jwilzewske: sublimation

Showing posts with label sublimation. Show all posts

Monday, April 23, 2012

Sex, Lies, and Music: Schumann’s Poet-Lover Alter-Ego

D ichterliebe’, the title chosen or accepted by Schumann for his choice of Heine’s texts, involves a double-meaning. Schumann the composer-poet found in the poems evidence that their protagonist is a poet-composer: one who is inspired by bird-song (No. 1), one whose sighs become nightingales (No. 2), one who inspires the lily to sing (No. 5), one who dreams magical fairy-music (No. 15), and one who finally buries all his songs at sea (No. 16). That persona, originally Heine’s surrogate [was embraced by Schumann as his own surrogate]... For the purposes of the poems, Heine spoke through the role of the unhappy Dichter; for the purposes of the songs, Schumann transformed that figure into a Dichter of his own.”
— Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

T he relation between Schumann and poetry is pretty revealing,” said pianist and long-time chamber music presenter Cynthia Siebert at a recent dinner party. “It is? How is it revealing and what is it that’s revealed?” I wondered. The conversation proceeded off in other directions. But my curiosity was piqued! Challenge accepted!

M usic theorist/pianist/composer Edward Cone wrote 20 years ago that Robert Schumann’s Dichter (poet) is dramatically different from Heinrich Heine’s Dichter. According to Cone, Schumann’s Dichter chooses music as the primary means of expression while words are secondary.

B ut the music depends on the other. The piano is inseparable from the vocal melody and the words. The piano persists in completing the voice’s unfinished cadences in No. 2, with the prolongation of each B. Every B, relinquished by the voice, resounds briefly before it resolves to A. The same prolongation-resolution motif appears also in No. 3.

N o. 4 has piano doubling the voice, and the two parts alternately imitate each other—a kind of counterpoint that might either suggest the complete co-dependent behavior of both, or the deliberate independence of each from the other. The rhetorical reversals [“He went to the country; to the town went she.”] are chiasmic: miniature embodiments of musical absorption of two-into-one where the two quasi-orgasmic experiences paradoxically highlight the separateness of the two at the peak of their union.

N o. 7 has voice and piano extensively doubling each other throughout—a kind of lovemaking or lovers’ dance. The voice is “on top” or leads through most of the song, but the piano is the one whose outburst at the climax has the voice in an inner or lower position.

M ost subtle in the ‘interpenetration’ of voice and accompaniment is the very first song of the cycle, which sets the tone for all that follows. The doubling is delicately heterophonic—as when the voice, but not the piano, anticipates the resolution of a suspension; or when the piano, but not the voice, remains suspended; or when the voice, after inserting an appoggiatura, resolves a suspension. The effect is the kind of blurring that might result if the piano could pedal the vocal line, treating the voice as a strand of the piano texture [and subduing it, see m.4, image above].”
— Edward T. Cone, ‘Poet’s love or composer’s love?’, in Steven Paul Scher, Chapter 10.

I look up the date and see that Dichterliebe, Op. 48, was composed in 1840, when Schumann was 30 years old, the year he and Clara at long last became married, against her father’s will. Susan Youens and others see nothing too subtle about the motivations and construction of Dichterliebe:

T he persona sings of his tears and sighs transforming themselves into [sprouting, turgid] floral offerings and love’s nightingales in ‘Aus meinen Tränen spriessen’; he sings in hectic, [pumping] alliterative excess of ‘die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine’ in ‘Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne’; and finds that he cannot trust the beloved’s words of love in ‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’.’ In ‘Ich will meine Seele tauchen,’ the persona longs to submerge his soul in the lily’s chalice. That this is a sublimation of sexual imagery is evident in the post-coital sobbing in the piano at the end.”
— Susan Youens, Carnegie Hall program notes, 2010.

T here are 14 excellent essays on music-text relationships in the multi-author volume edited by Steven Paul Scher (link below), including several that address music-text manifestations in Schumann’s compositions. Juicy bedtime reading!

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

My Lives / Writing as Resistance: Journaling Classical Music

W riting autobiography allows me to open up a vein of self-scrutiny, to peer through the slippery veil of what you call ‘character’—to define my own peculiar subjectivity.”
— Patricia Foster

CMT: A writer’s always preoccupied with gathering and prioritizing the material that will be retained in what she/he is writing. If there’s a nucleus of this, it inevitably permeates the writer’s world. It’s like beach sand—it gets into everything, no matter what the Editor’s instructions are. These things become virtual necessities, inevitabilities. Necessaries.

DSM: It’s a hammer looking for a nail. It’s in the DNA. It just has to come express itself. Your peculiar fascination with Deleuze and Lacan and Derrida—I’m sure you can’t help it. Is that what you’re saying?

CMT: I’m just saying: there are latent ideas and resonances, and these conversations we have are just triggers for them. These conversations are just occasions for synthesizing the observations that are, up until the moment they emerge from our mouths, just glimmers, little scintillations. They happen regardless of whether we’re together. But I’d never remember them if we didn’t set ourselves to conversing and making these little transcripts for each other.

DSM: Well, thank you. Gratifying occasions—to capture some sparks that might kindle something bigger, in someone else who happens to see them online. Maybe something more for us, as well. The minor chore of assembling the lists of links as we do here is at least potentially useful to others. Even when we don’t necessarily receive comments on a piece, we can see the click-throughs to the Amazon and Arkiv and other links at the bottom. We have a pretty good idea of what readers are finding interesting or useful . . .

CMT: For me, the moment when I realized what my favorite conception of art was, was in December 1995, a month after Gilles Deleuze died at age 70—young. I had read his several books long before then. But it was the occasion of his dying that led me to re-visit what I knew of him and his philosophy of music. I recognized immediately that he was the embodiment of my subject. In adopting the stance that he had put forward, I could at last be dealing with the material and the priorities that were ‘necessary’ to me. And I was grateful that he had bothered to write as much as he had.

DSM: And Derrida was and is like that for me. He lived to 74 years of age, young still—died in 2004. The world has moved on quite a bit, moved on very quickly. His writing, for me, was a wonderful tapestry, a web of loyalties and enmities. He became my vehicle and my guide to what had always been waiting at the back of my mind. He didn’t especially write about music theory, yet his philosophical writing consistently served as a prism through which my own thinking about music was—and is—refracted.

CMT: Writing is always about problem-solving. Whether in fiction, biography, memoir, scholarly exposition, whatever—certain questions have to be resolved. I have never written fiction, and essays or memoir may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true-to-life. Because life is just one thing after another. The writer’s job is to find the narrative shape in unruly Life and tell the story. Not to serve the Truth, but just to serve the Story. There really is no other choice. A reporter is in service to the Fact. A eulogist is in service to the Family of the Dead. But, in general, a regular writer serves only the Story. There really are no other competing claims.

DSM: That’s a ruthless perspective! You make it sound cold or detached, commodified.

CMT: Well, no. A writer who cannot separate herself/himself from the charaters in the narrative and see them within the full spectrum of their human qualities degenerates into sentimentality. If you’re writing about music, you degenerate into uncritical promotion. Bathos does no honor to anybody, and it sure doesn’t sell papers! It surely doesn’t attract repeat visitors to a blog!

DSM: The right voice in which to write—the voice in which I talk to you—comes to me from my music teachers. It comes to me from Bruce Pearson, Dick Whitbeck, Herb Pilhofer, Dan Tetzlaff. None of them interested in exotic theory. But each of them tenacious about detail and nuance.

CMT: But you’re extemporizing with me on topics that can’t be informed by anything you did with those people 35 years ago! You’re not spinning memoirs in these conversations!

DSM: What is it that we learn, though, from other people? I inherited from them a tenacious, curious disposition. I absorbed their pedagogical approach and made it my own. It’s not ‘memoir’ but autobiography, what we’re doing here. The moment we put fingers to keyboard, the essential nature of Life—the random one thing after another—is displaced. No matter how ambiguous you try to make the conversation/story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, no matter how faithfully you capture our oral detours and dead-ends—in print it’s still an objectified thing, packaged, decorated.

CMT: Everything that happens between us is not in the stories in this blog. How could it be? Memory is selective; storytelling insists on itself. Even the long, diffuse posts are only a poor simulacrum of the real deal. There’s nothing in these posts that didn’t happen. They’re edited, but they are all true.

DSM: Shades of true anyhow. Your truth; my truth. The provocation’s legitimate, so long as we don’t interfere with or libel anybody. The process we follow may be a bit chaotic, but it’s not unlike Eric Newby or other travel writers. We respond to the events, writing, performances, and recordings we encounter, such as they are—and to each other. If the ideas about music that occur to us had instead stayed in our heads or in a drawer, what value would they have? None. So, instead, we indulge ourselves here, engage in some constructive resistance, discover some new paths, reveal some of what’s necessary to our inadvertent autobiographies or travelogues, and find new friends and kindred spirits along the way. We don’t have the privilege of making a living writing about music like professional critics and reviewers and academics do. But this is a passable substitute!

CMT: In a 2005 study, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 11 million Americans have created blogs, and more than 25 percent of Internet users read them. The Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 44% of U.S. Internet users have contributed material to the online commons. And that was 2 years ago! Netroots infancy!

Charles Rosen: Journaling Classical Music, Musical Ambition

M usic is not just sound or even significant sound. There has to be a genuine love simply of the mechanics and difficulties of playing, a physical need for the contact with the keyboard.”
— Charles Rosen

DSM: Years ago, I picked up a copy of one of Charles Rosen’s collections of essays, Frontiers of Meaning. To me, that was true journalism. It was other things as well, of course.

CMT: His recordings are spectacular. But he writes in an irrepressible way—which I imagine is what makes you say it is true journalism. He holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from Princeton University, and has taught at Harvard, Oxford University, and he’s emeritus now from the University of Chicago. But the way he communicates is in terms of insatiable curiosity. It isn’t ‘mere’ journalism, and it surely isn’t an academician’s prose. It’s Journalism writ large!

DSM: I especially admire his regular contributions to The New York Review of Books. Those are wonderful examples of reaching across market segments in an exciting way.

CMT: Despite his penchant for detail, Rosen’s accounts of how music works are highly readable—any interested amateur musician will be captivated by them. He contends that because music has no fixed meaning, the only conclusion we can reach is that music makes sense when we are comfortable with it. That’s something of a populist notion, don’t you think?

DSM: Rosen’s demonstrations with familiar passages from works by Beethoven and Chopin and Hadyn and Mozart are particularly accessible for general audiences. He argues that, because each new style of music creates its own meaning, methods of musical analysis must constantly change. This is not a relativistic or permissive statement. Instead, it’s an invitation for listeners to engage and make their own assessments over time. It reminds me in some ways of how expert sommeliers and oenologists talk with people who are new to wine. By way of example, Rosen shows how Beethoven’s music—which often perplexed his contemporaries—gave rise to analytical methods that are localized to the works of classical composers. Its like a disquisition on wine by Hugh Johnson . . .

CMT: You’re right. Despite his virtuosity, he’s a populist at heart. For example, in his 03-NOV-2005 review of Robert Philip’s book, Performing Music in the Age of Recording, Rosen noted that, at one time in the U.S., performing music at the piano was, like breakfast and dinner, a routine part of life at home. Yes, more exceptionally, music could be heard in public places. But the public realm was essentially a complement to the private one. The plight of chamber music—and the arts in general—can be traced to the progressively passive, ‘spectator’ culture in western society, where the majority of people do not actively ‘do’ anything. They just watch ready-made productions and consume things. There are those who would chalk it all up to the erosion of arts and music training in the schools. But it’s more than that. The situation that the arts are currently in has more, I think, to do with the appalling passiveness of many people.

DSM: To me, Rosen’s discussion of the physical factors involved in performance are the most illuminating—and maybe the most inspiring. Rosen’s expository writing is as exciting as listening to a star athlete or coach explain sports technique—Rosen’s descriptions of the movements of the fingers, arms, feet, and torso that introduce dance and gesture into the pianist’s interpretations. He comments on the sublimation of technique and how the sublimation affects how the score appears to have been interpreted, at the time the listener perceives it. Possibly he would be offended by this, but Rosen’s play-by-play commentary is consummate sport journalism . . .

CMT: He spends a lot of time detailing the effects of a hall’s acoustics, too—the audience interruptions, the particulars of the instrument played—how all of these affect a performance. In that respect, the play-by-play mimics a classic sports announcer, explaining to the audience the good luck and the bad.

DSM: In recordings, a pianist tends to strive instead for perfection because a recorded performance is ‘forever’. But Rosen’s fastidiousness is not obsessive. His writing—like his playing—is generous, as though he fully expects to live to perform another day. That open, cavalier posture back-handedly enables each piece to breathe.

CMT: Yes, and his writing is the same. His is a special brand of lucid, persuasive prose. Spellbinding reading, even if you’re not a pianist. A wonderful example that’s a worthy model for any music writer to emulate.

DSM: Charles Rosen recently gave a talk on “Musical Ambition in the Eighteenth Century” at the Yale Whitney Humanities Center on March 1. And this Saturday (17-MAR) he is performing at Walnut Creek. And he will give a talk at 11:45 a.m. Sunday (18-MAR) in San Francisco as well.