La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas.
Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be at all.
André Breton: L'amour fou (1937)
Left us proceed forth to ask that most basic of questions: is music a language at all? Moreover, what exactly is a language in the first place?
The traditional line of thought has gone that if one says that music is a language, then it must mean that it makes music a system of signifiers and signifieds. In other words, that musical semiological expression can only be signification of something defined, definable, and where what is signified remains obscure, music nonetheless remains decodable, so that the obscured signified can be unveiled in the luminosity of its presence. If music signifies something—means something—then it must be possible to define exact what it is that is being signified: you have to be able to say exactly what music "means". In short, it allies itself with a philosophy of programmatic music.
In contrast to this has come an opposing camp that has argued that music is not a language because it lacks a system of signifiers, unshakeably linked to their corresponding signifieds. The lack of specificity in an absolute definable code has been used to argue that music is too lacking in its ability to anchor itself to clear signifieds to qualify as a language. Music is then said to "say nothing" at all and is, and of itself, absolute: the doctrine of absolute music. Ottokar Hostinsky, in 1877 described this as "absolute, purely formal, objectless" music (absolute, rein formale, objektlose) (quoted in Dahlhaus: Die Idee der absoluten Musik, p41). Objectless because it is lacking in the signified that naturally belongs to it.
Those of you who have already read the first part of this discussion will already have spotted where dubious assumptions have been made, and will doubtless already be vociferously objecting to them. Obviously, the whole assumption that language is a system of signifiers inexorably nailed down to their corresponding signifieds is where the problem lays.
This means that it becomes perfectly possible to admit to music having signifiers without these signifiers having to be fixed to concrete signifieds. A good example is the opening of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony:
Anton Schindler famously claimed that Beethoven himself had told him: "so klopft das Schicksal an die Pforte" (thus knocks destiny at the door). However, nobody has ever been able to otherwise corroborate his claim, and, as a result, generations of musicological commentators have clambered to dismiss it as a statement said by Beethoven in empty jest, or as a poorly recollected memory on Schindler's behalf, if not something completely made up by him. On another occasion, Beethoven himself was once asked what the motif at the start of the work "means" and he replied in magnificently abrupt Beethovian fashion: "the beginning sounds and means: you are too dumb".
Nor is Beethoven the only composer to tease us with half-veiled glimpses of programmatic knocking. A similar debate continues over the opening notes in the Fourth Movement of the Shostakovich 8th String Quartet. In one interpretation, it has been claimed that these represent, at the height of the Soviet Great Terror, the midnight knocking at the door of the KGB threatening to whisk Shostakovich away to a Siberian oblivion, after falling out of favour with the authorities:
Compounding the matter further is the dedication of the work by the composer to "victims of fascism and war", with the same notes being interpreted by others as the explosion of bombs or the sound of anti-aircraft fire. Shostakovich himself remained silent on the issue, long after it became politically safer for him to reveal the "true essence" of the matter. It is as though, like Beethoven, he wishes us to know that the "meaning" of the notes is that: "you are too dumb".
Another composer who mocks the listener with veiled allusions to a senseless programme is Schoenberg. In his papers discovered after his death, parenthetical annotations to the movements of his Piano Concerto, Opus 42, were uncovered. These have been hailed as the unveiling of the naked truth of what the actual "essence" of what the work is "really" all about:
Andante (Life was so easy)
Molto allegro (Plötzlich brach Hass aus—"Suddenly hatred broke out")
Adagio (Es wurde eine bedenkliche Situation geschaffen—"A grave situation was created")
Rondo: Giocoso (Das Leben geht weiter—"But life goes on")
 |
"So klopft das Schicksal an die Pforte" |
Anton Schindler famously claimed that Beethoven himself had told him: "so klopft das Schicksal an die Pforte" (thus knocks destiny at the door). However, nobody has ever been able to otherwise corroborate his claim, and, as a result, generations of musicological commentators have clambered to dismiss it as a statement said by Beethoven in empty jest, or as a poorly recollected memory on Schindler's behalf, if not something completely made up by him. On another occasion, Beethoven himself was once asked what the motif at the start of the work "means" and he replied in magnificently abrupt Beethovian fashion: "the beginning sounds and means: you are too dumb".
 |
| Beethoven: "You are too dumb" |
Nor is Beethoven the only composer to tease us with half-veiled glimpses of programmatic knocking. A similar debate continues over the opening notes in the Fourth Movement of the Shostakovich 8th String Quartet. In one interpretation, it has been claimed that these represent, at the height of the Soviet Great Terror, the midnight knocking at the door of the KGB threatening to whisk Shostakovich away to a Siberian oblivion, after falling out of favour with the authorities:
 |
| The opening of the Fourth Movement Largo from the Shostakovich String Quartet (Boosey & Hawkes) |
Compounding the matter further is the dedication of the work by the composer to "victims of fascism and war", with the same notes being interpreted by others as the explosion of bombs or the sound of anti-aircraft fire. Shostakovich himself remained silent on the issue, long after it became politically safer for him to reveal the "true essence" of the matter. It is as though, like Beethoven, he wishes us to know that the "meaning" of the notes is that: "you are too dumb".
Another composer who mocks the listener with veiled allusions to a senseless programme is Schoenberg. In his papers discovered after his death, parenthetical annotations to the movements of his Piano Concerto, Opus 42, were uncovered. These have been hailed as the unveiling of the naked truth of what the actual "essence" of what the work is "really" all about:
Andante (Life was so easy)
Molto allegro (Plötzlich brach Hass aus—"Suddenly hatred broke out")
Adagio (Es wurde eine bedenkliche Situation geschaffen—"A grave situation was created")
Rondo: Giocoso (Das Leben geht weiter—"But life goes on")
Yet in each case, what we find is so absurdly terse that Schoenberg seems to be mocking those of us from the grave, who rejoice at this alleged "discovery". In any case, Schoenberg himself never thought to bother publishing the notes, even though they are unfailingly quoted, raising questions as to whether here too those who take them too literary are being mocked for being "too dumb".
It all boils down to a matter of textual interpretation. In effect, the whole question of whether any musical text has a verbal metatext that constitutes it's true transcendental "essence": a metatext that is an Other to the text of the score itself. To put it another way, it comes down to whether music represents an apparent text that veils our access to the real text that can be decoded, unveiled, stripped down so as to reveal its luminous essence—if only we were not so dumb and we could outsmart the composer. Like the dance of Salome, music teases while it seems to veil a true luminous essence that promises to reveal itself to us in its nakedness. We are tempted to rip away her seven veils to get to the essence of the matter.
Yet there is no doubt that there is a veiled semiology in music. For example, in the slow movement of the Beethoven "Pastoral" Symphony, the composer himself identifies the birdsongs incorporated into the score as belonging to the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet). Yet, I would be hard pressed to identify the birds from a hearing of the music, and nor is an appreciation of there being representations of birdsong essential to an appreciation of the movement.
Nor is Beethoven the only composer to incorporate birdsong into his composition. Indeed, in Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux we find a whole ornithological cornucopia of them. Yet, in actual fact, the birds are musically of themselves even insignificant. What really matters is the musical handling of the foundational thematic material into meaningful musical structures, in a way that goes far beyond ornithological categorisation. Birdsong is a prominent feature in many works by Messiaen. In the Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine, the birdsong seems symbolic of an order far greater than a repackaged ornithology. It seems they are symbolic of Nature itself, and of a higher divine presence. Like angels, the birds are symbolic intermediaries between the human and divine orders. In short, they point to the abstraction of a wider symbolic cosmology far vaster than just the birds themselves.
Least and last of all, when it comes to discussing symbolic cosmologies, there is Wagner. In particular, there is a semiological universe of leitmotifs in The Ring. Yet, even here, a simplistic order of signifiers anchored inexorably to their signifieds eludes us deeply and fundamentally. This, despite these leitmotifs being conferred specific names—the Siegfried leitmotif, the Nature leitmotif etc.
However, the treatment of motifs as a simplistic order of signifiers and signifieds has been strongly questioned by Deryck Cooke, who has shown that there are only a few basic motifs from which an entire cosmology of other motifs are derived. The simplistic labels given to the motifs further often fail to correspond to their repeated usage. There is in Wagner thus a constant slippage of any relationship of signifier to its corresponding signified.
It is a demonic eroticism before which Kierkegaard stands in fear and trembling. He acts as though he had been confronted by the Stone Guest, and is quick to banish music from the realm of the spirit. He runs from his own realisation that the érotique-voilée, that sensual dance of the seven veils itself, is in itself the entire phenomenology of music that seduces us into the wider play of infinite meaning. For music is, by its very nature, always...explosante-fixe.
In the next part of the discussion, I will return, as promised, to the text of Derrida's Of Grammatology and to the polemic between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The problem there is that of the articulation of the voice in music. With it comes the problem between musical text and interpretation. After all we speak we of phrases in music, of phrasing and of articulation. What is the relationship between music and speaking? Or more exactly what is the relationship between music and articulation in full voice? Moreover, how does it relate to the question of the metaphysics of absolute music? All shall be "unveiled".
For the source of the quotations about the opening motif of the Beethoven Fifth see The First Four Notes by Matthew Guerrieri (although, alas, his unintentionally comical assassinations that pass for summaries of philosophers, such as Hegel, seriously undermine the book):
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Four-Notes-ebook/dp/B0084TWNUY/
For more on the Shostakovich 8th I suggest this website:
http://www.quartets.de/compositions/ssq08.html
Also worthwhile reading is this book by David Fanning:
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754606994
For a more detailed discussion of Cooke's analysis I recommend this website:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wagner/ringmotives/cooke.html
You can also get it "straight from the horse's mouth", in a spoken recording of Cooke speaking about the structure of The Ring:
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/cat/single?PRODUCT_NR=4435812
Deryck Cooke's unfinished study of The Ring is naturally essential reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Saw-World-End-Study-Wagners/dp/0193153165/
Yet there is no doubt that there is a veiled semiology in music. For example, in the slow movement of the Beethoven "Pastoral" Symphony, the composer himself identifies the birdsongs incorporated into the score as belonging to the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet). Yet, I would be hard pressed to identify the birds from a hearing of the music, and nor is an appreciation of there being representations of birdsong essential to an appreciation of the movement.
Nor is Beethoven the only composer to incorporate birdsong into his composition. Indeed, in Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux we find a whole ornithological cornucopia of them. Yet, in actual fact, the birds are musically of themselves even insignificant. What really matters is the musical handling of the foundational thematic material into meaningful musical structures, in a way that goes far beyond ornithological categorisation. Birdsong is a prominent feature in many works by Messiaen. In the Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine, the birdsong seems symbolic of an order far greater than a repackaged ornithology. It seems they are symbolic of Nature itself, and of a higher divine presence. Like angels, the birds are symbolic intermediaries between the human and divine orders. In short, they point to the abstraction of a wider symbolic cosmology far vaster than just the birds themselves.
 |
| Pual Klee: The Twittering Machine |
 |
| The Siegfried Leitmotif |
However, the treatment of motifs as a simplistic order of signifiers and signifieds has been strongly questioned by Deryck Cooke, who has shown that there are only a few basic motifs from which an entire cosmology of other motifs are derived. The simplistic labels given to the motifs further often fail to correspond to their repeated usage. There is in Wagner thus a constant slippage of any relationship of signifier to its corresponding signified.
Indeed, in all of music, wherever there is a semiology within the text, whereby a signifier appears to be unshakeably anchored to its signified, there is an enormous amount of slippage in meaning—a slippage that is far more readily discernable in music than it is in literature. In the case of Wagner, the sheer interrelatedness and mutual derivation from common motivic roots has signifiers constantly slipping into a wider abstraction of meaning. It is an abstraction that throws the meaning into the wider context of a trail (une trace) leading into the vast play of meaning. It seems that the nature of music is such that meaning is always caught up in the dance of Salome, permanently érotique-voilée, without ever revealing the nakedness of the presence of its transcendental essence. And with that, we find ourselves on seemingly similar shores to Søren Kierkegaard, even if for totally different reasons:
Of course abstract media are the prerogative of sculpture and painting and music as well as architecture. ... The most abstract idea conceivable is the spirit of sensuality. But in what medium can it be represented? Only in music.
... The task this inquiry has really set itself is to show the significance of the musical erotic, and to that end to indicate in turn the different stages, which, all sharing the property of being immediately erotic, agree also in all being essentially musical.
...[M]usic is the demonic. In the erotic sensual genius, music has its absolute object.
Kierkegaard: Either/Or—A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics edition). My emphasis.
It is a demonic eroticism before which Kierkegaard stands in fear and trembling. He acts as though he had been confronted by the Stone Guest, and is quick to banish music from the realm of the spirit. He runs from his own realisation that the érotique-voilée, that sensual dance of the seven veils itself, is in itself the entire phenomenology of music that seduces us into the wider play of infinite meaning. For music is, by its very nature, always...explosante-fixe.
In the next part of the discussion, I will return, as promised, to the text of Derrida's Of Grammatology and to the polemic between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The problem there is that of the articulation of the voice in music. With it comes the problem between musical text and interpretation. After all we speak we of phrases in music, of phrasing and of articulation. What is the relationship between music and speaking? Or more exactly what is the relationship between music and articulation in full voice? Moreover, how does it relate to the question of the metaphysics of absolute music? All shall be "unveiled".
Further Reading:
For the source of the quotations about the opening motif of the Beethoven Fifth see The First Four Notes by Matthew Guerrieri (although, alas, his unintentionally comical assassinations that pass for summaries of philosophers, such as Hegel, seriously undermine the book):
http://www.amazon.com/The-First-Four-Notes-ebook/dp/B0084TWNUY/
For more on the Shostakovich 8th I suggest this website:
http://www.quartets.de/compositions/ssq08.html
Also worthwhile reading is this book by David Fanning:
http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754606994
For a more detailed discussion of Cooke's analysis I recommend this website:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wagner/ringmotives/cooke.html
You can also get it "straight from the horse's mouth", in a spoken recording of Cooke speaking about the structure of The Ring:
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/cat/single?PRODUCT_NR=4435812
Deryck Cooke's unfinished study of The Ring is naturally essential reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Saw-World-End-Study-Wagners/dp/0193153165/
No comments:
Post a Comment