jwilzewske: illness

Showing posts with label illness. Show all posts

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Idealized, Totemic Love: Godfrey Winham and Bethany Beardslee before the Age of AutoTune

Godfrey Winham and Bethany Beardslee, 1955

L et me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not Love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no!

It is an ever fixèd Mark
That looks on tempests, never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque,
Whose worth’s unknown though His height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within His bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with His brief hours and weeks,
Love bears it out to the edge of Doom.

If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ nor no man [or woman] ever lov’d.”
— William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI.

L isten to this excerpt:

[50-sec clip, Bethany Beardslee & Robert Helps, Godfrey Winham, ‘To Prove My Love’, III, 1974, 1.6MB MP3]

O ver the past month I have been reading Leslie Blasius’s 1997 monograph on Godfrey Winham (link below), especially passages about Winham’s composition for soprano and string quartet, ‘Habit of Perfection’.

D uring this month I have also been listening and re-listening to the CRI disc, ‘Tribute to Bethany Beardslee’, who was Godfrey’s wife. The disc contains a recording of Bethany singing Winham’s composition, ‘To Prove My Love’, accompanied by Robert Helps on piano.

T he piece is published by Boelke-Bomart Inc in Hillsdale, New York, but the score for it was originally published in memoriam, in volume 13 (1975) of the journal, Perspectives of New Music, immediately after Winham’s death.

T he phrasing and perfection of the intervals that Beardslee sings are amazing. The voice-leading that Winham wrote for her is tight-rope like—no, more like virtuosic, risky ballet “choreography” for the voice.

L ove bears it out to the edge of Doom, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 has it.

W hat were these three sonnets—to Godfrey; to Bethany? The piece was composed during the first several years of their marriage, but on this recording it is performed when they had been married 19 years, still in their 40s, near the end of Godfrey’s long illness, youthful but within a few months of his dying and aged way beyond their years...

T here is a maturity and expressive clarity of Beardslee’s and Helps’s performance that poignantly manifests the vulnerability of the soprano wife gazing into the abyss of her husband’s fast-approaching terminal phase. It simultaneously bears the marks of bravery and devotion, defiant strength and tragic fragility. Frailty with advancing illness. Glenn Gould’s last recordings of the Goldberg Variations in 1981, compared to the ones from 1955? Well, no.

O r Johnny Cash’s last recordings? No, but still.

W hen we first went back and listened to the recordings after he had passed, it really just felt like this voice, coming back from another ‘place’. It had all this weight and gravity to it. Scary. You can hear good days and bad days in the voice. Sometimes, it’s weak—as if Cash were struggling for breath. Other times it’s stronger.”
— Rick Rubin, interview with David Bauder on new Cash CD.

W inham’s frailty and inner strength, projected vicariously through the piano part that Robert Helps executes beautifully. We suspect that ‘bearing it out to the edge of Doom’ meant something a bit different in June, 1974, when the piece was recorded than it meant in 1956 when the piece was composed. In 1974, Doom was plainly visible.

A lapse in sense happens between the twelfth and thirteenth lines of the sonnet. Most of the words are monosyllables; only three contain more syllables than two. Poetic diction is ruptured. The language is now concrete, not abstract or metaphysical. There are run-on lines and the pair of double-endings. There is, as Brooke put it, “a happy blending of open and closed vowels, and of liquids, nasals, and stops.” No Antares AutoTune® or vocoder processing. Only human pitch-shifting and formant correction that defies the impermanence of the flesh. The res-o-lute, fixèd accents in the quatrains give way finally to progressively more vulnerable, unrelieved iambic feet—ones that accept the reality of the soul stuck in the unreliable flesh. The thing converges on silence and ends. The ending is a meditative silence, a ‘hanging’ sonic [non-]event. Runic, millennial, catastrophic.

W hat is needed is a definition of ‘hanging’ which makes use of the notion of ‘effective context’, with the result that a tone is not ‘hanging’ before it occurs. An event x may be said to be ‘effective’ at the time of an event y if and only if x belongs to the effective context of y. An event x may be said to be ‘closed-off’ from y if it is subordinate to another sonic event z which occurs between x and y in time. An event x is ‘hanging’ at the time of an event y if it belongs to the effective context of y and is not closed-off from y, although there is a superior stage at which it is closed-off from y.”
— Godfrey Winham writings, Container VIII, page *26d.

L istening to the piece over and over, I sense a sort of adult willfulness that is out-of-sync with an inner childlike sense of reality. The complex personality who wrote such complex, chaotic music theory, all stored in 6.7 linear feet in the Princeton University Library in 16 archival boxes of cross-indexed papers and notebooks... still had this child inside, who was true and who hoped for everything. Who loved these sonnets, not as worthy artistic vehicles for creating prestigious, commendable academic compositions, but as totems erected to honor a love that defined him. Standing stones.

“Will Bethany be able to do this? Will I be able to do this?”

C hords with more upper structure notes, sounding more active compared to ones with more basic chord tones, which become points of resolution. Idiomatic and fluent writing; the beginning of each movement asks a question and so drives our interest; natural flow to focal points and climaxes; appropriate and sensitive realization of the text; effective and resourceful use of texture, with many imaginative challenges. This is the composer who in the 1960s imagined elegant computer-synthesized soprano voice, long before the technology could fulfill the fantasy. This is the soprano who could sing whatever notes are on the page, the fantasy who inspired the composer’s imagination.

M ost people don’t think of Winham as a contrapuntist, and it is true that one does not find much in the way of imitative counterpoint in his music. He never composed any fugues, and there are not many canons by Winham. However it can, and should, be said that Winham’s counterpoint is exquisite.

L eslie David Blasius is currently Professor of Music Theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book includes a set of complete excerpts of materials and an index for the entire Winham archive, which is housed at Princeton University. The book also contains a series of photographs, of Godfrey and Bethany and friends (including the one above).

T o read Blasius’s book and to listen to this CD is to wish to have known these wonderful human beings. I will plan to visit the 6.7 linear feet of Winham boxes the next time I am in Princeton...

H ow can you make a new revolution when your last statement already said that anything goes?”
— Charles Wuorinen.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Górecki on Loss: Progressive Disability in the Shadow of Canonic Agency

W hen horses die, they breathe,
When grasses die, they wither,
When suns die, they go out,
When people die, songs are sung.”
— Velimir Khlebnikov.

CMT: Listen. Górecki started with techniques that somewhat resemble Messiaen. But in his later works, his atonal practices disappear. They’re replaced by tonal minimalism of gently mounting thematic phrases.

DSM: His String Quartet No. 3, ‘...songs are sung,’ performed by Kronos Quartet, is songlike and thematic. But it’s not purely sorrowful, like his Third Symphony. This String Quartet No. 3 is filled with soul-searching melancholy, it’s true—music that seldom rises above mezzo piano. The opening Adagio builds on a pernicious metrical theme borrowed from Beethoven’s Seventh—over which we have this “breathing” violin melody. The violin part resembles a dying person’s breathing in and breathing out, progressively more labored—inspiring, expiring. It ascends to a tense climax and then dissolves into an angst-filled stillness.

CMT: That’s followed by an even more subdued Largo, interspersed with major-key plateaus. The brief third movement, Allegro, suggests a recovery, but that is short-lived and gives way to the thematically related Deciso and Finale with their continued progression and deterioration.

DSM: There’s a pervasive melancholy followed by a cathartic peacefulness, created by Górecki’s repetition of figures. It reminds me of my experiences taking care of people in hospice, close to the end of their lives.

CMT: Górecki’s slow tempos are very occasionally supplanted by faster ones—ironic or defiant outbursts. These exacerbations and remissions are surely characteristic of the course of many people at life’s end. Górecki’s mildly dissonant minor key chorale textures that tend toward harmonic stasis—those too are symbolically consistent with palliation of pain, with the incurability of failing organ systems in the body, with the clinging to hopes and spiritual concepts, with the dying person’s effort to maintain an emotional stasis up to the last.

DSM: Górecki’s five-movement quartet is a loose, arch-like form. Material from the first two movements is repeated in the last two movements in a way that clarifies or revises the meaning that was imparted at the outset.

CMT: The ending that mirrors the beginning is something of a T.S. Eliot-esque Four Quartets ‘Little Gidding’ (‘to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’) return, a cycle. Górecki’s surprises, such as the romantic theme that appears in the third and fourth movements, are wonderfully narrative: the temporary recovery; the suspense you feel when it becomes increasingly clear that the recovery won’t last, but it’s not yet clear what will happen next. But I think some listeners may have a hard time noticing or appreciating the narrative. It takes some effort on the listener’s part to grasp it—the listener must be in an imaginative mood, must be open to hearing a song about morbidity and mortality. Górecki has this glacial lyricism—long, long projective lines—mounting tensions conducted on a glacial timescale of minutes. Having worked in palliative care, this String Quartet No. 3 immediately spoke to me, spoke poignant truth. But I wonder how many listeners will be receptive and hear in it the things that I hear.

DSM: The hospice or palliative care interpretation is supported, I believe, by the positive, transient major-key melodies undermined by negative harmonies and dissonances. The negative material suggests doubt, and possibly a difficulty remembering.

CMT: Or even a relinquishing, a letting-go of trying anymore to remember. As the circulation begins to fail, as the perfusion of the brain diminishes—the person has less and less ability to keep up the effort to be wakeful and lucid. In fact, this Quartet as a whole seems preoccupied with the elusiveness of memory, with the mind’s ability to repeat ideas but to lose itself in them through that very repetition, through its periodic development and both exact and inexact recall. An excellent example is the rather sweet, rising melodic idea just after the start of the only fast movement (III Allegro, sempre ben marcato), which at the end falters and flickers and fades away. Its closing cadence barely registers. The symbolism is so strong—the resemblance to the process of dying is so unmistakable—it’s impossible to think that this idea was not behind Górecki’s writing.

DSM: Your example also reveals Górecki’s symphonic style—the lack of expressive closure in the Allegro third movement propels the listener forward. Then he quotes from the first movement of Szymanowski’s Second Quartet. This quotation—a technique we see in Górecki’s earlier music—also suggests that the person—the singer, the narrator of this Quartet—is remembering or trying to recall specific things that are outside this Quartet; is successfully remembering the Szymanowski snippet and then losing it.

CMT: Besides the Szymanowski quotation, the features of Górecki’s String Quartet No. 3 include its strategic use of melodic thirds, both minor and major; its chordal patterns with strong diatonic and sometimes cadential features; its conflictual dissonances between melody and harmony.

DSM: Górecki’s slow tempi produce moments of peace and resolution, introspective meditations during periods of lucidity. The music makes you urgently hope that the subject of the Quartet can somehow sustain the peaceful state of such moments. But no such luck—for the most part the work is characterized by an organic restlessness—like the agitation of an elderly person who has a cognitive disorder, like Alzheimer’s Disease. In effect, the Quartet is like the memorial testimony of a family member or other caregiver, summarizing the progress of their loved one’s prolonged deterioration and eventual death. It is a memorial to the person, but the person who gives this account is ennobled by the act of giving it. It is an unsentimental testimonial to the nature of the human condition, and to the innate goodness in humankind as members of our species try in extremis to cope with our condition. In the sense that the four string voices are rendering what amounts to a song or story of one person, this Quartet is far less discursive or conversational than most other string quartets.

CMT: Having cared for people at the end of life, including dementia patients, I identify viscerally with the expressive world that this Quartet evokes—the music transports me far beyond the literal musical content of the Quartet.

DSM: This String Quartet No. 3 convinces me that Górecki’s retreat from serialism in his earlier work to his more recent minimalism was really a positive move. The Quartet’s underlying morbidity somehow carries optimism. The writing is well paced and unrelentingly intense.

CMT: In terms of pacing, the length of the first movement, and maybe the fourth, would be a bit much for a listener who is not grasping or identifying with the morbidity-mortality themes, I think. The minimalist violin sighing-inspiring-expiring might annoy such a listener, especially when it continues for more than 10 minutes. This Quartet is 56 minutes long, after all. Most of the sections feature cadential silences—very meaningful, if one accepts the interpretation we’re applying to the Quartet—but easily misunderstood by others who are not in a receptive mood, who might feel the silences are gratuitous.

DSM: There are these slow pulses in the viola and cello parts that signify uncertainty and inability to act. Why do you think that ‘agency’—the human capacity to make choices and to act in the world—matter to us and to Górecki?

CMT: You mean why is it so important that our intentions have effects in the world and that they embody what we value? Well, the final, terminal phase of life when we are totally dependent on others and are unable to perform even the simplest activities of daily living like feeding ourselves or bathing or toileting represents a diminution of all of the means we have of establishing our identity and sense of self. It is a period of tremendous loss. With thoughtful end-of-life care, it need not mean the erosion of dignity or worth or integrity as a person. But it is undeniably a time of loss. Vegetables do not have ‘agency’ or intentions. Individuals in a persistent vegetative state do not have ‘agency’. Personhood—being fully alive—is inseparable from ‘agency’. That’s why ‘agency’—the ability to decide and act—is so important, to us and to Górecki. But, beyond that and given that Górecki is Polish, given that he experienced all manner of repression under the old regime, and given that he more or less completed this Quartet in 1995, I wonder whether this Quartet embodies his motivations for political agency and judgment in an age that lacks much enthusiasm for civil rights.

DSM: What are the conditions for being an impactful citizen when the meaning of democracy has become less transparent and nominally democratic governments are filled with corrupt plutocrats? David Kyuman Kim has published a book recently that addresses these issues. He specifically examines the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Kim treats agency as a form of religious experience that reflects implicit and explicit notions of the Good. Kim considers ‘projects of regenerating Agency’ or critical and strategic responses to loss—very relevant to the subject of Górecki’s String Quartet No. 3. Moreover, he says that agency is ‘melancholic freedom’. Such freedom persists through the moral and emotional losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, ethnic and gender discrimination.

CMT: Here are some excerpts from the fifth movement (Largo, Tranquillo) of this Quartet.

[60-sec clip, Kronos Qt, 1.4MB MP3]

W hilst the slow, mournful music fully articulates the weight of death and grief, instead of being catapulted into corresponding misery, it has the surprising effect of throwing the listener into a state of contemplation, reverie and even hope.”
— Charlotte Gardner, BBC Online.

I f Górecki’s works are informed by suffering and grief, they also chronicle courage and vision. There’s an unmistakably political component alongside the music’s spirituality. Górecki, after all, touches on some of the pivotal events of the 20th century: World War II, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Pope John Paul’s return to his native land in the closing years of the Cold War. But if Górecki is resolutely Polish and Roman Catholic, his music surely transcends cultural and spiritual barriers.”
— Cate Hagman, Olsson’s Classical Corner, Bethesda.

L ike the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Henryck Górecki’s music seems cerebral almost to the point of insularity. Stevens wrote: ‘Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.’ Of course, no art exists in a vacuum, carrying as it does an inherent quality of communication. Yet, there are those artists who, through their use of symbolism, create an atmosphere that leads to a profound sense of contemplation and loneliness.”
— ArtAndCulture.

I s my death possible?’ How is this question to be understood? ... One of the aporetic experiences—my own impossible yet unavoidable death—can never be subject to an experience that would be properly mine—an experience that I can have and account for. Yet there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly mine than ‘my death’.”
— Jacques Derrida, Aporias.

DSM: Melancholy and aporias are, of course, perennial subjects in the Arts. For example, you can see melancholy and creative despair in the works of such disparate artists as Peter Brueghel, Albrecht Dürer, Edward Hopper, Jörg Immendorf, Sigmar Polke and Caspar David Friedrich. Suffering and alienation inform Art across all cultures and all centuries. The sublime melancholy Górecki achieves in this Quartet is another masterpiece in that tradition.

CMT: The term ‘melancholy’ comes from the ancient Greek melas (black) and chole (gall). The Greeks believed that it was bile in the body that produced the despair and depression that so characterized the poets and artists of their time. In medieval times, scholars and artists formed ‘melancholy Clubs’ and in 1621, Robert Burton wrote ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ the first systematic review on the subject.

M elancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.”
— Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764.

DSM: For Susan Sontag, the ‘mind as passion’ and the body in pain were central motifs. Her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, considers how images of war and violence mediate our responses to human suffering. Like Górecki, she favored disjunctive forms of
argument; she liked silences. She used aphoristic modes of critical expression and used epigrams not as mere decorations but as encapsulations of the meaning she intends in her text; so does Górecki with his Khlebnikov epigram, although he tries to deny it in his interview with Norman Lebrecht.

CMT: In his delicate portrayal of indelicate aspects of human life—this Quartet with its complex network of multiple surprises and ironies, Górecki achieves a level of authenticity that one rarely encounters in depictions of life. Normal, canonical existence is always suspect, a temporary armistice. . . these fears bleed into successive generations, so that a war or defeat or forced labor or internment are not over when they are ‘over’ but are carried around as this inchoate melancholy the listener recognizes as the backdrop of Górecki’s work.

T he forests were on fire—
they however
wreathed their necks with their hands
like bouquets of roses
People ran to the shelters—
he said his wife had hair
in whose depths one could hide
Covered by one blanket
they whispered shameless words
the litany of those who love
When it got very bad
they leapt into each other’s eyes
and shut them firmly
So firmly they did not feel the flames
when they came up to the eyelashes
To the end they were brave
To the end they were faithful
To the end they were similar
like two drops
stuck at the edge of a face.”
— Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems, 1956-1998.

DSM: You mean that melancholics often keep mental ledgers of help received and given, feel deprived, begrudge others their successes. The elderly in nursing homes keep such ledgers—tend to resent those who are not maintaining their accounts in good standing, resent the family members who are not visiting as frequently as they would like. Yes, there is no ledger-keeping in Górecki. There is the nostalgia, though, that permeates this music. It remits in the Third Movement (Allegro) briefly. And it remits transiently when the tense, dissonant passages give way to sudden, gentle major chords. But even those affirmative moments are fleeting and seem fueled by memories, rather than durable new developments. This reinforces the realistic sense that the character Górecki creates—the individual that this Quartet evokes—is failing, beset by a series of ongoing morbid problems that are incurable and terminal, as with someone in hospice.

CMT: In other words, the nostalgia is not narcissistic. It’s propelled by the morbidities that are driving the rest—spontaneous and organic, not of the character’s choosing.

DSM: Flickering life, belly-up. The sageing flesh, a wrinkled vicedom. The veined reverberation of a life consumed. On corneas imprinted with a thousand dreams, now penumbral plays directed by a sight receding and a brain enraged.

CMT: It’s hard to believe this is the same Górecki who composed serialist music in the 50’s and 60’s. This is the music of a post-modern Romantic.

DSM: His earlier works are sharp, biting; this latest Quartet is sadly, warily wise.

CMT: I wonder why, given that he completed the composition of this Quartet in 1995, he withheld it from Kronos Quartet (who had commissioned it) until 2005. That has got to be unique. Very strange. And the story behind it would, I bet, be worthy of a novel or a screenplay.

DSM: A 10-year hiatus is not explicable in terms of mere editing. Was it that he was waiting, to see whether this Quartet in the end truly said what he intended it to say? Was it that events in Poland or events in Górecki’s life during those years were altering and re-altering what he felt truly needed to be said?

CMT: Or was the delay due to some frailty or health problems of his own?

DSM: No, my hunch is that—as with Polish poets like Zagajewski and Milosz—he wanted to be sure this Quartet did not contain anything that would, in hindsight, diminish it. This is a highly introverted, meditative piece—and there is a risk that compositional gestures in
such a piece could be precious or trite. To create such an inward-looking piece as this is a very subtle, risky thing—it’s deceptively simple-looking on the face of it. But I think it’s inherently harder to be sure when you are ‘finished’ with such a piece—harder, that is, if you deeply care about your decision being right. ‘Ten years hard,’ I don’t know. But hard, anyway.

W rite what you like about the quartet. I am always interested in what people write about my work. I put notes on paper, you put words. What I think about the music, my philosophy, that does not leave my work room. But I am curious to know what others see in it. [...] [W]hat goes into my music stays in my [work] room. The world can hear in it what it likes.”
— Henryk Górecki, interview with Norman Lebrecht, La Scena, 28-FEB-2007, about Quartet No. 3.

I ask why he waited so long before bringing it [Quartet No. 3] out. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he sighs. ‘It’s like wine, some bottles you leave for two years, some for five. This one had to lay a little bit longer.’ ”
— Norman Lebrecht, interview with Henryk Górecki, La Scena, 28-FEB-2007, about Quartet No. 3.

Monday, August 20, 2007

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]