jwilzewske: taruskin

Showing posts with label taruskin. Show all posts

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Opposing Throw-away Culture: Future of Program Notes

I wish program notes could be more like:

the ‘extras’ that we get on DVD videos, with panel discussions and out-takes, trailers, rehearsal miscellany, biographical and historical documentary collateral;
liner notes in CD and MP3 albums—less expository than conventional program notes and more expansive;
art exhibit catalogues—nice coffee-table books, objets d’art in their own right and iconic souvenirs that we treasure and display in our houses/apartments.

Program notes form the core of many classical music presenters’ marketing materials. But most printed literature today is disposable: today’s hot communication document is tomorrow’s landfill. Presenters and their donors and the authors of program notes devote huge amounts of time and money to make their material as informative and attractive as it can be. But many audience members treat it as though it were a cheap gew-gaw to divert them from their abject boredom while waiting for the performance to begin. They discard it after the performance, pitch it out without a second thought. This is really, really unfortunate.

The best programs should have a permanence and organic completeness that counters the ephemeral, and increasingly electronic, world of instant communications. A presenter’s program book should embody the best of contemporary printed literature or multimedia design. And I think it should drive the same kinds of revenue and cross-merchandising opportunities that, say, exhibit catalogues provide to museums and art galleries. It shouldn’t be a ‘throw-away’. It shouldn’t be so chock-full of advertising that it can’t function as a coffee-table book or iconic catalogue.

What we need are new formats, new and changing formats and new media—multi-media program note formats that offer the content that we are used to receiving but that also offer critical surveys of current work by leading practitioners from the U.S., Europe and Asia. Arranged performer-by-performer, composer-by-composer and accompanied by interviews, the kinds of new media program notes formats I wish for would offer a more complete and informative picture of the presenter’s programs, artists, and subjects—a more extensive invitation to the readers’ own further thoughts and enjoyment.

What we need, too, are new styles of writing and new, unconventional tone. The tone should be generous. The essays should not try to score ‘points’ (in the way, for example, that Richard Taruskin’s and Bernard Holland’s writing sometimes tries to do). The style should be engaged and engaging, not pedantic.

One of the champions of such writing is composer Robert Kirzinger, who is publications associate and author of program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. By concentrating on the overlooked, and by transforming and manipulating his texts-as-objects into works of art in their own right, Kirzinger both subverts their nominal function and challenges existing systems of classification and modes of discourse. Playful, often fantastic, his work reveals an acute intelligence alloyed to an irreverent and mischievous sense of humor. His are not ordinary program notes or liner notes, to be read and discarded. They are painterly essays filled with exciting imagery. They are adventure stories filled with the suspense of exploration. They are letter-like program notes that have an intimacy, and are written in a conversational style as if to a friend or a family member.

Handsomely illustrated, Kirzinger’s writing is straightforward, readable, and agreeably jargon-free. He can be didactic without being pedantic. Full, traditionally-placed footnotes and URL links make it easy for the reader to pursue particular topics. His critical judgments are often less ‘ends’ in themselves than jumping off points for explorations of particularly vexing problems in composing and performance practice. And, more to the point, general readers, who have perhaps had simplistic ideas of the scope of the music or the composers or the performers, will find themselves reconsidering and re-reading Kirzinger’s program notes. These are not Alex Ross or John Rockwell journalistic essays conglomerated into a book-of-days. These are art objects that have a certain timelessness. They read like Natural History.

Listening cannot be hurried: you have to allow enough time for it. You have to ask yourself how the piece is put together, how it is like other pieces you know and how it is different, and how it fits into the traditions you are familiar with, the works that you enjoy. Kirzinger writes in such a way that readers are not rushed or coerced. Instead, readers are tantalized as well as reassured of the legitimacy of their own independent ideas.

Good program note authors remember that the music itself is more important than all the talk about it, even what is said by esteemed experts. They try not to approach a piece through the fog of what others have said about it, for much of what’s said and written about music can be misleading until you experience the music itself. Good program note authors write without displaying their egos much. Cases in point are Kirzinger’s program notes for Wes Matthews’s ‘Terraces’ (Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, 20-27 OCT-2007) or his liner notes [1MB pdf] for Eric Chasalow’s ‘Left to His Own Devices’ CD, an homage to composer Milton Babbitt. Plenty of ‘light’ with no gratuitous ‘heat’ or ’tude.

T aruskin’s points are eminently worth making—but they’re drowned out by the irresistible lure of the lapidary put-down.”
— Matthew Guerrieri.

S tarry-eyed critics of the 1930s and ’40s predicted that by 2007 we would be singing Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’ in the shower. Most of us still lean toward ‘Embraceable You.’ I hope it is not unreasonable to suggest that composers, not listeners, are the servants here, and that every new opera or orchestral piece they write should be brought in on a tray with hopes that it has something substantial to say that we can like. When Haydn worked for the Esterhazys, he wore a uniform. That’s not a bad idea for our premiere-givers too. They can also tend bar at intermission. How do I prepare for premieres? I read about the people and the circumstances, where the piece came from and what the composer eats for breakfast. If I have a score, I look at the orchestration. It’s nice to know how many crayons are in the composer’s coloring box. I don’t listen to anything [recordings of the composer’s or artist’s work, before attending the performance]. Surprise me.”
— Bernard Holland, New York Times, 04-NOV-2007.

A proper note should follow up on points made by the music, the performers, the composers, and their lives and times. Often, music is influenced by or connected with political events of the day, by music of other composers, or other artists (painters, poets, authors). A good note may touch on such aspects of the music. Notes or reviews may discuss your impressions of the music as you listened, but should not lapse into a running commentary on how the music made you feel as you listened or what you did as a result of your internal feelings, nor should they be a medium for public ventilation of some private beef.

J ust as some chefs excel at seafood and struggle to make a good porterhouse, musicians have strengths and weaknesses, which are often related to temperament, intellect and taste. The all-Brahms first half of pianist Markus Groh’s recital Friday had refinement and clarity of texture but was so stuffy and colorless that I went out onto 12th Street at intermission gasping for air.”
— Paul Horsley, Kansas City Star, 20-OCT-2007.

This review may be of use to arts journalism students, as an illustration to prove that images and sentences do not automatically add up to a real review or a real program note. In short, I wish more people who write classical music program notes and reviews would write in good faith and good humor, like Arthur Danto writes about art. If they did, their work would not end up thrown into a rubbish bin.

L et us consider a painting once described by that cheerful Dane, Sören Kierkegaard. It was a painting of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Looking at it, one sees something very different from what a painting with that subject would have led one to expect, were one to imagine, for example. what an artist like Poussin or Altdoerfer would have painted: troops of people, in various postures of panic, bearing the burdens of their dislocated lives, and in the distance the horsèd might of the Egyptian forces bearing down. Here, instead, was a square of red paint, the artist explaining that ‘The Israelites had already crossed over, and the Egyptians were drowned.’ Kierkegaard comments that the result of his life is like that painting. All the spiritual turmoil, the father cursing God on the heath, the rupture with Regina Olsen, the inner search for meaning, the sustained polemics of an agonized soul, meld in the end, as in the echoes of the Marabar Caves, into a mood, a single color. So next to Kierkegaard’s described painting let us place another, exactly like it, this one, let us suppose, by a Danish portraitist who, with immense psychological penetration, has produced a work called ‘Kierkegaard's Mood.’ And let us, in this vein, imagine a whole set of red rectangles, one next to the other. Beside these two and resembling each as much as they resemble one another (exactly), we shall place ‘Red Square,’ a clever bit of Moscow landscape. Our next work is a minimalist exemplar of geometrical art which, as it happens has the same title, ‘Red Square.’ Now comes ‘Nirvana.’ It is a metaphysical painting based on the Artist’s knowledge that the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical, and that the Samsara world is fondly called the Red Dust by its deprecators. Now we must have a still-life executed by an embittered disciple of Matisse, called ‘Red Table Cloth.’ We may allow the paint to be somewhat more thinly applied in this case. Our next object is not really an artwork, merely a canvas grounded in red lead, upon which, had he lived to execute it, Giorgione would have painted his unrealized masterwork, ‘Conversazione Sacra.’ It is a red surface which, though hardly an artwork, is not without art-historical interest, since Giorgione himself laid the ground on it. Finally, I shall place a surface painted, though not grounded, in red lead: a mere artifact I exhibit as something whose philosophical interest consists solely in the fact that it is not a work of art, and that its only art-historical interest is the fact that we are considering it at all: it is just a thing, with paint upon it. This completes my exhibition. The catalogue for it, which is in full color, is monotonous, since everything illustrated looks the same as everything else, even though the reproductions are of paintings that belong to such diverse genres as historical painting, psychological portraiture, landscape, geometrical abstraction, religious art, and still-life. It also contains pictures of something from the workshop of Giorgione, as well as of something that is a mere thing, with no pretense whatsoever to the exalted status of art... Meanwhile, I can only observe that, though J has produced a (pretty minimal) artwork, not to be told by naked inspection from a bare red expanse of paint, he has not yet made an artwork out of that bare red expanse. It remains what it always was, a stranger to the community of artworks, even though that community contains so many members indiscernible from it. So it was a nice but pointless gesture on J’s part: he has augmented my little collection of artworks while leaving unbreached the boundaries between them and the world of just things. This puzzles J as it puzzles me. It cannot be simply because J is an artist, for not everything touched by an artist turns into art. This leaves then only the option, now realized by J, of declaring that contested red expanse a work of art. Why not? Duchamp declared a snowshovel to be one, and it was one; a bottlerack to be one, and it was. I allow that J has much the same right, whereupon he declares the red expanse a work of art, carrying it triumphantly across the boundary as if he had rescued something rare. Now everything in my collection is a work of art, but nothing has been clarified as to what has been achieved. The nature of the boundary is philosophically dark, despite the success of J’s raid.”
— Arthur Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Groh’s Liszt: How ‘Originalist’ Is Originalism Anyway?

At alternate turns, it’s implausible and then incontrovertible that Groh is an ‘originalist’ in his interpretations (that is, his playing aspires to faithfully render the original intent of the composer). His superb performance in the Friends of Chamber Music’s Master Pianists’ Series last night provided an excellent opportunity to assess this. He played Brahms’ Op. 1 and Op. 119, followed by Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. First, listen to his playing. Then, if you get a chance, by all means speak with him about it.

Groh’s performance of the Liszt Sonata last night was thrilling, rich with meaning and implication but never descending into sentimentalism or over-the-top theatricality. In this, Groh was the epitome of a dry ‘Romantic’s Romantic’ for the appreciative Kansas City audience attending the concert at the Folly Theater.

In 1844, Heinrich Heine heard Liszt play in Paris, as did Henri Blanchard. They wondered at the ‘frenetic enthusiasm stemming from disturbances pressed on the nervous systems’ of the audience and the performer and wrote that such enthusiasm must owe more to pathology than to aesthetics (Gooley, p. 208). Yes, Groh’s playing is fervent—at times, frenetic, even. But by contrast to variable public reception of Liszt’s playing, the listeners’ response to Groh’s reserved, controlled interpretation is empathetic and fully invested. The aesthetic pendulum swings. If, say, Liszt’s was a frenetic reaction to the dryness of Czerny’s playing, a renunciation of the style of his teacher—then Groh’s account of Liszt may be a renunciation of self-indulgence, extravagance, and narscissism—of whatever qualities Liszt displayed in the performances that earned him the bad marks.

The appropriate fusion of sadness and tranquility is there. And the vehemence and fervor are there when they should be. But Groh’s playing is not self-referential. His account of the Sonata is, essentially, an extroverted one: one conveying complete immediacy—touching his audience, inviting us to enter into the music, not withdrawing from the world or carping about unrequited attentions and alienation.

‘Originalism’ in the law takes each construction to mean what it would have been understood to mean by any intelligent but ordinary person who was a contemporary of the author/composer—any ordinary person familiar with then-current legal issues and the background of common law. That doesn’t mean taking everything hyper-literally, though, because such over-strict constructions will not turn out to match how the ordinary person would have understood it. As in the law, so it is in music with Groh’s rendering of Liszt. His scholarship regarding the biography and psychology of Liszt is impressive, but he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. Despite his burgeoning career and critical acclaim, Groh modestly presents his views on what the passages mean to him. He argues from evidence, cogently and patiently—this despite a long day’s travel, an ambitious and exhausting performance, and the diplomatic demands of an after-concert dinner.

L iszt’s reception in Paris requires an occasional turn to the narrative historical mode. His relationship to the French capital extends from 1824, when he arrived as a prodigy, to at least 1845, when he tried to make an impact with his Beethoven Cantata. His struggle to maintain a reputation in Paris over this long period is a tormented narrative, filled with upswings and downswings, ill-willed plotters, heated confrontations, and an outcome with a nearly tragic protagonist. This narrative is valuable for challenging the myth of Liszt’s easy victory over contemporary audiences and critics. The Parisian story reveals just how self-consciously he was managing his public identity. He tailored his repertory and ticketing practices to particular audiences... The Liszt that emerges from the Parisian narrative is a strategist, working within the constraints of a skeptical public to maximize his impact as a virtuoso.”
— Dana Gooley, p. 12.

Liszt, Groh says, undoubtedly had his different moods. He surely must’ve changed his mind from time to time. “Everyone has this right. The crossed-out bars in the original ending of the Sonata, for example. When were these crossed-out and replaced with the subdued ending as we know it today? Who now can really be certain whether this change was [a result of interior thoughts or whether, instead, a response to audience reaction to early performances]? I am more conscious of the latter possibility since my association with Michal Schmidt in New York. The importance of careful calibration of public image and communication with one’s audience cannot be over-emphasized.”

[50-sec clip, Markus Groh, Liszt Sonata in B minor,
Lento Assai, last 11 mm, 1MB MP3]

T he interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer’s intentions to the letter. He oughtn’t add anything that isn’t already in the work. If he’s talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldnt dominate the music, but should dissolve into it. I don’t think that my way of playing has ever changed. Or if it has, I didn’t notice, Perhaps I simply started to play with greater freedom as I threw off the shackles of existence and rejected the superfluous and all that distracts us from the essential. It is by shutting myself away that I’ve found freedom. I might have had doubts about the extent to which I managed to play what I intended, but from the beginning I was always certain that, for each work, it was in this way, and no other, that it had to be played. Why? It’s very simple: because I looked closely at the score. That’s all that's required to reflect what it contains. Kurt Sanderling once said of me: ‘Not only can he play well, he can also read music.’ That wasn’t such a bad way of putting it.”
— Sviatoslav Richter.

Textualism is a formalist theory of statutory interpretation which holds that a statute's ordinary meaning should govern its interpretation, as opposed to inquiries into non-textual sources such as the intention of the legislature in passing the law, the problem it was intended to remedy, or substantive questions of the justice and rectitude of the law. Likewise in music.

T he other work he gave me to practice during my first year was Liszt’s Sonata. The essential point about this piece, he taught me, was the silences—the sound of the silences... What does the beginning consist of, in fact? A single note; that’s all: a G. What can you do to ensure that this miserable G sounds somehow special? Here's what I do: I come out onto the stage. I sit down and I don’t move a muscle. I create a sense of emptiness within myself. In my head, I count up to thirty, very slowly. This causes panic in the audience. What is happening? Is he ill? Then, and only then, I play the G. In this way, the note sounds totally unexpected, but in an intentional way. Clearly, there's a sort of theatricality about all this, but the theatrical element seems to me very important. It’s essential if you want to create a feeling of unexpectedness. I know lots of pianists who play splendidly, who serve everything up on a plate. You know in advance what's on the menu. It’s good, but...”
— Sviatoslav Richter.

The original form of ‘originalism’ was known as intentionalism, or ‘original intent,’ and entailed applying laws based on the subjective intention of the text’s authors. The intentionalist methodology involves studying the writings of the author/composer for clues as to their intent. Groh works from the evidence in Liszt’s score, in a copy of the original manuscript, and in Liszt’s writings. He wouldn’t give much weight to the whining of Eduard Hanslick, who hated this Sonata. Nor would he countenance the bashing by the Nationalzeitung reviewer who in Liszt’s day referred to it as “eine Herausforderung zum Zischen und Pochen” (an invitation to hissing and stomping).

N ot every composer produces this sort of performer-in-the-notation. It is certainly most evident in the case of composers who were themselves superlative performers: Josquin, Couperin, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt. Their notation works as both a record of past performances and a mnemonic for the future... Recognition of a performing persona in the notation greatly informs our own interpretative role as external spectators or music critics, but the same persona may also enliven our musical experiences as performers and listeners.”
— John Butt, p. 94.

In constitutional law here are two kinds of ‘intent analysis,’ reflecting two meanings of the word ‘intent’ and these have, I think, direct correlates in music performances and aesthetics. The first, a rule of common law construction in the epoch when a text was composed, is ‘functional intent.’ The second is ‘motivational intent.’ To understand the difference, consider the metaphor of an architect who designs a Gothic church with flying buttresses. The functional intent of flying buttresses is to prevent the weight of the roof from spreading the walls and causing a collapse of the building, which can be inferred from examining the design as a whole. The motivational intent might be to create work for your brother-in-law who is a flying buttress subcontractor. Groh discusses the Liszt Sonata and reveals his deep understanding of both types of intent. Coherent resolution of the ‘good-and-evil’ meme is, he thinks, the functional basis for Liszt’s replacement of the original ending with the quieter, contemplative one.

I believe it is important to appreciate the latent intentionality in music as an art to be performed, something that can be distinguished from the more local concept of ‘the composer’s intentions.’ Just as our interest in art per se rests on our understanding that is intentionally created as art, our interest in pieces of music should be directed toward the human subjectivity involved in their creation and, particularly, in the intentionality occasioned by performance. The value of a composer’s intentions for performance cannot be legislated...”
— John Butt, p. 94.

H is high-intensity, often frantic bravura manner provoked involuntary physical reactions—shaking, shuddering, weeping. Applause for Liszt, indeed, was less a gesture of appreciation, wonder, or joy, than a sheer corporal reflex—an outlet for great physical excitement. The effect of his playing passed over into the physical realm by virtue of its excess: an excess of vibration, of musical information, of visual data—too many stimuli. Yet Liszt's playing reached into the body of his listener by a still more direct route: their identification with his performing self. At the keyboard he appeared possessed by a St. Vitus spirit.”
— Dana Gooley, p. 206.

‘Strict constructionism’—requiring a judge to apply the text as it is written and no further—is used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies such as originalism and textualism, which emphasize judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning (or originally intended meaning) of constitutions and laws. It could as well be used to describe any conservative musician or musicologist.

F reud writes in his 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’ that a power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions does really exist; indeed, it exists within every one of us in normal life. The delusion of being watched presents it in a regressive form... Conscience is the internalization of surveillance, just as in the broader cultural and historical context Protestant interiority is the internalization of baroque spectacle and visual control. The inner voice remains the voice of external authority. The task of emancipation is to free subjectivity, to free the voice from the bonds of those forms of external authority that are politically and psychologically harmful.”
— Michael Steinberg, p. 77.

The notion of a Living Constitution—a Living Score—can be defended, as Posner and others have done. The text is not static or univocal. It doesn’t need successive generations to bestow on it ‘flexibility’ in order to work: it won’t become brittle and break. So talking about strict constructionism from the perspective of the ‘insider’ performer-jurist is a political move that back-handedly seeks to arrogate authority to the critic and away from the performer. ‘Strict constructionist’ is a ‘politician-outsider-looking-in’ term—a critic’s term, not a performer’s term.

H ypocrisy is the beginning of virtue.”
— Antonin Scalia, UW Law School, 15-MAR-2001.

Are there sound arguments opposing originalism? Yes. For example, originalism can lead to unacceptable, morally or aesthetically indefensible results. For example, interpreting the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution only to protect liberty recognized at the time it was ratified provides no protection to groups who were discriminated against at that time, particularly women and homosexuals. With originalism, the courts are extremely limited in their power to protect against discrimination. Originalism faces hermeneutic difficulties in understanding the functional and motivic intentions of the Founding Fathers, or of the Composer. Originalism allows the ‘dead hand’ of prior generations to control important contemporary issues down to an extraordinary and unnecessary level of detail. Historically-informed performance run amok. Groh, for all his remarks that suggest that he is an originalist at heart, does not go this far. It would be fair to call him instead a pragmatist. “Playing piano is a way of life. I cannot help but learn something new each day.”

Definitions

Textualist: An originalist who gives primary weight to the text and structure of the Composition. Textualists often are skeptical of the ability to determine "intent."
Intentionalist: An originalist who gives primary weight to the intentions of composers, members of commissioning bodies, ratifiers, and dedicatees.
Pragmatist: A non-originalist who gives substantial weight to judicial precedent or the consequences of alternative interpretations, so as to sometimes favor a decision ‘wrong’ on originalist terms because it promotes stability or in some other way promotes the public good.
Natural Law Theorist: A person who believes that higher moral law ought to trump inconsistent positive law.

L iszt’s transcendent technique, which depended as much on the variety of sound he was able to elicit from the instrument as from sheer virtuosity, was directly inspired by Paganini’s violin playing.”
— Clive Brown, p. 222.

D uring the 19th Century a number of important composers strove to produce music in which accentuation was liberated from what they saw as the restrictions of metre. In such music, structural and expressive accentuation occurred with increasing frequency on beats that were metrically weak... Symptomatic of this attitude is Liszt’s comment, in the preface to the collected edition of his symphonic poems, that he wished to ‘see an end to the mechanical, fragmented up-and-down playing tied to the bar-line, which is still the rule in many places.’ ... a conscious reaction to the conventional rhythm that underlay much early Romantic music.”
— Clive Brown, p. 27.

T he Constitution does not say, ‘Read me broadly,’ or, ‘Read me narrowly.’ The decision to do one or the other must be made as a matter of political theory and will depend on such things as one’s view of the springs of judicial legitimacy and the relative competence of courts and legislatures in dealing with particular types of issue.”
— Richard Posner, in ‘What am I? A Potted Plant?’

T he idea of the Constitution as a binding contract is an incomplete theory of political legitimacy, not an erroneous one. A contract induces, reliance that can make a strong claim for protection; it also frees people from having continually to reexamine and revise the terms of the relationship. These values are independent of whether the original contracting parties are still alive. But a long-term contract is bound eventually to require, if not formal modification (which in the case of the Constitution can be accomplished only through the amendment, process), then flexible interpretation, to cope effectively with altered, circumstances. Modification and interpretation are reciprocal; the more difficult it is to modify the instrument formally, the more exigent is flexible interpretation. Bork is aware of the practical impediments to amending the Constitution but is unwilling to draw the inference that flexible interpretation is therefore necessary to prevent constitutional obsolescence.”
— Richard Posner, in ‘Bork and Beethoven’.

A fter Justice Holmes and Judge Learned Hand had lunched together one afternoon and Holmes began to leave to resume work, Hand called out, ‘Do justice, sir. Do justice.’ Holmes reproached him: ‘That is not my job. It is my job to apply the law.’ Holmes did not intend to say that a judge ought to be unjust. But laws are sometimes unjust, and without being unconstitutional. When a judge is faced with one of those laws, as a servant of the law he has to swallow hard and apply it. Perhaps that implicates him in injustice. Holmes probably thought so, hence his reply to Hand. But Holmes believed that that is preferable to judges thinking of their duty as serving justice first and law second.”
— Richard Bostan, The Tempting of Richard Posner, 1997.

Friday, August 3, 2007

Beam Me Up: Scriabin’s Pleromatic ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’

CMT: Listen to the piano part in Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’. Isn’t that a pleroma chord, an arpeggiated pleroma chord? [‘Pleroma’—a Gnostic term derived from the Greek word for ‘plenitude’, all-encompassing, located outside the physical universe, not ‘of this world’.]

DSM: That word’s too fancy for its own good. A curious thing about the piano part, though, is how ‘sculptural’ or ‘landscape-like’ it is. The lyrical arcs are delicate, like boughs of a tree bending in a breeze. . . . And the horn part is pondering and re-pondering his situation. Wishing, desiring; then and now. But not just declarative statements—reconsidering, regretful, remorseful, and maybe even recanting as well?

[30-sec clip, Miller, 1.4MB MP3]

CMT: More Greek for you, then: how about ‘metanoia’? Metanoiesis—not ‘change-of-heart’ in the way that New Testament scholars would have you interpret it, but more like meta-noia as ‘beyond-knowing’ or ‘after-knowing’ or ‘(re-)considering after the fact’ or ‘knowing-about-knowing’ or ‘mind-shifting toward a higher consciousness or transcendent understanding’. In other words, a Greek semiotics not restricted to NT Christian dogma. Isn’t this Scriabin piece about the limits of human understanding and the things that are beyond human understanding? Doesn’t this piece refer to the Divine, to existential unknowns?

DSM: I’ll consider that on my next hearing of the piece. But so far, no. I do hear phrases that could be a ‘change of mind’ in the horn part, a reconsideration as though revisiting an issue in hopes of now understanding it. That’s not a remorseful ‘change-of-heart’ as one who ‘repents’ of wrong-doing would have, in the NT sense. It’s more a revision of an intention or belief, about a topic of existential or metaphysical importance. Not necessarily a movement from a concrete perspective to a transcendent perspective, but instead a change of understanding about the trancendent. Or, maybe it’s an amendment of purpose—of someone who, on the basis of new facts, renounces something he has done or has been doing. The subject of this Romance is reviewing the meaning of a relationship—or the meaning of Life—and making new resolutions, maybe to think differently and undertake new courses of action. ‘Mind’ transcended to ‘Nous’. That’s what I hear. And incidentally I agree with you: I think that NT scholars have misunderstood metanoia far too long. And they keep citing each other, propagating the error, smoking their own dope. If what was intended was semantically equivalent to ‘repentance’, then metamelomai would’ve been used, not metanoia.

CMT: Scriabin took inspiration directly from Vyacheslav Ivanov and other metaphysical poets who were his contemporaries, but he wasn’t an avant-gardist. He was squeamish, introverted, pedantic, obsessive-compulsive, the product of a privileged upbringing—not flamboyant or reckless. And this ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ was composed in 1890—Scriabin was then 18 years old. Not that much water under his bridge yet. This piece is emphatically not juvenilia. But what does an 18 year old know of transcendence, even a brilliant gifted 18 year old?

S criabin [was determined] to cease to be an artist, to become instead a prophet, a votary, a predicant. Yet he refused to admit that his design reached beyond Art, that he violated the frontiers of Art and thus ceased to be an artist. On the contrary, he argued that the commonly accepted view of Art was too narrow, its true meaning lost, and its significance obscured. ... To him, Art was the religion of which he was the sacristan.”
— Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Univ California, 1987, p. 234.

I t would be a pity if appreciation of the music required us to follow Scriabin into this world of cosmic hocus pocus.”
— Hugh Macdonald, Skryabin. Oxford Univ, 1978, p. 10.

N othing is easier than to pour ridicule upon Scriabin’s gradual and finally total self-delusion. Ever since the bubble of his persona was so rudely burst in the 1920s, his quasi-religious convictions have been under relentless fire from the few critics who have paid him any attention at all, and must be eliminated from any possibility of serious consideration, now or in the future.”
— Hugh Macdonald, Musical Times 113:22, 1972.

DSM: This piece is encapsulated wonderment through boggling/incomprehensibility. It reveals a world with a fullness completely beyond rational or human emotional cognition.

CMT: Wonderment, maybe. But boggling? I think what we see a glimpse of here is Scriabin’s early ‘ecstatic truth’ / ‘transgressive truth’ vs. ‘compliant truth’ / ‘accountant’s truth’. Explanation of the pleroma chord’s structure only came with scholarly investigation of the octatonic scale, consisting of alternating half-steps and whole-steps, eight notes to the octave instead of 12. The horn has such a large voice! The piano part is ‘sculptural’ in this duet partly because of its timbre relative to the horn.

DSM: Well, besides that, Scriabin’s musical propositions do take the form of bold, unambiguous statements. Lushly lyrical—or, as Taruskin says, ‘ironic’ or even ‘ingenuous’—statements.

CMT: However emphatic or aggressive his writing may be, Scriabin never bewilders. The ‘signaling’ aspect of Scriabin’s compositions—typical of Schnittke and other Russian composers, too—is universally, insistently present. Miller’s gorgeous tone and fine phrasing are well-suited to the challenges of this bold, expansive piece. Beautiful.

T his semiotic aspect is what makes the music so ‘easily read’—or rather, so easily paraphrased on whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.”
— Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 101.

DSM: If Scriabin is through his music expressing the ineffable—the non-paraphrasable—how is it that Taruskin can say this is so ‘easily paraphrased’?

CMT: I think what Taruskin means is that the ineffability expressed by the music can be apprehended on various levels, depending on the receptivity and situation of the listener. I think that the word ‘paraphrase’ is not an apt choice. The moral implications of a passage can be ineffable, but can still be grasped and accurately understood by and localized to the context of a specific listener. The hermeneutics of your understanding of it may be different from mine, say. Taruskin is simply saying that the meanings are multi-valent, pluralistic meanings. It’s not discursive music, like a string quartet. It is inchoate music; it aspires to be a natural phenomenon like the aurora borealis. Deriving the meanings is entirely up to the individual listener. It’s deeply intimate music.

T he result is socialist realism minus socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy, even oracle, meanwhile (unlike most oracles) providing built-in ponies . . .”
— Richard Taruskin.

DSM: This piece has an unabashed, un-selfconscious immodesty—an ‘I-against-the-world’ aspect to it.

CMT: It has a ‘singing-in-the-shower’ karaoke feel to it—is what you mean to say.

DSM: No, I’m serious. There’s Ivanov’s notion of Scriabin’s vision consisting in surmounting the boundaries of the personal ‘I’—a musical transcendentalism—and a communal mingling of all humanity in a single ‘I’—a macrocosmic universal consciousness.

CMT: It has a certain monumentality, a megalomaniacal quality to it.

DSM: But its spirituality is highly personal and ‘context-dependent’. So experiencing the meanings it contains does require a certain suspension of disbelief, just as you would suspend your disbelief if you were watching a play or a film.

CMT: In other words, you need a bit of incense burning, in order to understand this piece—in order to understand what Scriabin intended!

DSM: If you don’t intend to give the music a chance, fine. That’s your choice.

CMT: But if you give it a chance—if you do suspend your disbelief for a time and project yourself into the piece—then it doesn’t disappoint.

DSM: Scriabin’s ‘Romance for Horn and Piano’ expresses what are, to me, some primitive, animalistic oppositions. It’s hard to imagine that the font of these musical ideas and compositional techniques would have rationally ‘transitioned’ to Scriabin’s later atonality, in the way James Baker suggests in his book.

S criabin’s art survives because he was a master of the craft of musical composition. Much as he might have been disappointed, it is through the study of his musical structures that we can best know him today.”
— James Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin, p. 270.

B aker’s] answer has to be regarded, finally, as an evasion, since the phrase ‘we can best know him today’ obviously ought to read ‘I wish to know him.’ It is Baker who has decided that Scriabin can and ought to be assimilated to ‘classical’ culture with its attendant formalism. It is Baker who has decided that autonomous existence may be ascribed to these products of the composer's creative labor.”
— Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 314.

CMT: So you think Baker was wrong? You think there was no deliberate abandonment of tonality and adoption of atonal compositional methods by Scriabin?

DSM: I’m not asserting that there was ‘none’. I'm only objecting to Baker’s (a) forcing the round peg Scriabin into one of the available square holes and (b) implying that Scriabin deliberately sought to fit into that square-hole category. I think Baker found Scriabin, and doing a simplistic hatchet-job on Scriabin, a very convenient vehicle for his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book. There are few, after all, who would come to Scriabin’s defense. For my taste, Baker was just too simplistic and normative in his analysis, that's all.

A ll conventional music history, whatever the period, is now written in this way; that is precisely what makes it conventional. And in the wake of what is often termed the second wave of modernism—the ‘scientistic’ one that took shape during the Cold War, and in response to it—techno-essentialist values have been a guiding stimulus on musical composition as well.”
— Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 315.

CMT: Martin Cooper, though, does take time to attend to Scriabin's gestures—Scriabin’s use of motifs that Cooper considers shamanistic zovï (summons) and prigovori (spells).

DSM: And Scriabin’s friend, Belïy, recounted that Scriabin viewed music as superceding poetry. Once Scriabin had composed the music for ‘Poema ekstaza’ he suppressed the words of his poem; he never allowed the words of the poem to be printed in concert programs.

CMT: Is this piece post-romantic? It seems purely ‘romantic’ to me, albeit with more chromaticism than Chopin or others. The horn part is thoroughly ‘tonal’, but the piano is off in space, doing ‘atonal’, bizarrely chromatic things, showing these things to the horn. The horn voice is oblivious, absorbed, ecstatic.

DSM: C.G. Jung said in ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ that, in dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we don’t need to ask what the material consists of or what it means. But this question is inevitable in dealing with the visionary mode of creation. The obscurity of the sources of the material in visionary creation is problematic. It’s the opposite of the psychological mode of creation. By ‘psychological mode’ Jung means creation at the level of craftsmanship or manipulation of elements within a pre-defined system—the conscious construction of the work. ‘Visionary creation’ refers to the core of artistic endeavor—what’s expressed and why. It’s clear that Scriabin was a master of both types of creation, regardless how delusional he may have been. Miller evokes a transcendence that is all his own in this Scriabin Romance. So, yes, it’s arguably romantic, not post-romantic. As to whether it’s concordant with Scriabin’s intentions we’ll never know . . .

L ux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.” (The Light shineth in Darkness, and Darkness has not understood it.)
— John 1:5.

CMT: You know, the piano in this piece is not so much an ‘accompaniment’, as it is a musical ‘context’—an enabling, cradling ground within which the horn’s lyricism is made possible.

DSM: I think the key—with this ‘Romance’ and with other of Scriabin’s compositions—is to consider that the composition was devised to cause a change in the listener. It is not an expository statement to be received passively by the listener; it is not attempting to enter into a dialogue with an active listener. Instead, it’s an objet d’art that aims to become a life experience for the listener. And not exactly in the normal present-tense either—instead, what Ivanov called sobïtiye zhizni, somewhat like the German Erlebnis, or the French Déjà vécu or Déjà visité. Beautiful, though, whether we’ve lived it before or not. This entire Greg Miller CD is excellent, don’t you think?