Music's Monisms

Disarticulating Modernism

Daniel Albright

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226791364
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one. Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his untimely passing. In Music's Monisms, he shows how musical and literary phenomena alike can be fruitfully investigated through the lens of monism, a philosophical conviction that does away with the binary structures we use to make sense of reality. Albright shows that despite music's many binaries—diatonic vs. chromatic, major vs. minor, tonal vs. atonal—there is always a larger system at work that aims to reconcile tension and resolve conflict.Albright identifies a "radical monism" in the work of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Radical monism insists on the interchangeability, even the sameness, of the basic dichotomies that govern our thinking and modes of organizing the universe. Through a series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on these specific figures but also on aesthetic experience in general. Music's Monisms is a revelatory work by one of modernist studies' most distinguished figures.

ONE

Thesis

Monism is the philosophical conviction that things that appear to be two are actually one. The large bifurcations by which we make sense of reality (matter versus spirit, concrete versus abstract, body versus soul) are somehow superseded by the monist. This does not mean that all monists agree. Bishop Berkeley was a monist who considered the physical world to be purely ideal, unsolid. As the poet William Butler Yeats put it:

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,

That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,

Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme

Karl Marx, however, was a monist of exactly the opposite character: a materialist, he believed that only the physical world existed. But there is a kind of convergence of these opposites: for Marx and Berkeley alike, all that is solid must melt into air.

The term monism has been widely used in literary criticism in recent years. John Milton, for example, has been called a monist because he posited a continuum between the spiritual and physical worlds: for example, in Paradise Lost (1674) the angel Raphael explains that his celestial digestive processes can incorporate regular human food into his ethereal self, “corporeal into incorporeal turn” (book 5, line 413). In this sense the monist Milton was the exact opposite of his contemporary, the dualist René Descartes, who taught that spirit and matter were immiscible, hermetically sealed domains, except for one tiny point of contact in the pineal gland of the brain.

But Milton was also a dualist of sorts, in that he regarded the spiritual and physical worlds as distinct from one another: he was a monist only in that he believed that a continuum existed between them. When I use monism in this book, I use it in a more Modernist sense: the philosophy that insists on the interchangeability, even the identicality, of the basic dichotomies that govern our thinking, our modes of organizing the universe. For the Modernist monist, the physical world isn’t subsumed into the spiritual (as it was for Berkeley), and the spiritual world isn’t subsumed into the physical (as it was for Marx): instead, the two worlds are the somehow same thing, regarded from different points of view. When T. S. Eliot writes, “Soul is to body as cutting is to the axe,”1 he is monistic in a fashion far more extreme than Milton.

As I’ve often had occasion to state, I think of Modernism as a movement, or heap of movements, devoted to aesthetic extremism. Modernism is a testing of the limits of aesthetic construction. According to this perspective, the Modernists tried to find the ultimate bounds of certain artistic possibilities: volatility of emotion (Expressionism); stability and inexpressiveness (the New Objectivity); accuracy of representation (Hyperrealism); absence of representation (Abstractionism); purity of form (Neoclassicism); formless energy (Neobarbarism); cultivation of the technological present (Futurism); cultivation of the prehistoric past (the Mythic Method). These extremes, of course, have been arranged in pairs, because aesthetic heresies, like theological ones, come in binary sets: each limit point presupposes an opposite limit point, a counterextreme toward which the artist can push. Much of the strangeness, the stridency, the exhilaration of Modernist art can be explained by this strong thrust toward the verges of the aesthetic experience: after the nineteenth century had established a remarkably safe, intimate center where the artist and the audience could dwell, the Modernist age reaches out to art’s freakish circumferences. The extremes of the aesthetic experience tend to converge: in the Modernist movement, the most barbaric art tends to be the most up-to-date and sophisticated. In these convergences Modernism shows its radically monistic character.

Of all artistic media, music is perhaps most at ease in demonstrating the collapse of dualities. In opera and in much instrumental music, the composer sets forth sharply contrasting binaries, only to erase them. This practice comes more easily to music drama than to the spoken variety, because, while music is infinitely rich in binaries (diatonic versus chromatic, staccato versus legato, major versus minor, tonic versus dominant, tonal versus atonal, and so forth), there is always some larger system of musical reference that comprehends, reconciles, abnegates, sublates, or otherwise does away with these binaries. A language like music, in which every element (pitch, rhythm, harmony) is overtly relative and contingent, in which no absolute can be found, is Jacques Derrida’s dream language: the binaries that undergird any organization of reality, such as nature and culture, undo themselves effortlessly.2 Black is just white understood in a different modality; the word black has sometimes been thought to have a common origin with the French blanc, that is, white.

All composers in all ages have availed themselves of these possibilities for reconciling opposites; the sonata form itself can be understood as institutionalized reconciliation. But among the Modernists—and I think a good case can be made that Richard Wagner, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche were among the first Modernists—there is a special effort not simply to reconcile opposites but to annihilate them, to deny that they ever existed in the first place. The composers I study in this book are notable for both their intelligence and their sensitivity to the intellectual ethos of the age: Wagner, Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. The chapters are independent, and they can be read in any order; what draws them together into a book is their formal congruence, the similar shape of their internal workings.

The study of musical semantics fascinates because of the ways in which the meanings of musical gestures tend to reverse themselves over time. In spoken drama, the rhetoric of comedy and the rhetoric of tragedy are often hard to distinguish: Romeo and Juliet and the galumphingly hilarious Pyramus and Thisbe skit in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the same play, even down to certain details in the handling of oxymorons and other tropes. But the situation is far worse in the case of music drama. Hector Berlioz once noted that you could listen to a certain chorus in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Alceste and not know whether it meant rejoicing or lamentation, and this is quite a usual circumstance—composers are sometimes exasperated by the faintness, the uncertainty, of musical representations of affect, but this semi-impotence can be, paradoxically, a source of power. When Gluck decided to write Orpheus’s tragic aria about Eurydice’s second death, “Che farò senza Euridice,” in the untragical key of C major, he was at once extending the semantic range of C major and proving the Orwellian musical axiom that wrong is often righter than right itself. Much of the most intense music I know derives its intensity by hovering between two opposing constructions of its meaning. Tragic ecstasy is a form of imaginary joy, vitiated only by the fact that it does not actually come to pass. Puccini’s “Un bel dì” would be the most joyous aria in the repertoire if Pinkerton were to show up and kneel before Butterfly with a wedding ring in hand.

The very first significant opera, Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), is a comic version of the Orpheus myth, but its libretto was published separately with a suggestion of a tragic resolution, as the maenads dance threateningly around Orpheus. When Carl Orff adapted Monteverdi’s opera for the modern stage in a German translation (Orpheus; 1923, rev. 1940), he preferred the tragic ending, which he obtained convincingly and without much trouble by moving Monteverdi’s joyous conclusion back to the first act. But with a little more imagination he could have made the happy moresca that ends the original opera into something angry and biting, its snap rhythms potentially as useful in depicting Furies as wedding guests. Why did Wagner and Franz Liszt labor so hard at their craft, if not to prove that any emotional content could be extracted from any sequence of notes?

TWO

Wagner’s Names

I grew up in an unmusical household: my parents were content to go about the business of their lives in silence broken only by quiet discussion. But at the age of fourteen I had, for the only time in my life, a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience: I turned on the radio and chanced upon a broadcast from the Bayreuth Festival of Das Rheingold. At first I listened with only half an ear and paid no attention to the announcer’s plot summary (if there was one); but three hours later I felt that something had just happened that was worth devoting my life to studying. In a sense I have done exactly that. Except for a piece on ballad structure in Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman; composed 1840–41, premièred 1843), I have written nothing about Wagner, but only out of a sense that I had first to learn about the pre- and post-Wagnerian universe.

I promptly told my father that we needed, right now, to buy a lot of serious high-fidelity sound equipment, and, to my amazement, he said all right. Soon the silence of the house was broken by endless hours of Valkyries and vassals, minnesingers and mastersingers, Norwegian maidens and Rhine maidens and flower maidens and heavy emoters of every sort. (My parents seemed relaxed about living inside this mini-Bayreuth; maybe they were glad that I’d at last found something commensurate with my gift for—what? intensity?) My high school offered good German instruction, and I spent my nights writing my own private translation of Der Ring des Nibelungen, improving Wagner’s text wherever possible: because I didn’t like horses, I eliminated Grane; and I made Sieglinde offer Siegmund a glass of wine, because I thought he deserved something better than a mere sip of water or mead. I read everything on Wagner I could get my hands on: I almost memorized Ernest Newman’s books and pored over tabulations of Wagner’s musical motifs—it seemed strange to me that one commentator referred to a certain modulatory wrench in Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) as the Fate motif, while another called it the Death motif. In a moment of triumph I found a motif that No One Had Ever Found Before: the Raven motif (on the basis of a certain vague resemblance in patterned semitones between Wotan’s “Er floh dir zu seinem Heil!” in Siegfried and Hagen’s “Erräth’st du auch dieser Raben Geraun’?” in Götterdämmerung—in act 3, scene 2 of their respective works). I suppose I imagined that I would spend my life discerning the correct names of all the Wagnerian motifs and finding many occult ones that had escaped previous detection.

I found, however, other things worth loving. By the age of sixteen I was as wrapped up, rapt up, in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) as I had ever been in Das Rheingold; then in college there came Schoenberg’s Erwartung (Expectation) and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and Verdi’s Otello, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Puccini’s Tosca, and the whole flood. But I always felt that I could learn new composers only by forbidding myself to listen to Wagner: Wagner could too easily seize control of my mind and sensorium. To this day tears come to my eyes when I hear the opening scene of Das Rheingold: when the Rhinemaidens, too elated to mock, invite Alberich to laugh with them in the light of the gold, they seem to forgive him for being an ugly greedy dwarf, and I am a teenager once again, wondering whether any girl would ever see through my ugliness and greed, would ever want to kiss me. The name Alberich is disturbingly like my last name.

Over the years I noticed a strange thing: I felt that most of the composers that I studied I knew better and better; but Wagner I knew worse and worse. When I was young I felt that the whole structure of Wagner-world was luminous and articulate in my head; now it seems viscid, gloppy, not (I think) through my own failure of memory but through its own internal processes of evolution. I believe that Wagner means for his semantic systems first to ramify and grow clear, then to sink into unmeaning. He first names, then he unnames. Wagner said that the great project of his life, his series of music dramas Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), concerned a god who willed his own destruction:1 the music dramas also will their own destruction.

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In Wagner’s works there are two problems of naming: figuring out the names of characters and figuring out the names of musical motifs. I believe that these are two aspects of the same problem.

Samuel Beckett, a more Wagnerian writer than he at first appears, always gave the most intense scrutiny to the names of his characters: some are mere puns (Miss Fitt, Miss Carriage); some are based on arcane allusions (the characters in Endgame are named after hammer—Hamm—or nails—Nell, Nagg from the German Nagel, Clov from the French clou); some are arbitrary babblings (Bam, Bem, Bom, Krim, Kram); and finally, there is the unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. A similar range of naming play can be found in Wagner: characters with no names (the Flying Dutchman), characters who don’t know their names (Siegmund, Parsifal), characters whose names get all twisted up (Tristan, who calls himself Tantris so that the hostile witch Isolde, nursing him to health, won’t recognize him as the man who killed her betrothed), characters who can’t keep a steady purchase on their names (in their ecstasy Tristan calls Isolde Tristan, and Isolde calls Tristan Isolde), characters whose names are jokes or puns (Pontio Pilato in Das Liebesverbot—and in an 1861 draft of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg the absurd critic Veit Beckmesser was called Veit Hanslich, after Eduard Hanslick, a Viennese critic not fond of Wagner’s music)—and finally a character addressed as Namenlose (Nameless One), though she is known by many names, including Kundry. Names seem to be like sacred talismans: the name is the source of character’s power, and to be master of someone’s name is to be master of the person. This is why, at the beginning of act 2 of Parsifal, the sorcerer Klingsor casts his spell over Kundry by calling her Nameless One, then summoning her with the full roster of her names, epithets, or avatars: Rose of Hell, Herodias, Gundryggia, Kundry. Similarly, in act 2, scene 2 of Tristan und Isolde, the lovers cry that they are “namenlos in Lieb’ umfangen”—without names, caught up in love. As we will see, Wagner’s names, like Beckett’s, also tend to be nothing at all.

In Plato’s dialogue Cratylus (fourth century BCE), Socrates referees an argument between Hermogenes, who believes that words are just arbitrary labels pasted onto things, and Cratylus, who argues that things may be rightly or wrongly named—and, of course, a right name is ideal, metaphysically prestigious, in a sense sacre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• contents
• List of Musical Examples
• Foreword Daniel Albright: Collector, Critic, Fancier
• 1   Thesis
• 2   Wagner’s Names
• 3   Maeterlinck’s Modernisms: Debussy and Dukas
• 4   Britten’s Dismantlings: Les illuminations and the War Requiem
• 5   Schoenberg’s Shatterings
• 6   Stravinsky’s Nightingales
• epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index