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The Archaeology of Postmodernity, Part III: Transvestism in Music
E. R. E. Knutsson
December 27, 2009
The Austrian
statesman Clemens
von Metternich once declared that the Orient started southeast of the
city walls of
As Anthony
Alofsin
points out, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was “a collage of so many nationalities
that it could never be transformed into a unified nation-state.”
Within this collage, Jews achieved cultural
preeminence. As Robert S. Wistrich
points out,
In 1900, Gustav Mahler was the leading conductor and composer in the city, Karl
Kraus its high priest of satire, Arthur Schnitzler its outstanding playwright,
Adolf von Sonnenthal its greatest actor.
The founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Victor Adler, was a
‘Protestant’ Jew and many of his leading associates were middle-class Jewish
intellectuals. Sigmund Freud had just published his epoch-making
Interpretation of Dreams and
psychoanalysis was about to be born. Waiting in the wings were such central
figures of twentieth-century culture as
Alexander
Ringer points
out, perhaps defensively, that “as long as familiarity with New England
transcendentalism or American individualism is considered indispensable for a
meaningful appraisal of Charles Ives and his
particular mission, Arnold Schoenberg, his exact contemporary and eventual
fellow American, deserves equally serious attention in equivalent Jewish
terms.”
In this
context, the significance of Schoenberg’s “antirational” view of art and his
personal experiences with anti-Semitism in the early 1920s has been emphasized:
His
acknowledgement that he could not escape his Jewish heritage initiated a
protracted period of reflection upon Jewish issues from both theological and
political points of view culminating in the early 1930s with yet another attempt
to give a comprehensive statement of his position by means of words and music —
this time in his opera Moses and Aron, which presents his personal vision
of Judaism.
The moment of
truth is usually believed to have come in 1921, when he was asked for his
certificate of baptism (to prove that he was not a Jew) while on holiday in
Mattsee, near
For I have
at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I
shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed
perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of
their race to me), but I am a Jew. I am content that it should be so! Today I no
longer wish to be an exception; I have no objection at all to being lumped
together with all the rest. … We are two kinds of people.
Definitively!
Schoenberg’s
statements of an explicitly Zionist position begin in 1924, when he, according
to Nicholas
Cook, “argued that only military victory could secure a Jewish
state in
In a letter of
13 June 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power in
Although
Schoenberg — whose ancestry included both rabbis and cantors — for a period of
time discarded the Jewish faith for Lutheran Protestantism, the proximity of his
ideas to Jewish theological thought remained obvious. Adorno had a point when he
asserted that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music:
Dissonance can be seen as an expression of the need to change forms of
expression in art, absolutely necessary in order to fulfill the old Jewish
prohibition on images.
As William E.
Benjamin points out, “Schoenberg realized that Judaism provided a
historical model for what he was attempting as an artist.”
Robert
Wistrich emphasizes the “connection between Schoenberg’s musical
agenda, his Jewish identity and the commitment to a Jewish national renewal (by
returning to the essence of ancient Judaism)”: “The Mosaic
aversion to idolatry, to visible symbols and mystery, as well as the Judaic call
for the triumph of rational consciousness, are harnessed by Schoenberg to the
cause of twentieth-century modernist
expressionism.”
In Judaism, as
in Islam, “it was
sacrilegious to make a figurative representation of God. With very
few exceptions, there were no Jewish painters before the Russian artist Marc
Chagall, who had to come to Paris to paint.”
Gleichgewichtsstörung: The
Schoenberg-Kandinsky-Tango
Schoenberg’s
friendship and cooperation with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky
— a philosemite who was erroneously
listed as a Jew in the Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie (1929)
— underscores the impact of the
blurring of boundaries between art forms, as well as the underlying, religiously
motivated, “aniconic” (i.e., without icons) or “iconoclastic” thematic structure.
Music meant a
great deal to Kandinsky; he referred to his own paintings as "compositions," and became deeply
interested in Schoenberg’s attempts to establish correspondences between musical
tones and colors, and in his rejection of the traditional tonal
order.
A new kind of transvestism among the arts was thus born:
We see, for example, a painter who wrote an opera libretto (Kokoschka), a poet who composed music (Pound), and a composer who painted pictures (Schoenberg). It is as if artistic talent were a kind of libido, an electricity that could discharge itself with equal success in a poem, a sonata, or a sculpture. Throughout the modernist movement, the major writers and composers both enforced and transgressed the boundaries among the various arts with unusual energy – almost savage at times.
As Christian
Meyer, director of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, points
out:
The first
decade of the twentieth century saw an almost simultaneous musical and visual
revolution. Because of Schoenberg’s innovations, musicians were freed from the
system of tempered tonality. At the same time, painters,
especially Kandinsky, broke away from the system of central perspective and
figural representation. These traditions had been legitimated for centuries by
an overwhelming number of masterpieces and were so universally sanctioned that
they had come to be regarded as the unquestioned essence of both arts. This
explains the anarchist energy that had to be unleashed to liberate music and
painting from the bonds of tradition, and at the same time it illuminates the
“atonal character” of pre-World War I painting in Europe, which reflects this
revolution. While Schoenberg’s music was an inspiration to
Kandinsky as he explored abstraction, today Kandinsky’s paintings function as
ambassadors for Schoenberg’s musical works. The strong
colorful essence of Kandinsky’s prewar works has the same richness of sound
colors in Schoenberg’s compositions.
Schoenberg
approved of Kandinsky’s Der gelbe
Klang with its "ungraspable" dimension, comparing it to
his own Die glückliche Hand - a work that, according to
Christopher
Butler, explicitly challenged “the ‘laws’ of art as imposed by the
Academy, along with the order of society as a whole.” According to James
Leggio, Kandinsky’s “floating sensations” and celestial aspirations
were reflections of Schoenberg’s release from “the gravitational grip of
tonality”, a feeling of “weightlessness.”
Kandinsky explained to Schoenberg that Der gelbe Klang was based on the anti-geometrical type of construction attained "by the 'principle' of dissonance." Referring to the Ten Commandments in a letter to Schoenberg, he emphasized the power of negation and the difference between the law as a sign (word) and its signified (the meaning of the law). Kandinsky broke the link between the sign and a transcendental linguistic signified and hence equated art with reality. As with Schoenberg, the artistic form is conceived as pure perception — independent of external references. This flight from meaning (in the traditional sense) eventually reached its final destination with the Dadaists: “The Dada Manifesto of 1918 proclaimed proudly and in capital letters: DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.” As their contemporary Ferdinand de Saussure stated: “The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”
Kandinsky and Schoenberg viewed their urge to change forms of expression as motivated by the desire to comply with the ancient Jewish prohibition against images. The old Jewish prohibition on images is characterized by its ability to uphold a separation between the pictorial and its referent, that is, the difference between the sign and what it signifies.
Vassily Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted immediately after attending a concert featuring Schoenberg’s music in Munich on 2 January 1911
Steven Beller cites Schoenberg's maxim
“music should not decorate, it should be true,” and suggests
that his explicit invocation of musical logic (most obviously in his serialism)
represents an “invasion of the world of aesthetics by the ethical
impulse of truth.” Beller comments that “it
does not seem improbable that this stemmed from attitudes whose origins lay in
his Jewish background.” Nicholas
Cook agrees: “The whole debate about ornamentation
… might be seen as resulting from the application to art of traditional Jewish
thinking.” Both Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker
have been described as “Grenzjuden” (frontier Jews) — both
cultural insiders and alienated outsiders. Schenker held that
Jews are “the compulsory instructors of
humanity.”
The Jewish
position, inclined to abstraction as in the work of Schoenberg, “stood
in tension with the aesthetic hedonism of the official Catholic
culture of Austrian society.” No wonder, then, that shouting and scuffling
accompanied the 1908 premiere of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in Vienna
— a work that certainly did not result in aesthetic
pleasure in the audience.
A near-riot erupted on March 31, 1913, at an orchestral concert in Vienna in
which works by Mahler, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg were played.
As Carl Schorske
points out,
The system Schoenberg thus devised was no return to the hierarchical, privileged order of the diatonic system. Yet its democracy of twelve tones would cohere again in a systematic way: in a hidden order, created by the composer — one in which above and below, forward and back, were related visibly to the analytic mind, even though not generally accessible to the listening ear. … Schoenberg as psychological Expressionist confronted his listener with an art whose surface was broken, charged with the full life of feeling of man adrift and vulnerable in the ungovernable universe; yet beneath it he posited out of his own powers a subliminal, inaudible world of rational order that would integrate the chaos. Here liberated dissonance became a new harmony; psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order. … Thus Schoenberg the artist, even as he turned back to the faith of his fathers and submission to God, became man the creator, what Goethe would have called ‘der kleine Gott der Welt.’
At a personal
level, Schoenberg was hardly a moral icon. Richard Taruskin points
out that Schoenberg’s personality “was as absolutist and
despotic as any dictator’s,” and that “his personal
relationships could be repellently exploitative.” Schoenberg’s only
name for skeptics, adversaries, or opponents was “enemies.”
The big step
that others called the leap into “atonality,” a term that he deplored for its
negativity, Schoenberg called pantonality or the “emancipation of
dissonance.” Schoenberg
characterized the Tristan chords as “spies reconnoitering weaknesses” to be
exploited “in order to create confusion”. But, as Taruskin points out, it was
not dissonance itself that had been emancipated: It was the composer who was
liberated “from the constraints of ‘voice leading rules’ whereby
dissonance was subordinated to consonance in traditional harmony and
counterpoint.”
The assertion
that Schoenberg’s atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of
Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde has been commonplace for quite some time.
Heinrich
Schenker held that Wagner was directly to blame for the excesses of
Schoenberg and his school. But, as Richard Taruskin points out, the Wagnerian
“crisis of tonality” was not Wagnerian at all: “It was read back into
Wagner by Schoenberg’s apologists”:
Wagner used
the chromaticism of Tristan und Isolde to delay to the point of torture
the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That
harmonic tension … was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now
call “tonal” music. Did the delays caused by Wagner’s
chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don’t be silly.
They only magnified it, vastly so. Wagner’s
chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The
consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner’s musical style were entirely
idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by
“dialectic.” To say the very least, they had nothing to do
with Wagner’s creative aims, least of all in Tristan.
Schoenberg’s
style recognized “no
distinction between consonance and dissonance, so that harmonically speaking,
literally anything goes.” Schoenberg once cracked to a pupil, “Now that I’ve
emancipated dissonance, anybody can be a composer.” Removing the
qualitative distinction between consonance and dissonance “eliminates
the concept of the one
being beautiful and the other ugly.”
While Wagner
in his heyday took center stage, Schoenberg remained marginal or sectarian, as
noted
by Leon Botstein:
In contrast
to Wagner, Schoenberg’s music and the rhetorical strategy employed in its
defense (designed largely by Schoenberg himself) never achieved wide acceptance.
… [F]rom the beginning, in the face of controversy, [Schoenberg’s] assertion of
artistic integrity assumed a nearly puritanical façade of ethical superiority.
Schoenberg’s envy of Stravinsky, Ravel, Respighi, and Bartók took the form of
high-minded moralizing about aesthetic concessions and superficialities.
Nevertheless, it is a
matter of fact that without Schoenberg, “our era would have made a different
sound.” As Jacques
Le Rider points out, the utopias of mysticism, genius and narcissism – as
responses to “feelings of solitude, ego-fragility, and instability” - had in
common the striving to transcend limitations imposed by tradition: “they negate
the male/female dichotomy and tend towards an androgynous ideal; they aim at the
auto-destruction of a self that suffers because it cannot accept its contingent
qualities (sex, race, etc.) and at the creation of a more perfect
self.”
As Taruskin
notes,
Surmounting
the majory/minor dichotomy, voiding all distinctions between particular keys,
was for him an achievement comparable to embodying androgyny or double gender. …
To his pupil Anton Webern he confided that pantonality, like androgyny, “has
given rise to a higher race!”
As Jacques Le Rider points out, “Viennese modernism recognised that [the] old certainties had crumbled. The androgynism of the modern psyche and the inextricable commingling of Jew and non-Jew had given rise to the most bewildering confusion.”
Egon
Friedell presented his essay on Peter
Altenberg (“the Zarathustra of the Café Central”) as a “natural
history” of the human race in process of mutation. Indeed, the phenomenon of
Schoenberg “stemmed from
an intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk,
closely related to new ideas then overflowing from science, literature, and
painting that quickly intermingled with those emanating from music per
se.”
It has been
suggested that the formation and
evaluative assessment of systems in relativistic or quantum physics and
atonalistic or dodecaphonic music are inspired by the same operative principles
and insights, and that there is “a historical-cultural link between these two
system mutations as such and the new world-view they produced” (e.g. probability
taking over from determinism, the pivotal role of the observer, theoretical
pluralism, etc.). In many respects the determinism inherent in tonality theory
reflected the determinism in classical physics. In a similar fashion, quantum
physics and atonality share an indeterministic rationale, affirmed in the
principle of probability and in the disappearance of external determinism
(tonality). As Mark Delaere points out: “In
quantum physics external determinism and causality were toppled. The description
of reality in terms of probability represented the triumph of ontological
determinism over the mechanical determinism of classical
physics.”
The ‘twelve-tone idea’ can be defined as a systematic circulation of
all the twelve pitch classes based on “transposition, inversion, retrograde, and
retrograde-inversion”; a shift from harmony as its principal structural
determinant and toward counterpoint, reversing the stylistic change that
occurred from Bach to Mozart by returning again to polyphonic thinking,” as
noted by John
Covach (pp. 604–610).
Delighting
in parody and outrage, the avant-garde, according to Richard
Drain, “fought a guerilla war against bourgeois culture”, the first
onslaught of which came with futurism (launched in 1909),
followed by Dadaism in 1916.
Dada preferred non-Western cultures to ‘modern’ culture, opposed all –isms,
including modernism, favoured spontaneity and a cabaret environment, cubist
paintings and cacophonous music. Relativity - a key modernist notion, invoked
also by the Dadaists and the futurists - was used “to deflate the status of
‘objective’ truth, license multiple viewpoints, and release them from the
judgement of a final authority.”
Indeed,
transmutations parallel to the convergence between Kandinsky’s painting and
Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music – a turning point sometimes described as a
‘Metaphysik des Schwebens’, i.e. a ‘floating’ condition between the subject and
the world – can also be seen in a general shift away from apparently absolute certainties in the
direction of relativity: Boasian anthropology, denying the concept of race;
Saussurean linguistics, insisting that there are no positive quantities but only
differences; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem; the Heisenberg Indeterminacy
Principle and the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, marking the advent of a
“postmodern” science characterized
by “paradox, uncertainty, and the limits of precise measurement”; Einstein’s
theory of relativity; Nietzsche’s scorn for the unfounded pretences of religion,
logic, or history; Freudian “decentring” of homo sapiens, not to mention
expressionism, surrealism, absurdism, Cubism (Picasso’s
“extravagant deformations”),
Dadaism, and atonalism in the arts.
Charles
Lemert has pointed out that the rise of the relativistic paradigm – or relativistic deconstructionism - was
based on the conviction that reality itself is not self-evident and orderly.
Relativism is critical of traditional rationality, uncritical realisms, strict
tonalisms, objectivisms, and systematic explanations.
This
development set off a chain reaction that paved the way for the critical
dismantling of Western tradition and traditional modes of thought, the cultural
logic of deconstructionism or The Culture of
Critique, according to which “the Western ideal of hierarchic harmony
and assimilation” was gradually destabilized and perceived as “an irrational,
romantic, and mystical ideal.” The
outcome was a gigantic meltdown of a whole civilization’s “cultural DNA
structure,” a transition to “liquid” (post-)modernity through a memetic “epidemiology of ideas,” inventing a kind
of “assembly line nihilism.” The
age of the gardeners has been succeeded by the age of the hunters and the order
of chaos and wilderness.
Jacques Attali was right: music is prophecy. Music makes mutations audible.
E.
R. E.
Knutsson
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Knutsson-PostmodernismIII.html
