jwilzewske: Primordial Thrownness of Interpretation: Viktoria Mullova, Katia Labèque, and the Aesthetics of Martin Heidegger

Victoria Mullova, Katia Labèque, and Martin Heidegger nowhere in sight

I n the space of such a music, listening to Heidegger’s silence, one must attend to the articulation of the needful connection between saying and thinking... the acoustic dimensionality. This is the silence that speaks between the words, between the lines: echoing as the ‘unsaid’ in what is said.”
— Babbette Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, p. 11.

Viktoria Mullova and Katia Labèque will perform tomorrow evening (13-MAR-2008) at National Concert Hall, Dublin, as part of the Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series.

Stravinsky - Suite Italienne
Bartók - Hungarian Folk Tunes for violin and piano [arr. Joseph Szigeti]
Schubert - Fantasie in C Major D934
Ravel - Violin Sonata

Violinist Viktoria Mullova’s simultaneous devotion to historically-informed performance of Baroque music and to new music makes for some novel interpretations that merit your attention. Viktoria performs on either the ‘Jules Falk’ 1723 Stradivarius or her Guadagnini violin—and she elicits from these instruments beautiful sounds that the luthiers who created them could never have imagined. Viktoria’s recital partner, Katia Labèque, is a classically-trained pianist who regularly transgresses into jazz outings——and the pairing with Viktoria is a perfect match in terms of aesthetic sensibilities.

Their performance of Ravel’s Violin Sonata (the second movement is marked ‘Blues; Moderato’) is a case-in-point, incorporating as it does idiomatic 1920s Blues.

This is not iconoclasm for its own sake. It is not radical ‘look-ism’; it does respect the intentions of the composers and their respective periods/styles. And it draws attention to the fact that Early Music is not the only domain for historically-informed performance. Historically-informed performance is applied every day—to works from all epochs, including the Ravel and the Bartók and the Stravinsky, and including new music composed yesterday.

There is an immediacy and Heideggerian ‘thrownness’ in every musical interpretation, in every performance by every performer, no matter how scrupulous the attention to historical detail. Mullova’s and Labèque’s performance reminds me of this. Specifically, their accounts of the Ravel and of the Stravinsky remind me of this. Although relatively few passages in Heidegger’s books pertain directly to music, in his correspondence he did frequently express his esteem for Stravinsky’s and Ravel’s and Orff’s music. He was very fond of Trakl’s and Celan’s and Rilke’s poetry. Of painters, he was enthused about Van Gogh, Braque, Klee, and Cézanne.

T he radical contingency of one’s thrownness and the inescapability of an ever-threatening death... This incompatibility is not a rational inconsistency or a failure to be rational enough. We are simply not in charge of whether care fails or not, or how to think our way into or out of such an experience. This ‘being-a-basis’ means never to have power over one’s own-most being from the ground up. This ‘not’ belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness. It is more primordial than any knowledge of it.”
— Robert Pippin, in Crowell & Malpas, Transcendental Heidegger, p. 209.

The interpretations are forged either by the arbitrary acts of a radically free human subject (‘decisionism’, the position of the early Heidegger) or by the equally arbitrary dispensations of the unrestricted power of Being, which is beyond the capability of human reason to comprehend (‘quietism’, the position of late Heidegger). Mullova’s and Labèque’s playing engages in such radical freedom.

W here ‘projection’ grasps the future-directedness of a life happening, ‘thrownness’ refers to our being already enmeshed in a particular context. [Being] enmeshed in a particular historical culture predefines the range of possibilities of action that will make sense in my situation. ‘Dasein’ is always ahead of itself: it is a projection into the future insofar as its actions involve a commitment as to what sort of person it will be. What this means is that, in taking a stand on its own life, Dasein takes over some range of possibilities as definitive of its identity—some set of personality traits, lifestyles, roles, attitudes—and exists as a ‘being-toward’ the realization of a final configuration of possibilities. Heidegger calls this futurity the ‘bringing-itself-to-fruition’ (sich zeitigen) of Dasein. Everything we do contributes to making us people of a particular sort.”
— Charles Guignon, Companion to Heidegger, p. 278.

Whereas writing aims at a whole or ‘completed’ work, live performance of music spins and weaves, toward a work that is always inherently ‘incomplete’: the subjectivity of the performer/listener is far more prominent than the subjectivity of the reader. In writing, the whole, which is tremendously ‘present’ at each instant of the author’s writing, is being undone—to the author, the serial moments of creation constitute a pure ‘present’. But in music, to the composer (or improvising performer), the whole is not necessarily ‘present’ at once: in general, the conception is not as serial as writing—not now, not in Ravel’s time, not ever. In both [recorded] music and writing, I can go back and discover that the ‘text’ and its implications had [partly] eluded me on the first experience; I can revise and extend my interpretation. The [musical] text still is a coherent whole, but it has unraveled and reconstituted itself in my understanding of it and in its effects on me.

P rojection stands in an essential relation to thrownness, to facticity, state-of-mind, and mood. In Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ the emphasis tends to be on the priority of disclosedness over concealment, of Truth over untruth, of projection over thrownness. There is an important sense in which the way ‘World’ is founded—in ‘Being and Time’, in the ecstatic unity of temporality—implies that World, as meaningful, is founded on that which, although it is the ‘meaning’ of the being of ‘being-there’, is not itself ‘meaningful’—originary temporality—and so the ‘being’ of being-there cannot be ‘uncovered’ [disclosed, unshielded] in the way that entities in-the-world can be uncovered since it is the ground of ‘being-uncovering’, of disclosedness.”
— Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, p. 182.

Unshieldedness—the proximity of our venture into pure ‘draft’ and ‘re-writing’ in our mind, along with the performers and respecting the intentions of the composer—displaces the epochality of the work. Our interpretive unshieldedness undermines the epoch of the technological—of the violin and the piano and the idioms of the particular time when the piece was composed.

This venturing into serious ‘draft’ and ‘re-writing’ is a sort of safe-keeping that Heidegger wrote about in several of his philosophical essays: “The gravity of pure forces, the unheard-of center, the pure draft, the whole draft, full Nature, Life—they are the same” [Poetry, Language & Thought, p. 105].

Honest interpretive thinking—in performance and in listening (and in conducting and music theory and criticism)—is a resistance of Desire, against Will (of others; of a self that is regulated by externalities). It’s a creative resistance that overcomes the resistance we naturally have to unshieldedness and responsibility. The easiest path would be to close-reading, scholarly reproduction and slavish historicism. But this would be to deny the incompleteness of the evidence upon which historically-informed performance can be based.

Mullova and Labèque give us careful, historically-informed performances—beautiful interpretations that honor the intentions of the composers—but ones that also reveal our own subjectivity, that compel us to the same sort of brave unshieldedness that they themselves espouse. Their approach produces a unique, ‘edgy’, introspective quality—a distinctive and impressive feature of their playing, in my opinion, but one that seems not to have been noticed or commented upon by others…

[Viktoria Mullova trained at the Moscow Conservatoire. In 1980, she won first prize at the Sibelius Competition in Helsinki, and her career in concertizing and recording has been prolific since that time. Since 2000 she has performed and toured with the Venice Baroque, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Il Giardino Armonico. Her 2007 recording with Ottavio Dantone (harpsichord) of Bach sonatas on ONYX Classics won the Diapason D’Or. Performances in the coming weeks include several with Il Giardino Armonico and appearances with London Symphony Orchestra. Viktoria’s website has full details.]

A ll of this is perfectly consistent with what I would call the average project of Romanticism... from the moment when the aim of the work is communal fusion, and when it seeks to evoke the vaguest metaphysical intuition—by, as it were, touching affect alone (emotion)—poetry becomes subservient to music. The metaphysicopolitical project of a new ‘myth’ therefore leads, in a pure paradox, to the secondary status of ‘saying’.”
— Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, p. 32.

jwilzewske

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Primordial Thrownness of Interpretation: Viktoria Mullova, Katia Labèque, and the Aesthetics of Martin Heidegger

No comments:

Post a Comment