Musical Style and Genre

History and Modernity

Marina Lobanova, Kate Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136652295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This volume constitutes the first complete publication of Marina Lobanova's study - banned in Russia in 1979 as too avant-garde and published there only in a bowdlerized version in 1990.
Drawing on baroque, classical, romantic, and contemporary music, Dr. Lobanova proposes an original concept of musical syntax with special emphasis on the role of the categories of time, space, and motion. Embracing such aspects of cultural life as poetry and philosophy, she deals with the problems of cultural dialogue and the disintegration of the concept of absolute music.

Chapter I Unprecedented Reality: Innovation, Tradition And Style In Epochs Of Great Rupture

DOI: 10.4324/9780203059722-2

The art of the twentieth century is full of acute historical resonances. The connections, analogies and correspondences of different epochs and cultures are felt keenly by modern artists and scholars. The problem of “Baroque and the Twentieth Century” acquires a special significance. “To my mind Monteverdi […] is not only a remarkably contemporary personality, but also, if I might put it like this, akin to me in spirit,” said Stravinsky.¹

Penderecki spoke of the Baroque features in his opera after Milton.² Clear connections with the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach can be traced in Bartók’s work. Thus, for example, the composer noted about one of his pieces, Microcosmos, that “The same dissonances can be found in Bach,” another piece is sub-titled Hommage à J.S.B., and yet another, to quote Bartók, “reproduces the Baroque form”.³ The resurrection of Baroque forms and genres and the use of the musical terminology of Baroque has assumed remarkable proportions in our day. Bach idioms are not only the “commonplaces” of neo-classicism, which to a large extent is actually neo-Baroque, but, paradoxical though it may seem, to an even greater extent they are a distinguishing feature of the music of the twentieth century. The theme of “Bach and the present day” could probably become the subject of extensive research. It is sometimes hard to remember that Bach composed in the age of Baroque, because his music is so closely connected with the modern consciousness, not with the past, but with the cultural present. In a sense we are living in the age of Bach.

¹ Quotation from: Konen V. Klaudio Monteverdi, Moscow, 1971, p. 21. ² Meine Musik hat barocke Züge: ein Gespräch mit dem Komponisten Krzysztof Penderecki. – Die Opernwelt, 1979, No. 1. ³ Breuer J. Bach und Bartók – In: Bericht über die wissenschaftliche Konferenz zum III. Internationalen Bachfest der DDR. Leipzig, 1977, S. 311.

The creators of the age of Baroque anticipated many of the ideas developed in the twentieth century and formerly regarded as the achievements of the modern day. Thus, Baltasar Gracián anticipated the important science fiction idea of the time machine, and his unique experiment The Critic is the first culturological novel of the new age. Whereas Garcia Lorca not only defended the poetics of the brilliant Luis de Góngora, but also established the significance of this heretical seventeenth-century poet for contemporary Spanish poetry.⁴

⁴ See: Gabriel Garcia Lorca. On Art (in Russian) Moscow, 1971.

The technique of conceptualismo developed by Gracián in his famous treatise Wittiness and the Art of Ingenuity is remarkably similar to the phenomena described in Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten by Sigmund Freud. It is not simply a matter of comparing and contrasting the themes of Bach and the Present Day, Heinrich Schütz and Contemporary Music, etc. For some traditions turning to Baroque is becoming a means of ensuring their viability in the present. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Latin American literature. “The literature of South America will be a Baroque literature or no literature at all,” is how Alejo Carpentier defined the situation.⁵ A theoretician and practitioner of Baroque and neo-Baroque, he wrote his famous novel A Baroque Concerto in 1975, and the theme of Baroque and Baroqueness is the main one in his writing. Baroque poetics is equally important for Federico Fellini, whom Alberto Moravia called Federico the Baroque. Serious parallels can be drawn between the aesthetics and poetics of Baroque and modern literature. “I believe,” wrote I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, “that a study of the influence of Baroque writers on Ionesco, Kafka and other modernist writers of the twentieth century would produce some quite unexpected results.”⁶ All this by no means exhausts the significance of the Baroque age and culture for the modern consciousness. There must be some most important reasons which compel modern artists to examine the Baroque world with such interest and draw ideas from it. There must be similar principles in the aesthetics and poetics of these two ages and, finally, there must be reasons of a social nature which influence the theme of Baroque and the Twentieth Century so strongly.

⁵ Quotation from: Zyukova N. Alekho Karpent’er. Leningrad, 1982, p. 101. ⁶ Golenishchev-Kutuzov I. N., Romanskiye literatury. Moscow, 1975, p. 232.

“Something has Come to an End”

The age of Baroque witnessed a radical restructuring of the system of thought, philosophical premises and picture of the universe comparable only with the crisis in “classical world outlook” that shook the world in the twentieth century. In the Baroque age “the religious wars and foreign interventions that aggravated social contradictions, the severity of the champions of the counter-reformation and the intolerance of protestants of all kinds promoted the emergence of people who combined the ironical and the tragic and doubted all truth. During this age the stability and immutability of the world were violated. The earth began to shake under the feet of people of the new age. Imagine a Quattrocento humanist in the middle of a Renaissance square. Before him are the straight harmonic lines of the buildings. Their contours clearly separate the work of human hands from the chaotic forms of Nature. The Earth is still the centre of the Universe. The sun and stars revolve around man and the creations of his hands. Copernicus, Bruno and then Galileo shook this harmonious and misleading system of the universe. The earth was ‘set in motion’ and this motion violated the symmetry and perfection of classical forms. Even those Baroque writers who meekly followed the teaching of the Church, sensed that something had gone wrong with the familiar geometrical world. The very idea of the transitoriness of the Universe and the illusory nature of earthly life drawn from mediaeval folios was a strange combination with the science of the new age.”⁷

⁷ Ibid., p. 346.

The modern world is experiencing equally painful processes connected with the collapse of the “age of humanism” (Alexander Blok) as an historical trend or world outlook. The rejection of the “classical style of thinking” which is taking place in many areas of modern culture shows itself most clearly in philosophy. For classical philosophy, the whole “style of thought” was characterised by a view of the world as a determined whole which could be rationally understood.

The optimistic wholeness of anthropo-centric classical philosophy proved to be short-lived, however, and did not justify its claims to universality. The crisis of this system in the twentieth century led to the realisation that it was bankrupt. Modern philosophy found itself challenging classical philosophy.

People at the beginning of the age of Baroque were haunted by a clear sense that “something had come to an end”, just as many were in the first few decades of the present century. Hamlet’s words “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born, to set it right” could perfectly well be applied to our day too. Man is correlated to history. He is correlated to different “ages”. He finds himself at the crossroads of the “old” and the “new”, senses the meeting of these two ages. It is not surprising that the problem of time and space, which is specific to the twentieth century, was realised and stressed in the age of Baroque. The contact of the old and the new in time, history and culture brings tragedy and tension to one’s experience of the world – the only possibility of being is antithetical.

A clear sense that “something had come to an end” was felt by people at the beginning of the Baroque age and during the first few decades of the present century. Man’s perception of polyphonic time, history and culture made him give a tragic interpretation to everything that took place in the world. The “end of the old” and “beginning of the new” are motifs which have resounded for many decades in the twentieth century. For philosophers the period of cultural alienation meant that something was “radically wrong” (P. Florensky) with the whole of life. In reality a Babylonian mixture of languages reigned. The disintegration affected everyday life and ideas of the personality. The “discovery of man” in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, the realisation of “pure duration” by Henri Bergson, William James’ philosophy of the “stream of consciousness”, etc. were precisely related by many artists to their own tasks and aims.

The formation of a new approach to culture and the search for syntheses which took place later, in the 1920s and 1930s, were painfully long and hard. The shock experienced by the Russian intelligentsia in the period “between two revolutions” was also reflected in Alexander Blok’s polyphonic hearing of the age and in Andrei Bely’s phantasmagoria Petersburg which, to quote one scholar, “deforms reality by shifting the narrative from the real level to a different one of ‘universal provocation’.”⁸

⁸ Piskunov B., “Vtoroye prostranstvo” romana A. Belogo “Peterburg”. – Voprosy literatury, 1987, No. 10, p. 131.

The hyperbolic nature of its world outlook was clearly sensed by the author himself: “Petersburg … is a point: on the geographical map; on the other hand: a point within a point, or the senator’s head asserted its point of view, the fiction of a bomb, in fact of life; the same turning of consciousness into everyday life is asserted by the senator’s son in the caricature-like rules of the neo-Kantian Cohen; and the idea of the bomb becomes in the thoughts of the father and his son a real bomb, from which the empire is to die (Poprishchin’s ravings about brain blowing over the cranium); the author himself is horrified: the idea of the senator thinking that his son is friendly with a bomb-thrower has become reality – a bomb, a bomb-thrower and the senator’s son who tries to kill his father, and the senator who entertains such suspicions … The changing of the stylistics of raving into pure punning and vice versa produces a deliberate inarticulateness which is served up in a stilted fashion. It is hyperbole achieved in the plot …”.⁹ The supra-reality of this plural, self-doubling, self-losing, self-stratifying hyper-reality which engenders different disputing voices that interrupt one another, intensify and are distorted in incredible conditions, this poetics verging on the absurd, is by no means an exception that disproves the rules.

⁹ Bely A., Masterstvo Gogolya. Moscow, 1934, p. 34.

Another equally significant example, is the experience of Joyce, who reconstructs history and restores the “broken link of the ages”. Hermann Hesse and W. B. Yeats dreamed of recreating the wholeness and primordial nature of culture lost by the “feuilleton epoch” and “newspaper civilisation”.

The strange imagery, style of thinking and course of associative discussion are seen in the growing acuteness of cultural conflicts. During periods of great change and rupture there is a heightened need to search for coherence, to find the original foundations. And most characteristic, in our day artists equate the paradoxical acquisition of unity in disintegration and the search for harmony in blatant contradictions with the Baroque method! “Baroque, baroqueness, is not just a style,” writes Carpentier, “it is a method or ordering through disorder.”¹⁰ Characteristically Alberto Moravia understands the word “Baroque” as “action directed towards destroying the rhythm of forms with the aim of revealing new meaning. Moravia maintains that ‘Baroque includes criticism of form and the urge to free meaning from form, which would otherwise be hard to understand.”¹¹ Here “Baroque” loses its stylistic function and becomes a cultural indicator of the changes which take place in a transitional period, colouring many forms in culture which require slow crystallisation.

¹⁰ Quotation from: Zyukova N., op. cit., p. 103. ¹¹ Moravia A. Federiko Barochny. – In the collection: Federiko Fellini. Stat’i. Interv’yu. Retsenzii. Vospominaniya. Moscow, 1968, p. 270.

The development of the new approach to culture which took place in the first few decades of the twentieth century was as long and painfully difficult as this. An awareness of the polyphonism of the age, history and culture forced people to look at what was happening in a new way, to build up new connections and see what had previously eluded their attention. And it was, of course, not surprising that the leading lights of the Silver Age in Russian poetry were not only highly demanding of themselves. They disciplined their own talent, doing a vast amount of work to transform both their own style and verse poetics. Suffice it to mention Bryusov and later Gumilev, for whom the question of self-discipline was not simply a narrowly personal one.

Even on the level of everyday awareness, however, the changes were perceived by the most sensitive artists and cultural theoreticians. Even familiar objects and words seemed strange and unfamiliar. This was brilliantly conveyed by Viktor Shklovsky: “We used to say ‘How do you do’ to one another when we met, but now the word has died and we just say ‘owdedo’. The legs on our chairs, the patterns on our cloth, the ornaments in our homes, the paintings of the Petersburg Society of Artists, the sculpture by Gintsburg all say ‘owdedo’ to us. The ornament there is not made, it is ‘told’, designed so that people won’t recognise it and say ‘it’s the same’… Today the old art has died and the new has not yet been born; and objects have died too. We have lost our feeling for the world; we are like a violinist who can no longer feel the bow or the strings. We have stopped being artists in our everyday life. We do not like our homes or our clothes and easily part with our lives, which we do not feel either. Only the creation of new art forms can restore to man his sense of the world, resurrect objects and destroy pessimism.”¹² The artist’s mission was endowed with this tremendous significance. “The days’ connecting link is broken”. These words arise here not through association, but because they convey the “Baroque” type of world outlook, a similar cultural situation. The resurrection of words, the resurrection of art, the resurrection of experiencing life – these concepts have become fundamental.

¹² Shklovsky V., Voskresheniye slova. St Petersburg, 1914, pp. 11-12.

The Antinomies of Baroque

The “Baroque” reveals itself not only in the subtle recording of “strangeness”. This quality also presupposes a heightened structuralism, the search for and recreation of harmony and perfection where the material of life and art oppose this. To understand the principles of Baroque aesthetics and poetics in their fullness and unity, we must first accept its mutually exclusive aims, otherwise we shall schematise Baroque, deleting ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Unprecedented Reality: Innovation, Tradition and Style in Epochs of Great Rupture
• 2. The Principles of Musical Poetics-Baroque and the Twentieth Century
• 3. The Formation of a New Concept of Musical Style
• 4. Problems of Musical Style: Classicism, Baroque and the Twentieth Century
• 5. The Problem of Musical Genre: Baroque, Classicism and the Twentieth Century
• In Lieu of a Conclusion
• Appendices
• Index