jwilzewske: Schnittke’s Polystylism: Life as Bakhtinian Bagatelles

A ll composers somehow reflect their times; some composers do little more. Schnittke is a separate case. Conditions in Russia [were], indeed, dreadful, but that is the least surprising news that this composer brings. He represents not only a moment in the history of Russia, but also a moment in the history of music. To put it simply, he will not vanish when his times are up. The multiplicity of styles, of schools, of genres; the overbearing weight of an impressive past; the overshadowing brilliance and energy of present-day ‘popular’ modes seemingly alien to the classical tradition; the possibilities of a future in which parochial barriers will crumble away—all this is acutely observed in Schnittke’s music, and at times epiphanically reconciled. He is nothing less than the composer of our climate.”
— Alex Ross, New Republic, 28-SEP-1992.

CMT: I think the musicologists and music theorists who study Schnittke are not accustomed to reading ‘small’ fiction—miniatures like ‘sudden fiction’ and ‘flash fiction’ and ‘microfiction.’ And, of course, there’s a tendency of the smallest of small fiction to be enigmatic or koan-like. These aren’t stylized stories with formulaic structures and predictable, ironic-twist endings.

DSM: Some microfiction idioms are constrained by the rules to be 55 words or less. They fly in the face of the conventional model for fiction, with heroic individuals making momentous decisions over long periods of time. They’re ‘thrown’—hurled—everything happens in seconds.

T heir driving source was not the need that created the novel but an older urge—the same need that created Norse kennings, Zen koans, Sufi tales.”
— Russell Banks.

CMT: There are now two variants—the term ‘sudden fiction’ now refers to pieces that are 4 to 8 pages in length (1,500 to 4,500 words) while ‘flash fiction’ refers to pieces that are 1 to 4 pages (500 to 1,500 words). Microfiction is nominally 250 words or less—less than half a page. And the shorter the piece is, the more subversive and alienated it tends to be. You need to have a look at Shapard’s and Thomas’s new anthology to see what I mean. And much of Schnittke’s music is like this. Especially the more ‘cinematic’ pieces, like the String Quartet No. 3. Schnittke may have been forced by circumstance to make a living writing film and cartoon soundtrack music, but you have to admit—it suited him. I think his temperament would’ve gravitated in this direction regardless what financial or political constraints were placed upon him.

DSM: Shorter equals more alienated, yes. But it also equals more referential to the things from which he asserts he’s alienated. References can be constructed in a variety of ways: allusions—inflections within a discourse—and quotations—incorporation of one discourse in another. Intertextual references have a different status from the surrounding discourse: they’re on another level. For instance, references aren’t directly attributable to the composer in question, but bring in another imaginary subject whose music we’re made believe we’re hearing—a musical persona. The same is true in the other arts—literature, painting, film. It’s in this sense that reference leads to representation. In small pieces, establishing the reference occupies a major percentage of the piece—the reference is the representation.

CMT: Let’s look at Schnittke’s Quartet No. 3, which quotes Beethoven and Lassus and Shostakovich.

E ach cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into the new thing, a different reality.”
— Perloff, Collages: Revue d’ Esthétique 1978; 3-4: 34f.

DSM: You know, Bakhtin didn’t distinguish between author and narrator—that’s a differentiation established later in literary theory. The ‘implied author’ is a later innovation. These days, Bakhtin’s ‘author’ would be called a narrator. Much of Schnittke’s writing seems to be from an alienated narrator—Schnittke composed as though he were a Bakhtinian ‘author’.

CMT: Bakhtin’s theory of the novel says that individual discourses in a fictional work aren’t isolated from one another but interact. If characters or narrators report or reflect on somebody else’s discourse, they inevitably orient themselves toward it in some way: someone else’s words introduced into our own speech inevitably display our own interpretations and become subject to our evaluation of them; that is they become multivocal. This ‘meta-discourse’ or ‘multivocality’ is discourse with an orientation toward someone else’s discourse. So the same words take on a different meaning if they are, say, the object of parody. As a writing technique, multivocality aims to mimic real life—including turns of events and hindsight. So, yes, I suppose Schnittke was a Bakhtinian.

DSM: As a detached observer/narrator, Schnittke feels less responsibility for insuring that what happens is coherent. The material—the musical collage—is simply represented as historical fact. This is a reportorial Schnittke; a Schnittke-as-collector. Schnittke gives us a collage—an anthology—of found objects whose deeper meaning, if any, Schnittke doesn’t elucidate. The collage is merely comprised of ‘facts’ about ‘others’. The interpretation’s left entirely to the listener.

CMT: But just as the concept of ‘other’ is called into question by the dialogue between ‘authorial’ and ‘represented’ discourses, so is the notion of ‘self’ called into question. The reportorial Schnittke isn’t letting us understand much about himself, is he?

DSM: I suppose that’s true. With his reportorial, narratorly stance, he does give up the conventional, privileged ‘authorial’ voice—or feigns giving it up. With his String Quartet No. 3 (1983), Schnittke embarks on this new stylistic path. While in earlier pieces his musical quotations and borrowings have an ‘irritating’ effect and seem to have been introduced as alien presences, in Quartet No. 3 the motifs he uses (from Beethoven and Lassus and Shostakovich) are introduced benignly into the musical flow and brought into a relationship with one another. It’s not alienation so much as touchy coexistence. I wonder, too, whether his own sense of self was not disrupted by the ongoing series of strokes he suffered during the years he composed the Quartets Nos. 3 and 4 . . .

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 I, 3MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 II, 4MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 III, 3MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Tale Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 I, 3MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Tale Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 II, 4MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Tale Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 3 III, 3MB MP3]

CMT: By contrast to the No. 3, Schnittke’s Quartet No. 4 is suspended between two opposing ideas. The suspension doesn’t prescribe any particular emotion, but it does induce an anxiety in the listener. Alienation and contemplation alternate through struggles between the voices.

M etrical accents are weakened in the adagios of Beethoven and Schubert and there arises a melodious, flowing, seamless music whose meditative profundity captivates listeners and carries them away from any real sense of time—one has the feeling of making contact with eternity.”
— Schnittke in Ivashkin.

DSM: The opposition and struggles aren’t entirely ‘reportorial’, though. The example above shows the first statement by the cello in mm. 1-10 of the first movement of Quartet No. 4. Here we have a melody consisting of all twelve pitch classes, arranged in two chromatic hexachords—{D,D-flat,C,E-flat,F,E}and {F#,B,A#,G#,G,A}. The aggregate is a referential set. I’d interpret it as an initiating event.

CMT: Or we could interpret it instead as a large-scale structural premise in its own right. Concomitant with its structural purposes are its textural properties—it’s the full chromatic array.

DSM: And look at the rhythms. This unclear metric rhythmic organization is associated with the cello. The cello part has this forlorn, wandering, disoriented and disorienting quality. The fluctuating number of beats from measure to measure in the first two statements of the opening of the Quartet and the segmentation of the melodic line by square or traditional fermatas—these account for the lack of a time signature at the beginning of the movement. But, more than this, there’s a quality of abandonment or desolation that comes from this ‘ametric’ or ‘hypometric’ approach. It resembles the ‘fits and starts’ of a person who is recovering from a stroke and is coping with significant ‘residual’ functional deficits from the stroke. You listen and try to resolve what the meter is. But just when you think you have a sense of the meter—have some reliable expectations of the rhythmic structure—the cello proves you wrong and wanders away. The fractured ametric structure or hypometer is, I think, very stroke-like. I have no idea whether Schnittke ever spoke of this or ascribed any such association to his No. 4 Quartet . . .

CMT: Well, life that lacks a consistent, coherent meter isn’t necessarily without meaning! And it’s not just stroke. Discourse that includes a disoriented or demented person is still genuine discourse, however diminished or labored it might be. Think of Alzheimer’s patients and other persons with dementia. Think of the dignity of Down Syndrome people. ‘Goal-oriented’ and ‘coherence’ are not the be-all and end-all of human existence and value. It seems to me that Schnittke privileges the voice of this raspy, ‘impaired’ cello in Quartet No. 4, in part to make the point that this chaotic voice, while chaotic, nonetheless does have moral standing and worth. That voice merits our concern, attention, care. That’s an important point in today’s free-market, globalization-obsessed society, which devalues the elderly and the infirm.

T hat anticipates the definite sense of luminescence of Schnittke’s later works. Generally speaking, talking about his illness as a definite point of change, I would say that there he had a presentiment of the illness even before it came. The String Trio and even moments in the Second String Quartet are evidence of this. After the illness there was further development of this feeling. As he himself said, a new time began for him.”
— Gidon Kremer, interview in Russian by Alexander Ivashkin, Besedy; 1989: 238-45.

DSM: Schnittke composed Quartet No. 4 in 1989, four years after his first stroke. From 1985, he lived 13 years with the burden of stroke after stroke after stroke. This was 20% of his entire life—40% of his composing life—that he was living under a shadow of debility and mortality. There are no quotations or pseudo-quotations in the No. 4. Instead, subtle scents and shadows of various styles pervade the composition. In his stylistic allusions in the No. 4, Schnittke relies on borrowings from other styles combined with musical ideas that developed in the whole course of his career, really.

CMT: Too, there’s a surprising level of emotionality in Schnittke’s music. To explain his music’s popularity, you need to remember: Schnittke is no avant-gardist; his concern is not experimentation with sound. Instead, he offers the listener bridges toward comprehension. He helps the listener to perceive familiar material in his music and then uses the familiar as a bridge to other meanings. Not all of it is as ‘interior’ or introspective as the No. 4. But Schnittke’s language is readily understood by audiences because it is so expressive, suggestive and associative.

DSM: Schnittke’s devotion to traditional compositional methods never was in contradiction with his modernism—to the contrary, his classical writing backhandedly reinforced his modernism. His detractors say that his music consists merely of these collages and quotations of motifs borrowed from others. But his composition technique was far more than that. In the Quartet No. 3, Schnittke uses quotations of three composers of very different eras. The formulaic cadences of the Stabat Mater quote Orlando Lasso; the theme of the Grosse Fugue and Pathètique Sonata op. 133 of Beethoven, and the musical DSCH signature of Shostakovich—these form the thematic basis of this quartet.

CMT: And Beethoven’s late style shows features that arise from apparent considerations of mortality and approaching death. Likewise, we see elements of illness weighing heavily on Schnittke in his works from the early 1980s onward. Maria Kostakeva claims that these are instead the result of his artistic development, not his strokes and intercurrent illnesses.

DSM: Of course, collage is used in various arts of the twentieth century, not just music. Collage in music should be considered as more than just a collection of other people’s music reused in another composer’s piece.

CMT: Schnittke’s chaos and alienation—they are lightweight, but not rootless. His wit is never merely humorous. He juxtaposes black, atonal material with nostalgic reminiscences of other types of music—creating this feeling of loss, isolation, grieving, lament.

DSM: I think coherence is over-rated—having a clear musical idea and communicating it concisely are not the card that trumps all others. You said this somewhat differently a few minutes ago, when you were talking about Alzheimer’s and Down Syndrome—or stroke or other debilitating conditions. Dread—and the effects that foreboding has on the integrity and dignity of the person—are worthy subjects for artistic expression. This, I think, is part of what Schnittke is saying.

O ne can compose in a contemporary language, imparting archaic attributes to contemporary intonations; or, conversely, one can compose in an ‘antiquated’ language, but follow a contemporary developmental logic. The resulting musical logic will inevitably involve a sense of paradox because it no longer falls within the framework of a single style or a single era.”
— Alfred Schnittke, Paradox as a Characteristic of Stravinsky’s Musical Logic.

T he superficiality of Schnittke’s confrontation with the past is less unnerving than the disorientation found in compositions which ‘in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror.’ With Schnittke the ‘inner organization’ is less likely to challenge convention, and what is genuinely shocking in the later works is that sickness-fuelled melancholy has almost driven out the desire to shock by means of surface confrontations and collisions.”
— Arnold Whittall, Problems of Reference, Musical Times, Autumn 2004.

S tring Quartet No. 3 (1983) is perhaps Schnittke’s most unabashedly ‘polystylistic’ composition. The first movement begins with three quotations that provide much of the quartet’s musical material: two cadences from the Lassus Stabat Mater, the subject of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Shostakovich’s musical monogram, D-S-C-H. The second movement opens with a passage that, while not a direct quotation, nevertheless strikes us as projecting a compositional voice not Schnittke’s own, but rather Beethoven’s. Rather than belittling critical responses to Schnittke’s flagrant stylistic juxtapositions, I instead propose that the passages from the first and second movements indeed beg such scrutiny. A close inspection of the three quotations reveals they have been altered by a meticulous if not subversive composer. In turn, contrasting the second movement’s opening measures with my own Beethoven-like recomposition of the passage, I re-examine the gradual process through which the listener comes to sense the presence of Schnittke’s ‘own’ compositional voice.”
— Greg Brown, Univ Wisconsin, MTMW-2001.

CMT: In the case of so called ‘atonal’, ‘twelve-tone’ or ‘aleatoric’ music, it’s difficult to speak about a main or subsidiary key. The concept of sonata form loses its meaning. But we still have opposing musical ideas, and a conflict between them can create a structure in which we can still find features of Sonata form. These Schnittke quartets aren’t normal quartets. The movements are more like Bagatelles! The quartets are assemblies of interrelated, conflicted Bagatelles.

A work of Russian art is a confession. There is nothing commonplace in it, nothing decorative, well balanced, or moderate. Everything is extreme, sometimes shocking, strange. We treat music as something more than just music; it is a means to express something spiritual.”
— Alexander Ivashkin. The Paradox of Russian Non-Liberty. Musical Quarterly 1992; 76:543-6.

DSM: The departure from traditional forms or procedures is something Schnittke did in some of his compositions before Quartet No. 4. I suspect his views on loss and loneliness and alienation and the human condition evolved in parallel with his compositional technique. Schnittke’s allusion to “rational formulas” is significant. He became convinced that a certain type of irrationality is more powerful than reasoning to an understanding of the ordered structure of the universe. He defined “irrationality” in this context as “not what lies outside reason; it is what has not been decoded by reason.” More often we arrive at a solution not solely by means of inference and deduction and reason, but empirically, through trial and error. Schnittke reportedly regarded the process of composition as one of “pre-listening” to a source outside the self—the composer serves as a medium through which music flows. He told Ivashkin, “I am just fixing what I hear. . . . It is not me who writes my music, I am just a tool, a bearer.” [‘Conversations with Alexander Ivashkin (1985-1994),’ interviews in Russian by Alexander Ivashkin, in Besedys, Moscow: Kul’tura, 1994), 127-73.]

P olystylism] widens the range of expressive possibilities, it allows for the integration of ‘low’ and ‘high’ styles, of the ‘banal’ and the ‘recherché’—that is, it creates a wider musical world and a general democratization of style. In it we find the documentary objectivity of musical reality, presented not just as something reflected individually but as an actual quotation. . . . And finally it creates new possibilities for the musical dramatization of ‘eternal’ questions—of war and peace, life and death ... It is doubtful whether one could find another musical approach that expresses as convincingly as the polystylistic method the philosophical idea of the links between the ages.”
— Alfred Schnittke, Polystylistic Tendencies.

CMT: Stravinsky’s famous dictum runs that a composition can only arise as the solution to a problem. Schnittke offers a rebuttal—that a great composition can arise out of a futile search for a solution to an insoluble problem. Schnittke’s rebuttal allows that irrational and aleatoric elements can not only be valid, but may be the only feasible response to an insoluble problem, an incurable condition.

DSM: In 1981, we have the String Quartet No. 2—it’s more engaging, especially the buzzing frenzy of the Agitato movement when all four strings play churning, relentless riffs. Coherence is not Schnittke’s goal. The music evolves according to his instincts, it seems, and if you resist giving yourself over to it, you are left behind.

T his polystylism is not a [syncretist] jumble of different things, but a successfully individual musical language. It opens up the spaces within which Schnittke can present music and ‘comment’ on it at the same time, where he can relate contemporary experiences of dislocation and confusion of the optimistic and progressive language of much of the Western tradition. Some of his works suggest an easy political or social interpretation; the concerto player who finishes her piece looking as if she’s playing her violin furiously but who is not in fact connecting with the strings – her ‘classical’ dialogue with the orchestra has ended in her being overwhelmed and silenced in spite of all her efforts; but such one-dimensional readings of Schnittke’s work do not tell the whole story. The failures and frustrations his music points are not just those of the heroic individual pitted against the social forces symbolised by the orchestra. Many of Schnittke’s works imply the end of, certainly the fragmentation of, the whole symphonic tradition and the conventions of coherence that have defined classical music – modernist as well as traditional.”
— Mike Waite, 1996.

H e was one of the greatest humanists who ever worked in the art of music. His music can have a bitter taste yet confront you with the truth of life, the tragedy of life, the poetry of life, the humor of life.”
— Kurt Masur.

CMT: In the third movement of the No. 4, we have a struggle playing out between the voices. The movement develops into sections with either a fragmented or a concordant treatment of the theme. An uneasy ‘draw’—not a truce—is found between these two polar ideas, with the first violin and cello playing in unison over the other rhythmically and texturally antagonistic second violin and viola parts. It’s terrifying and witty at the same time—a moving example of how Schnittke confronts irreconcilable conflict, loss, futility and the human condition. As Whittall said, by this time the will to shock had been driven out of him; maybe even the ability to shock has been driven out. And still he searches—but with hopes more modest than he once had. This is a path we all walk, if we live long enough. Listen!

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 4 I, 4MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 4 II, 3MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 4 III, 4MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 4 IV, 3MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Kronos Qt, Schnittke Qt No. 4 V, 4MB MP3]

jwilzewske

Monday, August 20, 2007

Schnittke’s Polystylism: Life as Bakhtinian Bagatelles

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