jwilzewske: theocracy

Showing posts with label theocracy. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Chamber Music and Principled Dissent: Cross-Over Art Music of Hanns Eisler

S omeone who knows *only* music understands not one thing about it. A composer with integrity knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. A musician with integrity must be an activist in his or her society, and stand up and say loudly what is wrong in that society and try to fix it. It is not right to make pretty, docile music. I could well understand it when in 1933 Hitler put a price on my head and drove me out of Germany. He and his lying bandits were the evil of the period. In fact, I was proud to be driven out. There was honor in this! But today I feel heart-broken over being driven out of the U.S.—this beautiful country—in this ridiculous way, by these ridiculous people. [black-listed by McCarthy Committee]”
— Hanns Eisler, public statement before being expelled from the U.S. in 1948.

D uring his lifetime, Eisler, who was one of Schoenberg’s favorite pupils, created a massive body of work. But these songs—written to inspire and enlighten a world gone mad with alienation and rampant greed—are his most immediate and successful musical contributions. The seventeen individual songs on this album classify as ‘agitprop’; they are political, anti-Nazi, pro-worker, pacifist—but their stirring sentiments and clear-eyed melodic and rhythmic appeal make them art songs as well.”
— Stephany von Buchau, review of Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, and Stephen Roans quartet CD, ‘Eisler: Nothing Quite Like Money’, in High Notes.

Mendacity cannot go unopposed.

Hanns Eisler (1898 - 1962) knew this. Eisler’s time with Schoenberg coincided almost exactly with the transition from atonal to twelve-tone music, and some of Eisler’s early compositions might be mistaken for Anton von Webern’s or Alban Berg’s.

But by the mid-1930s, Eisler became fed-up with the hermeticism and inaccessibility and elitism that typified the music of the Schoenberg School. Social responsibility and relevance were the moral justification for serious music, in Eisler’s view.

So he broke with Schoenberg, and Eisler’s new music—choral music, chamber music, music theater—came to be a fusion of atonal, jazz, cabaret and pop. Most of his pieces have political back-stories. These pieces (‘anthems’, ‘battle songs’) were intended to influence the feelings of performers and listeners, and to change their attitudes. The pieces were not merely entertainment. They didn’t behave nicely, re-upping for more of the ‘same’.

In 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood, at that time also home to many well-known refugee artists. He continued his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, wrote the music for a number of films, and taught at USC. In 1947, one of Eisler’s accusers was Richard Nixon, who testified that ‘the case of Hanns Eisler is perhaps the most important ever to have come before the Committee.’ A dossier with song texts which Eisler had set to music was brought as evidence against him. When the leading witness was asked why he was reading out so much material, the reply of the official was: ‘My purpose is to show that Mr. Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field, and he is well aware of it.’

Eisler was nominally the first one of what was to become a very large number of artists and intellectuals who were blacklisted in the U.S. on account of real or alleged political views. An international support group came to his defense—including Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin—but to no avail, and in 1948 Eisler was deported from the U.S.

His film-score credits include:

Aktion J (1961)
Les Arrivistes (1960) [The Opportunists]
Geschwader Fledermaus (1958) [Bat Squadron]
The Crucible (1957) [Les Sorcières de Salem]
Katzengräben (1957) [Cat Ditch]
Bel Ami (1955)
Nuit et brouillard (1955) [Night and Fog]
Schicksal am Lenkrad (1954) [Fate at the Steering Wheel]
Frauenschicksale (1952) [Destinies of Women]
Das Leben unseres Präsidenten (1951) [Life of Our President]
Rat der Götter, Der (1950) [Council of the Gods]
Unser täglich Brot (1949) [Our Daily Bread]
Křížová trojka (1948) [Three Cross]
So Well Remembered (1947)
The Woman on the Beach (1947)
The Life of Galileo (1947)
A Scandal in Paris (1946)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
The Spanish Main (1945)
Jealousy (1945)
None But the Lonely Heart (1944)
Hangmen Also Die (1943) [Lest We Forget]
The Forgotten Village (1941)
A Child Went Forth (1941)
Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) [oil and political oligarchies in 1939!]
The 400 Million (1939)
Vie est à nous, La (1936) [The People of France]
Nieuwe gronden (1934) [New Earth]
Dans les rues (1933) [Song of the Streets]

What a great lot of these have to do with progressive themes and social justice!

So Hanns Eisler is fascinating for his having both embraced and dismissed Schoenberg and serialism—switching abruptly to accessible ‘pop’ idioms. It is not so much that he tried to ‘bridge’ the gap between classical and popular music. And it is not the case that he resorted to composing for musical theater and films simply to make a buck. He refused to conform (even though he did later return to a sort of variety of serialism that he felt was emotionally accessible and non-elitist). His String Quartet Op. 75 (1938) in two movements (Variationen, Finale) is an illustration of his principled idiosyncrasy.

The Op. 8 (1925) has lots of internal symmetry between pairs of trichords—pitch-class/set-theory, Allen Forte-style: [0,2,5] [0,3,7] [0,2,5] [0,3,7] for the No. 2, and [0,1,4] [0,1,2] [0,1,4] [0,1,2] for the No. 6. The String Quartet has [0,3,6] [0,1,3] [0,1,6] [0,1,2]—far less symmetry than Eisler’s earlier pieces; almost a rejection, as it were, of the symmetries he had previously found beautiful and meaningful.

Or was it? In the Op. 8 No. 2 row, is the third trichord not a subversion of the series initated by the first trichord? Is it not a private rebellion against the politics of the serial method, rankling from inside the method—a minor third and a whole tone within a perfect-fourth interval [0,2,5]? Aren’t the Variationen of the Streichquartett de facto subversions-by-permutation? Or even the Op. 8 No. 2’s second and fourth trichords—both triads but a whole tone apart, an equal amount of permutation in their reversal of major-third/minor-third intervals?

Rather than revealing a change of heart on Eisler’s part, as David Blake interprets things, it seems to me that these features illustrate a consistent and durable attitude toward free will and the human quest for meaning. Principled dissent! Agitprop!

Blake does explore (p. 109ff) Eisler’s election not to use transpositions or explore some combinations—he says these remain ‘latent’ in the works.

Yes, but their latency or absence is itself conspicuous, like white-space in paintings or sculptures or like un-pursued back-stories in novels. And that, I think, is the source of considerable beauty in Eisler’s writing:

he creates a humanistic architecture that demands freedom;
he devises ironical serialist edifices that demean doctrinaire serialism and other isms; and
he engineers musicocosmological worm-holes that enable us to escape political oppression and live to fight another day.

Eisler insists on an emotional integrity that, as he saw it, serialism threatened. He deviates deliberately from a literal ordering and prefers intuitive permutations of the tone-row. If we perform it or listen to it, we perceive this directly. You don’t need an advanced degree in music theory to figure it out. And we can only imagine that this was Eisler’s deep intention, a pre-compositional and editorial mantra: create inherent radical liberty, where expressive freedom takes precedence over the tyranny of the tone-row.

The obsessiveness of some serialists, versus the iconoclasm of Eisler? Oh, but Eisler did indulge in a sort of meta-obsession. He is not an anarchist. He has his own detailed methods and values. The Streichquartett series is built from motivic ideas and is an ‘organic’ expressive space, in a way that’s reflected in how the piece progresses. But these series are not casual, ‘throw-down’ explorations. They are [obsessively] calculated so as to be precisely suited to [suitable for] the subsequent contrapuntal variations. The architecture for variation is itself the result of variation. Eisler draws and re-draws the architectural plans; surveys the building site; digs the holes for the piers and foundation; and begins constructing his building from the ground up, so to say.

But wait! He has architected the thing with provisions that anticipate the demolition of the building 50 years later, with provisions that facilitate the deconstruction and reclamation of the land, and its re-use for subsequent construction, for subsequent societies.

Wait again! He has architected the thing with provisions anticipating the return to a verdant naturalism. The departure from strict serialism reflected Hanns’s belief that innate and spontaneous motives will eventual prevail; reflected his deep mistrust of any ‘system’. Poetic license is not merely ‘taken’; according to Hanns Eisler, it must be taken, to produce anything of aesthetic value.

Not all Eisler’s music is challenging or ‘in-your-face’ political. In fact, some of his piano parts have an almost Schubertian tenderness. Other of his pieces are ironical or over-the-top comical. Some are combinations of all of these things.

[50-sec clip, Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, Stephen Roane Quartet, There’s Nothing Quite Like Money, ‘Abortion Is Illegal’, 1.9MB MP3]

Sadly, Eisler’s communist leanings have caused his music to be long neglected in the West, although the Vogler Quartett and others have added his works to their repertoire. There is much to be admired in Eisler’s compositions, and I hope more ensembles choose to perform these works. In the current political season in the U.S., Eisler’s music feels like ‘relief’—like a much-needed antidote to the relentless neoconservative, theocratic onslaught that is upon us; like an inspiring call to ‘mindfulness’ in this terrible era of the proudly ignorant ‘low-information’ voter.

E lias Canetti asked me how I got on with my father. When I pointed out that Hanns had been already dead for a dozen years, Canetti answered that he did in fact know this, but nevertheless wanted to learn from me how I got on with my father. ‘Very well,’ I replied. Canetti then assured me that the relationship with my father ‘would be still better in the future’ [than it has been thus far], a remark which seemed to me extremely odd, aggressive, and troubling... During my childhood, I saw my father rarely and at irregular intervals. My parents’ separation and divorce, which from my point of view occurred relatively early, was partly to blame for this, but above all it was due to events of the time. The meetings in Vienna are particularly clear in my memory—visits together to the Café Museum where my father met his friends, members of the Schoenberg circle... Because my mother was a singer and pianist I spent a significant part of my childhood amongst a circle of musicians, whose specialized language was familiar to me from an early age. My father was for a long time perceptible to me primarily through his ‘reflection’, through impressions I have of the people who were his friends... I often reflect on life in a musical family: the frequent chamber music [played by my parents friends, in public concerts and in the household of my childhood] signifies for me the ‘submerged’ world of childhood, the essence of childhood.”
— Georg Eisler, quoted in Blake’s biography of Hanns Eisler, p. 73.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Imbrie: Social Diversity-Conscious Composer/Historian/Iconoclast

P olitical myths are narratives that coagulate and reproduce significance [for and in a social group]. They consist of the work on a common narrative by which the members of a social group or society represent or posit their experiences and deeds. As such, they are an important part of what can be called the ‘social imaginary’... [Political myths] are positional, in that they are told from the standpoint of the present. In other words, if the historian can be defined as a ‘turned-back prophet’, in what ways does he or she differ from an ideal/typical myth-maker? Or, to put it another way, in what ways do political myths and historical writings respectively contribute to present identities, or in what ways are they the result of them?”
— Chiara Bottici, p. 201.

Andrew Imbrie (06-APR-1921 – 05-DEC-2007) had a wry sense of humor, one that hails from an era that seems now long-gone. Exhibit “A”: Imbrie’s ‘Three Against Christmas,’ an opera in four scenes (libretto by Richard Wincor, available through Edition C.F.Peters) about Christmas being banned and restored——premiered in Berkeley in 1964. In the current political climate in the U.S. today, it’s hard to imagine such a thing being written—even in jest—and unthinkable that it could be performed in a public place. Imbrie’s last completed work, ‘Sextet for Six Friends’, was premiered by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble in February this year. It, too, manifests iconoclasm at its social-activist best—revising the relationship between the performers and the audience, and challenging the audience members’ conceptions of themselves and their society.

Andrew Imbrie’s music was emblematic of a 60+ year quest for meaningful post-tonal idioms. His compositions honor the individual and social importance of emotion and integrity. He harnesses dissonance and motivic ‘passion’ in the service of narrative development, of dramatic exposition, and of harmonic relationships between the voices/parts; that is to say, he did not indulge in throw-down, dissonant gestures to uncertain ends.

It’s debatable whether Imbrie preferred harmonies that are non-triadic. But, if triadic harmonies were to be sanctioned in an Imbrie composition, then they’d better be ‘non-functional’ ones, or at least not ‘conventionality-subservient-functional’ ones!

His Requiem, for example, is terse, bitter, mercurial—defiant, even. But, rather than dwell upon poignant reflection and grief, the 32-minute, 6-movement work generates an unexpected epiphany. It propels us [performers; listeners] to an unbidden, inadvertent (re-)discovery of the divergence between views about what mortality means—divergent views of people of different ages, between successive generations of humans—decorated by the traditional Latin Requiem text and elegiac poetry by William Blake, George Herbert and John Donne.

M y music does not strive to be American like my nationality, nor Scottish like my ancestry. It is neither experimental nor conventional... Composing for me is a process of drawing out the consequences (as I perceive them) of an initial idea ... Once the idea has become specific enough, it begins to generate its own continuation ... The sense of the large structure becomes increasingly clear as the work progresses.”
— Andrew Imbrie.

The divergent views are not resolved, nor are they resolvable. In a thoroughly post-modern way, Imbrie shows the validity of each of the divergent perspectives and affirms each. There is no ideological ‘winner’; there is no ‘best’. Besides our inevitable losses and mortality, the inherent, irresolvable complexity in the human condition is the gaping truth that Imbrie reveals in this peculiar, deeply-moving Requiem. You wanted something nicey-nicey? Tough luck! Discover this!

A sking a composer to describe his own style is like asking a person ‘How do you walk? How do you talk? How do you breathe?’ ”
— Andrew Imbrie, Society of Composers interview, 2001.

Imbrie acknowledged his influences and composerly indebtedness to sounds and compositional methods used by predecessors. But he deeply mistrusted mathematical systems and 20th century formal models—12-tone/serialist ones and otherwise. He was, in other words, a brave and sturdy opponent of dogma and coercion and blinkered orthodoxy of all sorts.

Three Against Christmas, Andrew Imbrie, Berkeley, 1964

‘Three Against Christmas’ was, after all, a comic opera—a tragically prescient one, maybe, considering the course that things have taken lately, anticipating as it did the social and political trends that lay in the decades ahead.

Then and now, of course, no one has ‘banned’ Nativity plays. People are nominally still free to celebrate the coming holiday as they see fit—which may include going to church, celebrating it without any religious content, or completely ignoring it. The only significant change in recent years has been politicians’ and the media’s progressive audacity to pretend that they have ‘values’ (and implying that others do not have legitimacy or ‘values’) by spuriously defending something that isn’t under attack, and by disingenuously ascribing to their political opponents views that those opponents do not in fact hold—all of this done in a shameless attempt to arrogate more power to themselves, and to disenfranchise/suppress voices that are different from their own.

T here is a consistency of style, character, spirit — what is commonly called ‘voice’ — that identify the music as personally, individually his. At no point could it be identified with a ‘movement’, a ‘trend’, a ‘school’, an ‘-ism’.”
— Robert Commanday, Memorial remarks, A Composer Apart, SFCV.

Imbrie’s works include five string quartets, plus many chamber and choral works, as well as three symphonies. Each of these, in one way or another, propounds arguments in support of pluralism and explores the merits of cultural and perspectival diversity. By implication, Imbrie exhorted us to be honest, and to acknowledge that we are all of ‘mixed’ heritage—that we all desperately need to ‘belong’.

I n the Latin text, the Offertory is an actual prayer, not a poem about prayer as it is here. The choral and instrumental setting is intended to reflect its ritual quality, enhancing it by the alternation of male and female voices and by the ornamental use of tuned drums. Only in the middle, where the chorus prays that the dead be granted eternal life, does the music escape from this implied formality. ‘Death be Not Proud and Conclusion’ consists of three parts. The first is an extended, agitated orchestral introduction, which was needed in order to generate the energy for the setting of John Donne’s sonnet. Here, the chorus sings in English for the first time and sings only one melody in unison and octaves. This culminating expression of human faith in an ultimate victory over death is followed by a foreshortened setting of the concluding parts of the Latin Requiem, in which the soprano soloist, singing in Latin for the first time, participates by interjecting a ‘Benedictus’, reaching the highest notes of her range. After this, while the listener holds those high notes in memory, together with the preceding choral sounds, the music subsides quickly to its conclusion, recalling the opening of the work.”
— Andrew Imbrie.

T he overall concept of civic virtue too often contains a romantic reading of history that, we think, leads us astray. The assumption of a singular moral center in the past and the desire to resume it in the future promotes an ideology [that is] deficient on two counts. It is more intolerant toward those who feel harmed by the prevailing consensus, and it preempts the possibility that greater social unity might flow from value systems that are open to multiple sources of moral authority. To imagine a pristine time before the fall is to assume a harmonious time that never existed...”
— Tom de Luca, p.87.

We will miss Andrew Imbrie’s activism, his inclusiveness, his generosity and tolerance, his curiosity and enthusiasm for new ideas. We will miss his good sense of humor; his zeal for manufacturing equality, plurality, and justice where those were in short supply. We will miss his communitarian tendency to encourage all people to join and discover and celebrate their respective traditions and identities.