keep this in mind: watch, and delay judging. “I’m doing that thing where I drift and forget and can’t stick with a plan for longer than a minute. I am aimless, or at least appearing to be.” I don’t need to judge this, for the time being. It might not be a bad thing. I also don’t need to draw conclusions. This may not last forever. I just see that it’s happening, and take note.

Victimhood

Hey just here to do a little free writing after reading the Wozzeck chapter. One of the issues that came up was the martyrdom/victimhood stance, which is a theme in the Pierrot lunaire chapter already since I talk about Muteness Envy there.

To begin with, the muteness stance is not very helpful.

Here are my notes from 7/28/15:

muteness envy:

like peter sacks’s interpretation of the apollo/daphne myth in The English Elegy (discussed by Barbara Johnson 204), my interpretation might seem to replace the actual victimhood of Marie, the rape victim and economically vulnerable mother with few choices, with the allegorical victimhood of Wozzeck, whose decision to kill Marie is presented not as a choice but as an artistic necessity. Hence, “mystification of violence” in the words of Patricia Joplin (speaking of Philomela), and identification with the murderer instead of the victim. The murderer “is bought off with the aesthetic.”

I agree with this. And I think Berg’s warm treatment of Marie—who is not silenced, in fact, has more voice than Wozzeck, though in the world of the opera, she and her child are the only ones who hear it—indicates that he is not trying to turn Marie’s death into a trophy, he is not trying to silence Marie. You could even say that Marie gets the biggest voice in the opera, the D minor interlude, sung from the grave, despite the fact that I have so far been mapping Berg’s artistic perspective onto Wozzeck. The clear horror of Marie’s death suggests to me that, whether consciously or not, Berg felt ambivalently about his role in the history of tonality, that they had perhaps “killed” the wrong thing—Marie instead of the Drum Major, for instance—thus killing a sacred thing without which he could scarcely survive.

does Wozzeck “get off for a song”?

well, does Marie?

D minor interlude as Marie’s voice from the grave… the association of the interlude with Helene, Berg’s wife, the one who doesn’t care that it’s derivative, supports this interpretation.

so Wozzeck is also a fable of avant-garde music. it says: look what you will do if you continue the way you’re going, the collateral damage, the uselessness.

compearance happens in the dialogue between artist and community, and that includes the context of performance. so what compearance looks like changes depending on the circumstance.

playing the victim doesn’t count as compearance.

is there a way to do it without creating a scapegoat? without scapegoating the audience? (since scapegoating the audience, or scapegoating in general, is a way of destroying the in-common?)

What Mike liked in our Pierrot conversation

Our starting point: the taxonomic problem. What kind of thing is Pierrot lunaire? And at many levels. What type of work is it? What type of vocality is it? Is it a man or a woman? What genre are the individual pieces? Who is speaking? This is not saying that the piece is “uncategorizable” in the sense that word is often used: to say that a piece transcends genre or categorization. The way people reacted to this piece doesn’t attribute nearly so much elevation or mastery to it. More like, people just felt confused. And I’m saying that this experience of confusion, of not knowing what Pierrot is or even what type of thing it is, of wondering who is speaking and whether it is speaking or singing, is exactly what makes this piece tick.

The next thing: that taxonomy problems are always at hand in any genuine instance of second-person communication.

Here we ended up talking about the metaphor of messages from outer space, very apropos of the work (lunaire) and of Schoenberg reception during this period (air from distant planets). If aliens communicated with us, how would we know, since their way of communicating would be nothing like ours? What does communication look like on the moon, or on Mars?

And then: Mike’s question was, is there anything interesting about the particular way these ideas are explored in Pierrot lunaire, or the insights it has?

Yes! We talked about, first, the stylistic disparity between the poet and the moon. The way the moon “communicates” doesn’t sound anything like the way humans communicate. (I’m thinking about Solaris, and how the scientists’ desire to animate the ocean results in the ocean animating ghosts buried in their psyche.) This didn’t make as much sense to Mike, so then we talked about this idea that the poet wants the moon to speak to him, and how this results in a sort of animation exchange. The poet asks the moon to become animated, to speak to him. The moon doesn’t speak to the poet, but in Pierrot’s world, it becomes all too animated, annoying and disturbing Pierrot. If you animate the moon, do you kill the person? It raises the issue: second-person communication is more easily described than done. If you want to listen to someone, really listen to someone from a second-person perspective—not ventriloquizing, not appropriating—you just don’t know what you’re going to get. But the work says it’s a good thing to do. The act of listening is redeemed, in the music, by the fact that the moon’s music is really cool, and the way it combines with the poet’s music is really cool as well.

Mike started to describe this piece as a stoical exploration of what can go wrong when you address/listen in the second person.

It would be too much to describe Pierrot lunaire as enacting a dialogue between moon and human. But the two communication modes are cool when combined.

Relationality

Notes on the conversation I had with Mike during our walk back from the cemetery:

The main question I’m exploring is how music invokes human relationality by enacting or representing relational modes, the stances by which people relate to one another, and specifically how lyric represents a certain relational mode that emerges, as I’ll explain, from the second-person standpoint.
I’m looking at how this question gets explored in a particular context, that of musical modernism in the early twentieth century, focusing on a handful of works that seem to me especially insightful.
The works’ insights emerge largely due to their engagement with their context in music and intellectual history. Another way of saying this is that the works’ insights can’t be separated from their canonicity: their historical awareness and participation in the Western Art Music canon, and the accompanying reception practices and aesthetic discourses. That’s why I’ll spend such a significant amount of time establishing the context of these works, which are positioned on what each composer described as a transition between eras—in which what was being transformed was the structure of relationality.
Another way of saying this: to say that my thesis is about how music invokes relationality doesn’t capture the fact that there are many world-views from which this question is a bogus one—without stakes. But there are certain world-views from which this question matters a great deal. What are the perspectives from which we can see why this question matters? Several such perspectives are relevant to the works I’m studying: that of musical modernism, that of turn-of-the-century lied culture, and that of aesthetic philosophy of melody, song, and voice reaching at least as far back as the Romantic era. One of my tasks is to describe those perspectives, to try to step into those perspectives so that I can better articulate why, from those perspectives, the question of how music invokes relationality is so significant.
I’m not talking about the high-school writing lesson that demands you to explain “so what?” because the demand to explain “so what” assumes that the topic you’re exploring is, on some level, of universal interest, when it likely isn’t. I’m saying that, my thesis doesn’t just explain how lyric in music invokes second-person relationality; it explains how this comes to be a question worth asking, indeed a question that matters a great deal, in a certain milieu.
I think there are three basic relational modes. In the first mode, one sees others in terms of function or transaction. It might not really matter, from this standpoint, whether another person has an inner life or what they experience. This mode arises from a third-person standpoint: relating to others in the third-person. In another mode, one sees others in terms of similarity to oneself. One person bonds with another because of their shared identity, interest, or experience. This mode arises from a first-person standpoint. From a third-person standpoint, I relate to the other person more-or-less as an object or a machine; from a first-person standpoint, I relate to the other person as a version of myself or member of my tribe.
Finally, there is the relational mode that arises from a second-person standpoint. But this mode is not as easy to describe. How do I relate to another person in a way that can be reduced neither to function/transaction nor to identification? What does it mean to relate to another person face-to-face, truly recognizing them as “you,” not “they” nor “I’ nor “we”?
Lyric, I’ll be arguing, is uniquely capable of exploring the second-person relational mode, because it can flicker between modes—and, I’m suggesting, there’s something about the second-person that is intrinsically flickery, unstable unlike the other two modes. For instance, lyric might invoke the second-person only to demonstrate how slippery that stance is, how easily it shape-shifts into one of the other two stances. I start off addressing you, but I end up projecting my own experience into yours. I start off addressing you, but I end up talking about myself. I start off addressing you, but I end up objectifying you. Lyric is uniquely capable of exploring how difficult it is to sustain second-person relationality. A big part of its technique is to be itself a bifocality between first- and third-person, subject and object, voice and thing, showing that you only get to the second-person by hopping back and forth between the two sides.
One of the cool things about thinking in terms of second-person relationality is that it’s totally different from the more commonly expressed liberal ideal of people relating to one another as equals. In many of the best examples of second-person relationality represented in lyric, the addresser and addressee are not at all on equal footing. You can have honorifics and humilifics: second-person address can point up or down the status ladder. And you can even have one of the two, addresser or addressee, not be a “person” at all, but a thing, or an abstraction, or someone that isn’t or never was alive—hence apostrophe or prosopopeia. My point is that the way lyric invokes second-person relationality doesn’t have specific agendas about political organization. It’s only a reminder of the existence second-person relationality, and its fragility.
Was lyric always like this? Perhaps; if so, lyric discourse and reception culture, especially in musical contexts, lost sight of this truth during the 19th and 20th centuries. But lyric, given its unique role in invoking the second person, is also uniquely sensitive to reception culture.
I’m realizing that I don’t agree with Benjamin that lyric poetry was possible in the past because of integrated experience, at least not if that means integrated subjectivity. Then again, what he’s saying is that subjectivity gets integrated through social integration. Is it the difference between being able to relate as “we” vs. having to relate as “you and I”?

Reflections edited and continued

Why does the impulse toward lyric utterance survive in the culturally inhospitable environment of musical modernism, and how does it do so? There is nothing obvious about the continued and even increased attraction to lyric in pivotal strands of musical modernism. In terms of their stylistic connotations, modernism and lyric would appear to be opposites. The literature on modernist music has frequently relied on a juxtaposition between “modernist” and “lyrical” styles, a binary that in turn maps onto a whole set of binaries that structured so much of the discourse on twentieth-century art music until the past couple decades. Those binaries might include angularity vs. smoothness, intellectualism vs. emotionality, forbiddingness vs. accessibility, rarefaction vs. warmth, masculinity vs. femininity. Many of us might cringe at these binaries now, especially given that they were, and in some circles continue to be, employed to deem pieces and composers that fall on the side of “lyrical” less worthy of study. Such canonizing judgments occurred despite or because of the fact that, in the twentieth century, being lyrical was more correlated with being popular than being modernist. One way of seeing the stakes around lyric’s place in modernism is to historicize the binary: what did we get out of pitting modernism and lyric against each other, which side won, and why? This question is still worth asking even though the current thinking on modernism trends toward neutralizing any and all binaries, and here I’m taking a hint from Christopher Chowrimootoo, who questions our motives when we try to ignore modernism’s propensity to be judgmental.

I’m interested both in the ways in which modernism and lyric feel like opposites and in the fact that some of the most iconic examples of musical modernism confront lyric head-on. Such confrontation might occur via lyric genres as in Schoenberg’s watershed George Lieder (op. 15). Op. 15 is a great example of how modernist forays into lyric genres often upended what many would consider to be lyric, both at the time of composition and today. This upending is exactly why it’s so curious that such works retained the association with lyric—the aesthetic impact of which can’t be explained simply by slapping on the label “irony.” Yet scholars have mostly done their best to ignore what it would mean to think of a work like op. 15 as a lyric one. Often such works are valorized precisely insofar as they fail to be lyrical. Modernist confrontation with lyric might also occur within larger works, in moments of lyricism that often feel like an outpouring of otherwise restrained emotion. While such moments are frequently audience favorites—think of the “Great Bear aria” in Britten’s Peter Grimes or the final orchestral interlude in Berg’s Wozzeck—they are generally sources of embarrassment in the literature. What I’m saying is that it causes problems when a work identifies as both modernist and lyric, and that these problems have to do with how these categories influence reception.

If the central question of my dissertation is why and how lyric persists in modernist conditions, this question has a Cavellian twin: how did the persistence of the lyric impulse even come to be an issue worth investigating? I’m going to show that the problem of lyric’s survival takes on a mythic, life-or-death intensity in some of musical modernism’s most striking moments, and yet there are many cultural environments across time and place in which lyric’s survival hasn’t even arisen as an issue. It is not remarkable that musical modernism at times embraced lyric, at other times adopted other modes. What is remarkable is how charged lyric became in key modernist pieces. When it took on this charge, lyric was not just one mode among many: upon its survival seemed to depend the very cohesion of human society.

How and why did lyric become charged in this way? What did lyric seem to provide that other modes didn’t—and why, at this moment in history, did its powers nevertheless appear increasingly, urgently insufficient to society’s needs? As this gap between society’s need for lyric and lyric’s capacity to deliver widened, composers wrote pieces that envisioned a desperate solution: to destroy lyric for the sake of lyric’s renewal. All of the works I’m studying juxtapose an old lyric that must die with a new lyric that must, but has not yet, come into being. In addition to explaining how these composers would have conceptualized the “old” lyric and why it seemed increasingly insufficient, I’ll ultimately aim to define this new lyric that is imagined within the works. I’ll argue that these composers saw lyric as a ritual enactment of the social, or, even more fundamentally, the basic orientation toward interpersonal relationality without which ethics—and integrated personhood—would have no meaning. The difference between the old lyric and the new lyric is one of “person”: as these composers would have imagined it, the old lyric was only conceivable in the first person or, at best, the third person, but the new lyric would be in the second person.

The way I’m describing the old vs. new lyric may seem overly abstract and convoluted, and you might think that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. You might think what I’m talking about is the turn away from Romantic lyric, a turn that you might also think was historically overdetermined. A historian focusing primarily on style and convention might say that Romantic lyric had simply gone out of style by the early twentieth century (leaving aside the curious fact that many of the most beloved icons of Romantic lyricism, like Puccini’s arias or Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, were composed during the twentieth century). As Walter Benjamin would observe, “the lyric poet with his halo is antiquated”; note, however, that despite his tongue-in-cheek remark, Benjamin did not attribute this change to the vicissitudes of fashion but to a fundamental change in the nature of experience in modernity. One doesn’t have to go as far as Benjamin to see how early-twentieth-century experience might have cast Romantic lyric in a cynical light, especially if we caricature Romantic lyric as a sentimental idealization of the enchanting and soothing Orphic voice. In the aftermath of wartime atrocities enacted under the aegis of purity and beauty, beauty’s supposed relationship to goodness inevitably came under suspicion, and not least in the domain of what we now call classical music. If lyric could enchant, it could also seduce; if it could soothe, it could also drug. Critical theory pursued and heightened this moralization of pleasurable aesthetics—the negative valence placed on aesthetic experiences like pleasure and comfort, or, worse, captivation and succumbing. From the perspective of postwar theorists like Theodor Adorno or Paul Celan who valorized poetry that could write itself out of wholeness, Romantic lyric’s attachment to beauty and wholeness guaranteed its falseness, its inability to speak the truth about experience, since early-twentieth-century experience was neither beautiful nor whole. Adorno’s famous statement that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is just one example of postwar intellectuals rejecting lyric, or adopting it only in broken forms.

But the story of how and when Romantic lyric became a problem is deeper than a story of stylistic shift, and historically reaches much further back than the wars. We can better understand why lyric would accumulate a life-or-death significance in a modernist context if we recognize that lyric, as one of the main inheritances from the Romantic era, held profound cultural meanings—and that these cultural meanings underwent equally profound shifts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we look back to the turn of the century, we see that art music milieus were already in turmoil about what lyric for a modern age ought to be, not just for the sake of lyric itself, but for the sake of what it was thought to represent. Schoenberg’s op. 15 premiered at a moment in history when tensions surrounding Romantic models of lyric reception were rapidly becoming impossible to ignore. Savvy audience members no longer found it obvious how to attend or respond to lyric performances. Debates about concert etiquette and a proliferation of innovative performance models were symptomatic of an ontological confusion: petty spats about the proper use of lighting in song recitals were, on a deeper level, motivated by uncertainty about what defined lyric and what it was for.

Meanwhile, composers like Schoenberg were writing pieces, like op. 15, that aggressively challenged the frameworks through which many audience members were still accustomed to hearing lyric. Such pieces invoked lyric via convention, historical reference, form, or genre while denying what many audience members still expected from lyric: beauty in the Kantian sense, a well-regulated, balanced, integrated aesthetic experience. But these expectations went beyond mere aesthetic appraisal, for as the contemporary critical reception shows, audiences didn’t just expect lyric works to sound a certain way; they also expected to get something out of lyric. That something had to do, I’ll argue, with self-improvement and the broader culture’s aspirations to bloom and flourish (aspirations that were often and increasingly nationalistic). Works like op. 15 fundamentally challenged these old assumptions about what lyric reception consisted of. They suggested that insofar as lyric was a ritual enactment of integrated personhood, the experience of modernity ensured that this integration could no longer be defined as the autonomy of the individual. To have integrated personhood in modernity had everything to do with our ability to see each other in the second person: to look at one another in the eyes and recognize their otherness. As Levinas would later teach, ethics begins not when we recognize our sameness but when we recognize our difference.

One way to describe the old model of lyric reception is via the symbol of the circle. In the old model, successful lyric constitutes a circle. The reception around lyric genres at the turn of the century was shot through with a Romantic belief that lyrical beauty simultaneously proves and guarantees the moral, even spiritual ideal of integrated wholeness. The well-regulated, balanced, integrated qualities of the lyric utterance were taken as evidence of the beauty of the lyric speaker’s soul as well as proof of the cohesion of the society of which the speaker was part. Sometimes, the aesthetic qualities of lyric were also taken as tools by which balanced and integrated qualities might be instilled in the audience. By proxy, lyric was charged with the job of facilitating the thriving oneness of society as a whole.

Notes and reflections

I’ve come out the other side in a way since leaving this blog aside for awhile. I’ve written so much, received feedback, and then had some months off. Which maybe gives me perspective now.

Reflections on the 2017-11-17 Charlie meeting notes:

Why does the impulse toward lyric utterance survive in the culturally inhospitable environment of musical modernism, and how does it do so? There is nothing obvious about the continued and even increased attraction to lyric in musical modernism. In terms of their stylistic connotations, modernism and lyric would appear to be opposites: modernist angularity vs. lyrical smoothness, modernist intellectualism vs. lyrical emotionality, modernist forbiddingness vs. lyrical accessibility, modernist rarefaction vs. lyrical warmth, modernist masculinity vs. lyrical femininity. The attraction to lyric within pivotal strands of musical modernism, however, is certainly evinced by the fact that so many cornerstone works of the Second Viennese School and the postwar Avant-Garde fall into the lyric category, from Arnold Schoenberg’s op. 15 and op. 21 (Pierrot lunaire) to Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. So a major plot strand in the history of musical modernism is the story of composers torn between two impulses, one toward lyric, one away from lyric. As this conflict reached a crisis point, composers wrote pieces that envisioned a desperate solution: to destroy lyric for the sake of lyric’s renewal.

My opening question, the central one guiding my dissertation, has a Cavellian twin: how did the persistence of the lyric impulse even come to be an issue worth investigating? While the problem of lyric’s survival takes on a mythic, life-or-death intensity in some of musical modernism’s most striking moments, there are many cultural environments across time and place in which lyric’s survival hasn’t even arisen as an issue. It is not remarkable that musical modernism at times embraced lyric, at other times adopted other modes. What is remarkable is how charged lyric became in key modernist pieces. When it took on this charge, lyric was not just one mode among many: on its survival seemed to depend the very cohesion of human society. How and why did lyric become charged in this way? What did lyric seem to provide that other modes didn’t—and why, at this moment in history, did its powers nevertheless appear increasingly, urgently insufficient to society’s needs? And given that lyric had become so charged that it required death and renewal, what vision was there for what a reborn lyric would look like? All of the works I’m studying juxtapose an old lyric that must die with a new lyric that must, but has not yet, come into being. One of my challenges is to articulate what that new lyric might be, since the works give only a negative image.

One might think that the turn away from Romantic lyric was historically overdetermined. First, there’s the simple matter of styles becoming outmoded: Romantic lyric’s heyday had passed and was, by the early twentieth century, out of style (this is leaving aside the curious fact that many of the most beloved icons of Romantic lyricism, like Puccini’s arias or Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, were composed during the twentieth century). Second, if on an overt level Romantic lyric can be caricatured as a sentimental idealization of the enchanting and soothing Orphic voice, it’s easy to see why lyric might have taken on a negative aspect after the wars. In the aftermath of wartime atrocities enacted under the aegis of purity and beauty, beauty’s supposed relationship to goodness inevitably came under suspicion, and not least in the domain of what we now call classical music. If lyric could enchant, it could also seduce; if it could soothe, it could also drug. Third, from the perspective of postwar critical theory, lyric’s attachment to beauty and wholeness guaranteed its falseness, its inability to speak the truth about experience (since early-twentieth-century experience was neither beautiful nor whole). Adorno’s famous statement that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is just one example of postwar intellectuals rejecting lyric, or adopting it only in broken forms.

But the story of how and when Romantic lyric became a problem is deeper than a story of stylistic shift, and historically reaches much further back than the wars. We can better understand why lyric would accumulate a life-or-death significance in a modernist context if we recognize that lyric, as one of the main inheritances from the Romantic era, held profound cultural meanings—and that these cultural meanings underwent equally profound shifts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we look back to the turn of the century, we see that art music milieus were already in turmoil about what lyric for a modern age ought to be, not just for the sake of lyric itself, but for the sake of what it was thought to represent. Schoenberg’s op. 15 (1908) premiered at a moment in history when tensions surrounding Romantic models of lyric reception were rapidly precipitating out of solution. Savvy audience members no longer found it obvious how to attend or respond to lyric performances. Debates about concert etiquette and a proliferation of innovative performance models were symptomatic of an ontological confusion: petty spats about the proper use of lighting in song recitals were, on a deeper level, motivated by uncertainty about what defined lyric and what it was for.

Melody from chaos

From New Yorker Classical Music section, March 20, 2017, by Alex Ross (p. 18). On Esa-Pekka Salonen’s cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma, which premiered March 15-18 at David Geffen Hall with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic.

The state of the world was weighing on him, and he wondered what a large-scale instrumental work could offer. “I suppose that to write a piece like this is, in itself, an optimistic gesture,” he said. “To devote thousands of hours to such a thing, over two years—you have to hope that people out there can accept a certain degree of complexity. I’m always suspicious of things that see themselves as art. That has to be earned. But if you happen to sit down and create something that turns out to be art”—he laughed at his own circumlocution—”then that is some sort of statement.”

I find the pomposity of this statement pretty amusing when paired with the following banality:

This is Salonen’s third mature concerto. Previously, he wrote a piano concerto for Yefim Bronfman and a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz. “I’m doing things I haven’t done before,” he told me. “The opening is an attempt to show how consciousness crystallizes out of chaos. Out of a very thick twelve-tone structure”—he points to a dense spiderweb of figuration—”the cello slowly emerges and starts to sing a proper melody. After that comes a section where other instruments are shadowing the solo part, like a comet’s tail.” Later in the concerto, electronics assist in creating that shadowing effect: the soloist’s playing is looped at a mixing desk.

What a surprise! Yet another piece of modern music that relies on the juxtaposition between noise and melody. Melody yet again is burdened with signifying consciousness, meaning, significance, appropriateness (“a proper melody”?).

Aesthetic-religious redemption

Looking at Kita’s dissertation on aesthetic-religious redemption in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Lots of occultism and mysticism floating around. Is any of this useful to me? Mahler says of being in nature: “in isolation one finds oneself, and from there God.” This isn’t super interesting to me because it deflects attention away from the interpersonal. It’s this really super inward definition of redemption that doesn’t resonate with me. I think P/W/G are interesting because even though they all contain mystical themes, they aren’t satisfied with those themes. The lyric moments occur in spite of those themes.

It’s interesting to consider that in the Biblical context, singing is usually what happens as a result of redemption, or in praise of the promise of redemption. For instance, Mary’s “Magnificat” is a song praising God, who has magnified her. Or, from the Psalms, “Into your hand I commend my spirit, for you have redeemed me, O God of truth.”

It’s not usually what you do in order to earn redemption. So how does song go from being something that celebrates redemption to being something that earns you redemption?

The answer: song as prayer, not celebration. Song as interpersonal communication. This happens a lot in Renaissance sacred music that uses direct personal address to the lord. “Miserere mei,” or “Kyrie eleison.”

I’m also looking at Tannhauser. And Abbate’s “Metempsychotic Wagner” and Levin’s “Interstitial Redemption.” How is redemption defined here, e.g. in the Song to Venus? What makes song redemptive or not, it seems, is whether it is sincere—authentic, spontaneous, expressive, etc. It’s something you can’t fake. This idea of something you can’t fake but is still communicative is inherently redemptive, because it redeems you to yourself and to others. It’s like Hegel’s definition of happiness—a congruence of what you want and what others want you to want. (I think.) The same goes for Walther’s song.

I’m thinking about my first chapter being sort of about Wagner’s song aesthetics…this peculiar combination of sincerity and communicativeness…and moving on from there to this idea of lyric as redemptive.

Because the reason why Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and (less explicitly) Cinderella catch their guy is because they’re able to give voice to song in this sincere yet communicative way, and in so doing they’re able to captivate an audience (upon which the prince steals as an unknown outside observer).

Scattered thoughts

The human is the transition between two thingnesses: that which we’re given to be and that which we envision for ourselves.

Rilke: The human is the silence between two notes. (For death will always claim the higher key.) Quoted in Parabola, current issue.

Marx, summarized by Thomas C. Patterson: the human is defined by the dialectical interplay between “biological substrate, which endows all members of the species with certain potentials, and the ensemble of social relations that shape everyday life.”

Safe enclosure. In Orwell’s 1984, the lovers mistakenly believe that their love for each other is safe from Big Brother, because he can never take it away from them. He cannot, they think, get inside them. The safety of this enclosure turns out to be false.

Is music a process of Vergeistigung (spiritualization), as Adorno would have it according to Max Paddison, or Vergegenständlichung (objectification), as Marx would have it according to Gur?

Is music autonomous (Hegel? Kant? Dahlhaus?) or … imitative? communicative? Is this the same question as the previous question?

Is music revelational (art-religion, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer) or relational (Levinas, Warren)?

Is our relationship to music disinterested (Kant? Dahlhaus?) or based on need (Hegel according to Gur)?

Why I study this music

Why do I study this music that no one even likes? It’s music about the idea that music could be a source of mutual understanding and community. It’s music about the promise of music that brings us together.

The Trauma Rover

Reflections on traumatic experience