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Document: Focus Achieved?

Focus has always been difficult for me. I tend to take on big, ambitious projects. So, the proposal for the doctoral document has been a never-ending exercise in reigning in my thoughts. As much as I want to write about color theory and music theory at some point, I think it is perhaps best-suited to a place in my life when I have time to burn. Doubtful. I would love to relate the similarities of meme theory with music, too; one plan was to look within a composers work and identify “memes” that represent, in a linguistic sense, the compositional language of the composer. Needless to say, too broad. Then came a brilliant idea; to explore the homogenization of orchestral sonority, and examine the ways and the reasons that it has changed. Interesting, if a bit predictable, but terribly difficult to codify, verbalize and document. It’s a good thing, too; despite my love for tradition born out of reason, I stand divided about my feelings for sonority now. Much of my being believes that the twentieth-century notion of “finding the voice of the composer” is somewhat of a farce, a convenient veil for performers to substitute their own ego for the composer’s voice. The ego, of course, is part of the musical process anyway, for better or for worse. Though composers held widely differentiated viewpoints on interpretive liberties, almost all who led their own performances engaged in some degree of self-indulgence, because they could do so without being criticized.

But, I digress. The new working title for my document is “Art Nouveau and the Symphony during the Fin-de-Siècle: The Intersection of the Arts in Paris and Vienna.” Without the framework of Art Nouveau, it may seem a strange comparison to make; the gargantuan encompassing symphonic works of Bruckner, Zemlinsky, and Mahler pitted against the seemingly miniature repertory of French composers like Franck, Chausson, and d’Indy. In this case, the tie is Art Nouveau; though it was a style that developed quite differently in Paris and Vienna, the manifestations in each city shared a number of characteristics and exerted a strong relationship with the music of both locales, both within and outside of the physical composition.

But how? Of course, there was a great deal of café mingling of musicians and artists. Chausson, for instance, played in a string quartet with the symbolist painter Odilon Redon. In Vienna, Alma Mahler, Gustav’s wife, was very “active” in artistic circles and knew both Gustav Klimt and Oscar Kokoschka. But to me, these cultural connections are not really strong enough to stand on their own. Despite the fact that a composer often writes what he lives and breathes, I believe that there must be some supporting evidence within the music itself. And while various theories have been offered, the majority are powered solely through the use of analogy.

One of the avowed goals of Art Nouveau was to elevate the level of the crafts to the level of the fine arts. I see many analogies of this in the music of Gustav Mahler, for instance, who strove to incorporate the world into his symphonies. Along the same lines, Dahlhaus cites Art Nouveau as a byproduct of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. To me, and to others, folk music seems an interesting place to start. One could make an analogy that decorating a gauche subway station entrance with the highly ornamented plant tendrils of Art Nouveau is similar to putting vulgar folk music inside of a highly complex and contrapuntally ornamented piece of art music. Enter Guimard and Mahler.

We could also compare the symbolic figures used in the texts, but this has been done many times. Therefore, I am looking at works without texts. But which? Tentatively, I have decided on the Chausson and d’Indy B-flat major Symphonies, the Zemlinsky 3rd Symphony (also in B-flat), and Mahler Symphony No. 7. The Mahler is a stretch, but I have a feeling that it is ripe for Art Nouveau discovery, with its plethora of folk elements.

Musical architecture is an idea not often used in Western music theory classes. When it is, it is usually associated with form. I think, though, that the idea of musical architecture is far more encompassing than form alone. One can have recurring motives that have no relation to the overall form of a work, or recurring harmonies in different configurations, etc. At least one author has provided some detailed reasoning for the temporal aspects of music as a point of comparison. None of it is quite as obvious as it sounds, and I look forward to the challenges of codifying the musical abstract and the visual abstract in prose.

May 17, 2011  Leave a comment

Writing About Art and Music

Paul Klee: The Red Balloon (1922)

Well, I realize that I have neglected this page for quite some time. I hope you enjoy the redesign and some new videos under the multimedia section from my time in New Hampshire.

Surprisingly, the proposal which I have been seriously working on for several months has turned out to be a far more taxing a process than I anticipated, especially since my trajectory is an interdisciplinary topic: visual art and music. After exploring a number of possibilities, I have finally decided to pursue a comparison of the intersection of the arts in Paris and Vienna during the fin-de-siècle. Socio-cultural, scientific, and artistic developments in both cities had a strong influence toward the broad idea of abstractionism. Despite their difference, both cities were linked by unique but similar appropriations of Art Nouveau, a style with Belgian origins and English roots. In many ways a style with socialist goals, Art Nouveau (known as Jugendstil in Germany and sometimes Sezessionstil in Austria) sought to unify the level of the crafts with the arts in terms of  both aesthetic ideas and accessibility. The building and home interiors that were decorated from wall-to-wall with “excessive” organic ornament can in some ways be compared to the Mahlerian idea of the symphony as the world. Together, they immersed the viewer or listener in an imaginative world of their own devising, one that encapsulated much of the physical world as a sort of pseudo-escape from reality.

Without boring you with more detail, aside from problems of terminology (disagreeing definitions of “-isms”, for instance), the main difficulty lies within the methodology of comparison. How can one compare the subjective aspects of art and music coherently, logically, and decisively? One could look at the finished product alone, by simply comparing a painting and a finished piece of music. This yields limited results, though, in the form of analogy and metaphor. Does the fact that a flowing plant tendril in architecture or painting can metaphorically resemble the twists and turns of a long, flowing Mahlerian line? One could look deeper, beneath the surface at the socio-cultural aspects that germinated both. Some scholars, such as Walter Frisch, a musicologist at Columbia who has devoted considerable exploration to this subject, have used literature as an intermediary for exploration. This seems most pertinent with Symbolism, which began as a literary movement and influenced Art Nouveau, but less useful with Art Nouveau and Jugendstil themselves. The foundation of the latter was clearly in architecture and the decorative arts, developing out of the exoticism of the Japanese woodprints that were en vogue at the end of the 19th century.

Fortunately, I was able to find an obscure, 1979 collection of 16 papers presented at a conference at the University of Adelaide relating to just this topic, which is often alluded to but not often explored in depth. When I arrived at Brandeis and perused the book, I was disappointed: the same old story, too many questions, few answers. The trend is for vague philosophical discourse with weak conclusive results, frustrations that I have had in my own attempts. Perhaps Carl Dahlhaus, who is generally pessimistic about comparing the two, was right. Off to re-read some parts of Paul Klee’s notebooks, in hopes of finding some better answers. More tomorrow.

February 12, 2011  Leave a comment

Orchestral Vibrations

This will certainly be no-in depth post exploring all aspects of the subject of orchestral vibrato, which would be well past dissertation length. However, since some colleagues and I were discussing it last night, I thought it would be interesting to point out the following text from the preface of the excellent Henle edition of the Brahms Symphony No. 3 (1883), by Robert Pascall (2006). He relays some indications from Blume’s Brahms in der Meininger Tradition (1933), which discuss the score indications of Fritz Steinbach, a conductor whom Pascall says “Brahms held in high regard”. According to the introduction, one of the annotations in his score of Symphony No. 3 says:

“In order that the expression might become somewhat icy or silvery, there should be no vibrato in the strings.”

By inference, this warning indication implies that there would have been at least the possibility for noticeable vibrato within the string section. This quote counters the claims of those early music puritans whom have made and in some cases continue to make the erroneous claim that vibrato did not begin with regularity until the mid 1920s. Portions of the text can be found in this book; unfortunately, it appears the entirety of Blume’s work has yet to be translated.

The human voice vibrates naturally. Perhaps vibrato in the left hand of the string player  has developed from the exposure to, and a subconscious desire to imitate this sound. That would make it a natural tendency, despite the fact that the technical procedures for vibrato would still need to be learned. This sound, of course was cultivated to extreme levels of thickness during the mid-20th century, with some good and some bad results, depending on whom you ask.

Sometimes it is necessary to go toward an extreme direction to influence a move back to center; in this way, I hope that in a post “authentic” musical world we can find a center of music again. Through the combination of research and rationality with emotional and communicative substance, we can avoid the presentation of music as a cold and sterile museum piece and help engender a new wave of engaging, spontaneous performances that communicate something other than just authenticity. “I exist because I am what the composer wanted” is within itself not a justification for a performance.

Certainly, any legitimate musician takes great care to understand the composer and his world. However, there are many performers who rely solely on the dogmatic will to serve the “intentions of the composer”; wrapped in the veil of authenticity, they are frequently nothing but the desires of the performer projected onto the body of the dead composer, or even worse the desire to have the correct answer, as if in elementary school. In my opinion, this lack of imagination is no better than those interpreters who willfully contort the music to serve their own self-aggrandizement.

I hope to write a little bit while I am in Athens if I have time. I leave next Monday; so far, the forecast seems mostly sunny in the low 70s!

More to come.

October 17, 2010  Leave a comment