to my eyes, the Russian occupation of my country represented a forced de-Westernization). But the meaning of things keeps changing: today I would say that Diderot embodied for me the first half of the art of the novel and that my play celebrated various principles well known to the novelists of old, and dear to me as well: (1) the euphoric freedom of composition; (2) the constant association of libertine stories and philosophical reflections; (3) the nonserious, ironical, parodic, shocking nature of those reflections. The rules of the game were clear: what I did was not an adaptation of Diderot, it was my own play, my variation on Diderot, my homage to Diderot: I completely rewrote his novel; the love stories are taken from him, but the ideas in the dialogue are largely mine; anyone can instantly see lines in it that are unthinkable from Diderot's pen; the eighteenth century was optimistic, my time is not, I myself still less so, and in my play the Master and Jacques characters indulge in dark excesses barely imaginable in the age of Enlightenment.
After that little experience of my own I can only call stupid those remarks on Stravinsky's brutality and violence. He loved his old master as I loved mine. In adding twentieth-century dissonances to melodies of the eighteenth, perhaps he imagined he might intrigue his master out in the beyond, that he might tell him something important about our time, that he might even amuse him. He needed to address him, to talk to him. The playful transcription of an old work was for him like a way of establishing communication between centuries.
Playful Transcription According to Kafka
A curious novel, Kafka's Amerika: indeed, why should this young twenty-nine-year-old w
riter have laid his first novel in a continent where he had never set foot? This choice shows a clear intent: to not do realism; better yet: to not do a serious work. He did not even try to palliate his ignorance by research; he invented his idea of America from second-rate readings, from
popular prints, and indeed, the novel's image of America is (intentionally) made up of cliches; the main inspiration for the characters and plot (as he acknowledged in his diary) is Dickens, especially David Copperfield (Kafka describes the first chapter of Amerika as "a sheer imitation of Dickens'): he picks up particular motifs from it (and lists them: "the story of the trunk, the boy who delights and charms everyone, the menial labor, the sweetheart in the country house, the filthy living quarters"), and he draws on its characters (Karl is an affectionate parody of David Copperfield) and especially on the atmosphere that all Dickens's novels bathe in: the sentimentality, the naive distinction between good and evil figures. Adorno speaks of Stravinsky's music as a "music about music"; Kafka's Amerika is a "literature about literature," and within the genre it is even a classic work, perhaps a seminal one.
The first page of the novel: in the port of New York, Karl is about to leave the ship when he realizes that he has forgotten his umbrella below. In order to go back for it, with a gullibility that is barely believable he entrusts his steamer trunk (a heavy trunk holding everything he owns) to a stranger: of course, he loses the trunk and the umbrella both. From the first lines, the spirit of playful parody generates an imaginary world where nothing is completely plausible and everything is a little comical.