Tim Armstrong
Music has often been a privileged vehicle for understandings of modernism. Important moments of rupture were frequently musical: the shock of the first performance of Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, with its savage strummings and rapid shifts in time signature; the raucous Futurist sound machines, the intonarumori, on the stage of the Coliseum in London in 1914; the scandal of Jean Cocteau’s ballet Parade in Paris in 1917, with its music by Eric Satie and designs by Picasso; the megaphonic chanting of Edith Sitwell’s near-nonsense to William Walton’s eccentric orchestra in Façade in1923; jazz as ‘noise emancipated’ – Walter Benjamin’s term – an emblem of the nervous polyrhythms of the modern world, carried from America to Europe (Benjamin, 1999, 862).
The reasons for this prominence are twofold. First, with its stress on formal development across the centuries, and particularly in its internalized notions of development in sonata form, and its reliance on explicit codes of expression, music provides a place where breaks in form are easily marked. Musical modernism shifts away from melody and the tonic-dominant system, either towards the distributed, abstract mathematical values of the twelve-note system or even more disruptively towards noise itself, sound rather than notes. Second, the sonic world’s status as inescapable impulse – we absorb it with our bodies; we cannot turn away or shut our ears to it (see Connor, 1996) – reflects the modernist preoccupation with embodied aesthetics. This allies music to modernism’s depiction of somatic experience and streams of consciousness, and at times to its recourse to primitivism.
In terms of the relations between literature and music, the situation is of course more complex: music provides both an external point of reference and an aesthetic; it can appear within the work’s reality or inform its modes of writing and representation. Rather than language aspiring to the condition of music, as in the tradition which descends from Walter Pater and Stephane Mallarmé, modernism often reaches towards a dynamic multimedia mapping of the senses in the tradition of Richard Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk; or equally their aggressive juxtaposition, sound and sight clashing, as in Sergei Eisenstein’s understanding of montage and sound film (for a general account, see Halliday, 2013). But within that sensory paradigm, music nonetheless has a privileged role because of its ambiguous status, at once close to or ‘like’ a language – a highly formal one with inbuilt codes and expectations – but also the direct carrier of feeling. To that can be added a further complication: in the twentieth century music becomes increasingly bound to the productive and reproductive technologies which epitomize modernity: to the player-piano, gramophone, radio, and cinema. Modernist performance often demanded new technologies: Façade, the piece with music by William Walton set to chanted poems by Edith Sitwell, first performed in 1922, employed a Sengerphone (a papier-mâché megaphone that also covered the nasal cavities, producing a more natural tone). Igor Stravinsky and later the American composer Conlon Nancarrow used the player-piano to produce music so fast that no human player could readily play it; Bohuslav Martinů, Oliver Messiaen and others used the Theremin, an early electronic instrument with toneless gradations.
For Theodor Adorno in ‘Music, Language and Composition’ (1956), music transcends the tension between expression and form because it aspires to a directness of communication which distances it from language while remaining related to it (Adorno, 2002, 113–26). It is for similar reasons that modern artworks have often found in music a model for an organized synthesis of motifs which seem disparate, intermittent or even baffling. The drift of music, in Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, towards atonality, dissonance or sparseness and silence (Satie’s ‘white ballet’) mirrors modernism’s suspicion of representation and expression. In his ‘German letter’ to Axel Kaun of 1937, Samuel Beckett describes music as an avant-garde that, in this respect, literature has failed to match:
As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? […] Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? (Beckett, 1983, 172)
For similar reasons, for Adorno music emblematizes the general problem of the continuation of the avant-garde: in his 1955 essay ‘The Aging of the New Music’, he attacks Schoenberg’s followers in the use of twelve-tone technique for its decline into ‘abstract negation’ (Adorno, 2002, 187), an arid formalism in which its innovations no longer shock; no longer demonstrate a dialectical relation to the social milieu which produces them.
The Question of the Avant-Garde
At the beginning of the modernist experiment in London, at least, the question of what music would have to contribute to the avant-garde was less certain than it later was for Adorno, given the power of art as a point of reference. In Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924), Ezra Pound notes that ‘The Vorticist Manifestos of 1913–14 left a blank space for music; there was in contemporary music, at that date, nothing corresponding to the work of Wyndham Lewis, Pablo Picasso, or Gaudier-Brzeska’ (Pound, 1927, 37). Pound, whose output as a music critic is considerable, became interested in music as modernist practice largely in the period after 1920. His definition of the chord as a ‘complex of sound’ (40) and his talk of George Antheil’s ‘“decomposition” of the musical atom’ (148) bring music into a general alignment with Vorticism, but Pound also insists that poetry must learn from music a multisensory rhythmic complexity so that it ‘becomes not only aware of that given form, but more sensitive to other forms, rhythms, defined planes, or masses. It is a scaling of eye-balls, a castigating or purging of aural cortices; a sharpening of verbal apperceptions’ (44). Pound’s theory of the ‘Great Bass’ asserts a connection between pitch and rhythm which unifies notions of structure in different analytic frames:
Down below the lowest note synthesized by the ear and ‘heard’ there are slower vibrations. The ratio between these frequencies and those written to be executed by instruments is OBVIOUS in mathematics. The whole question of tempo, and of a main base in all musical structure resides in use of these frequencies. (Pound, 1966, 73)
The drive here is towards a synthesis of different senses and artistic modes. As Brad Bucknell argues, this parallels the Vorticist stress on relations between elements rather than things in themselves (Bucknell, 2001, 74), but also between differently scaled modes of analysis like the Cantos considered as locally related fragments on the one hand and the overall structure of the poem on the other hand.
Pound was careful to rule out both Stravinsky and the Italian Futurists from his account of modernist music. Nevertheless, the Futurists, seeking to reform all areas of art, were (as Douglas Kahn [1999] and others have argued) part of a crucial musical shift away from music towards the values of noise, of a liberation from the restrictions of the chromatic scale. In ‘The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto’ (1913, rev. 1916), Luigi Russolo proposes a new music for two reasons: first, a boredom with the values of traditional classical music, and a restless search for new stimulation; second because noise represents the ‘clamour’ of a technological society, ‘the throbbing of valves, the pounding of pistons, the screeching of gears, the clatter of streetcars’ (Albright, 2004, 180). Because noise is attached to the life process, it ‘is familiar to our ears and has the power to remind us immediately of life itself’ in its irregularity; it is not detached from life as music is (81). In a similar manner, the American Henry Cowell and the Australian Percy Grainger advocated the use of tone rows and glissandi (what Grainger called ‘free music’) detached from the musical scale, and later composers like Anteil incorporated noisemakers into their output.
The composer and pianist who often represented modernity in popular imagination was not Russolo, Stravinsky or even Antheil, but the largely forgotten Leo Ornstein, an emigrant from the Ukraine to the United States. His American recitals were packed; 1914 London performances of work by Busoni, himself and others, pioneering the use of tone clusters (a large block of adjacent notes played at once), were described as ‘Futurist’; his reputation reached as far as Australia. Works like ‘Wild Men’s Dance’ and ‘Suicide in an Airplane’, all composed before 1920, influenced later composers like Cowell, Antheil and Nancarrow – although Ornstein himself burned out and faded in the early twenties. The tone cluster had some European progenitors, in the main being used to register the dissonance of battle. But as it developed more systematically it was associated especially with Americans: Charles Ives, Scott Joplin, Cowell and later Lou Harrison. Its layering of slabs of almost inevitably dissonant sound (adjacent notes hit in groups, sometimes with padded bars) signals rupture of the kind that Beckett celebrated, but also a return to nature: roars; cliffs of sounds; primitive blows. Once again it represented a break with musical tradition, especially in relation to the tradition of melody and counterpoint and the values associated with the single note and the selective action of the hand in its trained interaction with the complexity of the piano.
While it is not possible to translate the values of such musical revolution directly into literature, one can see in the general modernist stress on rhythm, noise, and the word as impulse some suggestive parallels. Blocks of sound, layers of words rather than metrical development, are intrinsic to the methodology of Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and the poets who follow them; the layered noise of language in Finnegans Wake (1939) – a work full of both natural music, onomatopoeic thunder, and reference to opera and other musical forms – is, Joyce asserted, ‘pure music’ (Prieto, 2002, 63).
Many manifestos of modernist music also share the modernist suspicion of genre and indeed of the parameters of established music: harmony and counterpoint; the scale itself, attacked in compositions which use micro-scales or, like Russolo’s Futurist scores, graphed as continuous frequency maps of tonal shifts rather than steps and intervals. Commentators on jazz often insisted that standard musical notation could not deal with its melodic and rhythmic complexity, noting the use of rubato (shifts in tempo), syncopation, glissandi and melisma to bend the standards which were at the core of the repertoire (see, for example, Ernest Ansermet, ‘On a Negro Orchestra’ [1919], in Albright, 2004, 368–73). As Sam Halliday notes, modernism in music encompasses a range of features: tonality and the chromatic scale, pitch, rhythm and instrumentation were all involved (Halliday, 2013, 134). The musical collage and layering of composers like Charles Ives – who literally figures the collision of different kinds of music in his work – the incorporation of ragtime and jazz in the work of Claude Debussy, Ernst Krenek, Dmitri Shostakovich and others; such qualities link music to modernist aesthetics in the visual field.
There is less space here for other aspects of music in the period which should nevertheless be noted. One is the relation between music and the market – fostering, Mark Katz suggests, a stress on trademark style and difference in performances of classical music, a version of the genius as publicist also present in modernist literature (Katz, 2004; Rainey, 1998). In Adorno’s view, music that exists outside the developmental logic of the Western tradition is barely worthy of attention. But the globalization which is a central aspect of the modern world brings a variety of musical traditions into Western tradition, whether the American Spirituals used by Antonín Dvořák or the gamelan used by Debussy, Poulenc and Hindemith. Styles swirl and mix: to take one small example, the steel guitar developed in Hawaii around the turn of the century and later transferred to the American mainland may have been inspired by a combination of Portuguese and Indian immigrants using the steel-slide technique of Indian instruments like the gottuvadyam. Modernism incorporates these elements, at times, under the heading of primitivism, but because notes are not marked as quotations in the way that literary interpolations are, one might argue that music more quickly develops a dialogue with the forms it imports – as indeed do poly-vocal texts which operate under the sign of music, like Finnegans Wake.
Schopenhauer and the Stream of Consciousness
We can pursue a particular aspect of music, its linkage to embodied experience. For Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) in The World as Will and Idea (1819), music offers a privileged access to the individual will, the true source of knowledge of the Will which is the fundamental truth of existence. Music carries the pulse of the Will, not as a representation but as a direct transcription of being itself:
Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as the Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. (Schopenhauer, 1909, I 333)
Schopenhauer’s thinking on music – on the status of the soprano, tenor and bass parts, on the reconciliation of harmony and melody – is complex, especially when he returns to the subject in Chapter 39 of the third volume of his study ‘On the Metaphysics of Music’, and elaborates on the alternation of mood and form in music as they relate to the Will:
Thus, in general, music consists of a constant succession of more or less disquieting chords, i.e., chords which excite longing, and more or less quieting and satisfying chords; just as the life of the heart (the will) is a constant succession of greater or less disquietude through desire and aversion, and just as various degrees of relief. Accordingly the harmonious sequence of chords consists of the correct alternation of dissonance and consonance. A succession of merely consonant chords would be satiating, wearisome, and empty, like the languor produced by the satisfaction of all wishes. Therefore dissonances must be introduced, although they disquiet us and affect us almost painfully, but only in order to be resolved again in consonances with proper preparation. Indeed, in the whole of music there are really only two fundamental chords, the dissonant chord of the seventh and the consonant triad, to which all chords that occur can be referred. This just corresponds to the fact, that for the will there are at bottom only dissatisfaction and satisfaction, under however many forms they may present themselves. And as there are two general fundamental moods of the mind, serenity, or at least healthiness, and sadness, or even oppression, so music has two general keys, the major and the minor (Schopenhauer, 1909, III 243)
Music here, when the listener opens her mind to it, is a schooling in the possibilities of existence (and in some senses in the ethics of accommodation), as well as the representation of the particular struggles of the composer. Schopenhauer writes that the individual will is itself like a musical responder, ‘the trembling string that is stretched and twanged’ (Schopenhauer, 1909, III 237).
Schopenhauer’s thought on music reached English readers via interpreters such as Francis Heuffer (father of Ford Madox Ford) and H. R. Haweis, informing the ‘Wagner mania’ of the late 1870s and 1880s. But a more potent influence for the novel, I would argue, is the link between his vitalism and accounts of the stream of consciousness: if we seek to represent a flow of experience in which the world is perceived in terms of the various embodied intensities of perception and memory, music as conceived by Schopenhauer provides a model. Indeed, as Eric Prieto argues, the reception of Schopenhauer’s thinking in Wagner influences developing ideas of interior monologue, most importantly in Edouard Dujardin’s description of the method of his 1888 novel Les lauriers sont coupés, which was in turn a crucial influence on Joyce:
Dujardin bases his analogy between the Wagnerian leitmotiv and the interior-monologue technique on a simple empirical observation: the substance of thought is, like the sound stream of a melody, unidirectional (i.e., running continuously in time), but the content of thought is full of motivic recurrences […] Joyce, building on Dujardin’s theory of the interior monologue, also equates music with thought processes when he invokes the model of musical counterpoint for the ‘Sirens’ chapter of Ulysses. The counterpoint analogy, like Dujardin’s leitmotiv analogy, depends on a basic empirical observation, that of the mind’s ability to operate on several stimuli at the same time. (Prieto, 2002, 62)
I will return to this topic shortly, but it is worth noticing that Schopenhauer’s thinking can also influence accounts of poetry as a kind of pure experience. Wallace Stevens read Schopenhauer with approval as a young man, returning to his philosophy in his essay ‘A Collect of Philosophy’ (1951). He refers to music again and again in his poetry: as a marker of the sounds of existence, and as a human making which responds to that natural music. The following passage from ‘Description without Place’ (Stevens’s 1945 Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard), in which he meditates on the recent war, is a deep response to Schopenhauer’s understanding of music as an account of will:
There are potential seemings, arrogant
To be, as on the youngest poet’s page,
Or in the dark musician, listening
To hear more brightly the contriving chords.
There are potential seemings turbulent
In the death of a soldier, like the utmost will,
The more than human commonplace of blood,
The breath that gushes upward and is gone,
And another breath emerging out of death,
That speaks for him such seemings as death gives.
There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet’s metaphors in which being would
Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,
And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,
That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind. (Stevens, 1997, 298)
Schopenhauer says ‘the will is warmth, the intellect is light’. ‘Dazzle’ signals the limitations of vision and of metaphor’s perspectivism; music is the human world unmediated, as Stevens suggested a few years later in his essay ‘The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons’ (1954): ‘The principle of music would be an addition to humanity if it were not humanity itself, in other than human form’ (Stevens, 1997, 875). It is interesting, too, that in this poem we move from the ‘contriving’ of the musician – often Stevens’s focus in his early work – to music as a pure listening, untouched by the discursive, as in Schopenhauer’s account. Indeed, the technicalities of making music, a traditional figure for poesis, are often supplanted in modernist accounts by the notion of music as an absolute experience.
Stevens references recorded music on a number of occasions (see Armstrong, 2007). If music offers a transcription of being, it is one mediated by the performers of any piece; the listener hears two overlayered accounts, two histories. Recorded music, on the other hand, preserves an original historical moment and transmits it to another time. Recorded music enters modernist literature through a variety of routes: through allusions to and representations of the player-piano or gramophone, but also through tropes in which the recording of music captures the sense of a particular ineffable moment – part of an overall shift of modernism towards the conception of writing as media rather than self-expression (see Murphet, 2009).
Music and the Bildungsroman
Schoenberg and his school epitomize a musical modernity in which the narrative as exemplified by sonata form and the valuing of the tonic (associated above all with Beethoven) is abandoned, along with melody. Because of this eschewing of the developmental logic which reaches a kind of climax in the self-consciously ironic gestures of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1898), the relation between music and the Bildungsroman becomes a particularly interesting one. This is an issue on which I will focus the remainder of this chapter, using four examples of the subgenre (if it can be called that) of the music novel: in chronological order, Henry Handel Richardson’s neglected 1906 masterpiece Maurice Guest; James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); Dorothy Richardson’s sequence Pilgrimage (begun in 1915 and completed in 1935); and Thomas Mann’s study of the end of modernism, Doctor Faustus (1947). In each case, the developmental narrative of the novel outstrips or clashes with the intensities incarnated in music, resulting in narratives of death or apocalypse, or at least a flight from musical life. Music in this sense represents one of the defining contradictions of modernism, skewed between an absolute drive towards formal innovation and a desire to derive the energies for that movement from the life process, from a vitalism whose link to the avant-garde is in fact intermittent and ultimately in tension with its historicity. This is Mann’s narrator in Doctor Faustus, discussing the Apocalypse, the masterpiece of his doomed composer-friend Leverkühn, in eminently dialectical fashion:
How often has this intimidating work, in its urge to reveal in the language of music the most hidden things, the beast in man as well as his sublimest stirrings, incurred the reproach both of blood-boltered barbarism and of bloodless intellectuality! I say incurred; for its idea, in a way, is to take in the life-history of music, from its pre-musical, magic, rhythmical, elementary stage to its most complex consummation; and thus it does perhaps expose itself to such reproaches not only in part but as a whole. (Mann, 1968, 359)
‘Blood-bolted barbarism’ in Mann’s novel is placed in historical terms outside its musical story; it takes over when the music ends, as we will shortly see.
The connection between music and passion is central to what could be described as one of the most Wagnerian novels written in English, the Australian Henry Handel Richardson’s (nom de plume for Ethel Richardson’s) Maurice Guest. Set in the world of international music students in Leipzig, Maurice Guest carries in the rhythms of its musical subject matter and its three movements the tempestuous Totentanz of its protagonists. The novel is less interested in character in the traditional sense – it cannot easily be called a Bildungsroman, and deals with a central character who in many ways remains blank, deliberately detached from his origins in an English small town, and with musical ambitions which begin strongly but carry him nowhere, abandoned in the wake of his obsession with the femme fatale Louise, who is in turn in love with the egoistical violinist Schilsky. Where the musical avant-garde appears in the novel, it is in the work of the bloodless and detached Schilsky, who writes apocalyptic ‘Symphonic poems’ in the new style: ‘Zarathustra’ and ‘Über die letzten Dinge’ (titles borrowed from Nietzsche and Otto Weininger, respectively). What drives the novel forward is less music than the play of passions and the ‘values’ associated with particular positions and relations, rather than with character itself, carried in a prose that often aspires to the rhythms of music. This is Maurice overhearing Louise, who is talking to Schilsky:
What she said was inaudible to him; but it was enough to be able to listen, unseen, to her voice. Hearing it like this, as something existing for itself, he was amazed at its depth and clearness; he felt that her personal presence had, until now, hindered him from appreciating a beautiful but immaterial thing at its true worth. At first, like a cadence that repeats itself, its tones rose and fell, but with more subtle inflections than the ordinary voice has: there was a note in it that might have belonged to a child’s voice; another, more primitive, that betrayed feeling with as little reserve as the cry of an animal. Then it sank, and went on in a monotone, like a Hebrew prayer, as if reiterating things worn threadbare by repetition, and already said too often. Gradually, it died away in the surrounding silence. (Richardson, 1908, 150)
Maurice Guest makes the life of music less a matter of an avant-garde than it is an expression of embodied existence. Stylistically, the novel is characterized by repetition of a few set motifs – triangulated and frustrated desire, ambition, the approval of teachers – and by a setting which could almost be that of an opera – a few rooms, the cafe, the park and the concert hall. The narrative ends with a climax in which its opening motifs are echoed as the despairing and abandoned Maurice shoots himself in the breast – a walk in the woods on a raw spring day, a vision of passing clouds – and moves immediately to a coda, itself echoing and recapitulating earlier scenes in which Louise is seen from outside. This is an orchestration in which struggle is described – for long passages pain and obsession dominate, ‘worn threadbare by repetition’ – and only resolved in death.
Maurice Guest is an important text in relation to the link, discussed above, between stream of consciousness and an understanding of music derived from Schopenhauer and Wagner. Henry Handel Richardson’s namesake Dorothy Richardson similarly uses music to carry certain values – intimacy, the pulse of being and its communication – strongly associated with her own style. Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume of Pilgrimage, like Maurice Guest makes Germany the exemplary Kulturnation, a place of a musical seriousness and passion unknown in the protagonist’s English upbringing. Miriam finds her attitudes challenged:
Miriam’s uneasiness changed insensibly to the conviction that these girls were learning in Germany not to be ashamed of ‘playing with expression’. All the things she had heard Mr. Strood – who had, as the school prospectus declared, been ‘educated in Leipzig’ – preach and implore, ‘style,’ ‘expression,’ ‘phrasing,’ ‘light and shade,’ these girls were learning, picking up from these wonderful Germans. They did not do it quite like them though. They did not think only about the music, they thought about themselves too. Miriam believed she could do it as the Germans did. She wanted to get her own music and play it as she had always dimly known it ought to be played and hardly ever dared. (Richardson, 1979, I 45)
Later in the same chapter, she achieves just this, a moment of performance freed from self-consciousness:
She held the chord for its full term … Should she play any more? … She had confessed herself … just that minor chord … anyone hearing it would know more than she could ever tell them … her whole being beat out the rhythm as she waited for the end of the phrase to insist on what already had been said. As it came, she found herself sitting back, slackening the muscles of her arms and of her whole body, and ready to swing forward into the rising storm of her page. She did not need to follow the notes on the music stand. Her fingers knew them. Grave and happy she sat with unseeing eyes, listening, for the first time. (Richardson, 1979, I 57)
That finding underlies Pilgrimage as a record not simply of the stream of consciousness, but of a more general opening of the novel to the rhythm of being. Listening involves an abandonment of self-consciousness akin to this ‘German’ service to music. But we also discover, as Miriam’s pilgrimage continues, that felt life in its mundane heterogeneity is more important to her than the stricter logic of musical development – the celebration of technique, of production. Even at the very end of the sequence, music signals ‘the strangeness of the adventure of being, of the fact of the existence, anywhere, of anything at all’ (IV 638), rather than any consummation. The sequence has no cadenza; Miriam’s life achieves no firm pattern of upward struggle, of conflict and resolution, but it does offer a confrontation of experience and, as Angela Frattarola argues, the communication of that experience, often expressed with a Schopenhauerian stoicism. At the end of Honeycomb (1917), the third novel of Pilgrimage, nursing her dying mother, Miriam dreams of her school-mate Lilla playing the piano: ‘It shocked her that Lilla should know so deeply and express her lonely knowledge so ardently. Her gold-flecked brow eyes, that commonly laughed at everything, except the problem of free-will, and refused questions, had as much sorrow and certainty as she had herself. She and Lilla were one person, the same person. Deep down in everyone was sorrow and certainty’ (Richardson, 1979, I 484).
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man also shapes the ambitions of its unnamed musician-writer in his engagement with musical tradition. But music has a curious role in the novel, signalling the ambiguity of racial culture. The narrator is an outsider to ‘race’, raised without explicit knowledge of his origins, which are nevertheless signalled by various clues including his mother’s emotional singing style (‘largo’). He learns ragtime piano as an abstract accomplishment: ‘I had the name at that time of being the best ragtime player in New York. I brought all my knowledge of classical music to bear and, in so doing, achieved some novelties which pleased and even astonished my listeners’ (Johnson, 1995, 99). This sense of music as a kind of deracialized and commoditized communication is confirmed when he takes ragtime to Europe with his white sponsor, where he plays to German musicians one of whom, to his astonishment, immediately picks it up and reworks its modes according to a sophisticated musical understanding – mirroring modernist composers like Stravinsky. ‘I had been turning classical music into ragtime, a comparatively easy task and this man had taken ragtime and made it classical. The thought came across me like a flash – It can be done, why can’t I do it?’ (Johnson, 1995, 123). It is this moment which drives him towards a more racialized understanding of black music, closer to Johnson’s own; he returns to the United States in order to investigate the passionate traditions of Southern music-making (largely the ‘old slave songs’, the Spirituals) and to make them part of a universal art, like an American version of the black British composer, Samuel Coleridge Taylor.
The narrator’s white sponsor, with a certain justice, describes this task as one of ‘making a Negro out of yourself’ (Johnson, 1995, 125), and indeed as a ‘researcher’ of black life rather than an organic part of it, he worries whether his aim is ‘to help my people’ or ‘distinguish myself’; this is ‘a question I have never definitively answered’ (127). The spectre or reverse passing in the novel, that is to say, is framed by music as a mode of exchange. And while the narrator’s journey to the South yields material and inspiration (here he briefly refers to his possible ‘genius’ rather than seeing himself as a musical journeyman), his catastrophic encounter with the spectacle of a lynching inevitably contrasts the local violence of racism with the supposedly universal exchanges involved in music. He is driven away from the humiliation of racial identification, passing as white, and consigned to a secondariness which makes him a reproducer rather than producer of folk tradition – indeed he has been described as ‘gramophonic’ in his status as a vehicle of the sounds of others (Biers, 2013, 128ff). Music is consigned to the domestic sphere and to the ‘secret’ account of his life – to the Chopin he plays to woo his wife, to the parlour rather than the public stage. In that sense, the possibilities of Bildung and communication carried by music are denied, again by a ‘barbarism’ which freezes the self into immobility.
The last of my examples, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), is a novel concerned with the modernist end-game; with a German apocalypse which is both historical and musical, its narrator Zeitblom writing the life of his friend the composer Adrian Leverkühn between May 1943 and the last days of the war in 1945, with Germany burning around him. He tells the story of Leverkühn’s career and its climax in a fit in 1930, after which Leverkühn, like Nietzsche, lives ten more years in a state of near-catatonia – through the period of Nazi hegemony. At the centre of the narrative is Zeitblom’s transcription of Leverkühn’s own journal, purporting to describe a dialogue and pact with the devil made in Italy in 1912.
Clearly, Mann wished his novel to be sensitive to musical historiography: he read Adorno’s Philosophy of the New Music in manuscript and consulted with him on the musical elements of the novel. Leverkühn is partially modelled on Schoenberg and Krenek, as well as on Nietzsche, whose composition, the ‘Manfred Meditation’, Hans von Bülow described as a product of brain fever or a parodic and catachrestic attempt at the ‘music of the future’ (Ross, 2011). Leverkühn’s teacher, the musician and lecturer Kretschmar, is the vehicle for musical thinking, lecturing on the philosophy of music, the artlessness of Beethoven’s late style and so on. Like Mann’s (he edited Schopenhauer in 1948), Kretschmar’s thinking converges at times with that of Schopenhauer: speaking of Wagner, he notes that music celebrates a ‘cosmic aptitude for allegory: for those elements that were, as it were, the first and simplest materials of the world’ (Mann, 1968, 64) – the idea of music as allegorical in its relation to the Will was central to Schopenhauer’s teaching. Leverkühn’s own musical development is meticulously presented by the narrator: his progress through the opera Love’s Labours Lost; settings of Blake, Keats and Klopstock; the oratorio Marvels of the Universe; the Apocalypse; and his final work, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. The Lamentation is itself involved (in Zeitblom’s analysis) in a ‘dialectical process’ of development, subsuming centuries of musical tradition (Mann, 1968, 466).
But against that background, we have a narrative which is disrupted in its temporality, drawing out the tensions in a philosophical tradition in which music is at once nature and culture (despite his understanding of music as involving a hierarchy from nature – allegorically the bass – to the civilized, the soprano part, Schopenhauer had no strong account of musical history itself). Zeitblom insists that the work is the expression of a perennial alienation: ‘the Lamentation is expression itself; one may boldly state that all expressivism is really lament […] The echo, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament’ (Mann, 1968, 466). But the complexity of the novel’s narration is, as we have noted, located in a layered history where the music that Leverkühn produces is supposed to allegorize the barbarism that follows its production. Leverkühn’s 1912 confession is transcribed by Zeitblom in all its asynchronic register (he writes and often speaks in ‘a sort of elder German’ [475]). The devil himself – whether we take his presence as ‘real’ or a symptom of Leverkühn’s madness – places himself and his interruption of time – his delaying of the effects of syphilis to give the composer the creative period entre deux guerres – at the centre of the notion of the avant-garde. This is the temptation he offers:
Know, then, we pledge you the success of that which with your help you will accomplish. You will lead the way, you will strike up the march of the future, the lads will swear by your name who thanks to your madness will no longer need to be mad […] Not only will you break through the paralyzing difficulties of the time – you will break through time itself, by which I mean the cultural epoch and its cult, and dare to be barbaric, twice barbaric indeed, because of coming after the humane (Mann, 1968, 236)
The ‘barbaric’ is central to the avant-garde’s interruption of history, this says, a dark anticipation of the Third Reich imagining itself as violently seizing history and producing its own millennium. Implicitly, it is this fantasy which places Nazi Germany outside history for Mann, as a catastrophic negation of the inheritance of the West. But because the music precedes the history (and even precedes in its diabolic origins in 1912 the horrors of the First World War), it can only stand in an allegorical and implicitly timeless relation to history; it is not so much a record of history as an expression of the logic of its coming into being. We are back with Schopenhauer. Narrative, however, must juggle these different times and developments; it must deal with the life of Germany after 1930 and with Zeiltblom’s struggle to sustain his narrative in 1945, beyond the musical frame; his struggle to write rather than compose.
In each of these novels, competing logics attached to the idea of music are enacted. Music within the Western tradition promises development, communication, and the notion of a perfected expressive technique; it parallels, in its nineteenth-century inheritance, the Bildungsroman. But when confronted by atavistic forces – desire, racism, tyranny – its formal discipline is abandoned; its closeness to language collapses; it is either abandoned or reaches towards the ‘twice barbaric’ sounds of rupture. A tension emerges, that is to say, between the values of music and those of discourse. What Stevens called ‘The more than human commonplace of blood,/The breath that gushes upward and is gone’ does involve a gesture towards an absolute music, but not anything easily realized in the novel, which remains tied to a developmental narrative that fails as modernism’s non-narrative monstrosity is revealed. But what the idea of music nevertheless also allows is a writing which bears the trace of will in Schopenhauer’s sense, a recording of the rhythms of individual experience and desire. In that sense at least, Zeitblom remains the most faithful listener of Mann’s novel, recording the suffering of his friend, and of his nation, beyond the catastrophic end of music.
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