Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music

Aaron Hayes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429575167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music gives a historical and philosophical account of the discussions of the nature of time and music during the mid-twentieth century.

The nature of time was a persistent topic among composers in Paris and Darmstadt in the decades after World War II, one which influenced their musical practice and historical relevance. Based on the author's specialized knowledge of the relevant philosophical discourses, this volume offers a balanced critique of these composers' attempts at philosophizing about time. Touching on familiar topics such as Adorno's philosophy of music, the writings of Boulez and Stockhausen, and Messiaen's theology, this volume uncovers specific relationships among varied intellectual traditions that have not previously been described.

Each chapter provides a philosophical explanation of specific problems that are relevant for interpreting the composer's own essays or lectures, followed by a musical analysis of a piece of music which illustrates central theoretical concepts.

This is a valuable study for scholars and researchers of music theory, music history, and the philosophy of music.

1 Introduction

Music does not necessarily hold a privileged relationship with the question of time. All of daily life shares with music the basic temporal structure that philosophers have puzzled over since the pre-Socratics. Through time, our eyes follow the lines of a painting or the path we are walking down. The novel unfolds as we read it and the crystal reveals its facets as it is turned in the hand. The wood burns, the river flows. If time is simply an independent variable onto which listening, seeing, and feeling all can be charted, no experience could breach that independence. And indeed, keeping time independent from experience is certainly a parsimonious solution to an equivocal mess of issues surrounding the question of what time is. Most of the history of thought, however, has occupied itself with the problem of why human experience shares its basic temporal structure with a world time heading in a single direction. Time was a problem embedded in myth and religion even before the pre-Socratics took it up in its distilled philosophical form. This concern has persisted and became one of the most challenging questions to emerge as twentieth-century science, mathematics, and philosophy grappled with the unexpected development of relativity and the complexity of human memory and perception.

One simple reason that music was so closely tied to the question of time in the twentieth century was that certain composers who were attuned to the intellectual culture surrounding them were reading many of those philosophers who asserted this music–time connection. Philosophical and scientific questions about time and musical style were persistently bridged together by thinkers, and many of those composers studying with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s and 1950s, including Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, shared a concern with questions of time and music. Some of those composers’ compatriots at the Darmstadt summer courses in the 1950s and 1960s, including Györgi Ligeti and the philosopher Theodor Adorno, also invested a considerable effort in thinking about time and its relationship with music. The years between 1949 and 1954 saw a concentrated musical and philosophical discussion in Paris, which transferred to Darmstadt in direct ways through a mutual engagement with the problem of time by composers and other intellectuals. This closely knit musical-intellectual world in the early 1950s helped to foster a common ground that would come to influence musical and philosophical ideas about time for the next twenty years, especially those figures coming out of Darmstadt. Rethinking traditional concepts of musical form, rhythmic organization, and other inherited musical practices, their inquiries reflected an intellectual sensitivity to the larger concern with time that marked philosophy and science in the twentieth century. Time became a persistent trope within theoretical challenges and compositional practice. Moreover, thinking about time also provided a route into questions of musical experience, an issue which was often obscured in the discursive orientation toward compositional technique. In fact, this interest in time as a question of experience, I will argue throughout this book, was a primary reason that composers invoked the larger historical–philosophical discourse about time in their approach to music.

An unsympathetic interpretation would point out that ‘time’ in the discussion of the avant-garde represents a strategic intellectual posturing. This negative interpretation might point out that ‘time’ for these composers can often easily be reduced down to a simpler discussion about various musical elements within time. When, for example, Stockhausen wanted to discuss the serial organization of rhythm in relation to other musical elements, he put a spin on it by framing rhythm—an interesting topic, to be sure—within a statement on “…how time passes….”¹ The ellipses in the title of his famous essay amplify this suspicious sense of profound depth, but the basic style is endemic to composers’ writings and lectures of the 1950s. In his analysis of Anton Webern’s String Quartet op. 28, Stockhausen claimed that, in this work “…we do not experience simultaneous temporal processes, what we experience is time, which is always more than the sum of quantitative alterations….”² Stockhausen was perhaps the composer who most often sought to provide insight into nature of time itself, but he was not alone. “Without musicians,” Messiaen said, “time would be much less understood. Philosophers are less advanced in this field. But as composers, we have the great power to chop up and alter time.”³ Henri Pousseur claimed that “…the concept of time [and] the relationship of … consciousness to it, were definitely altered by Webern.”⁴ When Boulez laid out his distinction between smooth and striated, these categories were not merely theoretical structures of musical material. Rather, he proposed that “they are the fundamental laws of time in music.”⁵ In his 1976 program notes for the centenary Ring cycle at Bayreuth, Boulez writes that Wagner was “obliged to change the traditional structure of musical thinking—the most important of which was time.” Boulez remarked that “it is a strange fact that [Wagner] never refers to this primary component [of time] in any of his writings.”⁶ This elision of musical content with time itself did not strike Boulez as a mark of his own cultural moment, a hint that the concern with ‘time’ marked off a particular horizon of thought.

While it is true that these composers were often engaged in intellectualizing to establish their self-importance as composer-philosophers, it does not invalidate the historical significance of their efforts. The concern for time at this historical moment is not accidental. Indeed, it reflects a central characteristic of these composers’ historical significance. It would be a mistake to once again re-inscribe here a myopic vision of modernist progress that credits these composers as true discoverers of an essential nature of musical time, achieved through their relentless pursuit of the new. Still, the matter of matching the theoretical discourse to the historically corresponding styles like serial and electronic music requires a certain critical approach to the content of these composers’ thinking. Like other artistic changes of the past century in other media, the rapid developments of new techniques of creativity confronted older critical and analytical frameworks that seemed inadequate. This situation was amplified by the climate of Paris and Darmstadt in the decade after World War II. These composers’ search for a useful music theory within the post-war mindset invited not only the rejection of outmoded music theory, but a gesture of complete break with the past. Returning to the ostensibly ahistorical dimension of time as some intellectually primordial stage of drawing the first line on the blank slate of serial theory, carries with it a sense of the historical moment seeking an effacement of its historical dependencies. Though I will demonstrate a number of points of continuity of musical and theoretical thought, integral serialism did pose its own discursive challenges for a broader musical culture that still had not completely come to terms with the pre-war music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. It is, perhaps ironically, precisely this concern with the primordial, ahistorical problem of time that can serve as one of the most distinct indicators of the broader historical narratives in which they are placed.

Understanding time as a tool for theoretical discussions only explains so much, though. Time also provided a considerable amount of thematic content for early and mid-twentieth-century art, a fact that is reinforced in a number of musical works I discuss in the analytic sections following each chapter. Early on, Proust’s and Mallarmé’s writings confronted traditional formal categories in their literary genres, but equally touched on time or versions of the eternal within the texts themselves. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) and then The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) brought the topic into the realm of surrealist painting. The black and white stills of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée play with the formal constraints of cinematic temporality, but the plot equally takes up time travel as the only route to the redemption of a humanity destroyed by nuclear war. Americans went to see George Pal’s cinematic production of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine on the big screen in 1960, and Dr. Who began his time travels in 1963. From the broadest cultural viewpoint, Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße (1956), Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1941), and Jean Barraqué’s Le temps restitué (1957/1968) share the twofold interest in time as a theoretical and compositional problem, and as a thematic anxiety within the content of their pieces.

These composers’ approach to time illustrates a significant historical characteristic of the language and logic of modernist progress that they employed. The question of time sheds light on the larger historical arena in which composers created their music and their theories. However, even as their approach to time reveals a considerable amount about the history of this era, it does not do so by way of clarifying some operational definition of time. Rather, time was a generative problem. The situation did not articulate a certain way of understanding time, but a particular manner of questioning. For this reason, the specific discussions of musical works that I undertake in the following chapters rely on the concepts of time that live in closest historical proximity to that music. My (often admittedly sympathetic) reading of composers’ and philosophers’ ideas leads directly into the analytical methods I employ, rather than via some abstract version of time that I might have built out of an ahistorical account of their theories. These ideas shape my treatment of a selection of musical works that, in their own way, have come to represent some of the most focused musical attempts at confronting past assumptions about music and time. The validity of this approach does not rest on the hope that some essential version of musical time might be therein be discovered, but rather in the realization that any concept of time must from the beginning be thought within a horizon of discourse. Whether these horizons are satisfactorily large enough to contribute to a general theory of twentieth-century music remains an important and certainly open question.

If there is one perspective that precedes and motivates these diverse theorizations on time, it would be Gisèle Brelet’s two-volume work Le Temps Musicale published in 1949. Brelet’s work was an encyclopedic critique of ideas on music and time. Jean Boivin’s archival research notes that Brelet was a topic of study in Messiaen’s class, and Brelet is also mentioned in Messiaen’s posthumously published Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie as an important source for the composer’s concepts on time.⁷ Her work is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s sources for their treatment of music and time in A Thousand Plateaus, and Tamara Levitz notes in passing that Stravinsky and Souvtchinsky read her work as well.⁸ Completing her doctorate in philosophy and biology at the Sorbonne, Brelet’s writing tapped philosophical positions from Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Aristoxenus, Augustine, and other ancient philosophers, to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer; from Bergson and Heidegger to Souvtchinsky, Jankélévitch, and Boris de Schloezer, as well as scientific and musicological sources: Wundt, Seashore, Kurth and Hugo Riemann, Helmholtz, and a thorough account of her contemporaneous studies in music psychology.⁹ Brelet’s goal was to offer an aesthetic study of music from a philosophical perspective oriented on time, the first volume covering melody, harmony, and rhythm; the second volume organized around problems of form. Her expansive claims synthesized a wide variety of musical discussions (gamelan and other non-European traditions also make an appearance) into a focused inquiry into time.

Brelet’s thoughts help to clarify a number of themes that weave throughout the following historical and analytical discussions: why Webern’s music was an important discursive point of departure for much of the following discourse; why Henri Bergson remained a constant background presence, and the constant anxiety about the relationship between musical time and the concept of time in mathematics and science. Each of these topics had already germinated in the late 1940s within Brelet and Messiaen, and thus set the stage for their persistence over the next decades of discourse on musical time.

Chapters

Exc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Analysis: Anton Webern, Concerto Op. 24, m. 38–40
• 3 Duration and eternity: Messiaen’s time categories
• 4 Analysis: Olivier Messiaen, ‘Ile de Feu I’ from Quatre Études de rythme
• 5 Continuity: Boulez’s smooth time and its mathematical negotiations
• 6 Analysis: Pierre Boulez, Improvisations sur Mallarmé II—‘Une dentelle s’abolit’
• 7 The unity of time: Stockhausen’s engagement with acoustics
• 8 Analysis: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zeitmaße
• 9 Trauma: Goeyvaerts and Adorno on musical stasis
• 10 Analysis: Karel Goeyvaerts, Sonata for two pianos, movements II–III
• 11 Spacetime: Xenakis and the end of the discourse on musical time
• 12 Analysis: Iannis Xenakis, Nomos Alpha
• Bibliography
• Index