There is “religious music,” and there is “sacred music.” "Religious music" instills doctrines and requires a degree of belief on the part of the listener in order to be fully appreciated. "Sacred music" is simply a communication of the known (everyday life) with the unknown (the universe). It may also stem from a religious tradition, but moves the listener beyond the specific domain of that tradition, and is accessible for non-believers as well.
“Religious” and “sacred” are overlapping terms; it is hard to say where one type of music ends and the other begins. Some would argue that they perfectly coincide. But I would argue Bach’s B Minor Mass is an example of “sacred” music in the wider sense. Ecumenical in origin – written by a Lutheran for a Catholic prince, not long after the end of a devastating series of European religious wars – its cosmology straddles the Catholic / Protestant divide and sometimes even ventures beyond Christianity itself.
For example, coming from a traditional Chinese view, I have always heard the Kyrie of the B Minor Mass as a ritual of Heaven, Earth and ancestors. The intricate weave of voices represents the crowd of ancestral spirits who enfold us, and whose inherited habits, quirks and unfulfilled desires make up the substance of our lives. In Chinese the word used in modern times for “God”, Di, originally was a plural term meaning ancestors. The two ideas, God and ancestor, are linked by the idea of Creation - what makes us the way we are, the components that make up our bodies and minds. In modern terms we may call it "genetics."
The two Kyrie fugues, one celestial, expansive and forward-looking in technique, the other earth-bound and looking back toward Renaissance polyphony, speak to each other across space and time. The spirits of past and present, Catholic and Protestant are thus reconciled. The two choral sections of the Kyrie enclose a more intimate central section (Christe eleison), a dialogue between two female envoys (sopranos), one from Heaven and one from Earth, meeting in a middle region of the air.
The beginning of the Gloria section also explicitly refers to Heaven and Earth. Although it begins with the brassy glory of angels soaring through the sky (Gloria in excelsis), the clouds part on the more familiar scene below (Et ab terram pax), a tranquil, pastel landscape of winding rivers, green meadows, absent-minded cows grazing, and village huts with their evening plumes. The transition from Heaven to Earth, the return from the extraordinary to the ordinary, is one of the most moving moments in the work.
performed by Libor Pesek and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra
In his Fifth Symphony Mahler moves away from the folklore and Romantic nature-mysticism of his earlier work into the musical equivalent of the 19th Century Realist novel. The changing scale of the music – a single trumpet, then the whole orchestra, then only the strings, then a solo horn, two cellos, and so on... – suggest hundreds of characters within a vast background. Like the great 19th Century novels, War and Peace or Les Miserables or Vanity Fair, it depicts the fate of individuals, families, groups of friends, villages, cities and nations within the horizon of an observable, material reality.
Like the realist novel, it is full of characters who speak each from his or her own perspective, along with the author, who commiserates with, derides, and comments ambivalently on the fate of his characters, but he is not God. Unlike Bach's polyphony, Mahler's myriad voices do not add up to a coherent statement, but rather conveys a collective crisis of meaning. The Fifth Symphony can also be read as a narrative of the traumas of immigration. Mahler himself was a German Jew from an outlying province of the Austrian empire, who made it to Vienna, the center. As an outsider he was particularly in tune with the centrifugal forces within modern civilization. Near the end of his life he migrated again, this time away from Europe itself, and spent much of his last years in New York.
The curtain lifts on a village of bomb-cratered huts, smoldering metal and upturned earth, the villagers huddling motionless amid the rubble. This is the "old country," a place of both stifling rigidity and terrible uncertainty - The garish trumpet at the beginning announces, “Thus it has always been.” Above, the proud rulers represented by the brass; below, the suffering people represented by the strings. In the middle section, the threat of force is unleashed. Adorno calls it “pogrom music,” hearing the hetman's brutal commands in the trumpets and the terrified shrieks of victims in the violins.
The nightmare glimpsed in a few remote villages in the middle of the first movement fully expands as a storm that sweeps over the continent in the second. The motion of history drives us, as in Walter Benjamin's description of the “angel of history”, not forwards but backwards,:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Within this storm human agency appears as a counter-force, pushing against the blind momentum, at certain points almost seeming to arrest it, but always it is hurled back into the chaos. Near the end of the movement, the light breaks through the clouds; another world is glimpsed, another possibility for living – but maybe it is only wishful thinking on the narrator’s part. The triumphant fanfare dies out prematurely, and is swallowed up in the maelstrom once again. All that's left at the end is ruins, a few embers burning.
Whereas the first two movements are concerned with the dark past and the uncertain future, the third parachutes us into the sensuous fullness of the present – or, the present moment circa 1900, in the city of Vienna. The movement is structured as a a series of interlocking dances and dances-within-dances. We feel the blood pulsing through the veins and arteries of a great modern city, with its car horns, its clattering street trams, its swarming thoroughfares, its quiet tree-lined alleys, a thousand lighted windows at night with waltzes swooning and swishing under the chandeliers, and, above all this, just outside the city limits, the eternal snow and silence of the Alps.
In 1900, Vienna is a city surrounded by countryside, whose fresh air still blows through it from time to time. And so, the provincial Jew from the empire’s edge of has found his way to the center. He explores the tangle of streets, rides the trams until he knows all the routes by heart, and wanders lost in the mountains. From the crowded streets, we are transported far from the human world. Ghosts of the past peek through the mist at the lone figure straying into their realm. The city becomes an unreal mirage in the distance, and along with it all human history. But returning from the mountains, one is shocked by the frenetic pace of life that one had gotten used to. How murderously the cars hurl themselves down the street! How cold and ruthless the faces of drivers and passersby! – Each person bent on his or her private ends, without a thought for anyone else! The city now no longer seems exciting, but insane, a gigantic machine bursting at the seams, spinning out of control. How is a being of flesh and blood to survive amid the gnashing gears, in the hungry maw?
This world has not been innocent for a long time; neither has love, which gives birth to all these faces washing over streets and plazas, in and out of houses where the the dead are carried out, the living replacing them on couches, chairs and beds, among all these faces, which reflect yours in their decrepitude... to find one face you cherish, and that cherishes yours – is enough to keep you human. Where does this love come from? From you? From my own heart? A dirty river formed of many streams, whose weary meandering from the beginning of time, driven by some ancient, unquenchable thirst, the love depicted in the Adagietto is not a young love, but one that has gone through the sorrows and disappointments of a lifetime, and marvels at the fact that, after all, love is still possible. The wailing of countless ghosts, unloved at the time of death, turns to song in the resonance of two living hearts that is the Adagietto.
Then morning comes: a single note on the horn. The depths experienced in the Adagietto now flow from underground into the comic Rondo-Finale: a day of friends, working lunches, coffeehouse gatherings, dentist appointments, payday... It is all a bit silly, but the fervent Adagietto music reappears again and again, now integrated into the fabric of a full life, the warp thread around which the bewildering variety of the world makes sense again. Finding love, one finds one's rightful place in the world. The finale is crowned by the triumphal fanfare from the second movement, now restored to its full glory - a pledge to work for the betterment of humanity and an affirmation of faith in its future.
But, in spite of the fullness of life conveyed by the Rondo Finale, in spite of the sincere sentiment of personal happiness leading toward universal welfare – there is an undeniable sense of letdown, as is often the case with Mahler's triumphal endings, and, beneath the feverish invention, a monotony and melodic threadbareness, especially apparent upon repeated listening. The problem is that this multifarious world, once believed to possess an inherent divine harmony, is now being held together by the “I”. I am happy, but how fragile is that happiness, and how much of my worldview depends on maintaining that happiness?
To the disturbing question of collective destiny raised by the first two movements, the Rondo-Finale answers “At least I'm safe and happy.” It is a thoroughly bourgeois answer. I’m happily married now and own a house in the Berkeley hills. I drive our kids to school every morning in our Prius with politically progressive bumper stickers. Then I stop by the local coffee shop and drink fair trade organic coffee. But is this the pinnacle of human achievement – fair trade organic coffee? Is that all there is to life? But, my friend, you are really asking to much of a limited human being like yourself, one full of contradictory desires, haunted by the past and trying to do his best under the circumstances. Do you still remember what it was like in the old country? And isn't it enough that we have come thus far already? ...
Erik Satie - 3 Gymnopedies and 6 Gnossiennes played by Pascal Roge
Evenings in the height of summer, as the day simmers down to a thick broth of mixed colors and smells, then begins to dissipate, you realize that this seemingly boundless splendor of light is only one flower, resting in the lap of an even greater darkness, which waters it and surrounds it on every side. The petals are fully unfolded now, but soon they will begin to curl up. By winter it will have condensed to a single seed hidden in the blackness, until the light emerges again - from where?
Or, in the midst of a conversation, when you listen past the other person's words into the timbre of their voice, that unique tone appearing only once in this world, stamped with the grain of their personal fate, and you think that every living thing is like this, a lone voice singing, uncomprehended by the rest of creation, from whom to whom?
These mysteries, utterly transparent, utterly unfathomable, entered through the Rosicrucian obscurities that fascinated him or through daily life, Erik Satie manages to evoke with the solitary notes of the piano sparkling against silence, in these, his most famous pieces.
Our understanding of emotions is colored by Romanticism and its commercial use by Hollywood. Swelling violins, eyes overflowing with tears... when someone nowadays says "I'm feeling very emotional right now." It usually means they are on the verge of losing it, losing control of themselves. We confound emotion with passion, volcanic outbursts, operatic demonstrations.
But what about the emotion of tying your shoelaces? Of stepping outdoors in springtime from your room, or coming back into your room from the noisy streets? We often often have no words for these more ordinary, more intimate feelings, and for the same reason, it is hard for us to describe, for example, what emotion is expressed in Bach's First Suite for Cello. Maybe it is the emotion of walking around in comfortable shoes, or of cooking a full, satisfying meal for our friends.
Rather than seizing us in violent transports, these humble emotions bubble up in a stream throughout the day. Tenuous in themselves, they nonetheless point continuously to the our emotional nature. Perhaps before the advent of Romanticism, it was the constancy of this emotional nature, supported by our watery physicality, rather than the emotions themselves - differentiated into love, hate, anger, fear and other vivid, nameable forms - that was the proper subject of music, as it is of dance.
In Bach's Cello Suites, the most intimate turns and twists of the heart within the body directly correlate to the whirling of the cosmos. There is no need for the transcendent passions of Romanticism. Sliding our feet into a snugly fitting pair of shoes, we walk to the rhythm of stars. Thus Bach’s secular music moves beyond Christianity into a wider sense of the sacred. These allemandes, courantes and sarabandes must be what Davies had in mind when he wrote
Dauncing (bright Lady) then began to be, When the first seedes whereof the world did spring The Fire, Ayre, Earth, and water did agree, By Loues perswasion, Natures mighty King, To learne their first disordred combating: And, in a daunce such measure to obserue, As all the world their motion should preserue. Since when they still are carried in a round, And changing come one in anothers place, Yet doe they neyther mingle nor confound, But euery one doth keepe the bounded space VVherein the daunce doth bid it turne or trace: This wondrous myracle did Loue deuise For Dauncing is Loues proper exercise. ... Behold the world how it is whirled round, And for it is so whirl'd,is named so; In whose large volume many rules are found Of this new Art, which it doth fairely show: For your quick eyes in wandring too and fro From East to West, on no one thing can glaunce, But if you make it well, it seemes to daunce.
In autumn,
there are days that give the illusion of spring with their tender warmth. At
dawn the grasses raise their heads, the flowers open, and the birds sing out
feebly, as if everything could begin again – before a blast of killing wind
brings the dream to an end. This is the atmosphere of the first movement of
Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Late in life, memory is so overpowering that the present and past become
confused. One relives the enthusiasms of youth, and fights once more its
hopeless battles as if they could still be won. And when this youth is lived in a period of
general decline like ours, in the midst of a decaying empire, youth’s vigor
could not help but dash again and again against the walls before exhausting
itself prematurely.
The middle
section of the first movement is made up of three climaxes, each followed by a
collapse. In the first our hero, scaling a mountain, falls over a cliff into a
void filled with mocking voices. In the second, he finds companions who charge
into battle with him, amid brass fanfares, like Don Quixote against the
windmills. But the current reverses, an undertow pulls them in different
directions, friends scatter, each one left to fend for himself. In the third climax, the hero bets everything
on one last throw of the dice – and meets Death itself clad in full armor. Then
the outrage and bewilderment of “this is it” – a whole lifetime has gone by
like a dream; there are no more chances. The song of spring-within-autumn
returns, now mangled beyond recognition. Then, only scattered voices in the
shocked empty space, the consolation of utter hopelessness.
As always in
Mahler’s treatment of heroism, we do not know whether to identify with the
protagonist or watch him from a distance with ironic sympathy. We do not know
whether he is (we are) being righteous or absurd. Heroism, Beethoven’s heroism,
convinced of the individual’s power to influence the world, now appears delusional
in face of social and existential reality. Whereas the 6th Symphony
depicts the individual undone by the pressure of history, here personal
aspirations are undermined by Time itself, which emphatically enters the music
in gestures of “tearing away” – Time breaks in brutally, irresistibly upon the
moments of dream, of reverie and nostalgia, until all that is personal and
distinctive is carried away on the flood.
The icy grief in the central movement of Mozart's piano concerto in A Major, K. 488 - what is called in Japanese aesthetics "mono no aware" - the sadness inherent to earthly things: the realization that nothing here belongs to us, that one cannot hold onto the wilting of flowers, but only the continuity of blossoming and wilting - the fact that some things wilt in the middle of summer and others bloom in the dead of winter - this unfathomably rich fabric, this endless overlapping of threads is finally what we can trust in, even as the threads themselves unravel.
The music has the transparency of certain ancient Chinese poems and paintings. Mozart's classicism is classically Chinese. So is his politeness, evident in the outer movements of this concerto, with their garden frolics amid summer evening coolness. This politeness is more than an aristocratic posture. Politeness is a lightness of touch, the proper way to behave as overnight guests here on earth.
The Fahrenden Gesellen of the title is a “traveling journeyman,” a remnant of the guilds of the Middle Ages and a stock figure in German Romanticism. These were young people who learned their trade by traveling from place to place and studying with various masters. There were still a fair number of them in the 19th Century. Heinrich Heine describes meeting one in his Harz Journey:
After having walked some distance I caught up with a traveling journeyman who came from Braunschweig, a nice little young man, so thin that the stars could shine through him as through Ossian’s nebulous spirits, and in general a baroque mixture of whimsy and melancholy characteristic of the common folk. This was shown in the amusingly touching way in which he sang the wonderful folk song, “A beetle sat upon the fence; buzz, buzz!” This is the nice thing about us Germans; no one is so crazy but that he can find someone even crazier who understands him. Only a German can appreciate that song and nearly die with laughing and weeping when he hears it.
“Laughing and weeping” I listen to these songs, written when Mahler was still a young man, maybe before he renounced his Jewish heritage in order to secure himself a place in the German-speaking cultural establishment. They are ridiculous and heartbreaking, juvenile and deeply knowing. The text, by Mahler himself, seems less written than distractedly recalled from all the cliches of Romanticism. The music, “laughing and weeping,” brings together German folk songs and the Yiddish songs heard on both sides of the Atlantic around the turn of the 20th Century.
The “laughing and weeping” tone first heard in these early songs is piercing, immoderate, anti-classical and characterizes all Mahler's later music. It runs counter to the "classical" ideal of a sound that is smooth, whole, closed-off, removed from the tone-world of social reality. There has yet to be a proper performance of these songs. To capture their peculiar sorrow, the singer would have to take on that broken, self-mocking voice one hears on old recordings of Yiddish songs from the New York of the 1920s, a voice nasal and scarred with experience, bringing to mind an asymmetric, greasy, pitted face and a smile that is also a grimace.
Most classical singers, working within the industry, are not willing to take that chance. The sorrow of Mahler is that of the dispossessed, those not in full command of the means of expression. They work with whatever music they find at hand, and this usually happens to be folk music. But they cannot quite identify with it. It is inadequate to express their actual experience. This tension tears open the fabric of the music and defamiliarizes it, makes it painful and piercing to cultured ears.
In his essay The Romantic School, Heine offers another lengthy description of the traveling journeyman in his discussion of German folk songs:
Usually the writers of such songs were wanderers, vagabonds, soldiers, itinerant scholars, or travelling apprentices (fahrenden Gesellen), particularly these last. Very often on my walking tours I joined company with these people and noticed how, at times, inspired by some unusual event, they would improvise a snatch of a folksong or whistle it into the open air. The birds sitting on the tree branches heard this, and when another had later come strolling past with his knapsack and walking stick, they would whistle that little snatch of song in his ear, and he would add the missing lines, and the song was finished. The words come from out of the blue to the lips of such a lad, and he needs only to utter them, and they are then even more poetic than all the fine poetical phrases that we concoct from the depths of our hearts. The character of these traveling apprentices lives and moves in such folk songs. They are a strange sort. Without a penny in their pockets, they travel through all of Germany, harmless, happy and free. I usually found that three set out together on such a journey. Of these three one was always the faultfinder… and if they came to a poor quarter with miserable huts and beggars in rags, he was likely to remark ironically, “The good Lord created the world in six days, and just look, the result shows it.” The second companion interrupted only occasionally with angry comments… his continual refrain was how much he regretted not having given his landlady in Halberstadt a sound thrashing to remember him by. At the word “Halberstadt” the third lad sighed from the depths of his heart. He was the youngest, setting out into the world for the first time, still thought constantly of his sweetheart’s dark brown eyes, always hung his head, and never said a word.
Why were Heine and Mahler, both assimilated German Jews, so attracted to this figure of the traveling journeyman? Maybe the footloose, carefree lifestyle of the young apprentice offered a disguise for the rootlessness of people cut off from their own heritage. This gives us another filter through which to hear this music. Certainly, the images of Nature in these songs are Romantic cliches. But how does an outsider experience the forces of Nature worshiped by Romanticism?
In one strain of 19th Century German antisemitism, the Jew is distinguished from “true” Germans by being cut off from Nature, for Nature itself is Aryan, with its golden-haired fields and blue-eyed sky. Thus for a Jew, even the brilliance of Springtime, the flowers and birds that grow from the soil of his adopted homeland, are closed off. He does not know their proper names and has no business in the stewardship of the land. He cannot go to Nature as a source of healing, the way countless Romantic poets did. The sky and fields themselves reject him. The “two blue eyes” of the darling girl are the eyes of society, which drive him out into the wide world and into the night.
Mahler thus inhabits the same marginal space in German Romanticism as Heine, whose bitterly ironic poems to his (always blonde and blue-eyed) beloved share the same frustrated desire to belong, to find a home through love. In the most intimate of experiences, one feels most sharply the collective wounds of history. This wound is also the source of hope: "I forgot what life's really like." When the vagrant falls asleep under the linden tree, the tree that stands guard before so many ancient German villages, promising with its sweet balmy scent safety and shelter for all who dwell within, the dream that engulfs him is of death as Utopia – in that other world, where no one is cast out any longer, the outcast will finally be welcomed home.
Modern science tells us that most of the universe is inhospitable to organic life. And so the advent of life itself as we know it is a political act, a rebellion against the eons-long dominion of non-life. Thoreau in his journals compared the coming of spring to a revolution – the absurdity that flowers should take over the world – flowers! Why do we only notice revolutions in the human world? Every springtime is a revolution, harking back to the first spring of life on earth. The first of random molecules organizing themselves into some semblance of order in the midst of gigantic chaos. Life forms from the dregs of the universe, and yet at some point it organizes itself into a marching band.
Richard Strauss was disturbed by the march sequences in the first movement of Mahler's 3rd Symphony. He said they reminded him of the workers’ parties parading on May Day. The marches are an eruption of the vulgar into the erudite world of Classical Music. A ragtag army, beating cracked drums and blowing on leaky fifes, storming the citadels of power. Life, far from being natural, is portrayed here as something unnatural, persisting against the odds, against Nature. From a thousand different directions, whimsical toots and whistles coalesce together into an army of the lowly and insignificant. Life turns the tables on the rest of Nature, but only temporarily. The momentum of the march doesn't know when to stop - Mahler has always been criticized on account of his excess. Life pushes itself beyond the planet’s ability to sustain it, leading to mass extinctions and the return of the oppression of non-life. "Balance" does exist in nature but there is nothing tranquil or comforting in the actual way it works.
Yet, the omnivorous massive first movement of the Third Symphony does not exclude the possibility of reconciliation, even if it only occurs in brief intervals of the struggle of Life against Nature. Near the end of the development section there is an episode of almost unbearable sweetness, a kind of sub-tropical afternoon languor that gives the illusion of eternity. The struggle to survive abates and there is time to dream. But the cellos rumble from down below, and with two subversive flourishes on the woodwinds, we are thrown into chaos again.
The Third Symphony may be Mahler's most ambitious music, but is also his silliest. He seems well aware of the ridiculousness of trying to write a symphony about the history of the universe. There is something cartoonish about the marches of insect soldiers, like the cosmic aspirations of Disney's Fantasia, or Woody Allen speculating about the Big Bang and male erectile dysfunction to the camera... and because of this self-conscious silliness, Mahler succeeds where so many grand late Romantic symphonies failed. This really is the History of the Universe. (LOL)
My friend and I heard them coming down
Valencia St. yesterday. Quite a motley crew, blaring on trumpets and
beating on drums. The sound pierced the lazy Sunday afternoon, broke
a hole in the invisible ceiling above the street of shops, as people
went about their business shopping, begging or stealing. And we
suddenly realized: we were outdoors, with nothing between us and the
sky. This annoyed some people and delighted others. Of two strollers
that passed by, I saw one baby wiggling to the music and the other
covering its ears: politics begins earlier than we imagine! As for
me, my first urge was to march behind the band, no matter what their
political affiliations. So my friend and I did that, along with two
touristy guys in cowboy hats made from Coors beer cartons. As we
marched I felt like I was in some Eastern European village, on my way
to the Shrovetide festivities. It also made me think of the marches
in Mahler's 3rd Symphony... more on that later.
My friend quipped, “Whenever I put this on, it makes whatever I'm doing instantly more meaningful.” You could play this music while you're washing dishes, and you would be washing dishes with the whole universe. The music trains you to hear everything as a fugue – as strands of sound weaving around each other. It is the way everything works – the way roots grow under the soil, the way veins thread through a leaf or through a human body, the way planets and constellations revolve in the night sky.
This is the profundity of Bach's music – the same principle is at work on the smallest and largest scale. The voices speaking simultaneously depend on each other. They illuminate and support each other and derive their meaning from each other. Though written mostly in a religious context, the fugue has nothing inherently religious about it. This is especially clear in Bach's last, unfinished work, The Art of Fugue: written without words, even without instruments! The score gives only four "voices" and no indication of what is to give voice to them. It has been played on everything from harpsichord to organ to saxophone quartet to electronic instruments.
The timbre of the instruments makes a big difference. My favorite is the versions for string quartet. Though anachronistic, the sound of four strings, sensuous yet bare, take the music to a purely human level. It is the voice of the body - physical, social or cosmic, whereas the organ version is a voice speaking from above, dominating the body. The organ seems to embody religious authority.
Bach: Two pieces from The Art of Fugue, played by Keller Quartet
You may have to be between the ages of 16 and 18 to appreciate these songs properly. Back in high school they had the same place in my life as did R&B love songs in the lives of my classmates: balm for broken hearts. Nowadays most "classical" singers are too sophisticated for this music; you can hear the bow tie. Aksel Schiotz's recording from the 1930s is the only one that brings to mind the fresh, flushed cheeks and haplessness of the teenage miller.
Perhaps only rosy-faced teenage boys can move us with lines like these:
"I’d like to raise me a young starling
until he could speak the words loud and clear
until he could speak with the sound of my mouth
with the full, hot press of my heart…”
Perhaps only pimply-faced teenage boys are excused for this kind of love, love that is simply drunken absorption in the babbling brook, in the green alders, in the clattering mill-wheels around the house, the glint of sunlight from the windows, and the fountains of youth pouring from one’s body.
As for the “lovely mill-girl” of the title, she may or may as well not exist. This kind of love ends logically in suicide, in the miller boy drowning himself, merging with the landscape he loves so much. But really he is too young to believe in death, and so he only falls asleep and wakes up in November, older and more embittered, to wander the dead landscape of Schubert's other song cycle, Winterreise.
Beethoven’s lover in To the Distant Beloved is homelier, square-jawed like Beethoven himself, with none of the rosy pubescent charm of the miller boy. The melodies are plainer, and in the way Beethoven has with melodies, are nuts and bolts rather than Schuber's wild bouquets. But as nuts and bolts, they constantly remind us of the impulse behind the whole, which here might be summed up in Adorno’s epigram, “He only loves, who has the strength to hold onto love.” The six songs each flow into the next without a break, woven together by the piano, which is in many ways more expressive here than the voice (Beethoven was a pianist, not a singer) and embodies this unwavering, underlying impulse. The most moving moment comes when the refrain of the first song reappears at the very end, and we see, as in many of Beethoven’s works, that it could not be otherwise, that everything we have experienced so far only leads back to the beginning, to what we always knew in a process of trial and affirmation. And so space and time is overcome, and enduring absence and uncertainty, love is transformed from the sunlight of an afternoon into the binding force of life itself. It is a more adult love than that of Die Schoene Muellerin. The experience of love is ennobling in itself, regardless of how things turned out.
Mozart: Serenade in B flat, K. 361 ("Gran Partita")
My mom had an uncle whom she was close
to, a chemistry professor who loved collecting books and records in
his spare time, and who sparked her own lifelong interest in visual
arts. He had a huge number of Classical music CDs. At one point, my
mother recalls, the collection overflowed the shelves into a stack on
the floor of his study that almost reached to the ceiling. One day,
the Red Guards ransacked his house and smashed his entire collection.
No, he had done most of it himself an hour or so before, in
anticipation of what was coming. They finished off the absolutely
precious recordings he couldn't bear to destroy himself. There they
lay on the wooden floor: shards of grooved plastic that were once
vintage recordings of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.
Forty years later, this scene repeated
in the living room of my parents' house in Fremont, California. With
a hammer, my father, a former Red Guard, smashed the collection of
Classical CD's one by one that I had carefully amassed from the local
Tower Records. “I'm going to wean you of this drug once and for
all!” My father said as he swung his still muscular arms, honed
from manual labor. They were propaganda arms, the arms of the perfect
workers and soldiers in those posters he painted in the 60's. I stood
by with a cold fire in my heart, the unrepentant
counterrevolutionary. As I watched bits of shiny plastic scatter over
the carpet, I knew the music would be wedded to my heart forever, and
to my hatred of everything productive and modern.
This music was as incompatible with
Capitalism as it had been with Communism. I remember the first time I
heard it. I was about 12, my father and I were driving to his
workplace. I switched on the car radio and some Mozart came on. “Turn
that off, will you?” My father said, “That music doesn't belong
in the modern world.” How true that was, I thought as soon as I
looked out the window. We were in Silicon Valley, a landscape of
death, a horror of people working in windowless offices and giant warehouses, surrounded by
glowing screens and snaking wires. Mozart was an insult to this
world, because he reminded us that some part of us was still human,
that some part of us still longed to play, to laugh and cry at the
beauty of the world, that we were not completely enslaved.
All modern art and music seemed like propaganda to me: Either Communist propaganda to produce more
tractors, or Capitalist propaganda to buy more Viagra. The true
message of every song on the radio is “Work, work, work! Buy,
buy, buy!” The lyrics don't matter, the message is in the monotonous, unchanging beat, which is the same beat as freeways, factories, fighter jets. It makes us into robots who desperately produce
and then desperately consume – and that is the whole story of life. It is in this context that I proudly listen to music written,
played and enjoyed by dead white men.
The hollow chords echo from the walls of my family's house in Fremont, CA. It is one of a row of identical buildings in a vast suburb, glistening like rows of shiny teeth, built in a hurry for the waves of immigrants, like us, who settled in Silicon Valley. It was our American dream achieved – an empty victory. We never really dwelt in it. We lived with one eye on the property value, cleaning and renovating it not for ourselves but for some mysterious future buyer, who will one day enjoy the spaces we never did. The walls and tabletops had a clammy, hostile feeling, a layer of cold slime clung to them no matter how many times we wiped them.
This house instilled in me a hatred for all that is settled, domestic and cozy. As a teenager I would climb out the window of my room every night. The windy Bay Area night exhilarated me. I spent hours wandering the empty suburban streets, listening to the underground rivers rushing in the sewers, lying on my back on strangers' lawns, buying cigarettes at all-night gas stations. It was my world where I could do whatever I wanted: sing, dance, laugh, cry, all the things that were forbidden during the day. But at the same time, I felt was moving further and further from the rest of humanity.
I don't know if Schubert had the same experience. In Charles Rosen's book he associates the second Moment Musical to a record of a dream, which Schubert wrote down:
“I was a brother to many brothers and sisters. Our father and mother were good. I felt deep love for everyone. Once my father took us to a feast of pleasures. My brothers were glad but I was sad. My father came up to me and ordered me to eat the expensive entrees, but I could not, whereupon my father flew into a rage and banned me from his sight. I turned my steps and, with a heart full of love for those who despised it, wandered in faraway places(...) There I felt the greatest love and the greatest sorrow tearing me apart. Songs I sang these long, long years – and when I wanted to sing of love, it turned to pain before my eyes, and when I wanted to sing of pain, it turned to love. So love and pain tore me to pieces(...)”
The first section of the Moment Musical No. 2 is made up of static chords, the second section made up of restless rolling triplets and a song-like melody that floats over them. The first section represents the bourgeois home, where one is safe and surrounded by loved ones, but also stifled by them and unable to sing. The alternating section represents a nomadic life full of loneliness, where one can sing – yet only sing of pain.
Gulls and Herons Forget Scheming, played by Wu Zhaoji
The credits read: “Soaring aloft between sea and sky, the seabirds mix their hearts with the elements and forget all calculation. This piece has a deep resonance and, if played at night, opens the heart and lightens the spirit.”
As much as I love the great work of European classical music, I always feel like someone is lecturing me, especially when the said works are Really Great, like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Bach's Mass in B Minor. Someone is yelling at me "Stop what you are doing, and listen to me! This is much more important!" And I have no choice but to obey and be overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe, in contrast to which whatever I am doing at the moment seems insignificant.
But there is more than one way to show the vastness of our lives. You can fill the space with a thousand elaborate creations, or you can simply point to space – the pluck of a string attached to a piece of pine wood, reverberates in the furthest reaches of the universe. So now we can afford to relax and stretch our bodies out on a bamboo mat, like those loosely clothed sages in the paintings, who are often seen with the instrument under their arms. Each note of the guqin is a tiny dent or ripple in silence, which immediately smooths itself, before the next ripple arises. In terms of musical logic it is hard to say how each note relates to the next. Maybe we are all alone, and this is ultimate freedom. You can't trace the music, and it is difficult to hum. It never gets stuck in your head no matter how many times you listen to it. It is like clear water running through the ears, "wiping out the traces / of the people and the places that I've been." (Kris Kristofferson) It nourishes the wilderness within.
Who was Schubert? Can he be said to have been a person at all? All he left behind was his music, and he is not to be found even there – at least not in the way that Beethoven is found in every one of his works, shaking his fist and shouting, “I am Beethoven!” Schubert is shadowy and shapeless – like those figures in Chinese landscape paintings with their backs turned to the viewer, whose only purpose is to show the scale of their surroundings. The self is shown as not the creator of its environment, but inextricably embedded in it. By exploring the contours of the emotional landscape, Schubert reveals a different vision of humanity – not the humanity that demands its rights and dignity, as in Beethoven, but the humanity of which most of us are ashamed in the West – the fleeting experience of living in a body made up of unquenchable fears and desires.
Schubert's provocation is that going astray is itself a path. Life needs no purpose and we are not here to accomplish anything in particular. He veers away from the straight and narrow logic of Western music and carves his own wayward, winding path through the wild. This path digresses deceptively, curving around to find the shortest way down into the depths. The A major Sonata moves by this pattern of deception and digression, constantly undermining our expectations. It does not develop from within, driven by a continuity of purpose, but constantly opens itself to strange new vistas. There is no ground to stand on. This constant alternation is what is so disturbing and at the same time liberating about Schubert's music.
The A Major sonata begins with a wall of sound, an impenetrable, seemingly solid rocky cliff. A trickle of water seeps from its base. A few pebbles come loose. The trickle turns into a stream, into a network of streams. Cracks open in the hard wall and the whole facade breaks apart in pieces, carried away on a roaring flood. But the flood soon runs dry and we are left again on parched earth. At the end of the first movement's exposition Schubert adds a tiny little flourish onto the end of the secondary theme, seemingly a frivolous ornament. But this ornament becomes the pattern for the whole development section, as if, walking in the mountains, we are distracted by the sound of water, and following it, we see a whole undiscovered valley in bloom through the cleft in the rock. The first movement paints the splendor and chaos of the emotions as a riveting landscape, strange yet familiar.
Yet by the second movement, all this richness seems like a delusion. A homeless man is trying to find shelter under the freeway. His steps echo in the vacuous night. The middle section depicts the convulsion of a body abandoned to unspeakable loneliness. This is the dark side of individuality – unspeakable loneliness in a world where everything cold, metallic, dead to the touch. The only logical response to such a world is madness.
The third movement is dancing on broken glass. It carries an echo of the madness from the second movement but maintains a jumpy, precarious balance.
In the last movement, the turmoil is not so much overcome as bypassed – in Schubert, there is no need for resolution, since everything happens and exhausts itself in the moment. Walking and singing are seen to be the thread that ties a life together. The ambling, song-like melody persists through endless harmonic and rhythmic shifts, at times light and ethereal, at times diving into jagged, dark regions, reappearing in different variations, yet staying true to its original pulse. There is finally a sense of “normal life” that gives continuity amid the unpredictable turns of life. Yet even this is undermined at the end – the melody finally thins out like a worn fabric – silences appear in between its phrases – it hesitates, then throws itself into overwhelming chaos. There are no conclusions to be made about life.
Beethoven: Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111 (Played by Artur Schnabel)
The two movements that make up Beethoven's final torso, represent two different views of life. The first, from Beethoven's signature, stormy C minor mode, sees life from the midst of the struggle, where one never has enough time; one is so eager to finish that nothing ever gets done, and fate snatches the coveted prize again and again before us, no matter how fast we run toward it. The crude, ungracious three-note motif blunders through a series of disasters, comic and tragic at the same time, before time literally runs through our fingers in the coda. All that speed and aggression has been for nothing. "This is it? Not more?"
Yet the second subject of the first movement already offers a brief glimpse of calm, and in the midst of rage and bewilderment, hints at another way of looking at things beyond happiness and tragedy, success and failure. In the silence between the two movements, all bewildering desires are extinguished. The second movement begins in the coldness of outer space. Yet out of this cold distance a warmth emerges, a delight in the world of appearances divorced from personal fate. Life from now appears from this distance in its entirety, as an effortless, circular dance of light, which grows more dazzling and complex as we approach it, before vanishing on contact.
The long second movement begins as a set of variations, each twice as fast as the previous one. The first variation is still, the second a sentimental stroll, the third a gentle canter and the fourth a frenetic dance. The increasing richness and energy culminates in the fifth variation - where the sheer speed of molecular vibrations is shown as the same as stillness. Matter itself is revealed as a pure shimmering. The method is brutally simple, like the investigations of Buddhist sutras - a rigorous logic that leads us beyond logic, to the inseparability of form and emptiness. As in certain trance practices, where the increasing tension of focus finally releases one into a state of deep relaxation, Beethoven now discards the variation form altogether, and the rest of the movement is a free-form fantasia, which takes us to the outermost reaches of space before depositing us back on earth, with a new appreciation for our place.
