Notes on the modern period - 24 - Modern Music ii

One of the stories in my new collection, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable, imagines the fate of an emigre virtuoso pianist in L.A., Alexander Petrov, who is a friend of Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he is at the center also of an earlier work of mine, Hungry Generations: a novel, which partly tries to convey my pleasure in the history of classical music and especially modern music from Wagner forward. About Wagner, as my previous post tried to show, the evident gigantism in Wagner’s extraordinary operas participates in the modernist impulse to create art which surveys and encompasses the entire span of civilization, reaching back to its mythic origins and moving forward to the present world which is judged to be disintegrating from the mid-nineteenth century onward – and increasingly so, as the two World Wars were fought. This ambitious and audacious vision of human experience announces the current disintegration of traditional thought and received conventions. Such is the vision in Wagner and so too, for example, in Joyce’s Ulysses, with the qualification that Joyce’s creation of Leopold Bloom – as much a mockery of Odysseus as he is – celebrates the character’s struggling humanity. As a result, Joyce’s exposure of the vast, disintegrating edifice of civilization yet leaves some room for the ordinary human being. Such a paradox is not central in Wagner’s work (despite some superficial elements of it in Meistersinger).

However, in Mahler, a composer deeply influenced by Wagner (as every German-speaking classical composer was), we do encounter that paradoxical face-off between the individual versus the massive forces which can crush the human. The individual’s features are reduced to often primitive and, therefore, bitterly ironic markers of expressiveness, yet they survive. I am thinking of the third movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, in which a naive children’s tune is transformed into a deeply sad minor-key funeral march, and so its sweetness is converted into a beautiful but bitter gesture of yearning. Soon in the movement, we hear klezmer-style carnival tunes, and their primitive contours are made to convey a similar yearning for expressiveness, despite their grotesque transformations. (Here is a Bernstein performance of the movement on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPERXpOqiU&feature=related.) What we hear here is travesty: the children’s folksong and the carnival dance music are mutilated and mocked, and yet they are clung to as embodying the last possibilities of expressiveness and meaning: deformed as they are, they become a lyrical hallowing of the mundane and the clichéd as all that humankind has left of meaning.

The transition from the utter silence at the end of this funeral march to the last movement’s apocalyptic thunderclap is a primal gesture of disruption, and it yields another sort of tragically inflected and travestied march. (Here is a Dudamel performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY_g69mzv2E.) Mahler’s grotesque version of a victory march is, in Adorno’s image, a march as heard and witnessed from the point of view of the vanquished, the victims, who yearn for an alternative to brutality. Mahler’s music becomes an act of mourning for the passing of a "human" world. His symphonies employ huge orchestras, which can dwarf any semblance of the individual, and yet he makes us hear the individual instruments with chamber-music-like clarity. A most eloquent version of this meeting between gigantic resources in sound and the bared individual voices of instruments is to be found in his Symphony No. 3, the fourth movement, in which the mezzo-soprano sings Mahler’s setting of the “Midnight Song” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world is deep, / Deeper than day had been aware. / Deep is its woe;” yet joy is “deeper even than agony. / Woe implores: Go! / But all joy wants eternity - / Wants deep, wants deep eternity.” (Here is Abbado’s great performance with Anna Larsson, on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCEr2mWhYs8&feature=related.) An estranged minimalism (which is ironically a bit at odds with Nietzsche's yearning for the fertile, unbounded spirit) is at work in this movement after the gigantic structures, in terms of both time and sound, heard in the previous three movements, estranged because its “wisdom” is so dwarfed, so close to silence, though all the more moving to the modern ear for that. (There are many great interpretations on cd of the first and third symphonies; here are links to Abbado's [recently] conducting   Mahler: Symphony No. 3 and Bernstein conducting Mahler: Symphony No. 1- Titan / Symphony No. 10 (Adagio).)

Travesty and the tension between gigantism and minimalism are important also in an alternative classical music tradition to that in Germany, Austria, etc. In France, Debussy and Ravel employ features of modernist art with a quite different aesthetic, one based in a sort of floating aleatory associativeness, a graceful, sinuous welcoming dance of fragmentation. We can hear a powerful example of this alternative approach to travesty in Ravel’s “La Valse,” which presents the demonic destruction yet celebration of the mundane clichéd form of the waltz. Ravel disintegrates the form even as he simultaneously adheres to it as a last grotesque source of expressiveness. (Here is the second half of Dror Biron’s brilliant performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdaU-_vFH3g&feature=related# . There is also a wonderful performance available on cd of Argerich playing Ravel’s La Valse with Freire: Rachmaninov: Suite No. 2, Op. 17 / Ravel: La Valse / Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations ~ Argerich / Freire.)

Debussy, the greatest modern French composer, can employ a large orchestra (as he does, for example, in La Mer, or even in his setting of Mallarmé's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune), but he always maintains a clear, supple, associative flow of musical gestures, a sort of stream of consciousness emphasizing unexpected individual "voices." His music continually opens itself to the possibility of an alternative pentatonic harmony independent of classical music’s customary harmonic vocabulary and to the potential logic of synesthetic sensations joining the senses and separate from the ordered development of musical themes, which are always on the verge of fragmenting. (Here is a fine orchestral cd of Debussy: La Mer / Nocturnes / Jeux / Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre - The Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez.)

Above all, Debussy’s minimalism becomes a means of maintaining individual expressiveness in the face of the experience of fragmentation, of sustaining the pared-down search for “meaning” in the face of chaos. His minimalism is very far from the rather gently beautiful impressionism with which he is sometimes identified. It veers abruptly from the delicate to the violent and back, for example, in Debussy’s Prelude for piano, the 12th in Book 2 - Feux d'artifice, or fireworks. (Here is a fine Maurizio Pollini performance on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m1_IPErT-U. There is also a very great performance on cd of Sviatoslav Richter playing this prelude along with all of Debussy's Book 2: Richter in Spoleto.)

In my next post, I’ll attempt briefly to discuss Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Notes on the modern period - 23 - Modern Music i

In the course I teach on modernism, students are often stirred and surprised by the radical departures from convention in the modern music they hear in a series of ‘YouTube’ excerpts which I assign (and which I’ll present in a few posts here). Their responses are a more accepting version of the responses of early audiences to the most radical early examples of such music. Famously, there was a riot at the first performance in 1913 of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” and by 1918, Schoenberg had founded the Society for the Private Performance of Music as a venue for the elite contingent of the initiated to listen to his and his students’ demanding atonal music.

Of course, the novels of Virginia Woolf I've been discussing in recent posts are also quite difficult works of art; in many respects, her modern novels 'select their own society' of readers – literary, intellectual, and critical “free-thinkers.” (Woolf’s challenging work reminds us that Bloomsbury was an elite existing more or less on the edge of society and comprised of avant-garde artists, vanguard reformists, bohemian writers, feminists, homosexuals, Jews, etc. The challenging “post-impressionist” art they celebrated and created reflects those roots in a sort of outsider “aristocracy” – as E. M. Forster wrote – “of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.”)

Similarly, the classical music composed in the first three decades of the twentieth century sharply challenged its listeners. This spiky and difficult music often contains dissonant harmony, off-centered angular rhythm, and new structure. In the next few posts (as in the course I teach), I'll try at least to suggest some of the main features of modern music. I also try to evoke the achievements of this difficult music in both my 1994 critical study Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music and in my 2004 work Hungry Generations: a novel, about musicians and composers in Los Angeles in the wake of the Nazi occupation of Europe. And music and musicians are the topic of at least some of the fiction in my 2011 collection Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable.

The composers I’ll explore too briefly in these posts are Wagner, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok.

Wagner’s break from customary musical practice involves a pervasive chromaticism: it is an opening up of melody, etc., to all twelve of the half-tones in a scale [i.e., on the piano all twelve keys, both black and white, within an octave between say C and C]. This “fullness of dissonance” - this destabilizing enlargement of the harmonic field - is a precedent for radical artistic innovation which Thomas Mann (in his essay on the composer) sees as the subversive breakthrough and model of freed experiment for all the arts in modernity. The opening melody of “Tristan und Isolde” offers an example. (Here’s a link to Barenboim conducting the Prelude, on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZNHPwS4vmU&feature=related .) The melody's reach up, then down, then searching further up the scale does not achieve a resolution until after several slightly changing repititions; we are made to experience an emotional yearning and instability rendering Isolde’s ultimately mortal passion for Tristan. The passage's flux and flow of chromatic dissonance enact the ravaging yet creative power of the restless, unceasing passion of the lovers (who, according to Wagner, inhabit a sort of Schopenhauerian world of the will).

Wagner’s other break with convention involves the use of such a phrase as a recurrent marker – a leitmotif – embodying Isolde’s emotion; the structure of Wagner’s unfolding “arias” and all the movements of the opera are based on the deployment and interplay of such motifs. It is as if previous ordering forms in classical music and particularly opera had become moribund, in Wagner's view, and required the new ideas about form his "art work of the future" enacts. The climax of the opera is Isolde’s beautiful “Liebestod” or ‘love-death’ with its own characteristic leitmotif, which forms the basis of a powerful aria of immense yearning and orgiastic passion, as multiple repetitions of the melody move through the chromatic scale. (Here is a YouTube version – listen at least from the 3 minute point to the end: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8enypX74hU&NR=1.) Baudelaire describes the listener’s sensation here as experiencing the “joy…of letting myself be penetrated and invaded, in a truly sensual delight resembling that of rising the air or revolving in the sea.”  (Here's an Amazon link to Barenboim conducting all of the opera - Wagner - Tristan und Isolde.)

Wagner’s rendering of the experience of a ‘love-death’ partly echoes the role of death for modernsm, plus something more; there is death's emdodiment of mystery, yet of a pervasive sense of spiritual mobidity in modernity, also of absolute experience beyond reason, and of the haunting result of spiritual extremity, the risk of severing the bonds to community. In the face of these multiple ambitions of Wagner's music, Nietzsche “contra Wagner” emphasizes, however, another sort of death enacted by what he heard as the manipulative “embrace” of such music (which he yet calls "indispensible" here, a view "The Birth of Tragedy" demonstrates). In Bayreuth, which was built for the Wagnerian operatic "rites," he observed in Wagner’s listeners not truly a death of the ordinary self and an entry into an alternative life, but rather a “disease,” a “self-extinction,” and “a fear-repulsing narrowness and…hebetation” – all of this where Wagner would have his listener “yield himself” to the “wonder” of “the human heart,” which “encompasses” and “reconciles” him to existence as he experiences the “ultimate completeness” of the “highest collective art work.” The “all-embracing” theater, mythic drama, poetry, and above all beautiful music created by Wagner’s operas aim to constitute a total work of art: a “Gesamtkunstwerk.”  Nietzsche, of course, rendered his own encompassing "myths" (Apollo and Dionysus and Zarathustra and, finally, himself), yet his fiercest objections to Wagner involve the "all-embracing" gigantism in the composer's use of "Aryan" myths (and also, Nietzsche interestingly complains, to the composer's "descending" to "antisemitism"). So once again we encounter a powerful and spiritually risk-taking gigantism in modernity. Wagner's proto-modern "gigantism" finds its apotheosis in the mythic nature of his imagination and in the resulting "magnification" of the structures, themes, and characters in "Tristan und Isolde" and in the "Ring" cycle. (Here's an Amazon link to the Nietzsche texts: The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner.) I'll later try further to explore Wagner's significance, beyond this sketchy account.

I'll turn in my next posts to Mahler (and the issue of Wagner's influence), the relatively minimalist (!) Debussy, and Ravel, and then to Stravinsky and Schoenberg.