jwilzewske: said

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

The Uncertain Lateness of the Hour: ‘Periods’ and the Musical Self

E dward Said’s book [published posthumously, following his death in 2003 of leukemia] is a series of dazzling case studies exploring the idea of ‘lateness’ in a range of composers, writers and artists.”
— London Review of Books.

L ateness doesn’t name a single relation to Time but it always brings Time in its wake. It is a way of remembering Time, whether it is missed or met or gone. … The quality of Time alters then, like a change in the light, because the present is so thoroughly shadowed by other seasons: the revived or receding past, the newly unmeasurable future, the unimaginable time beyond Time. The conversion of Time into Space.”
— Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. xi.

Edward Said, literary theorist and Columbia University Professor of Comparative Literature, had not expected to die when he did, in early Autumn, 2003, at age 67. He had had chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) for more than 10 years. It was an acute infection related to CML blast crisis that took him away. His last book, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, was unfinished at the time, and was completed by Michael Wood at Princeton University. There is both irony and poetic beauty in this fact.

The intimacy of chamber music genres provides unusually apropos means to express lateness—the irreconcilabilities of it; the private amusements and perplexities of it—perhaps better than other genres. Lateness: the idea that one is not getting out of this alive, that one cannot go beyond the [terminal] idioms and stances to which one has finally arrived.

Edward Said asserts that ‘lateness’ has to do with ‘the sentiment of Being’ and ‘the sentiments of Art’. But there are plenty of specifics beyond such colorful hand-waving. The book was the result not only of his own drafts of material that were intended to become a published book but also lecture-notes and detailed outline materials that he used in his course on Late Style in the Dept of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Lateness: inculcating and sustaining the unity and integrity of the self—its dignity and freedom—like Jane Austen and her judgmental stance toward the selves of her characters.

W ith an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name, I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.”
— Edward Said, London Review of Books interview, 07-MAY-1998.

Lateness: embodying the quality of self-sufficiency and, in anticipation of the finiteness of life, a measure of abandon and acceptance of the human condition. Said’s is a visionary normative stance, just as the qualities we refer to as ‘late’ are likewise visionary and normative. Lateness is the reaching of a new and final level of expression—Titian’s late-period discovery of the all-penetrating light that transmutes human flesh to reveal the soul and an alterior unity (Hermann Broch, quoted by Said, OLS, p. 137). It is the arrival at a state of ‘nothing-left-to-prove’ [to others], a renunciation of ambition.

A mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in moral life—and the further cultural shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.”
— Jacket blurb for Lionel Trilling’s book, ‘Sincerity & Authenticity’.

Lateness’ is not about impoverishedness or loss or despondency. It is not about resignation or desolation. It may touch upon these, but it is not ‘about’ them. It is instead about parables and testaments. It is about exile and unashamed subjectivity. It is about the acceptance of life’s contradictions and irresolvable and irreconcilable differences. It is about the sadness of Life and the joy of Life all at once, as Elliott Carter has said. The longing and the fervency of expression may be, if anything, greater than ever in one’s ‘late’ period; just less concerned with coherence than before.

W hat gripped Adorno in Beethoven’s late work is its episodic character: its apparent disregard for its own continuity … seemingly unmotivated rhetorical devices like trills or appoggiaturas whose role in the work seems unintegrated into the structure … the caesuras, the sudden discontinuities … the work still remains ‘process’ but not as ‘development’; rather as a catching-fire between extremes which no longer allow for any secure middle-ground … the vestige of an individual human sorely aware of the wholeness that has eluded it forever.”
— Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. 10.

The notions of poetics and lateness imply at least some self-awareness. And whenever descriptive representation of a feeling or idea is planned and realized (composed; performed), poetics is met by analysis and interpretation. Composers, especially, cannot help projecting themselves and their own poetics into the analysis and interpretation by which their ideas are realized. Pierre Boulez’s analyses of Debussy and Berg are an example, as, too, are Adorno’s analyses of Beethoven and, now, Said’s analyses.

T he most meaningful analysis of a symphony is another symphony. [And, at the end of life, there will be no more symphonies, no continuations of re-thinking things, no more replies.] ”
— Luciano Berio

What else? We often see an expressive prolixity in earlier compositions, while in ‘late works’ there is expressive economy. Given just enough notes to sustain the idea, ‘late’ pieces are often harmonically or rhythmically sparse and sometimes lapse into monody, then silence. Sometimes a piece is open-ended, simply vanishing. Early exponents of the practice of ending (‘abandoning’) a work in mid-passage include Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. But there have been many since, including Elliott Carter—who spoke of this during his interview with Richard Dyer at Tanglewood last week.

An harmonic adventurousness, a radical chromaticism, a tonal ambiguity? Not necessarily. Those sorts of stylistic artifacts can arise at any age—early, middle, or late. Instead, what’s new in late compositions or late performances is a pervasive ‘worldliness’—not bitterness or cynicism or resignation. The musician has accumulated what business people jokingly call ‘scar tissue’—psychological grit; metaphysical emery. It doesn’t blunt the expressive edge; to the contrary, the lapidary effect sharpens all of the expressive edges.

Joann Lynn, RAND Corp, trajectories at end of life

One of the facets of ‘lateness’ that Said does not address in his book is the age-independent psychological aspect of how a piece comes unexpectedly to be ‘late’ or have qualities that we associate with ‘lateness’. The composer may have bipolar depression from early on in life, for example. Or the early onset of strokes or Alzheimer’s may fundamentally alter the composer’s or the performer’s perspective while not extinguishing the ability to continue. Or serious events happen in a person’s life that situationally yield the mien of advanced age. All of those can creep into the music. All of those can determine what and how much is left, and how ‘late’ the output that does follow is.

For example, in the late 1950s, the Neo-Classicist Finnish composer Einar Englund experienced a personal crisis and stopped composing. Modernism, which he termed “a mockery of the composer as a serious artist,” had irrevocably changed what was getting commissioned and performed. He said that in that milieu he felt he no longer had anything to say; his Neo-Classical idioms were no longer welcome: the ‘river’ had changed course, and he was left ‘high and dry’ on the old riverbank.

In his autobiography (1996), Englund confided another, more serious reason for the crisis: the tragic death of his wife in 1956, when Einar was 40 years old. Englund didn’t resume composing until 1971. His most productive period in terms of sheer musical output was the 1980s—and those of the ‘later’ Englund pieces that I’ve listened to do manifest some of the desultory attitude or ‘scar tissue’ I’m referring to. Englund died at 83, in 1999.

W hat of artistic ‘lateness’ not as harmony and mature resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction; as anachronism and anomaly; as a special ironic expressiveness well beyond the words and the situation?”
— Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. xiii.

Mahler and Schnittke and many other people have had health conditions that conferred a precocious ‘lateness’ early in their lives as composers. Schubert’s last three string quartets, the String Quintet in C (D 956), the last three piano sonatas (Sonata No. 19 in c (D 958); Sonata No. 20 in A (D 959); Sonata No. 21 in B-flat (D 960), and the ‘Schwanengesang’ cycle are yet another species of lateness that Said does not address. That is, lateness and apprehension sometimes impart a tense, hemmed-in-èdness—an amenability to expediency of orchestration and compositional cliché borne partly out of haste: compromises of the Eleventh Hour; contractions from the radical inventiveness that Said’s treatment of lateness dwells on.

If you haven’t previously seen them, have a look at Edward Said’s books, ‘On Late Style’ and ‘Music at the Limits’. They contain valuable insights for all musicians, with regard to age-appropriate style. And they are, inadvertently, eloquent auto-elegies for Said himself. Touching and, maybe, life-changing for the musician-reader.

A s one can see in the early and the late ‘Goldberg Variations’ performances that eerily frame his career—one at the very beginning, the other at the very end—Gould excavated the contrapuntal as well as chaconne structure of the work to announce an ongoing exploration of Bach’s inventiveness through and by way of his own virtuosic realizations … crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us on all sides. In enacting it on the piano, the performer aligns himself/herself with the composer, not with the consuming public, which is impelled to pay attention not so much to the performance as a passively looked-at and heard presentation, as to a rational and transcendant activity being intellectually, aurally, and visually transmitted to others.”
— Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, pp. 130-2.

Tsunami hitting pier, Hilo HI, 01-APR-1946; Time for the man pictured at left: about as 'Late' as it is possible to get.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]