Chamber Music as Alterity: Perfecting Civil Otherness

M  onumentality and bidding:
  words
neither yours nor mine but like his music.
Stalwart and tender by turns, the fugues
and larghettos: staid, bürgerlich,
  up to the wide gaunt leaps of invention.
Repetition of theme a reaffirming,
like figures in harmony with their right consorts,
with the world also, broadly understood;
each of itself a Treatise of Civil Power,
every phrase instinct with deliberation
  both upon power and towards civility.
At the rehearsing, always I think of you
  and fancy: with what concordance I
would thus steadily regale and regard her,
though to speak truth you are ever in my mind;
such is Eros, such Philia, their composure
these arias, predetermined, of our choice.”
  —  Geoffrey Hill, A Treatise of Civil Power, ‘Handel’.

F  or more than 30 years, there has been a widespread consensus that the most pressing critical challenge is to find ways to resist systems and structures that totalize by repressing otherness and by reducing ‘difference’ to ‘same’. Whether understood socially, psychologically, politically, economically, or culturally, so-called hegemonic structures must be subverted or overturned by soliciting the return of repressed otherness.”
  —  Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, p. 47.

D  uring the Seventeenth Century and the first half of the Eighteenth Century ... sympathy thrived where mimetic illusion [had] failed.”
  —  Ruth HaCohen, 2001.

T  o the degree that nations come to think of themselves as superior and exceptional, they make value judgments about other nations, usually without recognizing the closed system in which their own nationalist uniqueness operates.”
  —  Joan Hoff, Faustian Foreign Policy, p. 23.

The new volume of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry contains the poem above on Handel, which I think captures an essential feature of what chamber music is—individual aspiration toward civil power: an aspiration that presumes the perfectibility of civil society, in part through social expression in the arts.


The aspiration is a monumental, post-enlightenment one; there is something Faustian about its prodigious desire, against all odds, to have a perfectible, civil society. Or maybe Pygmalion is a better analogy to draw: desiring to ‘remake’ or perfect others in the surrounding society to conform to a diversity-tolerant social ideal that the composer, performers, and audience members hold in high regard; desiring to represent that social ideal through music; desiring to assert the rights of each individual in such a society, and the rights of ‘otherness’ (alterity) itself.

T  he monumental monochrome paintings of Mark Tansey seem at first to celebrate a landscape’s elemental grandeur with photographic accuracy. Icy blues of snowscapes and oceanscapes show a frozen moment of nature’s ungraspability. Then, out of the blue, literally, you make out a face in a large snowball—and not just any face, but Karl Marx’s. A vague surfer rides roiling swells around the Statue of Liberty, and the cliff face that climbers are scaling is as impossibly angled as an Escher staircase. Now we realize we’re in the same intellectual (and often very funny—) terra infirma of Tansey’s earlier quasi-conceptual works, as when he reimagined Picasso and Braque as the Wright brothers trying to get their Cubist plane off the ground.”
  —  Jacket blurb, Kerber edition of Mark Tansey prints.

Chamber music works are packed with information—starting with their surface—which tends to introduce a profusion of historical and social references. At times, the references become overwhelming, and I start to think about other works from different epochs or genres rather than thinking just about the work at hand. For me, the process is a Mark Tansey-like deconstruction of representation, something that not only arises in the various arts including music, but also in arts criticism.

D  oes the title [of Mark Tansey’s 1984 ‘The End of Painting’] announce the conclusion of painting or identify the purpose, goal, and aim of painting? Is the title a play on the duplicity of ‘end’ that suggests the goal of painting is the cessation of painting? Since there are no clear and decisive answers to such questions, the title remains a puzzle.”
  —  Mark Taylor, The Picture in Question, p. 2.

For artist Mark Tansey, titles frame the work. The titles are not only about the work but are woven into the work in a way that confounds any clear opposition between the musical and discursive aspects. The title is like a koan, something that simultaneously provokes classification and denies the legitimacy of whatever classification you produce. It is early morning and I listen to Oliver de Mones’s account of Meynaud’s ‘Faust’ cello sonata (link below). It embodies some of the ideas from the collage above. The title frames the piece and both explains and confounds: the impression seems true, so I share it with you here and then go to begin the rest of my day.

I  am not a realist painter. In the nineteenth century, photography co-opted the traditional function of realist painters, which was to make faithful renditions of ‘reality’. Then the realist project was taken over by Modernist abstraction, as later evidenced in the title of Hans Hofmann’s book ‘Search for the Real’. Minimalism tried to eliminate the gap between the artwork and the real. After that, the project itself dematerialized. But the problem for representation is to find the other functions beside capturing the real. In my work, I’m searching for pictorial functions that are based on the idea that the painted picture knows itself to be metaphorical, rhetorical, transformational, fictional. The narratives in my pictures never actually occurred.”
  —  Mark Tansey.

• Jean Hasse’s Faust, Southwest Ensemble (Bristol), Barbican Centre, London, 21-OCT-2007
  
• Center for the Study of the Presidency
  
• Joan Hoff page at MSU Bozeman
  
• de Mones O. Chamber Music of Michel Meynaud: Faust [Cello Sonata, mp3s]. (Naxos, 2006.)
  
• Danto A. Mark Tansey: Visions and Re-visions. HNA, 1992.
  
• HaCohen R. The music of sympathy in the arts of the Baroque; or, The use of Difference to overcome Indifference. Poetics Today 2001; 22:607-50.
  
• Hill G. A Treatise of Civil Power. Yale Univ, 2008.
  
• Hoff J. A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush: Dreams of Perfectibility. Cambridge Univ, 2008.
  
• Tansey M. Mark Tansey. Kerber, 2005.
  
• Taylor M. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Univ Chicago, 2003.
  
• Taylor M. The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation. Univ Chicago, 1999.