jwilzewske: zizek

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Monday, July 16, 2007

The Open-Ended ‘Present’: Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor

I deology seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.”
— Slavoj Žižek, in Mapping Ideology, 1994, p. 4.

DSM: This Quartet was written in 1876, when Mahler was around 16 years old . . . when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. It was written in A minor, a key Mahler believed symbolized the ‘unconscious anticipation of things to come.’ The melancholy end of the movement is clairvoyant—premonitory of sad things ahead for Mahler, the death of his children, sad things ahead for his country, for Europe, and the world. This quartet is the only chamber piece known to be composed by Mahler. And, as you know, it’s incomplete; only the first movement was finished.

CMT: There’s an intensification of the emotion in this Piano Quartet—an increase in the magnitude of what Žižek would call ‘disturbances of the real.’ The ‘real’ manifests itself in this Piano Quartet as an innocuous cadence whose presence becomes uncanny only when the cadence keeps recurring. Its constant presence disrupts the other motifs and symbolisms, and serves as a continual reminder that these realities are only constructions. The rendering of the ‘real’ seeps into the core of the Quartet, through the ‘leaping’ motif (in the left hand of the piano in this snippet):

which irrupts on the surface again and again, setting into motion the final passage which becomes a materialization of a pure, singular drive. What was abstract in the opening becomes pernicious and concrete motive by the end—a psychological ‘fixation.’ Yes, it’s a ‘fixation,’ monotonously dominating the Quartet. This motive, an empty signifier, represents the kernel upon which Mahler’s modern subject’s reality is grounded. Irruptions of the ‘real’ become an pervasive feature in Mahler’s musical discourse in this Quartet, to the exclusion of most everything else.

DSM: This Quartet may have been written in his young student days, but it isn’t ‘juvenilia.’ It does show some emulation of Dvorak, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It has a dark consonance that grows denser toward the end. Mahler’s transitions into remote keys occur unexpectedly. This lends a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty to the piece. Uneasiness.

CMT: Look at this tenuto combined with a marcato—a ‘portato’—intermediate note-lengths, detached but not staccato. Accentuated one way or another, more détaché than martelé—it’s played on one bow stroke, but each note is gently articulated, used when a feeling of “carry” from one note to the next is needed. The portati consume the bow—moving from the bow tip back up to the frog, say—running out of time, running out of life. This is emotional writing (violin staff in snippet below).

DSM: The melodic elements sink deeper and deeper into the bass register until all energy is spent and only a quiet malignant evocation of the minor third of A minor is left. Grim pathos here!

CMT: To a certain extent, the Quartet finds its own means of managing and containing the ruptures of the ‘real’ within its constructed musical universe. But with the increase in the size of the ruptures, the ‘real’ affects the Quartet on an more and more ‘pathological’ level. The Quartet’s means of integrating the little piece of the real into the constructed universe is not so pathological. But by the middle of the movement, we have a recapitulation for the sonata form—a kind of ‘payment of symbolic debt’ that brings an end to the pure emotional ‘drive.’ By the end, the emotional devastation wrought by the ‘real’ in this Quartet is catastrophic. The piano’s last two chords are a poignant fatalism. All other meaning has been obliterated by the end of the movement, leaving only an empty husk. In a sense, the Quartet documents an almost complete destruction of the musical universe.

DSM: As such, its drama feels a bit like Barber’s Adagio. But, your qualifier ‘almost’ is important: history is not closed here with those last two piano chords. What was to be a suicide note, a work commemorating something or someone in memoriam, has failed: in the final chords we find that the work is a testament to the author’s, and to humanity’s, resilience and ability to survive.

CMT: Ultimately, the end of the Quartet proves the continued existence of the Quartet’s subjects—the composer; the performers; the listeners—by showing that the subject still remains, despite all that’s happened. So, while the Quartet argues convincingly that catastrophes definitely do happen, the catastrophes don’t bring about a complete end. In Lacanian psychoanalysis no act is ever totally complete: something always remains. For Žižek, there’s always a survivor or survivors, however damaged they may be. As the Quartet pushes towards its final notes, a conclusive End is an impossibility. The End doesn’t come. The exhausted survivors are left to carry on.

DSM: In Lacanian terminology, the survivors of the apocalypse represent the “the excess that cannot be accounted for by any symbolic idealization”—embodiments of the ‘real.’ With the apocalypse, the exhausted survivors, having survived The End, become representatives of a rendering of the ‘real’—they are the ‘ruptures’ in this symbolic reality.

CMT: The devastation pushes Mahler’s apocalyptic narrative to its limit, as the Quartet’s narrative concludes with a catastrophic act. To continue the intensification process of the apocalyptic narrative is, I think, not possible. Maybe that’s why Mahler never wrote other Piano Quartets: how does one write after the apocalypse? How does one compose a sequel to an ‘end’ that does not bring The End?

DSM: Along with the narrative break, there’s also a dissolving of the barrier of the distance created by the apocalyptic trajectory of this Piano Quartet, and a humanizing of the pathological irruptions of the ‘real.’

CMT: I think so. And, in his book, Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin differentiates between the stylized, ‘absolute’ past of the epic and the open-ended, solvent-like ‘emergent’ or continuing reality found in the novel. An ‘epic’ is set in a past that is so distant that the ‘gap’ created is unbreachable. It is a place where everything is “absolute and complete…everything is finished, already over.” It’s a place of unwavering protagonists and narrative trajectories that never divert from the path. The beginnings of epics are “idealized” or “brightened” and the endings are “darkened.”

DSM: On the other hand, ‘novels’—or in this case, novelistic musical compositions—don’t speak to a remote experience but instead address current reality. Epics have one language, an omniscient voice that knows and tells all. In the novel there are multiple languages, a variety of voices caught in the act of development. In short, the epic is a single-voiced discourse; the novel a multi-vocal discourse. Where the epic prophesies, the novel predicts; while the epic must end in death, the novel depicts “a life process that is imperishable and forever renewing itself, forever contemporary;” the epic is closed and complete, while the novel contains “an unrealized surplus of humanness.”

CMT: Following Bakhtin we can think of this Mahler Piano Quartet as a narrative trajectory of an epic form. Its opening begins with stylized innocence, referring to an absolute past. In the middle of the piece there’s a narrowing of focus to the singular (epic) story where no provision is made for varied voices or points of view. The epic distance is solidified at the end of the Quartet as the world of the past becomes completely inaccessible. At the end there is the violin cadenza—a “canonizing of events” that leads up to the catastrophe or apocalypse.

DSM: But, if we continue following Bakhtin, a novel has discursive features that are capable of seeping into other genres, including the epic. What happens at the end of the Quartet is not the end of history but, to use Derrida’s words, “the end of a certain concept of history,” in this case the epic history of the apocalypse. Mahler’s 16 year-old premonition is of modernity itself. That’s what I hear in this!

CMT: So we have a ‘novelization’ of the Quartet’s discourse when a single voice no longer speaks monologically from an absolute, epic past, but instead multiple voices now sound from current reality—life in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The process follows Attali’s notion of innovative music, leading to “a…conception of history…that is open, unstable.”

DSM: The Quartet strikes me as a searing elegy, a dirge where “death chords” are interrupted by laments equal in their emotional force. The individualistic utterances that are set apart from the surrounding music (both physically and emotionally) have their lyrical and harmonic beauty effaced by the irruptions. The ending passage opens the way for the diffuse finale that represents an unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.

CMT: The finale is the longest section in the Quartet, and in it material from earlier movements returns cyclically. The increase in tempo over the five movements combined with the cyclic return of themes, the intensity and sheer length of the finale create an end-oriented trajectory for the work culminating in the final movement that is an exhausting tour de force. The movement is a sonata form in which every section has developmental tendencies and the recapitulation returns themes not only from earlier in the movement, but also the cyclic returns.

DSM: Well, ‘long’ is a relative term. Melissa Rose and her fellow ensemble members who performed yesterday in Kansas City performed this Quartet in 9 minutes and 20 seconds. By contrast, Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra last year was 13 minutes. Various other artists’ performances of this Quartet are also 12 to 13 minutes long. So it was a tremendous disappointment to hear Rose compress this piece by more than 30% and, in so doing, extinguish the portato and the emotional drama. The ‘arc’ of the recurrences lacked dignity, and the existential impact that the piece should have was blunted by this interpretation. The last two chords became no more than appendages. Regrettably, it retained nothing at all of the depth that Eschenbach projects:

[30-sec clip, Eschenbach, 2.6MB MP3]

T he dignity of Mahler’s music lies in the fact that it can be understood and understands itself, but eludes the hand that would grasp what has been understood.”
— Theodor Adorno

H ow can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly understood by other people, since he himself feels in the presence of his work—if it is genuine art—that he is faced by a riddle about which he too may have illusions?”
— Richard Wagner, letter dated 25-JAN-1854, to August Roeckel

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Anamorphosis: Carmignola’s Lacanian Violin Playing

W hen a string is plucked, the ones which are an octave or a ﬁfth higher vibrate and sound audibly of their own accord. Music thus tightens its ties with sympathy.”
— Descartes, Compendium Musicae, 1618

DSM: Giuliano Carmignola’s playing was positively cinematic!

CMT: His attacks were fierce! Ferocious! The improvisatorial license he exercised was not only with the phrasing and baroque ornamentation, but also with the tempi and dynamics! Vivaldi can so often be merely innuring. But this! This! Carmignola gave us theater! Did you see his suffering? Did you see his ‘argument’ with the Venice Baroque first violins? The alternate bowings, the detaché notes, the arpeggios on each of the strings, the double stops, the dervish figurations in the upper register!

DSM: He put himself entirely into the music! He really made these pieces stand up, made them 3-dimensional—made them living, breathing things! It was ‘anamorphic Vivaldi’!

CMT: Anamorphic rendering—this means a distortion in the spatial dimensions of a work, correct? In anamorphic graphical art, there are two or more images of the same object in the field of view that simultaneously compete for the viewer’s perception and belief. You have a trompe l’oeil perspective that compels you to work to understand what’s being represented and resolve the conflicts or contradictions in it. This is what you are saying when you use this fancy word ‘anamorphic’?

DSM: Yes. István Orosz and Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner and others are artists who recently having been working in this idiom. The tradition dates back at least to the early Renaissance.

But ‘anamorphic’ also is a term in cinematography—optical lens transformation developed in the 1950s in connection with widescreen formats, to fully utilize the 35mm film surface. If shooting in widescreen picture format, without an anamorphic lens, the available film area is not used completely; some of the film surface is wasted (top and bottom).

But if you shoot with an anamorphic lens, the picture is optically stretched in the vertical dimension to cover the entire film frame, and the inverse projection of this has a much better picture quality. When projecting the film, the projector must use an inverse lens to stretch the image horizontally back to its widescreen 2.40 aspect-ratio.

When I said that Carmignola’s playing seemed ‘anamorphic’ to me, what I mean is that he is compressing the timbral range of the Vivaldi and Tartini. He is also dramatically stretching the rhythmic space of the music, accelerating or retarding tempi as he animates the character. His ferocity and passion arouse in us an identification with his character—a strong sympathy that is really quite unique for an account of Vivaldi. That is what I mean by ‘anamorphic’.

CMT: Žižek describes Lacan’s view of the Subject—that the Subject is signaled by whatever “perturbs the smooth engine of symbolization and throws it off balance, an anamorphic entity that gains its consistency only in retrospect, viewed from within the symbolic horizon.” This is precisely how Carmignola comes across in live performance. He achieves his authenticity exactly because he throws Vivaldi’s smooth engine of symbolization off-balance. And Carmignola capitalizes on the fact that our mass-culture exposure to flatter Vivaldi has innured us! The slow movements for me were romantically milked too much by Carmignola and were nowhere close to an historically ‘proper’ reading. Some of the double-stopping by Carmignola was out of tune. And, just when I’m about to worry about those things, here comes Carmignola with another cinematic revelation, an entirely authentic and passionate utterance from his violin that makes me forgive and rethink all of my ridiculous quibbles. The point about the consistency that is evident only in hind-sight—the retrospective reflection of my forgiving, forgetting, and understanding anew—is basically this rethinking. A hind-sighted coherence. I think you are right—Carmignola is doing an anamorphic rendering of Vivaldi. In fact, Vivaldi is a perfect vehicle for Carmignola’s character. By the way, you know of course that your use of the 50-cent word ‘anamorphic’ is not at all novel. The literary theorists have been using it for years!

DSM: Well, fine. The term just seemed apt to me, that’s all. I don’t care whether the notion is new or not, or whether others in poetics and literary theory have appropriated it before. Musically, these pieces Carmignola performed in Kansas City are unique among Vivaldi’s output. The Vivaldi echoes Tartini and later Italian composers. Several of the pieces offer the soloist notes higher on the staff than we usually hear from Vivaldi. As for the romantic-sounding slow movements, I don’t think that Carmignola’s treatment of them was necessarily ‘romantic’ per se. They certainly were emotional, as they should be. Nobody knows exactly how these were performed in Vivaldi’s time, but I think that Carmignola presents viable and excellent interpretations. His playing is certainly consistent with the dictum that musicians should on one hand try to come as close as possible to the composer’s intentions, but on the other hand should live with the music they play and put their own personality into it. Carmignola has more than a fair share of personality!

CMT: Throughout the allegros were lively, vivacious and clean. But the temptation to take too swift a tempo was carefully avoided. Carmignola’s superbly virtuosic playing extended to the adagio/largo movements. The Venice Baroque ensemble performed with considerable control, I thought, offering calmness and serenity—a dramatic foil for the mercurial Carmignola. I loved the way the expressive playing from Carmignola provides an air of mystery.

DSM: I especially liked hearing Carmignola in the warm ambience of the small Folly Theater. It added nicely to the coloristic palette of the period instruments and was especially congenial to Carmignola’s dynamics. Nothing clinical or astringent about it!

CMT: But what about Carmignola’s character? What about the voice of the subject that Carmignola breathes life into. You know, Plutarch once told the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: ‘You are just a voice and nothing more.’ Deconstructing the layers of meaning that cover the voice and concentrating on ‘the voice and nothing more’ is something that philosopher Mladen Dolar does.

DSM: Ah, up again pops our other mutual interest! In ‘A Voice and Nothing More’ Dolar goes beyond Derrida’s idea of ‘phonocentrism’ and revives and develops Lacan’s claim that the voice is one of the fundamental embodiments of the self, of the psychoanalytic object. Dolar says that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle for meaning and as a source of aesthetic value, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as a ‘lever’ of thought. The voice is a ‘prime mover’. Carmignola is the epitome of a prime mover!

CMT: It takes a certain intrepid curiosity to pick up a book like the ones that Dolar or Žižek write. But the payoff can be huge: a new meaning, a new resonance accruing to something we previously paid barely any attention to—this inquiry into the nature of voice and its role as a bridge between nature and culture, Subject and Object, Self and Other, Body and Mind/Language, the personal and the political, the liminal and the pelagic.

DSM: Ruth HaCohen, a musicologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written about this, too. And Foucault and Deleuze. And Adorno. And Derrida in his brilliant essay ‘Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins’. And Schopenauer long before that. Sympathy, in the sense of the ability to suﬀer with or for the other, entered English usage toward the end of the sixteenth century. This artistic sensibility nourished by the Aristotelian notion of poetic compassion has everything to do with ‘voice’. Max Scheler distinguished sympathy from emotional fusion—empathic states or experiences of total identiﬁcation with another subject. He insisted instead on the exclusivity of sympathy as a moral and aesthetic principle stemming from the unequivocal recognition of the separateness of another human existence.

CMT: ‘Another existence’ in the sense of ‘other’? Other human beings, or other perspective on one’s self?

DSM: I see what you’re getting at. The normal sense would be in terms of subjectivity of other selves. But there is an aspect of Carmignola’s playing—the character he inhabits in his performance—that is self-referential. I suppose it’s possible to have sympathy with yourself, to identify with oneself as a subject, including one’s former self. Carmignola’s minor-key passages’ reflectiveness makes me think of this.

CMT: And Aristotle can be read as viewing real pity and theatrical pity as partially antithetical to each other—the ﬁrst as encouraging moral action while precluding over-involvement, the second as related only indirectly to moral action while demanding emotional participation. Bifurcated between life and art, the Aristotelian eleos became a challenge for literary theorists—they tried to overcome it without relegating pity to an imaginary or lower moral sphere. The outpouring that Carmignola delivers is clearly real, convincing, morally binding! We listeners were pulled from our seats, down to the stage, and grabbed by the collars!

DSM: Peter Greenaway achieved an effect quite like this in his 1982 movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract, set in the England of the Restoration, when tensions between artistic representation and social norms precipitated new appraisal of artist-beholder relations.

CMT: Okay, anamorphic. Have you got any other exotic neologisms in you today? More over-loose associations you wish to share?

DSM: Well, there are Carmignola’s fierce ‘Lombardic’ rhythms. And Carmignola’s ‘terraced’ dynamics. What about the ‘vocal’ tradition of ‘Venetian’ sound? Could we not say that Carmignola makes ‘bravura’ instrumental works out of works that were not written in a bravura manner? How about virtuoso ornaments as ‘insinuations’? The minor keys in Carmignola’s hands seemed to me to be ‘confessions à l’amore’—chromatic ‘incursions’ or ‘irruptions’ into lyric drama. There you are! Satisfied? Enough theoretical neologisms to suit you?

Giuliano Camignola website
István Orosz website
Julian Beever website
Kurt Wenner website
Carmignola G. Vivaldi. (Arkiv, 2006.)
Carmignola G. Late Vivaldi Concertos. (Sony, 2002.)
Carmignola G. Late Vivaldi Concertos. (Sony, 2001.)
Dolar M. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT, 2006.
Gombrich E. Art and Illusion. Princeton Univ, 2000.
Gombrich E. Meditations On a Hobby Horse and Other Essays On the Theory of Art. Phaedon, 1994.
Habib I. Shakespeare's Pluralistic Concepts of Character: A Study in Dramatic Anamorphism. Susquehanna Univ, 1993.
HaCohen R. The Music of Sympathy in the Arts of the Baroque; or, the Use of Difference to Overcome Indifference. Poetics Today. 2001;22:607-50.
Leeman F. Hidden images: Games of perception, anamorphic art, illusion : from the Renaissance to the present. Abrams, 1976.
Žižek S, Critchley S. How to Read Lacan. Norton, 2007.
Žižek S. Interrogating the Real. Continuum, 2006.
Žižek S, Dolar M. Opera's Second Death. Routledge, 2001.