The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts: Breaking the Barriers (Analecta Husserliana)

THE AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE ARTS BREAKING THE BARRIERS

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME LXI

Editor-in-Chief" ANNA- TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Belmont, Massachusetts

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

THE AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE ARTS BREAKING THE BARRIERS Dedicated to Marlies Kronegger

Edited by

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-7923-6006-0

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA02061, U.S.A.

In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All rights Reserved © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

Dedicated to Marlies Kronegger, the inspiring partner in this aesthetic enterprise

Marlies Kronegger

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS THE THEME /

The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts

ix xi

INAUGURAL ESSAY ANNA- TERESA TYMIENIECKA /

The Creative Impulse and the

Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts

3

SECTION ONE

Breaking the Frame: Transgression and Transformation in Giulio Romano's Sala dei Giganti JOAN FIORI BLANCHFIELD / The nineteenth-Century Landscape and Twentieth-Century Space: Traumatic Loss or Trace of Memory? Robert Smithson and the Entrophic Metaphor RENEE RIESE HUBERT / Alechinsky, Cobra and the Book KAREN KARBIENER / Aspiring to the Condition of Music: Hardy and His Art from the 1840s to the 1890s ROSEMARY GRAY / Counterpoint in Print: Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol PAULA CARABELL /

19 35 57 71 87

SECTION TWO DAVID LIPTEN /

Semiotics and Musical Choice: "Beyond Analysis"

Revisited JAMES PARSONS /

When is a Work of Music Real?

105 143

SECTION THREE

Machine-Time, Passion-Time, and Time that Trembles: Debussy and Baudelaire 167 CYNTHIA OSOWIEC RUOFF / Baroque and Classical Aesthetic Visions 179 TONY RACZKA / To Consociate and Foster the Self 189 STEPHEN BROWN /

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TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION FOUR

Inanimorata: The Dread of Things Musical and Visual Encounters: An Investigation of the Aesthetic Experience RANDAL DAVIS / " ... We Need Not Fear ... " Expressivity and Silence in the Early Work of John Cage CANDACE K. SKORUPA / Berlioz's Programme and Proust's Sanate: Parallel Quests to Bridge the Gaps in Musico-Literary Expression

201

Index of Names

273

MICHEAL VANPELT / ROBYN GANGI /

211 241 251

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection brings to the public the papers presented at the Second International Congress of the American Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, and Aesthetics, which took place in Cambridge, MA, on May 23rd and 24th,1996. Special thanks are owed to Marlies Kronegger, the president of this society, for her expert handling of the program, and to Patricia Trutti-Coohill, the dedicated secretary-general. Of course all the authors are to be cordially thanked for their participation in our new aesthetic venture. Our appreciation goes to Isabelle Houthakker for her dedicated copyediting and proofreading.

A-T. T.

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THE AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE ARTS

The consortium of the muses, that for the Greeks presided over the diverse arts, implies a kindredness among them, beginning with their common origin in human genius. If we take from the nine genres attributed to their inspiration only those that denote what we call the "fine arts" and expand their number to include aesthetic endeavors that have unfolded and flourished in the ages since - painting, graphics, sculpture, opera, cinema - we see that this kindredness has its origin in the human creative endeavor, specifically in the "creative impulse." In all of these forms we find expressed in varied ways the aesthetic modalities of the specifically human striving to express what human beings feel, to arrest that which is passing away and retain it in a concrete representation, to bring away from our encounter with reality the elements of beauty, gracefulness, charm which germinate in that encounter, and, finally, to lift us from the everyday-ness of our practicality-bound existence to the ethereal and yet so very strong - stronger than old vintage wine - tonality of the sublime, to draw us from the fleetingness of existence into supratemporal reverie, even bliss. And yet the artistic genres are distinct from each other in their specialization, which goes back to the different senses through which we express and receive those things having aesthetic import. The great majority of composers are inept at holding a brush or a woodcarving knife, for example. Nor will a musical work calling for a perfect ear ordinarily be justly appreciated by a gifted sculptor. Each expression of the artistic is distinct, then, and yet art of its very nature projects rays allowing aesthetic discourse between all types of artistic creation. How is this ever-transformable network of correspondences thrown over the virtualities of works of art as well as their reception by the spectatorauditor? Each expression of creativity has affinities in some way or other with the others - sculpture, say, with lyric poetry, epic poetry, history. Indeed, the artistic endeavor, the crystallization of the aesthetic experience in ritual dances, cave drawings, etc., differentiates into what we have come to call "genres" as it brings them together: music, song, dance, poetry, adornments in a pictorial modality have evolved together until they have reached the distinctive "purity" of their kind. The spontaneous emergence of art seems to correspond to, to express the human longing for beauty, for arresting the fleeting moment, a longing to leave a trace of our innermost experience for Xl

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all to share in. Philosophers have wondered, "What is the beauty of something?" (Plato in Hippias) and "What is the nature of works of art making them beautiful/ugly?" (Aristotle in Poetics). This led to the development of "the science of the beautiful" that Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten called "Aesthetics" (Aesthetica acromatica). His conception of aisthesis (perception) went further than Kant's, for whom aesthetics was a universal theory of our perception of reality. With the greater differentiation and nuancing of aesthetic experience and aesthetics conceived as a subjective feeling (Friedrich Theodor Vischer), as the objective correlate of the "aesthetic object" (Th. Conrad, Der aesthetischer Gegenstand, 1907), aesthetic values (Roman Ingarden), aesthetic qualities and enjoyment (Moritz Geiger), etc., it would seem that we have developed the means to investigate the common source of the artistic genres, the common nature accounting for their distinctiveness as well as the "aesthetic discourse," as I call it, that they carryon among themselves enhancing thereby their respective aesthetic potentials by radiating within a vaster spectrum of aesthetic qualities. The above-mentioned and numerous other attempts to grasp the specific nature and aesthetic conjuration of beauty/ugliness have dealt with issues surrounding the question of what art is by proposing different approaches and answers - objective, subjective, psychological, ontological, semiotic, linguistic, etc. When we ask what makes music, poetry, dance, pantomime, the theater play, sculpture, painting, arabesque, ornament, film, etc. "art," "aesthetic," we seek some common features that make them art and that make them aesthetic as well as the differences that set apart their respective modalities. We may try, as has been proposed, to divide the arts according to the temporality and spatiality displayed in artworks. Yet this criterion is quite obviously inadequate. Arts such as sculpture, architecture, painting may have structures extended in space and may seem to be atemporal, being quite different from arts such as music, dance, poetry that are in essence extended through time, but we cannot overlook the temporal aspects of the plastic arts. Those consist in capturing an instant - as in Rodin's "Bourgeois de Calais" in which a temporal instant fixed in bronze refers to the temporal phases of the circumstances from which it draws its significance, the history of the siege, the famine, the entire historical context. And "The Thinker," which seemingly fixes a single instant, extends that instant into the previous moment, the present moment, and the future moment in maintaining the attitude grasped in bronze. An architectural work may also appear to be an atemporal creation. It certainly is so as an aesthetically neutral building. Yet when we want to

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appreciate a castle, cathedral, or avant-garde office building aesthetically, whether to appreciate it as an involved work or a bare one, we have to go around it, inside and out, and it is only in the temporal succession of our perceptions and their coming together in an aesthetic object as the artistic work that we "perceive it" aesthetically. All of the criteria for classifying the arts offered so far, whether in terms of psychology, feeling, form, content, etc., even the ontological distinction between the genres in their natures, fail to do justice to the nature of their correspondences, to their discourse. Even the two attempts that have come closest to bringing together the subjective and objective, the object and experience, do not reach the origin. Ingarden brought analysis of the work of art as a conveyor of beauty/ugliness to its "foundation in being," that is, to a many-layered structure, whose layers he differentiated as he evoked their ontological status, on the one hand, and the corresponding aesthetic experience in the perceiver who retrieves this aesthetic object from its crystallizing medium, on the other. But he did not reach the origin, nor the ways in which the artistic genres differentiate. Consequently, he does not show the reasons and manner of their aesthetic convergence either. The approach that has come closest to touching the secret of the arts appears to be that of the "experiential system" of the Geneva School, which is supposed to be grounded simultaneously in the structure of the work of art and the mind of the percipient. Yet we are here also left only halfway toward the complete understanding of the work of art. No psychology, no theory of emotion, or of ontological foundation, or of the experiential system reaches the existential foundation that reveals the origination of the arts and aesthetics, the key to their secret. In our times, with their innumerable attempts at extending the artistic media, at inventing new approaches, styles as well as criteria of aesthetic and other valuation, the criteria of beauty/ugliness, of gracefulness/clumsiness, of elevated and base have lost their significance. Not only may no consensus on aesthetic criteria be expected, but in this disarray of values no objective horizon of reference for criticism is possible. The arts themselves, then, call for a thorough re-visioning of their situation. Where do we seek the "basic aesthetics"- in and beyond the aesthetic import into the senses - that shares in our rudimentary experiential existential axis of time and space? Time and rhythm, the time of passion, the time that "trembles," the space of the landscape, the space of performance, the space of

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feelings, the space expanding or contracting in music? Where shall we find the footholds of these correspondences? These and many others are the questions we propose to investigate in concrete examples. No objective, subjective, ontological, or experiential approach draws from the source that is the spring of life itself. Only from the entire compass of an anthropology immersed in the ontopoiesis of life may we draw the adequate clues. To seek the ways and origins in which the affinities of all the artistic genres are experienced means not only to seek deeper understanding, but also and foremostly to project, to enhance the aesthetic vision of our existence and lastly, to advance our investigation of the creative Human Condition.

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

INAUGURAL ESSAY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE AND THE AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE ARTS

Artistic work, creativity is associated with the spontaneous movements of consciousness or with inspiration, which like a gift of the gods offers the artist, poet, composer an outline of an artistic objective. Thus it astounds when poets like Valt~ry or artists like Degas tell us that they know nothing of spontaneity or inspiration but believe merely and entirely in work, study, persevering effort. In fact, in Degas' paintings, drawings, clay models, one is introduced not only to the otherwise unobserved secrets of the moving body but to the most delicate nuanced reflections of the personal lives of subjects vibrating with life. His work excels in fixing instants in the movement of race horses or the poses of ballerinas and psychologico-somatic pulsations of feeling or mood so well that they are captured in almost atemporal motion or gesture and seem suspended in the living air. One could say that his art excels at grasping motion and this at the verge of an essential transformation. I think here, first of all, of his capturing the miraculous instant at which an otherwise plain girl (and he usually chose such) with a plain figure is transformed in the ecstasy of the dance. On the stage she metamorphoses into a sublime apparition, one that carries spectators away from reality with its constraints and into an open sphere of beauty. Yet these apprehensions of a unique instant, of even a turning point, are not freely given but are the fruit of persevering, detail-obsessed labor. In the case of Michelangelo, we find it preceded by innumerable sketches of crude reality that study the motion of limbs down to those of the muscles, the pulsation of veins, whether of horses or humans. To catch a dance movement, the position of the legs, the curve of the feet, the inclination of the spine, the inclination of the head and the gesture of the arms and hands and to finally conjure an instant calls for innumerable sketches and studies. In order to capture the very instant of transformation from a "real," "everyday," pedestrian appearance to the sublime on canvas, Degas indulged in studies while viewing the pedestrian, routine exercises of the corps de ballet, the stage performances, the behind the scenes doings. So exact is his work that seemingly nothing was given him, neither spontaneity nor inspiration. Here we have not an effortless creative gift, disposition, or genius but the persistent pursuit of the "objective" in a tenacious and repetitive effort. 3

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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However, is not such a pursuit already to be distinguished from the studies of a veterinarian, physician, orthopedist, carpenter, or even a ballet master, all of whom are bound to certain rules, directions, and interpretive devices in the observations they make particularly to their calling? The objective of all of these is adjustment, or attunement to everyday life: a bench or a chair must be fit for humans to sit upon, the health of domesticated animals must be attended to, dance students must do the physical exercises that prepare them for the demands their art will make on their bodies, exercises that do not rise above the level of addressing the body's constraints. Obviously the artist's objective is different. There must be a different motivation involved in the artist's labor of patient discovery of the normally imperceptible, in moments and motions ordinarily only glanced at, in sounds and colors imbued with feeling, and there must be a different intent that directs it. This motivation is the motor for the work, for the patient pursuit, and this intent over and over again lifts the artist's gaze from the trivial aspects of reality and towards its heights. This motivation and this intent must be rooted in the deepest core of the artist's frame. He must be imbued through and through by their specific sense in his experience, taste, and feeling for existence itself in order to maintain his workaday involvement and solicitude. The work is merely an indispensable tool, the means. This is a twofold progress: preparation for the happy instant when the spark of the sublime ignites, and the preparation of the artist himself as an ignitor, transmitter, witness. In the incubation of a masterpiece, the artist, a common human being, is transformed. We see such a transformation at its radical point in Degas as an artist; there is an inner/outer transformation that could not have come from all the observation, all the established toilsome routine alone. The turning point of his style, approach, interest, direction came when he left off copying the great masters and abandoned their concept of beauty; from their airy mythological and allegorical themes, their apotheosis of historical figures and events, he turned toward real life in itself. This shift in attention could not have come from toil alone. "La Baigneuse" of Ingres might well have inspired him to see something in the flesh that he had not seen before, but more than a transformation of his entire psycho-artistic system was needed to transpose what he saw there into an artistic project of his own; above all, the artist's creative imagination had to be freshly ignited and stirred at its source. What is this source?

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Observation at the service not of the mere replication of the observed but of the transfiguration of crude reality in a newly invented style so that the world is seen, felt, approached anew: this cannot be accomplished without toil both inwardly and outwardly directed. But where does this totally absorbing pursuit come from? If it cannot be identified as a vital spontaneity or an unusual gift or talent or enlightenment, we have to pursue its origin and deployment much deeper. The artist, who is firmly rooted within the pragmatic, life-subservient world of life, through the application of a personal style lifts that world beyond its rudimentary significance into an aesthetic universe of grace, beauty, the elevated and sublime and in doing so reveals other dimensions. Thus a change of style means for an artist breaking away from one ephemeral universe in which he has instituted himself and become integrally immersed, in which he dwells, and moving on to an unknown land. This involves not only a complete "rediscovery" of the aesthetic dimension from some other point of view revealing new vistas, but also an interior "taming" of the new discovery. One must adjust to the new vistas opened and in receiving their promptings ignore one's habitual ways of taking them in. There is a transfiguration of both the aesthetic lifeworld and the inner existential universe of the artist. This quest after the specific source of art cannot be limited to the plastic arts or to any particular art. In Degas' work there is a striking harmonizing of the basic marks of all the varied arts. There is an extraordinary unification of space and motion. The scenery here is not an inert background but is that of horse and rider, of the dancers. Commonplace scenes of life vibrate with the movements of the figures depicted, whose rhythms viewers should feel in their frames as they hear the music to which those figures move. One indeed does hear the music that gives an amplifying aura to Degas' ballerinas' moves, gestures, postures, unearthly swings. We feel them cutting through the air in their strides like riders as they spring forward. The spasms of their breathing transform the air, and the airy movements of their etherially curved feet transform the ground, which actually appears to receive their touch. Here we witness the communication of the art through sensory media touch, sound, space, movement, air. Do not all of the arts somewhat combine here, given the trans figurative potency of this initiating swing? In seeking the source of their meeting, or "discourse" as I call it, we are tempted at first to see it as inhering in a "correspondence" of the separate senses and the respective media - color, sound, touch, movement, vibration,

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breath, odor. However, the manifestation of the world around and within us is certainly the fruit of the combined work of the senses so that we experience a cogent texture of objectivity without rifts or holes that resides in a quasicomplete mutual attunement. But the harmonizing of the human senses that we find in the discourse of the arts leaves behind practical, life-subservient concerns and is obviously invented. Thus, if we want to disclose the workings of the senses in the artistic realm, we have to pursue the origin of both the natural and the invented harmonies, which are not only parallel but intimately interwoven though distinctive. In going down to their origins we will meet the source of their correspondences and that of art. With this intimation let us outline briefly the schema line of their genesis and seek the point of their differentiation, which is simultaneously that of the birth of art. PART ONE THE CREATIVE IMPULSE AND THE GENESIS OF ART THE OVERFLOW OF AESTHETIC FEELING

In art from its very origins, for example in prehistoric cave drawings of animals, clay figures of animals and humans, even conceding that these are attempts to "imitate" "real" beings from experienced reality, there is a swing of the imagination in which the experience of reality is transformed by a movement, a "figuration," a personal style. One is tempted to see in this incipient moment of formation in the creative experience an "impulse" which already as an "impulse" means a transformation of the real as experienced that will give to it a new and unique stamp. This experience of reality, of the "real" animal, instead of objectivizing the creature in a stereotypical fashion as it is visualized in practical approaches to and encounters with it, already at the incipient moment, as charcoal is being lifted toward the wall of the cave, transforms the reality. An artistic "impulse" that seeks out a unique realization is immediately in evidence as a vortex of the significance of life in its transformative potency. Whether we place ourselves in the perspective of scientific theory of the evolution of the human being or remain simply within a deepened Husserlian perspective, we cannot now envision the nature of man and the origin of sense other than historically, that is, as having hypothesized evolutionary stages. There seem to be three main phases of the transformation, progress, and enrichment of life's significance with the creative

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impulse being the vortex for life's aspiration to transcend any limit and tend toward the infinite. First, as it surges from the elementary workings of life in their organic/vital sharing-in-existence, from the conundrum in which "objective" and "subjective" are nothing but two aspects of an individualizing constitutive push, and as it impinges on its working materials and absorbs them into its own workings as it shapes a significant form out of the hitherto anonymous, neutral forces that lend themselves to it and to which it then gives its stamp, the creative impulse does not directly disrupt the workings of nature-life. The impulse does suspend its claim to self-sufficiency, however. It challenges the absolute dominion of nature-life's routine paths with its own peculiar imagery and it attributes sites to the spacing and timing of the workings of life. It does so by prompting a longing to overcome life's limits, the seemingly necessary laws that impose habitual submission. The urge of the creative impulse to go ahead with the unfolding of a novel significance for life's procedures, aims, and tasks leads (as I have already indicated) to the galvanizing of the habitual system of vital procedures in the projection of a new system. This follows from the impact of a new factor of the human creative condition coming into play: imaginatio creatrix in its aesthetic overflow. This arrival of the now enriched virtualities of the creative condition in a novel expansion of the functional system of life is the first phase of the workings of the creative impulse. As it emerges and makes its way along the evolutive progress of life forms, the complexity of types, etc., the creative factor aims at cutting through the vitally significant functional chains carrying individualizing life, recombining them in a way that gives them novel significance, thus slowly bringing about the entire complex of the specifically human apparatus called transcendental consciousness. At a crucial point in the establishment of the latter, a sort of centralization of the creatively primed functions peaks with the surge of a unique novum: the creative impulse to give unique form to what had previously been stereotypical and pedestrian in the experience of life then mandated by survival concerns. The work of art is the vehicle for a life-enjoyment that is novel. A new vibrant round of life emerges from the turmoil of the creative forge: the human spirit. It is to this special "meaning" now fully felt within our entire frame that figure, shape, sound, motion, taste will contribute in ways innumerable in their nuances. This meaning originates in a ground irreducible to any of its artistic incarnations, present in all and yet standing out as something peculiar that the creative effort, a lengthy, winding labor of trial and error aims at and

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culminates in. On the other hand, this vibrant "meaning," once it has emerged "incarnate," will spread through the networks of existence, will emotionally imbue one's vision of the world, inasmuch as it will rebound on the artist by transforming his feeling about himself and his specially significant "place" in the vibrating "flesh" of the communal world. The artist experiences himself or herself as participating in and expressing the world in a novel, transformed fashion. It is obvious from this brief description of the creative impulse that the labor of shaping and incarnating this impulse is what constitutes the slowly progressing search after flesh, form, significant expression. The work of art is ultimately the expression of this very own intimate feeling of existence within which we subsist and which transforms that existence. The artistic expression itself is sui generis. It is not derived from all in our experience geared to the business and vital interests of life, to our handling of worldly affairs for practical purposes. On the contrary, it seems to float above these concerns with a specific experiential tonality of its own; it imbues practical reality with a unique fragrance and illuminates it with a light that is not utilitarian but intended for enjoyment, for contemplation: its specific significance - the aesthetic. Enjoyment, however, in its innumerable tonalities, intensities, and qualitative nuances, accompanies all acts. It is important to acknowledge that. For in searching for the initial phase of artistic/aesthetic production, activity, experience, we may be tempted to see it as compassed within the specific human transcendentality. However, in the animal kingdom at large we find rudimentary but unmistakable aesthetic phenomena in the very schema of life. It is enough to mention, on the one hand, that stimulus by and response to natural beauty is a channel of behavior found already in animals having but a meager measure of transcendental functioning, in birds in particular. I have in mind birds that attract the attention of individuals of the other sex through their colorful plumage with the attraction being essential for finding a mating partner. Here the elementary phenomenon of a "natural" aesthetic impression emerges within the individual's ontopoietic system at the crucial point of procreation and so plays a life-promoting function. On the other hand, as was discovered half a century ago, the chimpanzee, the animal closest to us in the development of transcendentality, is capable of rudimentary artistic activity. In a primitively simple way chimps are capable of drawing with a paintbrush designs with a repetitive proportion and harmony to them, indicating that they have their own aesthetic take on reality. Very recently it has been reported that a chimpanzee has painted a depiction

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of nature, a bird on a branch, and further has indicated in sign language to his tutor that the drawing is meant to represent a bird. This shows creative and re-creative proficiency of a modest but most significant kind. There is a vast distance between the first example in which the elementary aesthetic impression created is itself an instrument of nature installed by the progress of life in its evolutionary advance, and the chimpanzee's imitative depiction in which the impression expresses a complete perception, an impression independent as it were of the direct natural designs of life; here the creation detaches itself from the chains of life's current game and moves on its own for the sake of the individual's enjoyment. The path of evolution covered a yet still greater distance, however, before the full-fledged creatively informed transcendental apparatus of the human being surged. With the recognition of the ontopoietic role of the aesthetic factor already at work in the earlier phases of evolution, the much discussed question of the beauty and aesthetics of nature, the question of whether nature per se entails intrinsic solicitude for aesthetic experience or whether the beauty of nature reflects only the specifically human endowment of ability to experience it, is sharpened. In our perspective the presentation of "nature," the image of nature is itself already the fruit of the constitutive powers of the human transcendental system. As such it is imbued with the work of the aesthetic sense. Thus, it takes only a special tum of attention to activate the otherwise inert aesthetic elements of this presentation and fuse them with our aesthetically creative attitude as a stimulus and response. It might have taken humanity millions of years to cover this route from the rigid vitally interested functioning of individual life to the complete blossoming of the aesthetic sense. It seems that we can distinguish a second phase along that route, one in which the creative impulse intensified its determination and became singularized, uniquely personalized in its moves. It is as if our aesthetic powers began as an overflow of the creative impulse. This was in itself a novel phase, one that transformed the meaning of life. This new tum of the creative impulse transformed human experience. One has to differentiate this new round of life from the "empirical," "real" life experience that serves the business of life and the networks of which situate us in the world of our existence. There universal laws and the workings of the human mind produce manifestations of things in their "everyday" shape, color, odor, taste, and experience. But with the swing of the imagination, which we will call "unique" and "creative" or eminently aesthetic, then, as numerous artists and poets have affirmed, there is a prompting to find a specific shape or sound that can incarnate a vision. This is the initiating moment of a creative

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endeavor proper. As artists and poets testify, this moment is, on the one hand, a prompting force that surges within us, an "impulse" to bring forth a "voice" of our very own with a tune of our own to be shared and made to resound; this prompting surging up from the deepest self appears to galvanize all our forces in this swing of imaginative desire, as if our entire being depended on its actualization, as if in its pursuit and fulfillment our existence itself were fulfilled. The artist is prompted from within to give the innermost felt testimony of his real personal reality to others. On the other hand, in the creative impulse, as I will henceforth call it, that which the artist wants to give testimony to with his heart's blood, the dream he dreams, the desire that drives him is neither intimated nor clearly presented to him. On the contrary, there is need for extensive labor to find out what this dream is about. From the creative surge a search ensues in which a vision - an inner formless vision - has to take shape and assume meaning. This is the point at which "inspiration" enters in, bringing its hints to the imagination, mind, psyche, or soul. Here we are returning by a roundabout path to the other of the two main spheres of humanness, that covering the entire realm of the manifestation of the living human being. While to be human is to crystallize the "human condition" within the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, man's creative virtualities unfold, under the aegis of imaginatio creatrix, the entire system of experiencing that brings about self-consciousness, the system of the mind and the specifically personal enjoyment of all acts - enjoyment that we cannot consider as being other than aesthetic, that is, as rising above the matter at stake toward our own self-awareness, above pedestrian practical concerns to reflection on the vast and endlessly nuanced themes of the beautiful, the graceful, the endearing, and their contraries. Due to this we "enjoy" living our life. To be human, to be a self-conscious being, means thus to be aesthetic. Yet the creative impulse stands out from our aesthetically informed experience in its unique nature. Its aim is to bring about a new significance of life in forming a new vibrant object, an "art object" as opposed to an "object of nature." PART TWO THE CREATIVE IMPULSE AS THE VORTEX OF TRANSFORMATION OF THE SENSE-PROGRESS OF CULTURE

Now we come to the third, crucially significant, phase of the role that the creative impulse plays in the progress of humanity and culture.

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A) As discussed above, the creative impulse does not surge at random. Yes, it is always an offspring of a completely functional network in which some complexes or segments of functions are peripheral, some even seemingly completely mute, and in which others come together in configurations that are not necessarily cogent. But ultimately some or other aspect of the emerging project will fall into place and in one dynamic swing vigorously energize the network of functional forces; some oblique glimpses of a message prompt questions to be answered, questions still to be formulated, and questions still empty of objective sense. This dynamism comes from a loosening of the survival oriented direction of life in a surging of free functional forces and vital-cultural spontaneities. Life's ordered progress is suddenly without objective orientation and so hooks are thrown out in advance of the surge in a search for new orientation. As I have described it elsewhere, the origin of the full creative act leading to a creative object always opposes, revolts against the already given. And yet when it undertakes its search for the new, it remains immersed in the habitual elementary images of old and even more in the specifically human universe of culture, a civilization's acquired forms of feelings, ideas, customs. It takes a considerable effort - we call it "genius" - to shake off these old convictions and substitute for them freshly conceived inventively projected ways of "seeing." First, it takes a peculiar configuration of the already available, established, creatively informed operative faculties, a configuration that draws vital and conscious forces into participation so that a saturation is achieved such that the person is no longer satisfied with a reality subservient to survival needs; as our natural strivings pass through this subliminal sieve they are endowed with specifically human significance. Yet at the stage of the search for new significance, this configuration is unexplainable, ungraspable, and unforseeable as the triggering factor that accounts for the surge of the creative impulse as a force, striving of its own. Second, being grounded in the process of an individual life, this surging impulse is in this phase polyvalent; it is a force seeking constructive enactment. It moves in various directions, with each questing hook thrown out seeking a foothold in the realm of sense, an answer in terms of possible constructive deployments of the impUlse. Third, this questioning bears within it an affinity with the constructive nature of the possible answers. Still, and foremostly, this questioning sets itself over against the already acquired. In its first primordial phase the creative impulse surges just as a "feeling" in the entire functional system incarnated within the pulsating arteries of

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participation in the world of life. Through these arteries there moves a flux of events, change without halt, but these even in their contingency are projected and established in relatively stable form. B) Of course our vitally significant organic and physiological functioning lays down a primary elementary network for the individual's stretching itself within the vast networks of nature and societal life. But although even at its originary phase this network remains motile, subject to transformations in the life processes carrying the self-individualizing progress, there is laid down a foothold, a reference schema for the sphere of felt images that comes forth in order to orient the progress of life and in and through our life, and the world shapes the progress of life. Our vital feelings are indeed elementary imaginary complexes, of the simplest content, which situate us "in space," the extension of our vital involvement, stretching into the world of life. The "world" for a simple organism exists only insofar as it is "felt" through images of its vital interconnections with the environment. These felt images in their repetitive appearance construct habitual, stereotypic lines over time, the past being repeated in the present and projected into the future. It is through these networks of habitual felt imagery that a continuous reappraisal proceeds according to the success or failure we find in the performance of life's tasks. Yet these feelings would remain helpless to serve as sensitive guideposts for life's progress had they not from their seemingly loose, discontinuous surging (e.g., pain, pleasure, thirst, fear) each with an imaginary indicator, yes, but vague and lacking individuality as well as universality, remained but mere "touches" on the living being's intersection with its circumambient world. Living beings would have been left "blind" had these "touches" not been supplemented with fully-fledged feelings in which three-dimensional content projects an interactive, spatial and temporal orientation. The instrument of fully-fledged feeling consists simultaneously in attention to the life concerns of individuals, attention that concentrates feeling on oneself, and then in the intentioning of this attention toward other circumambient "objects" as well as toward inner objectives in the life progress of the individualizing self. Lastly and most importantly, this fully-fledged feeling is selfabsorbing. This means that it directs attention back to itself. In this return to the point from which it surges it institutes the "self," which has no place because its "place" is infinitely moveable along any line that solicits attention. The self is everywhere at the circumference of the individual's life zone, circumscribing its expansion.

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The imaginative indicator of our own circumference sets for us through innumerable repetitive instances a relatively stable pattern of imaginative "space" as well as "time lines" along which we situate all our experience, our projected sensing, desiring feelings and our reaction to the responses they meet. Already at this elementary level of natural animal functioning propelling the life course onwards, a set pattern of the individual's selfsame beingness with its factual and virtual interactions with the life zone individualizes its existence with an inner core of selfhood as well as an imaginatively informed pattern of intercourse with the forces surrounding the self and impinging on it. Hence there emerges and persists a pattern personifying the identity of the beingness in question. That pattern is its functionally substantialized beingness in established habitual functional interactions, spontaneities, reactions, etc. A historical order emerges through the sedimentation of images that reshape each other in life's progress. The human person whose genesis we are describing resides in the system of their genetic unfolding. The originary creative impulse surging with the human condition disrupts all habitual order, however. It brings an orientation swing beyond the established; its imagery is undefined, but it disrupts the schema of the already there. With its unfolding in a search for an "aim" incarnating its spontaneity, after a constructive task with which to start, it indicates merely a desire to dismantle the already there and transform it sclerotic, habit-bound confines. This tendency to transcend the vital confines of life's functioning simultaneously establishes under the imaginatio creatrix novel types of functions, reshaped types of functions; besides prompting an expansion of functional activity their congeries organize themselves into the faculties that will bring about, first of all, a new schema for functional enactment, an expanded schema. Together with that, these new functions evoke an expanded repertoire of feelings. And they will fall together into a varying and yet persisting schema defining the sameness of the individual - a sameness unified in a selfprojected image of self. However, and most significantly, the hitherto advancing self-sameness incarnated in the eye attentive to life, to the individual's progress, perils at hand, needs, etc. will receive a stream of powerfully transcendent intellectual acts and hitherto felt images will fall in among a throng of new images, the nucleus of imagination's "sight." C) In a further phase accompanying the emergence of the intellectual act, the creative impulse will free itself from the cocoon of vital concerns and, having contributed first to the surging of the full-fledged human schema of functioning, will now be partaking of its benefits. The introduction of

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intellect is accompanied by the entrance onto the scene of the imaginatio creatrix; the intellect provides a clear overview of the elementary world of images, on the one hand, and of the infinite possibilities offered by the imaginatio creatrix, on the other, so that the creative impulse may now enter into its distinctive task, the origination of art. The impulse to create always carries the prime directive to change the already given, to transform, to renew, to create. At the ripe moment the creative impulse makes the liberating move from ingrained survival subservient mechanisms to life's full swing; it does this through a move in which the imagery of habitual, stereotypical categories, imagery which seemed to be the solid, unchangeable stuff of life as both inwardly and outwardly projected, which seemed so connatural to our seeing, sensing, imagining the world and ourselves, to be indivisible from it, is now distanced from the palpable realm, is "detached" from things, flowers, animals, human beings in their seemingly necessary stereotypical designs, detached from them not in order to deny them but to leave them while the creative swing of the newly emerging mind proposes, so to speak, a second view of things and of beings that we want then to project outside of ourselves and far beyond the narrow confines of our first sensing of them in our life zone. The creative impulse, now under the inspiration of imaginatio creatrix, detaches these images so that a vision of a bull, a deer, a human being may be re-created from the "original," re-produced according to the mind's will. Thus, the breakout of the creative impulse into a third phase capping the entire progress of the evolution of the human mind that it initiated and now affirms the mind's singular independence, its separation from binding natural forms, so that it is no longer enmeshed in natural life. PART THREE THE AESTHETIC DISCOURSE OF THE ARTS

In the incipient phase of the creative impulse there is no definitive indication given as to in what fashion, for what higher purpose - that is, of what and how - this transformation of the shape of the world, of life, of our understanding and feeling will occur. We are tempted, of course, to posit a one-toone correspondence between the push of the impulse and the skill which the individual has at his disposal by innate disposition or through training. That is to say, we are inclined to believe that there is a direct correlation between the urge to create and a gift for poetizing, or drawing, or sculpting. And yet, we also know that people endowed with several dispositions or gifts hesitate for

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a while while they search out which artistic skill best allows them to express what they are "looking for." Beginning to paint, you might abandon your sketch to write a sonnet or a musical composition. This indicates that the creative impulse per se is blind and impotent. A significant vision is what is required for its concrete realization, a vision that calls out for a means of incorporating it into the network of the human being and the circumambient world. This means also and foremostly for our purpose that as such this vision is the common originary source for all art, for all its genres. It is in its purely aesthetic enjoyment that art expands in that all artistic genres meet and crosspollinate as if in aesthetic discourse. We usually consider the differentiation of the arts into genres to correspond to the basic senses through which we receive impressions and on which the aesthetic-artistic experience is built, into which experience the potential of the aesthetic sense carried by the creative impulse overflows: the impressions conveyed by sight, the impressions conveyed by touch, the impressions conveyed by hearing, and the impressions of movement and stasis conveyed by the kinesthetic sense. This could give us an erroneous idea that the sense impressions already carry an artistic-aesthetic potential such that they could activate artistic effort and unfold this potential, further in creative experience. This supposition is dispelled by the fact that these same sense impressions are constitutive of the objects, processes, events of the reality of life, of the world of life, from the "prose" of which precisely artistic endeavor stands out as the prosaic is lifted up into a specifically human exalted sphere. Of course, as I have already indicated, the aesthetic sense already informs at the incipient instant of the human creative condition as it realizes its program of the basic transformation of the significance of life from animal-vital life to creative-human life. That is to say that the entire constitutive system of the human world and life contains an aesthetic ingredient ready to be activated in a specific way. Still, it needs to be "activated," and this is the role of the creative impulse that monopolizes in its constructive swing all that enters into the functional system - the conscious system with all its dependencies - for the creative-constructive undertaking. We are tempted to overestimate the creative role of the senses also because the development of each particular art as well as its performance and reception works with a particular sense that carries this art as if by itself. Indeed each art calls for an ever more precise, thorough apprehension of and practice within the circumference of its sense-carrier. Hence the apparent one-sidedness of the specific genres and their self-sufficiency. And yet there

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is a felt, an intuitively seen, a creatively experienced congenial, familiar sphere in which all the genres pulsate - in an analogy to the most intimate cooperation of the senses in the constitutive construction of real life objects. It is only the sum of sensations, the accord of the feel of surfaces with the seen shape and density of objects, with, say, the sound produced when it is rapped, and with the heft it has when lifted that gives us our perception of an object. The creative impulse induces at once the creation of sharper sense impressions and their greater linkage and finer attunement. Hence even with their diversification into specific genres, the arts can come together as music and poetry come together in song, the visual and the auditory meet in the play, and all of these confabulate in the opera. The very roster of the muses transmitted to us long ago by Hesiod manifests how close the arts are to each other, how they even overlap each other. Calliope's heroic epic draws on Clio's history, Euterpe's flute music lends inspiration to Terpsichore's dance and to Erato's lyric poetry, Melpomene's tragedy has affinities with Thalia's comedy and Polyhymnia's mimic art. (Plastic art is missing here, and Urania's astronomy did not maintain its place among the arts in modem times.) By building upon or rather bringing together in sense impressions aesthetic factors such as rhythm, proportion/disproportion, harmony/disharmony, gradation in intensity, the "color" of feeling, etc., the creative-constructive process conjures innumerable correspondences among the genres. This study is restricted to the unraveling of the profound source of the "family resemblances" among the genres flowing from the creative impulse. The aesthetic discourse of the arts, between their differentiated genres, which allows the human being to vibrate with all the strings of existence while under the spell of any of them, has here been traced to their originary sharing in the aesthetic swing taken by the creative impulse.

SECTION ONE

PAULA CARABELL

BREAKING THE FRAME: TRANSGRESSION AND TRANSFORMATION IN GIULIO ROMANO'S SALA DEI GIGANTI

Ever since the sixteenth century, the Sala dei Giganti (in the Palazzo del Te, Mantua), has been viewed as a masterpiece of artifice and illusion. l Designed so that architectural and decorative elements combine seamlessly into a single tour de force, this unified structure surrounds the visitor so completely that it strikes fear in the heart of anyone who enters. 2 Recent accounts of the chamber have, however, de-emphasized this important dynamic; rather than fully acknowledging the Sala dei Giganti's ability to disconcert as well as delight, they have characterized it as mere Mannerist conceit, an extravagant display meant to entertain, not enlighten. 3 This was not the view of Giulio's own contemporaries. In 1541, Giorgio Vasari visited Mantua as part of a fact-finding mission for the first edition of his Lives of the Artists (1550).4 Giulio, it appears, was a most gracious host and Vasari, who "never left his side," was shown all the newly finished wonders of the city including the Palazzo del Te. 5 But despite Giulio's guidance, Vasari's account of the interior decoration was initially less than accurate. 6 Fortunately, however, Vasari returned to Mantua in 1566 and, able to refresh his memory, constructed a more precise description of the Sala dei Giganti for the expanded 1568 redaction. 7 His revised report concludes with the following laudatory remarks: So let no one think ever to see any work of the brush more frightening, or more realistic, than this; and whoever enters that room and sees the windows, doors and so forth all distorted and apparently hurtling down, and the mountains and buildings falling, cannot but fear that everything will crash down upon him, especially when he sees in that Heaven all the Gods rushing here and there in flight. And what is most marvelous to see in this work is that the whole painting has neither beginning nor end, but is all interconnected and smoothly continuous, with no ornamental partitions or boundaries, so that the objects which are in the distance, where the landscapes are painted, gradually recede into infinity. Hence that room, which is more than thirty feet long, seems like open country; and then, too, the floor being composed of pebbles set evenly, and the lower part of the upright walls being painted with similar-looking stones, there is no sharp angle visible, and so the level surface appears to be one vast expanse; and this effect was achieved with great judgment and beautiful skill by Giulio, to whom our craftsmen owe a great deal for such inventions. 8

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On a manifest level, Vasari's account of the Sala dei Giganti exists as a conventional piece of Renaissance art criticism; its primary function is to describe and praise and thus can be viewed as mere rhetorical strategy. Such an assessment is, in fact, incomplete, for the passage provides the reader as well with an intimate understanding of the nature of response. As Vasari demonstrates, the Sala dei Giganti not only is a delight to behold, but also inspires fear in the unsuspecting viewer. Most amazing of all, however, is its internal structure; constructed without boundaries, its four walls and ceiling form an unbroken continuum that physically surrounds the viewer. This feature, he claims, is what makes the Sala dei Giganti an astounding sight. 9 Vasari was not, however, alone in such observations. In 1566, the antiquarian Jacopo Strada was equally inspired by Giulio's creation, making note both of the room's unusual structure and of its terrifying effect on the beholder, while in 1586, Giovanni Battista Armenini remarked that "its strangeness and diversity make it very awesome and dreadful to see."10 Later, in the seventeenth century, Andre Felibien, like Vasari before him, celebrated the room's unique structure by maintaining that "what is particularly worthy of mention in this magnificent work is that all the parts are so uniform, and are so well attached one to the other, that there is no ornamental separation; that the whole room is but one single painting .... "11 And finally, in 1832, A. C. Quatremere de Quincy recalled that "the painting ... completely makes the plan and elevation disappear under its magic. Once he has entered, the spectator cannot see any way out; he is surrounded only by falling rocks and giants who defend themselves in vain."12 All but the last response are to the room's original appearance. As Vasari observes, Giulio constructed the floor from actual stones and merged them into the ones he had painted at the fresco's lower edges. Besides contributing to the overall illusion, this feature must also have affected the beholder's physical equilibrium, making his position at the center of the fray seem even more precarious and frightening. By the eighteenth century, however, the pavimenti had begun to deteriorate and were replaced by the present pattern. 13 In addition, a working fireplace once stood between the two windows on the eastern wall. Appropriately, Polyphemeus, whose mythic forge was located under the volcanic fires of Aetna, was placed above the hearth and thus real and imaginary flames blended together to form a stunning conceit. 14 In all probability, the backs of the shutters and doors were equally decorated, making the idea of escape seem a futile endeavor. One can only imagine how these features affected the visitor as he entered the chamber, but certainly the experience must have been one of both amazement and dread. It is no wonder

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then that the Sala dei Giganti gained such fame; the room existed as a fully illusionistic enclosure that promised not just to entertain, but moreover, to overwhelm. Why, however, was such an unusual area created? How did this extraordinary display of fantasy relate to the overall function of the Palazzo? In 1524, thanks to the diplomatic interventions of Baldessar Castiglione, Giulio Romano took up residence in Mantua as artist to the Gonzaga. 15 Shortly after his arrival, he began work on his masterpiece, the building that would ultimately become the Palazzo del Te. Sometime toward 1525, Duke Federigo II Gonzaga decided to transform what was once a stable into a more refined place of leisure, a villa where he could meet his mistress, Isabella Boschetti, away from the prying eyes of both her husband, Francesco Calvisano Gonzaga, and Federigo's mother, Isabella d'Este. 16 Eventually, however, affairs of state began to compete with affairs of the heart and the Duke had the villa enlarged into a palace, hoping that such a structure would serve his political aspirations. 17 But although the palace addressed another side of Federico's character, it nonetheless continued to function as a place of delight. That the palace remained a locus amoenus finds confirmation in the Duke's choice of inscription for the Sala di Psiche: "Federigo II Gonzaga, Fifth Marquis of Mantua, Captain General of the Florentine Republic, ordered this place built for honest leisure after work to restore strength in quiet."18 Earlier, in 1492, Isabella d'Este herself had described the site in a similar manner, "a place surrounded by water ... where we sometimes like to take pleasure."19 As expected, much of the interior decoration reflects this aim, particularly the Sala dei Giganti. 2o In many respects, the Sala dei Giganti differs considerably from other rooms in the palace. Areas such as the Sala di Psiche, Sala dei Cavalli, Sala di Ovidio, Camera dei Venti, Camera delle Aquile, and Loggia di Davide offer the visitor scenes of erotic abandon, pastoral calm, or sublime heroics; nothing, then, seems to prepare him for the violence and chaos that confront him upon entering the chamber of the giants. Perhaps its unusual mien can be traced to the fact that the room never served as living quarters; it was removed from Federigo's private apartments and located near to what Jacopo Strada identified as recreational areas. 21 Traditionally, of course, the unusual and the grotesque have long served as a source of pleasure. One only needs to think of the pranks played by Leonardo da Vinci on unsuspecting guests such as when he inflated a steer's intestines to the point of near explosion, forcing anyone standing there into the corner of the room,22 or to consider the function of a popular feature of the Renaissance garden, the grotto. In 1591, Francesco Bocchi, recognizing the power of the Grotto Grande in the Boboli

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Gardens in Florence, noted that its seemingly ruinous state "aroused delight, but not without terror, because the building seemed about to collapse to the ground."23 Certainly, the dynamics at work in the Grotto Grande find their precedent in the Sala dei Giganti. But perhaps the clearest expression of the lure of the unexpected comes to us from Baldessar Castiglione: Now the place and as it were the source of laughter consists in a certain deformity, for we laugh only at those things that have incongruity in them and that seem to be amiss and yet are not. I know not how to state it otherwise; but if you will think about it yourselves, you will see that what we laugh at is nearly always something incongruous, and yet it is not amiss.24

Yet despite its convincing tone, Castiglione's analysis seems an incomplete account of the vicissitudes of response, particularly when we consider a complex structure like the Sala dei Giganti. It does not explain the admixture of pleasure and fright that remains a constant feature of reactions to the chamber nor does it take into account the significance of a fully illusionistic space. To comprehend the dynamics at work in the Palazzo del Te, then, we must look beyond such generalizations; instead, we must tum to matters of technique and examine the artistic solutions adopted by Giulio when he formed this singular chamber. According to Vasari, Giulio: had constructed ... a large, round room, with very thick walls, so that the four external angles of the masonry should be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round like an oven. This done, at the corners running right round all the walls of the room, he had the doors, windows, and fireplace built in rusticated stones looking haphazardly rough-hewn, and, seemingly, all askew and disjointed so that they appeared to be really leaning over to one side, and indeed about to collapse. And having built this room so strangely, he set out to paint in it the most fantastic and imaginative composition he could devise, namely Jove hurling his thunderbolts against the giants. 25

As Vasari makes clear, Giulio unified architectural and pictorial elements into a single plan; rather than limiting himself to the conditions of a preexisting site, he constructed a room that would accommodate his own concetto. Traditionally, mural painters inherited an already organized architectural space, a setting the design and proportions of which determined the decorative scheme. 26 Nonetheless, the challenge ofthe flat wall, the invitation to penetrate its solid opacity is inherent to any mural project. Painters have always been tempted to open the windows of their rooms. An example, close at hand in Mantua itself, was, of course, Mantegna's camera picta in the Palazza Ducale, the so-called Camera degli Sposi, completed in 1474.27 This wondrous chamber had functioned as the main reception room of the Gonzaga until the middle of the 1530s, and surely Giulio must have considered its presence a direct challenge to his own artistic inventiveness.

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Mantegna had been the first artist since antiquity to create a fully illusionistic chamber, constructing a room which gave the impression that the walls had been removed and that the vault, which appears open at the top, is supported on pilastered piers. Such innovations forced the visitor to become an active participant in an unfolding drama; he was placed at the centre of an illusory expanse and was made to enter a region that seems to have escaped its structural limitations. Yet despite its opening of walls and vault, the Camera degli Sposi ultimately respects the very architectural supports its pictorial decorations seem anxious to deny; the structural logic of the room is delicately maintained, articulated as the basic framing of the illusion. 28 Such a method of construction was fully in keeping with Renaissance notions of image-making. Leon Battista Alberti himself had acknowledged the window implications of the frame: Let me tell you what I do when I am painting. First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen. 29

Alberti's conception of painting as a window is one that, like Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi, posits a circumscribed notion of space; it presumes the existence of some form of boundary that defines the edges of the image and that separates it both from the sphere of the observer and from the world around it. This clearly defined relationship between real and imaginary, viewer and viewed, could not, of course, have taken place without the development of another Renaissance framing mechanism - mathematical perspective. 3o As the first book of Alberti's influential treatise explains, representational space was to be thought of as the intersecting plane of a visual pyramid, whose centric ray (or vanishing point) was designed to remain coincident with the eye of the beholder. 31 In order for such a system to work ideally, however, the spectator was required to remain in a fixed and centralized position, a location that was coextensive with, yet distinct from, the area depicted. Thus, like the idea of the window, single-point perspective established for the observer a delimited, albeit privileged, view of the pictorial field; it provided the beholder with a sense of authority and completion and in this manner, enabled him to maintain an illusion of sovereignty over a circumscribed, fictive world. The Sala dei Giganti, with its lack of framing devices, however, denies the viewer such control. As Vasari and subsequent visitors implicitly observed, the Sala dei Giganti was constructed in a manner that stretched Alberti's notion of image-making to its outermost limit. Although Alberti himself had acknowledged the need to bridge real and representational space, his pictorial strategy continued to

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uphold the very separation he wished to negate.32 Giulio's approach completely erased the distinction. Alberti's images were conceived of as spatial extensions of the painter's own world, his proverbial window opening out onto a carefully controlled and calibrated environment. Giulio's innovative schema, however, abolished the safety of Alberti's construction: the threatening mass of the false cupola, the falling titans, and the precarious and crumbling walls of the Sala dei Giganti invade the visitor's territory, forcing him to become part of the surrounding event. While such an arrangement seems to bear a natural affinity to the dramatic, its boundless structure eschews even this likely model. In the Renaissance theater, the newly conceived of proscenium arch served a function close to that of the frame; it delimited the view and provided a clear separation between actors and audience. 33 Exploiting the principles of Albertian perspective, it continued to enable the spectator to enjoy mastery over the world. But unlike this mediated and empowering experience, the Sala dei Giganti decenters the viewer. Its seamless structure brings about a union of subject and object that not only serves as a source of pleasure, but also creates an acute sense of discomfort. As we have seen, Federigo's decision to enlarge the structure on the Isola del Te was predicated upon his desire for a place of delight; he wanted a site where he could reflect upon the beauty of the female form and take his pleasure away from the concerns of city life. For Federigo, however, carnal activities were but one approach to self-satisfaction. Like others of his generation, he recognized that pleasure could equally be transmitted through the sense of sight. By the sixteenth century, the notion that love could best be aroused through visual means had become commonplace. From Dante onwards and particularly amongst the Neoplatonists, the eyes were considered to be the windows of the soul, avenues along which the image of the beloved entered the heart and imprinted itself forever. 34 Such a view of amorous captivation was, however, primarily transcendent in nature. Contemplation of beauty not only provided the lover with the ability to find himself, it gave him the power to reach God as well; by gazing upon his beloved he was transported beyond the temporal sphere into the realm of the divine. 35 In the Palazzo del Te, however, vision was undoubtedly linked to more earthly concerns. Unlike the Sala dei Giganti, The Sala di Psiche has generally been accepted as an expression of Federigo's erotic interests. 36 One only needs to consider, for example, the image of Jupiter seducing Olympias on the east wall of the chamber to be convinced that this room offered the Duke hours of

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sensual pleasure.37 Such satisfaction was, of course, achieved through projective means. In practical terms, Federigo's response to this carnally explicit image depended upon his ability to transgress the boundaries of pictorial space and relinquish his identity for that of an even more privileged masculine presence, Jupiter. 38 That this compensatory relationship aided Federigo in the enjoyment of his chamber cannot be doubted. It is, however, Giulio's own particularized account of Olympias' seduction that makes such vicarious pleasure a considerably more complex affair. Although this ancient tale of jealousy and intrigue finds initial expression in Plutarch's Life of Alexander (7 : 3), it is Giulio himself who best describes the perils of the prurient gaze. Central to the image's structure is the figure of Philip of Macedonia, that suspicious and lustful husband who becomes the victim of his own scopophilic drive. Unlike Jupiter, Philip is an observer rather than an active participant, his involvement visual instead of physical. An unhappy witness to a carnal scene, he is acutely aware of his own limitations. Giulio, however, in so emphasizing the plight of this hapless protagonist created an even more distressing situation; he destroyed for Federigo the fiction of bodily union and forced him to confront his role as mere voyeur. By making clear the presence of a second male figure, Giulio created a dual target for the Duke's projective drive. In so doing he ruptured a bond that had promised compensatory pleasure and made this an image of insatiable desire. Federigo's inevitable exclusion from the activities of the amorous duo is, of course, a function of Giulio's compositional strategy. Cast in profile, Philip serves as a surrogate for the covetous spectator, his position a mere ninetydegree rotation from that of the external observer. It is, however, the most curious aspect of Giulio's creation, the wounding lightning bolt hurled by Jupiter to punish the prying intruder, that best describes the dynamics at work both here and in the Sala dei Giganti. Historically, the development of illusionistic painting has always been associated with the use of mirrors. The most famous pictorial account of the relationship between reflection and representation, however, is surely that of Filippo Brunelleschi, created as part of his novel experiment in single-point perspective. According to his biographer Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi pictured the church of San Giovanni in Florence and its immediate surroundings on a panel that measured about a half a braccia square: Since in such a painting it is necessary that the painter postulate beforehand a single point from which the painting must be viewed, taking into account the length and width of the sides as well as the distance, in order than no error would be made in looking at it ... he made a hole in the

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painted panel at that point in the temple of San Giovanni which is directly opposite the eye of anyone stationed inside the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore, for the purpose of painting it. The hole was as tiny as a lentil bean on the painted side and it widened conically like a woman's straw hat to about the circumference of a ducat, or a bit more, on the reverse side. He required that whoever wanted to look at it place his eye on the reverse side where the hole was large, and while bringing the hole up to his eye with one hand, to hold a flat mirror with the other hand in such a way that the painting would be reflected in it. The mirror was extended by the other hand a distance that more or less approximated in small braccia the distance in regular braccia from the place he appears to have been when he painted it up to the church of San Giovanni. With the aforementioned elements of the burnished silver, the piazza, the viewpoint, etc. the spectator felt he saw the actual scene when he looked at the painting. J9

Two elements of Manetti's account are central to an understanding of Giulio's own, subsequent enterprise, the peephole and the mirror, each of which makes clear the nature of scopic drive. From the start, Brunelleschi's peephole installs the viewer as voyeur. Restricting his movement, it reduces him to a disembodied eye thus forcing his pictorial involvement to be a visual rather than corporeal affair. The mirror, in tum, redoubles this discarnate form of vision; its reflective surface endows the image with its own sense of sight and enables it to return the viewer's gaze with an unblinking authority. Such a model of spectatorship, however, became more than mere display when it found codification in Alberti's De pictura. Alberti's conception of vision is one that is not only monocular, but is strictly mathematical in nature. As he explains, perception takes place through a series of rays issuing from a stationary location, a pyramidal formation that converges at a spot known as the vanishing point. It is this place on the horizon that replicates the reflexive character of Brunelleschi's mirror. Just as occurs in Brunelleschi's specular model, Alberti's lines of sight are reflected back to their sender, their conical structure reversed and returned until the observer himself becomes the object perceived.4o This visual dynamic finds pictorial expression in Giulio's image of Jupiter and Olympias. That this image addresses the impulse to see cannot be denied, satisfying, as it does, the sexual curiosity of both internal and external observer alike. But even this form of vicarious pleasure must be momentary at best since the split identity of the extrinsic male viewer disrupts any hope of voyeuristic gain. When in the guise of Jupiter, he no longer remains a clandestine witness, but himself becomes the focus, the object beheld. This reflexive form of spectatorship is made clear by the arrow in Philip's eye. 41 Analogous to Alberti's model of vision, the intrusive vector represents the redoubling of the gaze; it transforms voyeur into victim, forcing him to fall prey to his own scopic desires.

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On a manifest level, the Sala dei Giganti seems to offer little of the libidinal excitement afforded by the Sala di Psiche. The contest between the gods and the giants more closely approaches the images of battles and heroic deeds that decorate the adjacent chambers and, in this manner, appears to reject any overt reference to erotic pleasure. But the Sala dei Giganti does, in fact, directly address the notion of desire. By intensifying the dialectical engagement between viewer and work it not only recalls, but expands the dynamics at work in the Sala di Psiche. As Vasari and his successors observed, the Sala dei Giganti formed a single, unified image, one that remained unbroken by frames of any kind. Thus, upon entering the chamber, the visitor found himself the focus of a dynamic conflict, becoming the veritable center of the pictorial field. Surrounded by a fictive world over which he had little control, the observer not only saw, but was seen. Centuries later, the notion that the self not only acts as beholder, but as object beheld was, of course, extensively explored by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly in his last, unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible where he describes vision as a reflexive process. 42 Earlier, this phenomenon was recognized by Sigmund Freud and discussed in his work on the reversal of instincts. 43 As Freud demonstrated, instincts, particularly those of a sexual nature, have the capacity to turn around upon the self and thus, the impulse to look may transform itself into a desire to be beheld. This change from an active to a passive aim is, of course, often accompanied by pleasurable sensations and, in this manner, can be related to the delight experienced by visitors to the chamber when they perceive themselves to be the centre of interest. Ever since the sixteenth century, however, accounts of the Sala dei Giganti have equally emphasized its more dreadful aspects, noting that its huge figures and limitless structure also have the capacity to frighten the unsuspecting viewer. Certainly, such reactions can be dismissed as mere rhetorical strategy, intended as they were to reflect an appreciation of the artist's skill in matters of illusion. To read them exclusively in this manner, however, would be to restrict our understanding of the dynamics of response. We can best begin to address the complexities inherent in the Sala dei Giganti through a set of prints produced ca. 1680 by Pietro Bartoli. 44 Bartoli, who himself spent time in Mantua and who undoubtedly visited the Palazzo del Te, undertook a series of eight etchings which he based upon Giulio's most fantastic invention. Of these eight, two include a vivid account of reactions to the chamber.

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As expected, Bartoli's prints present a convincing likeness of the destructive fury unleashed by the gods on the hapless giants. Of particular interest, however, is not his rendition of battling forces, but rather, his treatment of the beholder's share in the drama. In question is the disparity in scale between the protagonists and those who observe them along with the placement and attitude of these tiny figures. Dwarfed by the image that surrounds them, the viewers are incorporated into representational space, entering into a state of non-differentiation that reflects the chamber's unique pictorial structure. It is this sense of merger that gives rise to feelings of fear; it produces a sensation of discomfort that finds its closest parallel in Freud's notion of the uncanny.45 According to Freud, the uncanny represents the return of familiar feelings long ago repressed. 46 Such a sensation can, for example, be aroused when the ego moves back in time to a point before it strove to differentiate itself from the external world or when it temporarily erases the distinction between real and imaginary.47 Keeping this notion in mind, one can understand why the Sala dei Giganti produces such feelings of dread; it engulfs the viewer and brings about an uncomfortable union of seer and seen, one that, we now recognize, reflects the inescapable reality of the reflexivity of being. It is the fear of fusion that finds expression in the reports of Vasari and his contemporaries as well as in Bartoli's own graphic account. As seemingly threatening in nature, the ego's pull toward a state of nondifferentiation often finds itself denied and, as a result, its own identity appears to become fully reinstated. 48 This return to a state of individuation plays a pivotal role in reactions to the chamber. In a classic passage from the existential treatise Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre offers an account of beholding that reifies the visual basis of self-awareness. 49 The philosopher tells of the observer who, with eye clandestinely to keyhole, finds himself discovered by an approaching intruder. Driven by the other from his position as voyeur, he takes his place as object seen. Sartre's account of the instability of the viewing process is, however, essentially intersubjective in nature, dependent as it is upon the presence of a veritable other. A more fitting discussion of the self's unsettling through vision comes to us from Jacques Lacan in a tale from his student days. While at sea, one of the fishermen with whom he was then working spied a sardine can floating in the water. Jokingly the fisherman said. "You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see yoU!"50 Lacan, however, was not amused; to him, that seemingly inanimate form boldly confronted him, returning his gaze, dislocating and objectifying his very existence. 51

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Implicit in Lacan's narrative is the notion that the object and hence, the image, is not only capable of luring the viewer into a reflexive engagement, but is able to destroy the integrity of the ego by making it aware of its own status as representational form. As Lacan makes clear, "in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture."52 It is the subject's inscription into the pictorial realm, his conversion into the image beheld, that is enacted in the Sala dei Giganti; where once the gaze of an external authority functioned as a source of pleasure, providing as it did narcissistic compensation to a seemingly unified subject, it now carries with it the seeds of fragmentation. As Vasari and his successors implicitly realized, the chamber's cycloramic structure was a decentering feature, one that destroyed the preeminence of the viewing subject. By reversing the relationship between seer and seen, the Sala dei Giganti let it be known that identity exists as a relative construct. Even in a pleasure palace like the Palazzo del Te, the integrity of the individual remained always far from secure. Washington College, Maryland

NOTES 1 Ovid's account of the battle of gods and giants serves as the primary source for Guilio's imagery (Metamorphoses, 1: 152-168). 2 Work on the Sala dei Giganti belongs to the years 1532-1534. Although the decoration was executed by Giulio's assistants (see payment records of October 11, 1532 and September 25, 1534 to Fermo da Caravaggio, August 4, 1534 to Rinaldo Mantovano, and October 7, 1534 to Luca da Faenza in Giulio Romano: Repertorio di fonti documentarie, ed. D. Ferrari, 2 vols., Mantua, 1992) there is no doubt that the master himself was responsible for the actual conception of this amazing chamber. Not only is the Sala dei Giganti in keeping with earlier works of Giulio's, but some of the artist's own drawings for the room remain extant. See F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1958) pp. 152-159 and figs. 348-50; E. Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te: Images of Love and Politics (Baltimore and London, 1977) p. 128. 3 See Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, pp. 37-38 and 53; J. Shearman, Only Connect ... Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1992) pp. 188-191. 4 "Perci6 che chiamato a Vinezia da messer Pietro Aretino .,. fui forzato, perche molto disiderava vedermi, andar la; il che feci anco volentieri per vedere l' opere di Tiziano e d' altri pittori in quel viaggio. La qual cosa mi venne fatta, per6 che in pochi giomi vidi in Modena et in Parma I'opere del Coreggio, quelle di Giulio Romano in Mantova, e I'antichita di Verona" (Le vite de' piit ecceUenti pittori scultori e architettori neUe redazione del 1550 e I568, ed. P. Barocchi and R. Bettarini, Florence, vol. 6, 1987, pp. 381-382). 5 "In questo tempo Giorgio Vasari, che era amicissimo di Giulio, se bene non si conoscevano se non per fama e per lettere, nell'andare a Vinezia, fece la via per Manova per vedere Giulio e

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l' opere sue; e COS! arrivato in quella cittii, andando per trovar l' amico senza essersi mai veduti, scontrandosi l'un I'altro si conobbono non altrimenti che se mille volte fussero stati insieme presenzialmente: di che ebbe Giulio tanto contento et allegrezza, che per quattro giorni non 10 stacco mai, mostrandogli tutte I'opere sue ... " (Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol. 5, 1984, pp. 78-79). 6 For example, he has confused the order of the rooms and has misidentified subject matter, describing the Sala di Psiche as "una Baccanaria per un Sileno" (Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol. 5, p. 68). 7 On Vasari's later visit to Mantua, see K. Frey, Der Literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris, 2 vols. (Munich, 1923, 1930) vol. 2, letter dxxxvi, May 15, 1566. 8 Lives of the Artists, trans. G. Bull, vol. 2 (New York, 1987) p. 224. "Onde non si pensi alcuno vedere mai opera di penello pill orribile e spaventosa ne pill naturale di questa; e chi entra in quella stanza, vedendo Ie finestre, Ie porte et altre COS! fatte cose torcersi e quasi rovinare, et i monti e gl' edifizii cadere, non puo non temere che ogni cosa non gli rovini addosso, vedendo massimamente in quel cielo tutti gli Dii andare che qua e chi Iii fuggendo; e quello che e in questa opera maraviglioso, e il neder tutta quell a pittura non avere principio ne fine, et attaccata tutta e tanto bene continuata insieme senza termine of tramezzo di ornamento, che Ie cose che sono appresso de'casamenti paiono grandissime, e quelle che allontanano dove sono paesi, vanno perdendo in infinito: onde quella stanza che non e lunga pill di quindi [ci] braccia, para una campagna di paese: senzache, essendo il pavimento di sassi tondi piccioli mura ti per coltello, et il cominciare delle mura che vanno per diritto dipinte de' medesimi sassi, non vi appare canto vivo, e viene a parere quel paino grandissima cosa. II che fu fatto con molto guidizio e bell'arte da Giulio, al qual per COS! fatte invenzione deveno molto gl'artefici nostri" (Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol 5, pp. 72-73. For the entire account of the Sala dei Giganti, see pp.69-73). 9 These points appear in more nascent form in the 1550 edition (Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol. 5, pp.69-73). 10 Strada described the Sala dei Giganti as, "Un gran Camerone in tutta volta senza verona Cornice e ornamento ... maraviglioso spetacolo et oribile a vedere ... " (in E. Verheyen, "Jacopo Strada's Mantuan Drawings of 1567-1568," Art Bulletin, vol. 49, no. 1, March 1967, room 17, p. 69). This material was first published (with errors) by S. Daveri, "Descrizione del palazzo del Te di Mantova, di Jacopo Strada, illustrate con documenti tratti dall' Archivio Gonzaga," L'arte, vol. 2, 1899, pp. 248-253 and 392-400, and was reprinted as Descrizione dello storico palazzo del Te (Mantua, 1904). Strada's account, a hand-written text, was in all likelihood unknown to Vasari and thus, would not have influenced the latter's expanded description of the room in the 1568 redaction of the Vite. I would like to thank Professor Egon Verheyen for discussing these issues with me. G. B. Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, trans. E. J. Olszewski (New York, 1977): " ... et invero e commendato per un capriccio bellissimo e, come che sia vario e nuovo, e molto orribile et a vedere spaventoso" (De' veri precetti della pittura (1586), ed. M. Gorreri, Turin, 1988, p. 179). 11 "Mais ce qui est particulierement digne d' etre observe dans tout ce magnifique Ouvrage, c' est que toutes les parties en sont si uniformes, et si bien attachees les unes avec les autres, qu' il n'y a nulle separation d'ornement; que toute la chambre n'est qu'une seule peinture ... " (Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes, Paris, 1666-1688, vol. 2, p. 192-193). Also continuing within a Vasarian tradition are comments by G. Bottani, Descrizione storica delle pitture del regio-ducale Palazzo del Te (Mantua, 1783) and G. Cadioli, Descrizione delle pitture, sculture ed architetture che si osservano nella ciua di Mantova ene' suoi contorni (Mantua, 1763).

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12 "La peinture, en effet, comme a fait entierement disparaitre et Ie plan et I' elevation du local sous la magie de la composition. Une fois entre, Ie spectateur ne voit plus d'issue; il n'est environne que de rochers ecrasant dans leur chute les geants, qui se defendent en vain" (Dictionnaire historique d' architecture (Paris, 1832) vol. I, p. 246). I3 On Giulio's original plan and its vicissitudes, see K. Forster and R. Tuttle, "The Palazzo del Te," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 30, no. 4, December 1971, pp. 267-293. 14 On the disposition of the fireplace, see E. Verheyen, "Studien zur Baugeschichte des Palazzo del Te zu Mantua," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 16, no. 1, 1972, fig. 13, p. 89. 15 On Giulio's relationship with Castiglione, see J. Shearman, "Giulio Romano and Baldessar Castiglione," in Giulio Romano, Aui del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Mantua, 1989), pp. 293-301. 16 On the notion that the villa was constructed for Isabella Boschetti, see Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, pp. 19-21. For an opposing view, see Clifford Brown's review of Verheyen's text, Art Bulletin, vol. 52, no. I, March 1980, p. 163. 17 On the palace as propaganda, see F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, New Haven, 1958, esp. pp. 105-160 and Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, esp. pp. 1-55. The reconstruction took place between the years 1527 and 1534. 18 "FEDERICVS GONZAGA II. MAR ... HONESTO OCIO POST LABORES AD REPARANDAM VIRT. QUIETI CONSTRVI MANDAVIT," trans., E. H. Gombrich, "The Sala dei Venti in the Palazzo del Te," in Symbolic Images (London, 1972) p. 225, n. 40. 19 "Desyderando nui de havere de Ie lepore vive per metterle suso al Te, logo circumdata de aqua Ie porte Mantua dove volemo potere pigliare qualche volta piacere, ve pregamo 'di fomirci di esse lepri' aci6 che quando venireti in qua ve possiamo menare a spas so et farvi recreatione ece" (letter to Andrea de Zobolis, February 4, 1492, in A. Luzio, La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all'lnghilterra nel 1627-28, Milan, 1913, p. 240). 20 That villa decoration enjoyed a certain freedom from the constraints of decorum finds early expression in L. B. Alberti's De re aedificatoria (Book 9, section 2). 21 On the disposition and function of the chamber, see Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua. esp. pp. 37-38. Strada's descriptions of each of the rooms are reprinted in Verheyen, "Jacopo Strada's Mantuan Drawings," pp. 68-69. 22 Vasari, Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol. 4, pp. 34-35. 23 "Egli si mostra adunque la volta in sembiante, che rovini, et che per Ii fessi, et per Ie rotture escano diversi animali, come serpi, uccelli, satiri, et molti piante, che paiono COS! vere, COS! naturali, che quasi in verita del fatto recano altrui diletto, rna non senza terrore, posciache del tutto pare, che a terra rovini I' edifizio" (F. Bocchi, Le bellezze della citta di Fiorenza, Florence, 1591), p. 69. Trans., C. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven and London, 1990), p. 206. 24 The Book of the Courtier, trans. C. Singleton (New York, 1959) p. 145 and cited by Verheyen, The Palazzo del Te in Mantua, p. 48. "II loco adunque e quasi il fonte onde nasconi i ridiculi consiste in una certa deformita; perche solamente si ride di quelle cose che hanno in se disconvenienzia, e par che stian male senza per6 star male. 10 non so altrimenti dichiarirlo; rna, se voi da voi stessi pensate, vederete che quasi sempre quel di che si ride e una cosa che non si conviene, e pur non sta male" (lllibro del cortegiano, Venice, 1528,2: 46). 25 Lives of the Artists, trans. Bull, vol. 2, p. 222. "Fatto dunque fondare in quel cantone, che era in luogo paduloso, con fondamenti alti e doppi, fece tirare sopra la cantonata una gran stanza

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tonda e di grossissime mura, acci6 che i quattro cantoni di quella muraglia dalla banda di fuori venissero pili gagliardi e potessino regger una volta doppia e tonda a uso di forno; e ci6 fatto, avendo quella camera cantoni, vi fece per 10 girare di quella a' suoi loughi murare Ie porte, le finestre et il camino di pietre rustiche a caso scantonate, e quasi in modo scom-messe e torte, che parea proprio pendessero in sur un lato e rovinassero veramente. E murata questa stanza cosf stranamente, si mise a dipignere in quella la pili capriccios a invenzione che si potesse trovare, cioe Giove che fulmina i Giganti" (Vite, ed. Barocchi, vol. 5, pp. 69-70). 26 On such conventions, see E. Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1980); M. Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431-1600 (Chicago and London, 1990). 27 On the camera picta, see L. Coletti and E. Camesasca, La Camera degli Sposi del Mantegna a Mantova (Milan, 1959); R. Signorini, Opus Hoc Tenue: la Camera Dipinta di Andrea Mantegna; lettura storica, iconografica e iconologica (Parma, 1985); C. Cieri Via, "Il luogo della corte: la 'Camera Picta' di Andrea Mantegna nel palazzo ducale di Mantova," Quaderni di Palazzo del Te, vol. 6, 1987, pp. 23-44; D. Arasse, "Il programma politico della Camera degli Sposi, ovvero il segreto dell'immortalita," in ibid., pp. 45-64; R. Starn and L. Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992); M. Cordaro, ed., Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi, trans. H. Evans (New York, 1993). 28 On the framing of mural cycles, see J. Schulz, "Pinturicchio and the Revival of Antiquity," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld 1nstitutes, vol. 25, 1962, pp. 35-55. 29 On Painting (Florence, 1435), trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972) Book 1, para. 19. " ... dir6 quello fo io quando dipingo. Principio, dove io debbo dipingere scrivo uno quadrangolo di retti angoli quanto grande io voglio, el quale reputo essere una finestra aperta per donde io miri quello che quivi sara dipinto ... " (De pictura, ed. C. Grayson, Bari, 1973, 1:19). 30 The literature on perspective is immense. Amongst the most important contributions are E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. Wood (New York 1991) (originally published as "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" in the Vortriige der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924-1925 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927), pp. 258-330); J. White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge, MA, 1987); S. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York, 1975); w. Ivins, On the Rationalization of Sight: With an Examination of Three Renaissance Texts on Perspective (New York, 1973); M. Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990); M. Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge, 1986); H. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. J. Goodman (Cambridge, MA, 1994). 31 De pictura, esp. paras. 4-8 and 12-24. 32 "E piacemi sia nella storia chi ammonisca e insegni a noi quello che ivi si facci, 0 chiami con la mano a vedere, 0 con viso cruccioso e con gli occhi turbati minacci che niuno verso loro vada, o dimostri qualche pericolo 0 cosa ivi maravigliosa, 0 te inviti a piagnere con loro insieme 0 a ridere" (De pictura, Book 2, para. 72). 33 On the history of these developments, see G. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1944); L. Magagnato, Teatri italiani del Cinquecento (Venice, 1954); R. Krautheimer, "The Tragic and Comic Scene of the Renaissance: The Baltimore and Urbino Panels," in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York and London, 1969) pp. 345-360; D. Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven and London, 1982), esp. pp. 150-158. 34 See, M. Fieino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love (Florence, 1484), trans. S. Jayne (Dallas, 1985) esp. speech 6, chapter 6; B. Castiglione, I1libro del cortegiano (Venice, 1528),3:

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66. On the history of this concept, see M. Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance (New York: 1958) esp. pp. 219-222. 35 The beloved's function as intermediary to God finds repeated expression in Dante's Divine Comedy, Petrarch's Rime sparse, Michelangelo's love poetry, and Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium, (see, in particular, speech 2, chapters 6 and 8; speech 6, chapter 19). 36 For an opposing view, see Hartt, Giulio Romano, pp. 126-140. 37 This suggestion finds alternative expression in Pietro Aretino's letter of October 6, 1527, addressed to the Duke himself. "Credo che messer Jacopo Sansovino rarissimo vi omara la camera d'una Venere sf vera e sf vera, che empie di libidine il pensiero di ciascun che la mira ... " (Lettere sull'arte di Pietro Aretino. ed. E. Camesasca, 3 vols. In 4, Milan, 1957-60, vol. 1, p. 17). On the reception of sexualized imagery in the Renaissance, see C. Ginzburg, "Tiziano, Ovidio e il codici della figurazione erotica nel' 500," in Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Venezia, 1976 (Vincenza, 1980) pp. 125-135 (translated as "Titian, Ovid and Sixteenth-Century Codes for Erotic Illustration," in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans., J. and A. Tedes-chi, Baltimore, 1989, pp. 77-95). 38 Such a mechanism would certainly have been called into operation for another of Giulio's lascivious inventions, I Modi. On the history of these highly sexualized prints, see L. Lawner, I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, an Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance (Evanston, 1988); H. Zerner, "L'estampe erotique au temps de Titien," in Tiziano e Venezia, pp. 85-90; L. Puppi, "Immaginazione e immagini erotiche in Giulio Romano," Eidos, vol. 5, no. 9, October 1991, pp. 46-58; B. Talvacchia, "L'erotismo in Giulio Romano fra dec oro, decorazione, e scandalo," La nuova citta, no. 5, May-August, 1994, pp. 94-113. 39 "Laquale dipintura, perchel dipintore bisognia che presuponga uno luogo solo, donde sa a uedere la sua dipintura si per alteza e basseza e da lati come per discos to, accio che non si potessi pigliare errore nel guardarlo, che in ognj luogho, che s'escie di quello, a mutare I'apparizionj dello occhio egli aueua fatto un buco nella tauoletta, dou' era questa dipintura, che ueniua a essere nel dipinto dalla parte del tenpio di Santo Giouannj, in quello luogo doue percoteua I' occhio al diritto da chi guardaua da quello luogho dnetro alia porta del mezo di Santo Maria del Fiore, doue si sarebbe posto, se I'auesse ritratto. E1quale buco era piccolo quanto una lenta da 10 lata della dipintura e da rouescio si rallargaua piramidalmente, come fa uno capello di paglia da donna, quanto sarebbe el tondo d'uno ducato 0 poco piu; e uoleua, che I' occhio si ponessi da rouescio, dond' eglj era largho, per chj I'auessi a uedere, e con I'una mano s'accostassi allo occhio et nell'altra tenessi uno specchio piano al dirin-petto, che ui si ueniua a specchiare dentro la dipintura; e quella dilatione dello specchio dall'altra mano ueniua a essere la distanza uel circha di braccia piccholine quanto a braccia uere daluogho, doue mostraua essere stato a ritrarlo, per insino al tenpio di Santo Giouanni; che al guardarlo con I' altra circustanza dette dello ariento brunito e della piaza ect. et del punto pareua, che si uedessj el proprio uero" (A. Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, trans. C. Enggass, University Park and London, 1970, p. 44). 40 On the return of the gaze in Alberti's schema, see N. Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven and London, 1983), esp. pp. 104-107; M. Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), esp. pp. 52-56. 41 A similar feature may be found in Mantegna's Archers Shooting at St. Christopher, in the Eremitani Church, Padua. On both the iconographic and metaphoric significance of this detail, see M. Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art, chapter I. Also, see D. Arasse, "Le Corps fictif de Sebastien et Ie coup d' oeil d' Antonello," Etudes de lettres, vol. 2, April-June, 1983, pp. 55-72.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, 1968), p. 134. 43 S. Freud, "Instincts and their Vicissitudes (1915)," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-73), vol. 14, pp.111-140. 44 On Bartoli's prints of the Sala dei Giganti, see Giulio Romano pinxit et delineavit, ed. S. Massari, ex. Cat. (Rome, 1993), pp. 271-277. For an opposing view of their chronology, see E. Verheyen, "Marginalia to Vasari," Racar, vol. 5, no. 1, 1978, pp. 38-39. 45 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), SE, vol. 17, pp. 219-256. 46 Ibid., p. 245. 47 Ibid., p. 236 and p. 244. 48 On the reassertion of the ego, see S. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), SE, vol. 18, pp. 3-64. 49 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York, 1956), pp. 347-350. 50 J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977), p. 95. 51 Lacan's views on the reflexive nature of vision find equivalent expression in M. MerleauPonty's posthumous work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964). Lacan makes clear this relationship in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, pp. 74-75. 52 Ibid., p. 106. 42

JOAN FIORI BLANCHFIELD

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LANDSCAPE AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPACE: TRAUMATIC LOSS OR TRACE OF MEMORY? Robert Smithson and the Entropic Metaphor

Since the nineteenth century, the "denaturing" of land has alienated numerous artists and writers, depriving them of many positive and viable sources of inspiration. Most writers about landscape painting of the nineteenth century assume it is a rationale for settlement and development, conveying nationalist feeling. However, it is less well understood how landscape has served as an idea, and as a metaphor, for both the desecration and the preservation of land, even while it may be taken for granted by the environmentally aware. The sublime landscape in nineteenth-century painting is "denatured" in the abstract art of the first half of the twentieth century. But it reasserts itself as a subject in the "surrealist" uncanny of the literal landscape by environmental earthworks artists like Robert Smithson, and other environmental artists in the second half of the century. This paper will show, through the work of Smithson, with its roots in the work of nineteenth-century artists such as Thomas Cole, and landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmstead, as well as through twentieth-century abstractionists like De Kooning and Pollock, that the subjective position of the viewer in relation to the pictorial space of the object and its environment is as crucial to this "denaturing" of landscape as it is to the possibility of its redemption. This can be shown by utilizing both spatial and psychoanalytical analysis. In the early years of the nineteenth century, American writers and artists were already keenly aware of changes in the American landscape, and of the destructive forces of civilization. Forging a new Euro-American identity on the North American continent, Washington Irving in 1809 lamented "the melancholy progress of improvement" and the "savage hand of cultivation." (Thoughts of a Hermit ... Port Folio 6 (July 1815): 85 in Nygren 58.) Yet an anonymous American writer (echoing William Birch's nationalist feelings), reflecting an American sensibility for nature, says, It may, however be remarked that this beauty of natural scenery can be fully relished only in a populous and long settled country whose face is marked with accumulated operations of art; but in embellishing on country seats in the United States, where the features of nature have as yet

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undergone but little change, an appearance of human labor and skills, and even of formality, produces the agreeable effect of variety, and awakens the pleasing ideas of progressive civilization and improvement." (Thoughts of a Hermit ... Port Folio 6 (July 1815): 85 in Nygren 58.)

This quotation suggests an acute perception of two different readings of subjectivity and landscape. The first reading ascribes to the European view the difference between enjoyment of nature, and a subject's view from within an urbanized culture. The second reading implies a subjectivity as yet unjaded by a despoiled landscape, which is assumed to be the American view. Implied in the former is the mediation of art in the production of subjectivity, and in the latter a nationalist sentiment that assumes a "naif standing before nature," aspiring to a just civilization. These two points of view characterize nineteenth-century populist and theoretical conceits about landscape from the American vantage point at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus the idea of landscape as a spiritual and cultural art form in the United States (and in Europe) would unfold disparate (and sometimes contradictory) ideological and cultural identities (Eisenman 137-139). The elevation of landscape painting as a spiritual and cultural art form became an integral part of the development of nineteenth-century painting in Europe, and in the Americas even as the eighteenth century came to a close (Eisenman 137-139). The conjunction of Romantic nationalism and landscape art was first explored by German artists like Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) and Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) who intended to revitalize national unity and promote a consciousness of a German national destiny. Friedrich, like Runge, was despondent after the Napoleonic invasions. Runge's paintings represented nationalist sentiment with a "pantheistic optimism," and were influenced by mystical ideas of the "semiotics of natural elements" of seventeenth-century theosophist Jakob Boheme, then current in Naturphilosophie among artists in Dresden. Friedrich, however, treated landscape in a more transcendent and immanent manner, attempting to go beyond the materiality of nature. Friedrich's Abbey in the Oak Forest - a funeral procession of monastics, in the snow near stone tracery remains of a Gothic church - joins ideas of religious building and heroic gravesite with the interment of religious faith and the German nation. These organic and mimetic theories of the Gothic propounded by Goethe and Hegel were imminent in this despairing view of a redeemed Germany (Eisenman 141). "Art stands as a mediator between nature and humanity. The original is too great, too sublime, for the multitude to grasp," said Friedrich. (This observation suggests a nascent version of the Lacanian "screen," which veils and protects the subject from reality.) As Friedrich's paintings did not reveal a

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visible metaphysics of nature, this "mediation" in its depiction, by means of the philosophy of esthetics of the Jena Romantics, led to the "recognition of the impasse between nature and art, mind and spirit, and subject and object" (Eisenman 141). Likewise, patriotism promoting national unity against possible French invasion accounts, in part, for British gardening and landscape painting's popularity early in the nineteenth century. Peaceful farming scenes were a temporary reversal of the trend towards wild scenes of romantic nature. These shifts in contemporary political realities explain instances of change in the idea of landscape that might otherwise seem regressive (Cosgrove 66). However, early in the 1820's, J. M. Turner's work began to exhibit extreme exaggerations of space and form. A sense of the overwhelming splendour of the world emerged, especially in his watercolours. This was a central period in Turner's career (Wilton 79). An increased exaggeration of geographical features in order to present heroic perspectives was used in a dramatic pictorial way. Such distortions were devised to increase the dynamic of landscape. While they reconstructed, in two dimensions, the spatial complexities of the actual scene, they were invented primarily to impose a dramatic mode of vision upon the viewer, who is "compelled to enact with the eye leaps and plunges, ascents, penetrations, and progressions that plot for him the threedimensional presence of the perceived landscape." The "unnaturalness" of these devices is evident, and suggests a theatrical, not a naturalistic approach. Employed primarily to convey certain fundamental truths about the physical world, they are Turner's literal equivalents to what he experienced (Wilton 79). Over time, Turner's landscapes would change from representing the detailed geographical sublime to the more immaterial unrepresentable. Artists like Thomas Cole (1801-48) shared the nationalist concerns of Freidrich and Runge. But his concerns were not only for ideas about cultural myths of the nation's future, but also about the "primal vastness" of the continental wilderness. His earliest landscapes of the 1820's in the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley explore ideas of national symbolism in "unspoiled nature," and paradoxically, the notion of "unchecked cultivation." Cole was to write a series of essays that, in spite of their early criticism of the "industrialization" of the landscape, valorized nature as the "national past" and the "basis of national identity, moral regeneration and guarantor of the democratic constitution." These "redemptory nationalist" sentiments were an adopted discourse already extant in England in the eighteenth century, but lacking at that time in the United States (Gidley and Lawson-Peebles 86). By the 1830's however, Cole, disillusioned with populist Jacksonian rhetoric of

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unlimited expansion, began to paint what he termed "a higher style of landscape," allegorical and historical painting informed by Turner and Martin. In 1836, Cole painted The Course of Empire, a series of five works depicting a cycle of civilization from birth to destruction, encompassed human history from its hunting and gathering stage, pastoral stage, to its "apogee as Greco-Roman empire." All were painted against the background of landscape. The last painting, Desolation, is a final reclaiming by nature of the "ruin of the landscape" (Eisenman 141). However, between Native Americans and Europeans there were no ideas more different than those about land. European American settlers and colonizers appear to have had little guilt about appropriating land from "savages" who, they claimed, never worked it. 1 Yet the indigenes believed that the land was to be utilized by everyone, and was to be owned by no one (Momaday 18). Among the Iroquois league2 of the northeast United States for example, "women owned the houses, belongings, and fields to the extent, at least, that anyone could be considered as owning land." In fact, Indians throughout the continent "generally held that tribal terrain was a trust to be used, and no more saleable than air" (Sturtevant in Momaday 124). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, as a direct result of the Indian Removal Act (1830) and unrelenting coercion by the military, Native Americans were "constricted in their lands," and largely restricted to reservations. By 1871 the right ofIndians to make treaties was abolished by the United States Congress (McNickle 347). Alienated from hunting and ancestral lands, Indians were living under inhuman and intolerable conditions (McNickle 348). They began to tum, as did many other Americans, to new spiritual movements and new religions like the Native American Church. In the Northwest, Smohalla preached a return to "Indian ways" and against "the white man's exploitation of the earth." The despoliation of the ancient American landscape, as mediated through a female metaphor of torture and commercial exploitation by a member of a tribe whose language is related to the Nez Perce, goes thus: You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? ... You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her bones? You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it. ... But how dare I cut off my mother's hair? (McNickle 347)

This is essentially a prescient surrealist perception as mediated through nineteenth-century tribes, who were among the last holdouts against the United States military before an epic flight to Canada, and the surrender of

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Geronimo and his band of Apaches. 3 This view was to be of profound importance as developments in the twentieth century were to unfold. An argument articulated by Cosgrove carries with it the importance of the social mediation of the idea of landscape within this new context of alienation, a dimension that would shift again dramatically in the twentieth century in the work of Robert Smithson. Cosgrove says: The struggle to redefine in terms of capitalist relations is the key to the modern landscape idea and its development. ... In a natural economy the relationship between human beings and land is that of the insider, an unalienated relationship based on use values and interpreted analogically. In a capitalist economy it is a relationship wherein man stands as outsider and interprets nature causally. Culturally, a degree of alienation is achieved by compositional techniques - particularly linear perspective, the formal structure of the pastoral in poetry and drama, and the conventional language of landscape appreciation. The idea of landscape holds these relationships in an unstable unity, which can tilt either toward the unreflexive subjectivism of the insider where the feeling for the land is incommunicable through the artificial languages of art; or the objectification of land as simply property - the outsider's view, where alienation is complete and a statistical weighting can be placed upon the "landscape value" of a piece of land .... This is purely a costlbenefit analysis against the value that the land might have as an industrial site. (Cosgrove 64)

He goes on further to say: [T]he Western origin of the landscape idea and its artistic expressions [have ideologically promoted,] an acceptance of the property relationship while sustaining the image of the unalienated use of land. The history the landscape idea explores the tensions encompassed in it. [W]ith the hegemonic establishment of urban industrial capitalism and the bourgeois culture of property, landscape lost its artistic and moral force and became a residual in cultural production regarded either as an element of purely individual subjectivity or the scientifically-defined object of academic study, particularly geography. The ambiguity in landscape between individual and social meaning may be understood as an alternative way of articulating the same tensions, but at the level of human relationships, of self and community, rather than human life and land. (Cosgrove 64)

Hence, after the tum of the century and the destruction wrought by World War I, profound changes occurred in society, leaving the canon of formally and/or technically advanced modern art alienated from the prevailing ideology in a way that challenged the existing social orders. With this alienation came formal and substantive changes in the depiction of landscape and in representation in general. In fact, both were formally advanced and politically alienated (Eisenman 13). If anything, it was, as Worringer said. "a drive for abstraction, a process of self-alienation. the jettisoning of any remaining naturalism and vitalism '" and reinvesting them with a severe and disturbing appearance, transforming them into images that held the

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secrets of sleep and death." (This was only a part of the anti-humanism formulated by De Chirico after World War I.) (Pemiola 130) After World War II, the Korean War, the holocausts of Germany and Cambodia, and the tragedy of Vietnam, there were further upheavals in society. Industrial despoliation of the landscape stretched and sprawled across the United States. Works such as Willem de Kooning's Woman as Landscape (1954-55) in its abstract conflation of person and thing, woman and object, and of their mutually violent deformations, appears emblematic of the process of destruction of land (Vogel in The New York Times 23). By the 1960s, Smithson says in relation to these deconstructive tendencies in art: A lack of consciousness of mass seems to have caused the demise of "action painting," and that might explain also the dissolution of "assemblage," and the "happening ...." If action, energy, motion and other kinetics are the main motives of an artist, his art is quick to atrophy. (Smithson 22)

The idea of the frame that contained and limited had also begun to deconstruct. Insubstantiality that was simultaneously physical characterized the new work. Smithson says further: In the work of Frank Stella and Barnett Newman the "framing support" is both hinted at and parodied. Clement Greenberg recognized an element of "parody," perhaps unconscious, in Barnett Newman's "field" paintings, which called attention to the "frame." This element becomes less of a parody, and more of a conscious fact, in Frank Stella's "shaped canvases." Judd's symmetric, free standing structure eliminated all doubts about the importance of the framework by asserting its formal presence beyond any reference to "flat" painting .... Ups are downs and downs are ups .... An uncanny materiality inherent in the surface engulfs the basic structure. Both surface and structure exist simultaneously in a suspended condition. What is outside vanishes to meet the inside, while what is inside vanishes to meet the outside. The concept of "anti-matter" overruns and fills everything, making these very definite works verge on the notion of disappearance. The important phenomenon is always the basic lack of substance, that core of the "facts." The more one tries to grasp the surface structure, the more baffling it becomes. The work seems to have no natural equivalent to anything physical, yet all it brings to mind is physicality. (Smithson 23)

The difficulty of finding language to describe landscape within this more abstract context is suggested, even later, in an elliptical description of the work of Terry Shave, by Hooker: [Allow horizon, perhaps the ocean, and an emblematic "V" shaped "bird" in the top centre, which is almost solid black ... might read as sky. (Hooker 50)

In addition, developments among certain woman artists eager to establish artistic identities separate from the "excesses of Expressionism" of the 1950's

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and from the Pop, Color Field, Minimal and Conceptual schools also suggest these changes: In a very real sense, landscape provided an escape from style .... The movement away from [it] is perhaps the most telling hallmark of women's painting .... [Wlomen of the sixties and seventies sought ways to maintain some vestige of contact with their feelings, frequently in association with fairly conservative subject matter. ... Inevitably, any mention of the conservative carries with it the implication of regression, a turning away from the Modernist definition of art. But the idea that art must always seek new and increasingly reductive languages based upon those of the recent past has been challenged by Postmodernism in general, and by women specifically. The very notion of a succession of styles exerted a pressure that many feminist artists regarded as anathema to their own creativity. (Field and Fine 17)

The author goes on to say in describing the work of Susan Shatter, Steep perspectives may not be a specifically feminine characteristic of recent art, but they do carry an emotional charge not frequently encountered in landscape images by male artists ... . Her art sets up a dialogue between the character of a place ... and the character of materials ... . [H]er commitment to a painterly reality parallels the reality of the land. (Field and Fine 17)

This reciprocity of perspective, site, materials, and subjectivity echoes Smithson's, over ten years earlier. However, Smithson's commitment to a dialectic of nature and work, artist and audience, carried with it implications of a social contract, reiterating his self-conscious grounding in the nineteenthcentury landscape tradition of Frederick Law Olmstead. My own experience is that the best sites for "earth art" are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization or nature's own devastation. For instance the Spiral Jetty is built in a dead sea, and The Broken Circle and Spiral Hill in a working sand quarry. Such land is cultivated or recycled as art. On the other hand, when Olmstead visited Yosemite it existed as a "wilderness." There's no point in recycling wilderness the way Central Park was recycled. One need not improve Yosemite, all one needs is to provide access routes and accomodations. But this decreases the original definition of wilderness as a place that exists without human involvement. Today Yosemite is more like an urbanized wilderness with its electrical outlets for campers, and its clotheslines hung between pines. There is not much room for contemplation in solitude. The new national parks like the Everglades and the Dinosaur National Monument are more "abstract" and lack the "picturesqueness" of Yosemite and Yellowstone. In many ways the more humble or even degraded sites left in the wake of mining operations offer more of a challenge to art, and a greater possibility for being in solitude. Imposing cliffs and unimproved mesas could just as well be left alone. (Smithson 124-125)

Smithson also was keenly aware of the mound structures of Native Americans. The Serpent Mound in Ohio which combines the spiral and the meander was one of a number of prehistoric monuments which he had an interest in. Spiral Jetty (1970), like a number of his earthworks, is a successor to it, but it is at once contradictory, ironic, and parodic (a "spiral jetty").

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Made with large earth-moving equipment and not out of the natural formation of the terrain (Janson 834), it conflates the past and future of time (Hobbs 140) and was intended to be reclaimed by nature (Janson 834). Thus the allegory of ruin and despoliation in Cole's Desolation is for Smithson not a biological devolution, but a literal and material entropy consciously aware of its roots in both Marxian ideas, and the ritual and aesthetic of the Native American. His ideas include redemptive notions about landscape, but they tend toward the ironic and surreal, rejecting the attitude of a "naIf before nature." Smithson's work, so self-consciously conceived in the nineteenth-century tradition of Olmstead and the Native American, recalls Freud's thoughts on memory: [Blecoming conscious and leaving behind a memory-trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same system .... In fact, memory traces are most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind ... never enters consciousness .... All systems have permanent memory traces which form the foundation of memory except consciousness. In fact, [clonsciousness rises instead of a memory trace. (Freud 27-28)

Entropy was the great metaphor dominating most of Robert Smithson's work. He used the idea repeatedly in connection with landscape in the surrealist form of the "veiled erotic." Entropy, as a measure of change in unavailable energy in a system, shares in the concept of the last great mechanical idea of energy, and the principle of its conservation. 4 In scientific jargon entropy is waste heat divided by temperature. Hence entropy commonly has been construed to mean that systems decreasing in energy are the equivalent of death for individuals, and in a figurative sense it implies an inactive or static state or condition. Since Newton's creation of the classical theory of the universe - a formulation that had set boundaries and processes in equilibrium - more recent speculations have emerged about whether the universe expands or contracts, that is to say, whether the universe is an open or closed system - infinite, or finite. These recent theories are connected with ideas about the conservation of the universe. (Stephen Hawkins, for example, has speculated about the existence of the black hole.) These concepts have been borrowed by economists and other social scientists. Artists too have theorized about whether and/or how the world ends. And while the larger scientific question has been whether the energy balance in the universe is sufficient to keep the universe in its present form, artists like Robert Smithson have created monuments that recall these theories of the conservation of energy. Freeman Dyson in Infinite in All Directions recounts the two most important alternatives related to the laws of the conservation of energy. The

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first is a universe which begins as a "Big Bang" ends with a big "crunch," or a universal collapse into fiery death, as the sky gets so hot that it collapses inward carrying everything into a "space-time singularity at infinite temperature." This cataclysmic theory is a melancholy and depressing vision of a universe in its last days of dying energy, passion spent, marking time until the hour of its final end (Wheeler in Dyson 109). A second theory, however, suggests an open universe that is infinite in both time and space, expanding toward an endless future. In this universe life passes through a "slow freezing" rather than a "fast frying" process. As it expands, the universe grows colder as the energy supply dwindles. Laws of cosmic ecology suggest two very different views about these differing futures of the universe. If the adaptability hypothesis holds sway, life will prefer ice to fire. As eons pass, life in an expanding universe would adapt its metabolic energy to its environment, and life of a given complexity would survive as the temperature falls, its pulse growing slower but never shutting down (Dyson 111). However, theoretical models suggest that there is good reason to think that all matter may be unstable. Atoms may have a finite duration and could ultimately decay into radiation. The universal decay of matter is now being experimentally tested. At some point there may be some certainty about whether matter is permanent or transient. A reality in which the transience of matter is posited - an open universe - would pose major difficulties for the survival of human life, because in a history that is eternal the disappearance of matter threatens all forms of life at their nascent stage (Dyson 111). This is the concept of "frozen" death in the mechanical cosmos that Smithson tropes. For Robert Smithson the idea of landscape resurfaces as "site" in his work after 1968 in the monumental earthworks, non-sites, mirror displacements, and a few other proposals that went unrealized. They differed from the landscapes of his earlier work, because they had no pictorial formats. It has been assumed by writers such as Shapiro, Hobbs and Reynolds that Smithson's environmental earthwork is about the mechanical metaphor of entropy, and the extinction of the universe through the trope of the natural history museum. For these writers, and others, including Smithson himself, it is paradigmatic that his work is based on these scientific theories. Yet, I think it is possible to find a way into Smithson's later work that we sense is "human" even as he declares his metaphor to be the crystalline mineral structures of the inanimate world, and the didactic method of museums of natural history. Smithson, as is well known, valorized both of these in contrast to the world of the art museum. 5 Psychoanalytical theory in Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and expanded in Lacan, Barthes and Foster, gives another reading of Smithson's

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work through human subjectivity beyond the simple reading of the apocalyptic end of the universe. This subjectivity's position in space vis-a-vis the object is crucial to the idea of "denaturing" of landscape where this essay began. In Smithson's work one is struck by the repetition of certain symbols that recall us to the same place. Smithson's works were often fragmented. In both the symbolic and pragmatic register they suggest a trauma: something a person cannot remember everything about, but that has happened. Due to resistance, it is possible only to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of ... remembering it as something belonging to the past (Freud 18-19). For example, dreams occurring in traumatic neurosis repeatedly bring the person back to the situation of an accident (Freud 11).

The surrealist concern with ... the uncanny, is exactly this return of a familiar image made strange by repression. It is related to Marx's idea of the outmoded and the nonsynchronous - a persistence of old cultural forms in the uneven development of productive modes and social formation. In The Unknown Smithson by Eugenie Tsai, five works from the early nineteen-sixties are reproduced, which when taken as a group point the way into the artist's work (Tsai 33). Tsai refers to Smithson's concerns throughout his career. She suggests, as the most obvious, his interest in landscape, which emerged at that time. In these mixed-media works, landscapes combining images and words coexisted with diagrams of dinosaur skulls, reptiles, space imagery, various demons and monsters, as well as geologic history. Some had layered chart-like diagrams representing a cross-section of the earth's strata. One had a space landscape-[Untitled (Spaceman Shooting)]. King Kong, in another, was surrounded by cut-out photographs of New York City. Among these paintings with differing "landscapes," recalling the prehistoric and the future simultaneously, is evidence of overt erotic imagery. It is later embedded in the symbolic register of the entropic landscape - the object of the sex drive, parodied as a voluptuous woman in an Untitled (Venus with Reptiles) (Tsai 33-34). Imagery of impregnation and fertilization is everywhere present in Smithson's work, even as the entropic landscape metaphor dominates our primary perception and our conscious response. The surrealist idea of male and female as the difference between the human and the mechanical, and the sexual as a mechanical act (Foster 163) are veiled in the trope, or "screened" as Lacan would say, by the entropic landscape metaphor. Hence the trauma (fear of castration) of the impregnation [of the earth] as a human act is sublimated by the subject. Its repetition in Smithson's work as a whole

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serves, as Foster following Lacan would say, to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need points to the Real, and it is at this point that the Real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture not in the world but in the subject; or rather, it is a rupture between perception and consciousness of a subject touched by an image - an image that recalls death. Lucy Lippard, in her essay "Breaking Circles: The Politics of PreHistory," discusses Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: Given ancient mythologies, for instance, the boulder [in Spiral HilllBroken Circle1can be seen as a seed or an egg (Smithson's notion of burying it has a ritual flavor). It gives a bone, or hard core, to the soft flesh of the earth, and it will be there long after the piece has disappeared perhaps another reason for the artist's ambivalence (unfair competition from nature). (Lippard in Hobbs 35)

Smithson created maps and films, and wrote about his work - as artist, critic, chronicler, and participant-viewer. Nevertheless, it is with its value as symbol that Smithson, turned his work toward process and entered the flow of geological time ... Spiral Jetty is the serpent's tale of language that tempted Eve, and the endless spiral leading to redemption. It is a coiled phallus forming watery wombs between its circle. Smithson did not hide sexuality behind a veil of steel because he understood that intellect too has a role in the entropic forces of time. Myth moves as the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake, to clarify in the mind as the form itself is obscured (Jones 59).

In speaking of the filming of his work Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, Smithson's language conflates the sexual and the historical, because by reclaiming the site he meant to integrate his work into the surrounding landscape. This was to be a public art, worked out in the imagery of a "prehistoric future." Laconically and in an ironic tone, this is what Smithson says about Broken Circle/Spiral Hill If you are immersed in a flood you can drown, so it is wiser to perceive it from a distance. Yet, on the other hand, it's worth something to be swept away from time to time.

Recalling both creation mythology and Holland's history (a deluge that occurred in 1951), the center of the work's round dike was to be flooded (Hobbs 33) like an insemination. There are additional symbols pointing to other repressed material, which is not only symbolic, but epical, in the circular and spiral earthworks. Smithson used the form of the broken circle and the spiral in many plans and projects: The "uroboric broken circle" and the "dynamic spiral" were simply more intense forms of the "wandering," "labyrinthine," "forking," "branching"

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serpentine form which can be seen everywhere in Smithson's work, says Lippard (35). The spiral also is a concept that carries with it the destructive and overpowering forces of nature like the whirlpool or the tornado, unlike the circle which implies motion even as it goes nowhere (David Leveson in Lippard 35). Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (Emmen, Holland), Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake, Utah), Amarillo Ramp (Texas), Bingham Cooper Mining Pit (Utah Reclamation Project), Sunken Island; and Mangrove Ring (Summerland Key, Florida), etc. were a few of these works. "Sunken Island was made," says Smithson, "by consolidating rocks from the bottom of the lagoon. The rocks were encrusted with small slimy things, and sponges called 'dead man's fingers. '" The Mangrove Ring was created by planting seedlings in the sediment in fissures in the rock on the bottom of a lagoon. (The seedlings were to take root immediately.) "Mangroves," says Smithson, "are called 'island makers' because they catch sediment in their spidery roots." A play on the words "island makers" may refer to a thinly veiled slang word "making" - meaning "having sex with." On the other hand, Smithson's use of the snake, a matriarchal symbol in numerous societies, can be associated with breasts, eyes, mounds, and water. Also a symbol of pagan worship, it was relegated to caves and associated with evil. Its motion mimics that of water6 (Lippard 35). Both individually and collectively, Smithson's works recall the Lacanian reading of Barthes' Camera Lucida by Margaret Iverson in "What is a Photograph?" - a play on Lacan's "What is a Picture?" The ostensible theme of Barthes' book is the son's melancholy search for his mother in a photograph described in the book, but never revealed in its pages. The narrator, assuming a connection to Barthes, appears nevertheless to be a fictive one. While looking at the photograph, he experiences a "collapsing of time" as "he sees his own fate in a painful recognition that he is going to die." Barthe's account of his dead mother's photograph is, as Iverson suggests, an encounter with the persistently denied fact of his own mortality. His central concern, she says, is at the level of the unconscious - a "missed encounter with the Real" that is the cause of repetition as the Real comes back in the "chance" encounters of the automaton - "a disruption that conceals what cannot be named or located"7 (Iverson 452). Smithson's collapsing of time in the entropic metaphor of landscape recalls the Barthian experience. "To ignore the death instinct is to misunderstand Freud," says Lacan. Likewise, to ignore the death instinct in Robert Smithson's work is to misunderstand Smithson.

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In 1972 Smithson cites an article from The New York Times by Grace Glueck with the headline "Artist in Residence for Mother Earth," with Alan Gussow in a photograph as "A sort of spiritual caretaker." The article, he says, reveals an "Ecological Oedipus Complex," a "penetration of the incest taboo into nature." He further quotes from Theodore Thass-Thienemann's book, The Subconscious Language, the words of a catatonic schizophrenic: They should stop digging (now shouting petulantly in a rage) down inside the earth to draw metals out of it. That's digging down into Mother Earth and taking things that shouldn't be taken.

"This is the Oedipal complex projected onto earthworks artists," says Smithson of Alan Gussow who in a Sense of Place: Artists and the American Land says, What these artists do is make these places visible, communicate their spirit - not like the earth works artists who cut and gouge the land like Army engineers. What's needed are the lyric poets to celebrate it. (Smithson 122)

Smithson says further, [Gussow] fails to recognize the possibility of an organic manipulation of the land devoid of violence and "macho" aggression .... After all sex isn't all just a series ofrapes .... The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions in the landscape. [Gussow's] [s]piritualism [just] widens the split between man and nature .... Artists like Gussow are the type who would rather retreat to a scenic beauty spot than to try to make a concrete dialectic between nature and people. (Smithson 123)

Instead, Smithson suggests by analogy from a photograph (a tunnel through Vista Rock from 1862), that nature is dialectical, not metaphysical. The photograph has the rawness of an instant out of the continuous growth and construction of the park, and indicates a break in continuity that serves to reinforce a sense of transformation, rather than any isolated formation .... Modern day ecologists with a metaphysical turn of mind still see the operations of industry as Satan's work. The image of the lost paradise garden leaves one without a solid dialectic, and causes one to suffer an ecological despair.

He goes on to note that the bridge by Olmstead, located in Central Park, is in the real world. Yet twentieth-century earthworks continue to challenge and inform the two views of nature stated in the introduction. Paul Shepherd in his Man in the Landscape, in defense of his view says, Those [army] engineers seem to be at the opposite extreme from the esthetes who attempt to etherialize their sexuality. Yet, the engineers' authority and dominance over land carries the force of sexual aggression - and perhaps the guilt as well.

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However, such an artist, says Smithson, "surrounds himself with selfrighteousness and pretends to be saving the landscape. This is not being an ecologist of the real, but rather, a spiritual snob" (Smithson 123). In his essay Domain of the Great Bear, Smithson records an image, a "World Serpent Twined about [an] Earth Egg" in "secrets of the ambulatories," that is later recalled in the Spiral Jetty. In the ambulatories there no longer are any realities. Just vague disorders, and contingencies .... The planetarium becomes the same size as the universe. Perplexed, dizzied, one encounters there a cosmic nostalgia. Vertigo at contemplating man's most futile gesture - patrimony of the infinite. (Smithson 25)

Smithson, who chose the Great Salt Lake for the Spiral Jetty because of its red colour, speaks in tonalities and words of estatic sex and organism, as he recalls from a helicopter how the lake appears from above as it takes on for him the characteristics of woman, and blood On the slope of Rozel Point I closed my eyes and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color red ... pumping into ruby currents .... My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun .... Once when I was flying over the lake, its surface seemed to hold all the properties of raw meat. .. .

Then in a litany - "North-Mud, salt crystals, rock, water, North by east-Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water" like the pulsing of the male sex drive, there follows each point of the compass from the center of the Jetty. And finally the losing of the self and the collapsing of time as the penetration and release occur: The helicopter manoeuvred the sun's reflection through the Spiral Jetty until it reached the center .... The water functioned as a vast thermal mirror. From that position the flaming reflection suggested the ion source of a cyclotron that extended into a spiral of collapsed matter. ... The sound of the helicopter motor became a primal groan echoing .... Et in Utah ego. I was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into a unicellular beginning, trying to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral.. .. All that blood stirring ....

Speaking of "The Fifth Mirror Displacement" in Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan, Smithson tropes a slightly more revealing, and "traumatic" unveiling of mother and the earth as the penetrated female body: Out of green reflections came the networks of Coatlicue, known to the Mayans as the Serpent Lady: Mother Earth. Twistings and windings were frozen in mirrors. On the outskirts of Coatlicue, rocks were overturned; first the rock was photographed, then the pit that remained. "Under each rock is an orgy of scale," and CoatIicue, while flashing a green snake from a nearby

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"killer tree" (parasite vines that smother a tree, till they become the tree). Each pit contained miniature earthworks - tracks and traces of insects and other sundry small creatures. In some beetle dung, cobwebs, and nameless slime. In others cocoons, tiny ants' nests and raw roots .... Each of these secret dens was also the entrance to the abyss ... a damp cosmos ... an exhibition of fungus and mold - an exhibition of clammy solitude. (Smithson 98)

The preceding images recounted from Smithson's writings and art are a "general revelation" of which they are only "fragments." They are the "residues of a dream world," as Benjamin would say. In the surrealist outmoded the present is recalled to the past, and in its "auratic register" it appears to evoke a "maternal memory" (or fantasy) of psychic intimacy and bodily unity. (Foster 163)

Art can disrupt a sense of spatial or even temporal continuity, denying us a way of orienting ourselves in space as Lyotard's aesthetics of the sublime would have it. This negative stage of the sublime experience elicits emotions of displeasure. But, positive stages of sublime experience may be argued by Kant perhaps better than by Lyotard. A brief Kantian formulation is more to the point. When a work disrupts our feeling of spatial or temporal coherence, it proposes varying forms of continuity, different logics of orientation. As a painting stages different forms of imaginative synthesis, it can invite us to identify imaginatively with a certain position in its virtual space, requiring us to see in a corresponding way (Van de Vall 72). Abstract Expressionism, which inspired Smithson, took exception to the continuity and unity of prior spatial experience - the controlling view of mathematical perspective which characterized most two-dimensional works of the nineteenth century before Cezanne. It challenged this spatial experience in a variety of ways, and in its reconstitution any "objectifying organisation" was contravened (Van de Vall 72). The surface of the painting was unable to be encompassed by an observer in its totality in a single overview (Van de Vall 72). Like the Abstract Expressionists, Smithson chose to emphasize a "dispersed image with no internal focus." Any limits initially were related to the framing edges of abstraction, and were inspired by the "overall" compositions of artists like Jackson Pollock. Later, like Donald Judd and others, he was to compose serially - a variation on the former way of composing - but his "framing," like theirs, was informed by this initial impulse. Movement in this kind of painting is "a slice" of infinite activity devouring everything that would limit it (Schamlack in Kepes 174). Smithson's non-site works, like Abstract Expressionists' paintings, have no accents, no dominants, no centers of gravity. The center of gravity is outside the work and within the artist.

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Indeed, "[w]henever Smithson invokes the notion of the center, it is to describe its loss," says Craig Owens. Smithson's non-sites are only a "vacant reflection" of the site (Owens 122). Thus any restrictions on randomness in Smithson's work, such as walls (Hobbs 118-119), containers, and the earth in space became the vertical or horizontal "limits" of composition. Smithson was later to use the idea of "vacant" reflection in Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan as a way of "re-framing" the subject in the rectangle, and, hence, recreating both his own subjectivity and the intersubjectivity of the relational dialectic of work, site, and viewer, just as he was to use photographs to document the dialectic between the work and the site. The enantiomorphic mirrors which crystallize and fragment suggest to some critics another realm, perhaps a fourth dimension. Smithson confirmed this idea when he said that the vantage point for certain works was the void on the horizon found in one point perspective where all transversals meet (Hobbs 79, 100, etc.). In Smithson's work there is not merely a dislocation, but a relocation, and a viewer/subject reorientation,8 which places one in the sky (heavens), or looking down from an aerial position suggesting a new spatial mythos of subjectivity. In Smithson's writings and films, one frequently finds oneself in an airplane, boat, or car, travelling through the sky, or down a road as part of a "narrative" or a series of "incidents" - chronologically connected with little complication of plot. These episodes recall the wanderings of the picaresque hero. That these "incidents" or "episodes" recall a parody of epical travel from Greek myths, both literally and figuratively, is suggested by Ron Horning: How, after all does one forget a jetty 1,500 feet long that spirals out into the pink water of the northern Salt Lake from the shore at one end, steadily losing any illusion of practical value, and out of the water at the other end, a mocking parody of the sacred bellybutton on Delos?" ... Photodocuments of [it] are more closely related to postcards from Karnak than to reproductions of Guernica. (Homing 75)

Indeed, it was Apollo (the only Greek god who bears a matronymic epithet) born to Leto on Delos, who made his birthplace a place of prophecy. An averter of evil, a serpent slayer, Apollo avenged the attempted murder of Oedipus by sending sickness to Thebes because it harboured Laius. He purified murderers who were morally guiltless, or who had made restitution. He came from the sky in a chariot surrounded by the sun. As he was essentially remote, ordinary mortals rarely approached him (Hamilton passim). He was later transformed mythically into a Christ figure in late Roman art with identical characteristics. However, it was Oedipus who

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correctly answered the Sphinx's riddle with a thematic, recalling Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life series with which Smithson was familiar: "What creature goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noonday, on three in the evening?" Oedipus answers, "In childhood he creeps on hands and feet; in manhood he walks erect; in old age he helps himself with a staff."

This suggests a conflation of epic heroes of destruction and redemption. This reading can be underscored by Sonfist, also an artist of the entropic, who like Smithson realized the efficacy of applying illustrative metaphors to ecological issues: ... all great art has derived its meaning not only from artistic quality but from the social needs of the time. Our overriding social need is to develop a sensitivity to nature so that we can preserve our planet. My art has always dealt with this. ("Situation Esthetics ... " 29)

Thus the dislocation of Smithson's works to locations and sites that could be reached and/or negotiated only with difficulty suggests a missed encounter with the real for the "viewer/subject" who sees the "documentation" of the work in the non-site setting of the museum. Photographs, diagrams and maps, while clearly helpful in negotiating the "site" work, in reality exist on the "inside" of the inside/outside dialectic that Smithson thought was so crucial to the experience of the work. "What is repeated is always something that occurs ... as if by chance," says Lacan (Lacan 54). Of great importance then is the appearance of the "accidental boulder" at the center of the Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, which was too expensive to move (Hobbs 33). It became "a dark spot of exasperation," and" ... a geological gangrene on the sandy expanse.

Apprehensions of the shadowy point spread through my memory of the work." But finally it was left as a "glacial heart of darkness - a warning from the Ice Age" ..... - a cyclopian dilemma" impossible to escape "just as the earth cannot escape the sun," said Smithson. (Hobbs 33)

In The Uncanny, Freud depicts the Unheimliche as a walk in the woods: ... [Wlhen one has lost one's way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot. (Ballamy 216)

Elizabeth Bellamy's theoretical exploration of the epic narrative is instructive. An epic narrative, she says, "frequently retraces a labyrinthine path through a wandering wood" - and not surprisingly, then, it is in the uncanny and literally "familiar" that one may encounter the epic paradigmatic return of the repressed, "a return so self-conscious of its literariness that it becomes a virtual theoretical exploration of what constitutes the uncanniness of the epic topos." Rephrasing Bellamy in art-historical terms,

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"We do not realize the ongoing persistence of [art] history itself as the unconscious (the unthought) of interpretation - and as the uncanniest of hiding places for the Unheimliche - or the name of everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden" (Bellamy 224). Hence, Smithson's "dislocations" (literal re-Iocations) are both psychically and physically shocking, signaling a psychic crisis - an "entropic" dissolution of the subject. They suggest not the imminence of death, but an arrested process of dying. We are transported by photographs and text to a world with which we are unfamiliar, and we see it in the disjointed and fragmented way of the "framed" site photograph, the aerial map, the diagrammatic, and contained materials gathered from the site. Each non-site is a place with an absent location. In the text of Incidents of Mirror- Travel in the Yucatan, a disembodied voice speaks: In a suburb of Uxmal, which is to say nowhere, the second displacement was deployed. What appeared to be a shallow quarry was dug into the ground to a depth of about four to five feet, exposing a bright red clay mixed with white limestone fragments. Near a small cliff the twelve mirrors were stuck into the earth. It was photographed from the top of the cliff. Again Tezcatlipoca spoke, "That camera is a portable tomb, you must remember that." On this same site, the Great Ice Cap of Gondwanaland was constructed according to a map outline on page 459 of Marshall Kay's and Edwin H. Cobert's Stratigraphy and Life History.

These voices of descriptive clarity and prophetic truth, are despite their literalness, the voices of a disembodied mythic narrative. The mirrors are the "fragments" of both time and the psyche. Thus Smithson's "psycho-physiological redefinings" cannot be separated from sociological transformations, which in "surrealism are often expressed in terms of each other." "Sexuality is commodified"; the sexual becomes a mechanistic act; the "difference between male and female" becomes the "difference between the human, and the mechanical"; "ambivalence concerning woman becomes an ambivalence regarding the mechanicalcommodified," and the unconscious becomes an "autonomous machine" of repetition; Foster says "[T]hese grotesques bespeak a mechanizing and/or commodifying of body and psyche alike" (Foster 136). In Smithson, then, there are many of these same redefinings. His use of the mechanistic metaphor as the "veiled erotic," is thus dependent upon the shift in position of the viewer and object, and a change in perspective in relation to the object brought about by both dislocation and relocation. Thus a spatial and psychoanalytical interpretation yields a new understanding of subjectivity in Smithson's work. This understanding of subjectivity depends on the position of the viewer/subject and its relation to the space of the art work/object which

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are crucial to the symbolic "denaturing" of landscape, and finally to the possibility of its redemption. NOTES 1 Flanagan 591: "[TJhe agricultural argument [iJs exemplified in the writings of John Winthrop, John Locke and Emer de Vatte .... The European appropriation of Indian land in North America has often been justified through versions of the "agricultural argument" to the effect that the Indians did not need the land and did not really own it because they did not permanently enclose and farm it. Thus the European settlers could resort to original appropriation as described in Locke's Second Treatise. Analysis shows that the argument is formally consistent with the premises of natural rights philosophy because it assumes the equal right of both Indians and Europeans to engage in original appropriation. But the historical record shows that the argument actually applied to only a small portion of the land acquired by the Europeans. Sovereignty is the issue that should receive further inquiry." Flanagan's rhetorical question, "[DJoes any group have a right to expect that it can continue to live as it always has?" is answered by Nicolas Griffin: "This seems to be a question to be asked far more pointedly of the West than of any indigenous peoples. The factors Flanagan alludes to, such as climatic changes, are largely irrelevant for a consideration of European colonialism. (Such major environmental changes as we are now seeing result almost entirely from Western practices.) The appropriate question is: "Does any group A have the right to demand that another group B change the way it lives in order to solve A's perceived problems (in ways cogenial to A) or (more realistically) in order to satisfy A's greed, when B's way of life is not in any way harming A?" The answer to that question is, surely, "No." 2 See Momaday 388, 124, in The World of the American Indian. The Iroquois were a confederation of tribes with immense influence way beyond their population, which apparently never was more than twenty thousand. Tribes speaking Iroquois languages stretched from south to north: Cherokee in Erie, and Susquehanna in Ohio and Pennsylvania, to Huron in the area of Georgia Bay, among whom could be included the five tribal groups from central New York - the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca from the areas painted by the Hudson River painters. 3 Foster 210. The surrealists themselves saw many correspondences in things, but most often in tribal objects, especially Oceanic and Northwest Coast Indian, which they considered "auratic," or having a "reciprocal gaze." Foster quotes Levi-Strauss, "By way of another correspondence, the words of the poet translate exactly the native term designating the sculptured posts used to support house beams: posts that are not so much things as living beings with 'familiar glances', since in days of doubt and torment, they too let out a 'babel of words,' guide the dweller of the house, advise and comfort him, and show him a way out of his difficulties." 4 Webster's 855: "Absolute energy is referred to absolute-zero temperature as a starting point. However, any convenient temperature can be used as the starting point of the entropy scale in order for changes of entropy to be dealt with. For example at 32 degrees Fahrenheit the entropy of water is taken as O. Changes of entropy indicate changes of unavailable energy in a system, and in general they occur by (1) addition or subtraction of heat from the system, (2) frictional processes in the system, and (3) heat conduction from one part of the system to another." Holton 313: "The so-called fundamental quantities of mechanics are usually taken to be length, time, and mass. From these are derived concepts such as velocity, acceleration, force, momentum, and

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rotational inertia. Each plays a role in some fundamental law of nature .... The last of the great mechanical concepts is energy, together with the law over which it reigns, the great principle of the conservation of energy." 5 Brooks 67: The post-modem artist Damian Hirst whose works use such media as blood, wax, dead sheep, urine, metals, plastics, formaldehyde, and glass tanks, also deals with death, or entropy, and the anxiety frequently attached to these notions. Like Smithson's non-sites, Hirst's works appear intentionally alien to the art museum, as they frequently have the appearance of dead specimens preserved in a laboratory museum. Brooks 59: Because of its unknown and unknowable qualities, a confrontation with death in artistic form resonates with our deepest fears resulting in an existential sublime, as Burke outlines it. 6 In a longer essay this type of memesis might be explored further through Caillois, and others. 7 As Iverson suggests, Barthes essentially accepts Lacan's optical scheme of the unconscious as "between perception and the conscious." 8 See Capasso for an informative discussion of some strategies of reorientation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Richard Howard (trans.). New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bellamy, Elizabeth. "From Virgil to Tasso: The Epic Topos as an Uncanny Return," Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Caillois Roger. "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," October, Winter 1984. Capasso, Nicholas 1. Environmental Art: Strategies for Reorientation in Nature," Arts Magazine 59, Jan. 1985. Cosgrove, Denis and Stephen Daniels. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Dyson, Freeman. Infinite in All Directions. New York: Harper and Row. 1988. Eisenman, Stephen (ed.). Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical Theory. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1994. Field, Richard S. and Ruth E. Fine. A Graphic Muse: Prints by Contemporary American Women. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1987. Flanagan, Thomas. "The Agricultural Argument and Original Appropriation: Indian Land and Political Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Political Science 22, no. 3, Sept. 1989. Foote, Nancy. "Situation Esthetics, Impermanent Art and the Seventies Audience," Artforum 18, no.5,Jan.1980,20-29. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: M.LT. University Press, 1993. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1961. Gidley, Mick and Lawson-Peebles, Robert. "The Absent Landscape of Eighteenth Century America," Views of American Landscapes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Little Brown, 1942. Hobbs, Robert. Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Holton, Gerald. Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1952. Hooker, Richard. "Sublimity as Proven: Hegel. Newman and Shave," Art and Design 10, Jan.-Feb. 1995,42-53.

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Horning, Ron. "In Time: Earthworks, Photodocuments, and Robert Smithson's Buried Shed," Aperture 106, Spring 1987. Iverson, Margaret. "What Is a Photograph," Art History 17, no. 3, Sept. 1994. Janson, H. W. History of Art, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Jones, Bill. "Stunted Brides and Fascinating Hardware," Arts Magazine 64, Summer 1990. Kant, Emmanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason; The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Ethical Treatises; The Critique of Judgment. Mortimer J. Adler (ed.). Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Kepes, Gyorgy (ed.) Arts of the Environment, New York: G. Braziller, 1972. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. 1981. Alan Sheridan (trans.). First published as Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre X, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. Lippard, Lucy. "Breaking Circles: The Politics of Prehistory," in Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Lukacher, Brian. "Nature Historicized: Constable, Turner, and Romantic Landscape Painting," in Stephan F. Eisenman, et al. Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. McNickle, D' Arcy. "The Clash of Cultures," in Wallace L. Chafe et ai, The World of the American Indian. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1974. Momaday, N. Scott. "I AmAlive ... ," in The World of the American Indian. Nygren, Edward J. Views and Visions: American Landscapes before 1830. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986. Owens, Craig. "Earthwords," October, Fall 1979. Perniola, Mario. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art. Christopher Woodall (trans.). London: Verso, 1995. Smithson, Robert. The Writings of Robert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Sturtevant, William C. "Woodsmen and Villagers of the East," in The World of the American Indian, op. cit. Tsai, Eugenie. "The Unknown Smithson," Arts Magazine 60, Mar. 1986. Van de Vall, Renee. "Silent Visions: Lyotard on the Sublime," Art and Design 10, Jan.-Feb. 1995. Vogel, Carol. "Nothing from the White House but There's a Degas," The New York Times, April 26, 1996. Wilton, Andrew. Turner and the Sublime. London: British Museum Publications, 1980.

RENEE RIESE HUBERT

ALECHINSKY, COBRA AND THE BOOK

The 1992 Travaux d'Impression by Michel Butor and Michel Sicard lists close to 90 illustrated books, yet this aspect of Alechinsky's work is little known. l The authors mention a wide range of books, from ordinary volumes with reproduced vignettes to priceless "livres de peintre." The artist makes use of a variety of graphic techniques, quite often in combination: etching, assemblage, stencil, lithograph, woodcut, china ink drawing. Moreover, Alechinsky's inventive lettering, whether typographical, handwritten, handscribbled, calligraphed, or simply semic, flows into unusually shaped inscriptions which go beyond the bounds of recognizable illustration. The painter actually started out as a printer. "Je suis un peintre qui vient de l'imprimerie" [I'm a painter who started out as a printer].2 He never dreamed of disowning his earlier profession, for even his most painterly compositions reflect in one way or another the art of printing. He invented a great variety of devices so as to maintain throughout his production a close contact between the verbal and the visual. Nor did he cross the barrier between the two, for he never acknowledged their separation. Alechinsky's works, even those that have nothing to do with the art of the book, can fruitfully be treated in terms of illustration. The illustrative principle is not only part of Alechinsky's creation because he felt impelled to write texts as well as to draw pictures and because his lines can be seen as distortions of the alphabet, but also because so many works labelled as etchings or acrylic paintings include outer and inner frames, seemingly separating or associating two sets of images inevitably commenting on each other. "Dessiner: ecrire avant la lettre. Ecrire: tracer du meme pinceau que celui du peintre et sur la meme feuille de papier" [Drawing: Writing before the letter. Writing: Tracing with the same brush as the painter and on the same sheet of paper]. 3 Although Alechinsky considered himself primarily a painter, he wrote a great number of texts, some of them paralleling etchings or drawings, others providing significant slices of memory from his own life, reflections on the media used in his own art, and thoughts on the artists with whom he collaborated. None of these texts can be labelled as treatises or manifestos. Casual sayings, jokes, aphorisms, reflections, esthetic opinions follow one another without transition. Alechinsky, who insists on the activity of painting ("peindre") as opposed to the completed work of art, presents the 57

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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reader with texts that reveal a mind in motion and favor spontaneity rather than persuasiveness. The power of words, immanent in many graphic works, manifests itself above all in gnomic titles and only rarely in descriptions. His titles enhance the poetic and enigmatic productions of an artist who admittedly wished to rival metaphor in his graphic work. Roue Libre, 1971, is included in Les Sentiers de la Creation where creators can explore their artistic search.4 Although Roue Libre is written in the random style that generally characterizes Alechinsky's texts and that matches his preference for motivated chaos over accepted principles of order, for freedom over rules, for the activity of writing and painting over theorizing, a coherence or unity, already implied in the title, emerges in the book. We never completely loose sight of the image of the wheel that shows strong affinities with the serpent, another key image in Alechinsky's work. The artist anthologizes the wheel by a surprising array of photographs both historical and modern, borrowed from artworks as well as from daily life. La Roue d'Ecriture provides the most telling image. 5 This stencil etching, created in collaboration with Michel Butor, was originally designed as a 5FFR stamp. The painter etched the multilegged wheel - a fantastic creature - over the facsimile of a Butor manuscript. Sharing the same space, text and image maintain a reversible relationship with each other. The writing functions as the "agent provocateur" of the monster whose tongue is bound to articulate language and whose mobile legs erase and transform part of this overwritten text. Roue Libre introduces both centrifugal and centripetal strategies. First, Alechinsky establishes links to a number of artworks and texts from cultures and periods where, iconographically, the wheel played a conspicuous part, and displays radical transformations of an image together with his own borrowings from other artworks. Secondly, when he comes to the end of his peregrinations, he invites some of his painter friends to provide their version of the wheel. Having thus allotted each one her or his share in the problematics, he incites them to move on to a more active stage. On pink paper wheels emerge, some featuring writing, others displaying mythical figures showing affinities with Alechinsky's illustrations and texts. Joyce Mansour, the only participant who is primarily a writer, traces a wheel surrounded by a frame accompanied by the words "carrement la roue" [squarely the wheel], thus introducing a pun and a paradox typical of much of her work. It so happens that even Alechinsky's paintings and prints more often than not have much in common with book illustrations. A lithograph for a collective volume entitled Comme un Coursier indompte (1989) reminds us of

ALECHINSKY, COBRA AND THE BOOK

59

I~~IS

j l,AS T Ie SOJ\'t ))~. \' A"'I~ K~ ))f"

l)\ (/B f -,- ~

l"E

~__--'

Fig. I. Pierre Alechinsky, La Boucle de Justice. Lithograph from Un Coursier indompte, 1989. Credit: © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York!ADAGP.

a page6 (Fig. 1). The upper section provides the image, the lower, the text. A magnified or oversized vignette conveys the stylized image of a tree, an intrusion of nature for which the text, couched in a cursory script, provides a commentary. The model of the conventional page has been modified, if not distorted, the regular contours of the tree, particularly of its branches and its leaves, have been replaced by uninhibited lines and splashes equating the

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Fig. 2. Pierre Alechinsky [and Christian Dotremont], Abrupte Fable. Screen, 1976. Credit: © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York!ADAGP.

return to nature with a return to the fundamentals of drawing and writing, bringing image and text into closer contact, and suggesting that they are an ongoing process highlighted by the "dots" that drop from, or are suspended around, a tree. The artist seems to have avoided finality of representation and inscription in the plate. A screen entitled Abrupte Fable (1976), created in collaboration with Christian Dotremont, one of the central figures of the Cobra movement, shows great affinities with books (Fig. 2). While AIechinsky stated, "Je suis un peintre qui vient de l'imprimerie" [I am a painter who started out as a printer], Dotremont said, "des des sins de mots, des peintures de langage" [drawings of words, paintings of language]. The latter eventually created or invented his own genre called "logogram," which he defined as follows: "Les logogrammes, j'y insiste en particulier, sont des manuscrits originaux, aucun n'est une copie Ecrive, cest creer a la fois Ie texte et les formes. l' ecris donc je cree Ie texte et les formes" [I insist that logograms in particular are original manuscripts, none of them are copies. Writing involves the writing of both the texts and the forms.

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I write, thus I create the text and the forms.]? As both artists moved between word and image, commenting on each other's plans to free writing and drawing from their limitations, from any programmatic or preexisting model, collaboration reached its high point. Dotremont sought to create texts, the more illegible the better, perpetually on the move, ready to dissolve thought and eager to display themselves as a spectacle. The alphabet, tom into fragments, provided the basic (re)sources for the logograms. Abrupte Fable includes a logogram, with India ink and acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, displaying their shuttling between the verbal and the visual. The screen is composed of vertical panels which in tum are subdivided horizontally. Dotremont occupies at least one space on each panel. The logograms are integrated into the layers of Alechinsky's framed scenes: an accompanying text attached like an appendix, a commentary tangential to the frames. The poem attached to the side, printed in both English and French, refers to images traceable in the screen, including those created by Alechinsky. The short lined text in which every autonomous word is equivalent to rhythmic movement on the level of both sound and vision bypasses content and even the semblance of ideas while avoiding arresting syntactical structures or cohesive metaphors. A vibrant trace of verbal fragments which progresses yet erases itself, the poem functions in the same manner as Alechinsky's deliberately jerry-built constructs. Although it is not impossible to read these words as a text, as fulfilling Cobra ambitions of liberation, it was meant as an accompaniment to the logogram proper, which had already dismantled the alphabet by means of scriptory deviations. The printed poem is not so much a concession to the reader as a stage bypassed by the logogram. In a way, the conventional text is seen as a vanishing supplement. The screen with its horizontal and vertical divisions can be viewed as an open book while the rectangular sections act as pages as well as diminutive canvases. Black and white sections come close to writing, those in brown and yellow, traced with a pencil, approximate drawing, and those in red and black, applied with a brush, emulate painting. By pointing to the interactions of verbal and visual forms, the screen wilfully remains untranslatable, thus bringing up once again the problematics of collaboration in Alechinsky's numerous illustrated books. ABC de Correspondance (1986) goes far in transgressing the conventions of the book. 8 It consists of "factures," receipted bills, which Alechinsky has covered with drawings, responding to combined texts by Michel Butor and Michel Sicard. The term "facture" has an additional painterly meaning indicating the workmanship involved in producing an artifact, a meaning all the more ironical insofar as Alechinsky rarely if ever assumes the role of per-

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fectionist. And old bills could hardly be further removed from "grands papiers," indispensable in his numerous "livres de peintre." A receipt listing sold and paid for items is a functional and ephemeral document that loses its value upon completion of the deal. By the inclusion of these "factures," Alechinsky introduces the materialistic world of commerce, but as a quaint and posthumous operation (Figs. 3 and 4). The various bills, replacing as best they can blank canvases, provide a complex drawing board. Under the company's elegantly printed title and, more often than not, a vignette displaying a prestigious building or enticing products, they list in elaborate handwriting the essential modalities of the transaction. Strokes in India ink add a figure, for instance a painter or an actress. On one of the antiquarian bills he has added what may very well be a self-portrait in which the head holds a printed typewriter and the hand clutches a stylized and loosely drawn copy of the emblematic machine. He sometimes converts the commercial to the artistic world by adding spontaneous lines to the impeccable calligraphy and printing of the bills. Referring both to the first and to the second of the

tll/,r." DAcrrLE PARIS "

Paris, Ie 7 Kar. 1902

TldJottO,.;t; )):11-1 1

DOlT Konsleur L. de 1a BASrfOE 10, Plaoe Saint Jean Chartres .

..... ..•. .••....•. • 11' t •. .. • •....••••...•• 11'60 2f60

Fig. 3. Figs. 3 and 4. Pierre Alechinsky, from ABC de Correspondance (Lelong). Drawings on bill, 1986. Credit: © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New YorklADAGP

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Fig. 4.

book, where letters replace bills, the title also suggests that ABC de Correspondance is a primer. More perhaps than in other "illustrated volumes" by Alechinsky, this book thrives on discrepancies between texts and images competing, as it were, for the same space. Already divested of their financial power, these "factures" must also disclaim verbal potency and effectiveness. By eliminating part of the writing and printing, Alechinsky's pen strokes often produce new fragmentary texts. ABC de Correspondance belongs to the series of altered books, of which the best known is undoubtedly Tom Phillips'

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Humument. 9 No less important than the mutilation of the perfectly aligned printing and calligraphy by winding circular lines and inked surfaces is the displacement of part of the text into a new and disturbing context, a displacement similar in effect to adorning a canvas with graffiti, one of Alechinsky's favorite procedures. Entrapped in a network of lines, the building or typewriter so proudly displayed in the bill is unexpectedly transformed into an enigma with an undefinable function. Advertising is thus transformed into art. By moving from text to image, Alechinsky, even from a conventional point of view, remains an illustrator although every aspect of illustration has been displaced. The drawing obviously enters a world completely alien to it, but only to prey on it and assimilate it into its own substance. By means of his signature and his encroaching brush strokes, Alechinsky proclaims that his graphic additions are indeed art works even if they remind us of the damage a naughty child might have done to his father's business files. Not only does Alechinsky sign, but he dates the drawings, further stressing the discrepancy between his graphics and the bill, invariably bearing a date preceding his birth by at least a generation. I have already mentioned one of the most suggestive pages in the book, the one involving a typewriter company named "Dactyle." The typewriter is displayed at different levels as object, writing, and artwork. It appears on the letterhead as a handsome model and proves its superiority by means of the immaculate lines of text it has presumably typed. And it must henceforth function as the upper part of the forehead of the figure that may well be Alechinsky's self-portrait. Did the artist really need the banal representation of a typewriter to generate his freehand drawing? The humor of the situation is carried even further because the drawn lines become the endless prolongations of a typewriter ribbon as though to suggest a most unexpected connection between the textual and the drawn. The title of the book would lead us to believe that there is a correspondence between the alphabetically arranged paragraphs by Sicard and Butor, and Alechinsky's receipted images. Since the amalgamated responses of the two writers, carefully arranged in alphabetical order, are confronted with the receipted drawings, the reader is faced with a redoubled "tour de force." Apart from their ordering, these paragraphs dealing with a vast array of subjects have nothing in common with dictionary topics or definitions. Far from providing a positive commentary, they alphabetize a series of denials. The texts no less than the drawings overdetermines objects pointing to commercialization or, more precisely, setting it up for a downfall. The brief "Reparation" includes the words "livres" [books], "phrases" [sentences],

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"comptes" [accounts], "toiles" [canvases], "dossier" [file], "roue" [wheel], "affiche" [poster], "lettres" [letters], clearly suggesting that the text, however unsystematic it might appear, favors spontaneity over the mechanical, art over script, and receipted bill over an immaculate canvas. "Huile" [oil] is particularly representative of such favoritism. By featuring a list, it follows the same pattern as a bill and by ascending from the unit to higher numbers, it has much in common with addition, indispensable to billing. Written as an order to a grocer, the text will necessarily generate another bill. Though rich in cliches and religious allusions, this aggressively textual bill also functions as a sort of biography. Digressions and misdirections increase in number while details involving culinary and other domestic aspects of daily life diminish. The bill, always already archival, must willy-nilly exchange its lost functions for the newborn postmodernity bestowed by the artist. By evoking future biographies, the letter to the grocer leads to regeneration in an exemplary manner. Published by Maeght in 1981, Le Grand Jamais is a rather late example of a Surrealist "livre de peintre."l0 It combines tradition with experimentation in a striking way as two painters with different, but hardly antagonistic, esthetic allegiances collaborate in illustrating a poetic text by Mansour. Matta and Alechinsky jointly undermined certain conventions of book illustration, and all three collaborators indulged in Surrealistic subversion according to the formulas of Breton, whom they admired and respected. Le Grand Jamais reveals by its very title the paradoxical nature of the enterprise. "lamais" is an adverbial absolute which no adjective should modify; coupled with "grand," it becomes a noun. By suggesting chronological nothingness, the term "jamais" also introduces the poetic principle of negation. The chief characteristic of Mansour's poem is its metaphoric density, charged with the explosive quality that characterizes Breton's prose poetry. Sudden reversals from day to night, from love to hatred, from death to life, from creation to destruction intensify the dynamism of the poem and suggest affinities with Alechinsky's canvases. These metaphors are not subject to a progressive development since they reveal the unknown and imaginary by means of discontinuous spectacles. Thanks to their rhythm and their breathless tone, various passages deploy lyrical echoes reinforced by incipits, invocations, repeated questions. Lyricism alternates with an irony sustained by manipulated proverbs, truncated expressions, juxtaposed and almost contradictory fragments. The text begins by a question that the poet addresses to the reader, her inseparable alter ego. Reading and writing coalesce into a single identity as

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far removed as possible from romantic metaphysics. Without ever approaching an ideal, the poem reduces man to the level of rodents, the final world of a poem in which terms designating bestiality and savagery recur. Eating becomes gluttony, if not cannibalism and vampirism. These aggressive characteristics highlight the poet's preoccupation with language, with the production of the text, with silences, forgetfulness, and erasures, marking a return to negation as a poetic principle. According to ancient and modem poetic laws, a text winds and unwinds itself. Mansour situates herself at the antipodes of poetical idealism, romantic and even to a certain extent Surrealist, not only because of her aggressive gestures, such as devouring, which manifest themselves in the metaphoric system, but by the presence of disgust with its constant repercussions. The poet is no longer attracted to the poetic domain by a thrust or a wish, but by the impelling desire to validate the life of the body (another parallel with Alechinsky), the simultaneous presence of life and death, constantly reverberated through verbal shifting. A great variety of terms referring to sexuality, often in oblique and distorted contexts, serve mainly to designate substances that the body eliminates: sweat, sperm, urine, menstrual blood. But these substances that the body has secreted, far from being satisfied with a unilateral overflow to the exterior, simultaneously unleash a penetrating motion, a labyrinthean push toward the intestines and the anus. Love and other human manifestations do not have to be replaced by other violent actions, for, thanks to reversals, they can assume new masks and disguises. Although Le Grand Jamais, consisting of loose leaves folded in a box, respects the conventions of the "livre de peintre," the nature of the illustration itself is highly innovative. The mere combination of the talents of two artists on the same pages is quite unique. Cobra obviously advocates a more immediate, primitive, and impulsive kind of art than Surrealism, a movement to which Matta belonged. Nonetheless, Cobra does have affinities with the kind of abstract Surrealism that Matta along with Mir6 and Masson so often practiced. Collaboration in Le Grand Jamais relies on a clear-cut distribution of roles between the painters: one uses pencils, the other the brush. As each one has a set space on the page, they can share the same page without encroaching upon each other's territory (Figs. 5 and 6). The contributions of the two painters alternate between confrontations and dialogues. The lack of direct encounters on the page where the signs and legends of the two artists might overlap precludes any progression toward a growing affinity, let alone a fusion of identities. On two occasions, Matta's and Alechinsky's figures come close. In the first, a simple crayon figure by Matta animates a section of the text, as well as a spatial and colored expansion which comes from

ALECHINSKY, COBRA AND THE BOOK

Fig. 5.

Fig. 6. Figs. 5 and 6. Pierre Alechinsky [and Sebastian Matta], from Le Grand Jamais (Maeght). Lithograph, pencil and brush, 1981. Credit: © 1997 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New YorkJADAGP.

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Alechinsky's brush. The second brings about a true confrontation, a tete-atete of two figures, one by each painter. Nonetheless, this confrontation respects separation of style and space. The title page spells out the project: "duo lithographique pour pinceau (Alechinsky) et crayon (Matta) dont divers melanges obtenus par derivation de tel detail decalque par Matta (l'un) chez Alechinsky (l'autre) et par Ie traitement par l'autre d'une idee de l'un ['exterieur et /'interieur - parmi les poemes de Joyce Mansour." [A lithographic duet for brush (Alechinsky) and pencil (Matta) of which several mixtures resulting from the derivation of a detail traced by Matta (the one) from Alechinsky (the other) and by the other's treatment of the former's idea - the exterior and the interior - within Joyce Mansour's poetry.] Thus, the publisher attempts, however clumsily, to define the relationships among the three collaborators. I shall first seek to evoke the different relations between the images traced in pencil and those applied with the brush and establish afterwards how they function in relation to the poems. By practicing metaphoric expansion while doing its best to situate itself, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes diagonally on the page, the text establishes both a visual and a verbal rapport with the illustrations. From a thematic point of view, we discover fantastic creatures in Matta's as well as Alechinsky's contributions. Both include barely recognizable serpents - a COBRA trademark frequent in all of Alechinsky's work - and mammals practically reduced to their sexual organs. They undergo variations from one plate to another, or with the same multi-imaged page. When one painter derives his inspiration from another, he uses a detail that he amplifies or transforms. In Le Grand Jamais, contours evoking an active male organ as well as a pencil or a painter's brush move without difficulties from the iconography of one painter to that of the other. By introducing the fantastic in more than one way, Matta in several instances has recourse to narrative. In situating itself halfway between vision and writing, Alechinsky's graphisms drive toward a dynamic search for the sign. The serpent, for example, glides along a labyrinthean way, then reduces itself to a spiral. Each artist has in his own way integrated the snake, also eminently present in Mansour's text. Two round colored contours, two circles close to one another provide a frame for a spectacular scene. They unleash quasi musical variations on a simulacrum of organic fertilization that the two painters exchange and radically transform. Without ever losing sight of the poetic text, we have to scrutinize alternatively the vignettes and the full-sized lithographs where the margins, as they extend, continue to interact with the center. Many pages problematize this shuttling between the frame and a center in the process of transgression. This multi-

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plication of visual and verbal elements establishes several levels of reading that lead to complex networks devoid of clearly traced paths and without closure. The book includes two sets where the image extends over a double surface. As the two painters occupy alternatively the outside and inside pages, as well as the center and circumference, the principle of exchange appears quite distinctly. By their alternation in fabricating the center and tracing the frame, the artists deliberately tamper with the conventions of the illustrated book. In daring to relegate momentarily the text to marginal zones while indefinitely amplifying the frame in relation to the enclosed image and while eliminating the very possibility of stability, the artists enliven all sections of the page and even the order in which they take each other's place. And as it happens on two occasions that two pages of one artist cover, include, and frame two pages of another, the principle of interiority and exteriority announced on the title page manifests itself in the very structure of the book. Thus the loose-leaf volume proclaims that it functions simultaneously like a container and a flat surface. By its presentation, it responds, in the Baudelairean sense of the word, to the metaphors of Mansour, thanks to which the effort of the surface reverses itself into penetration. In the end, all aspects of the book interpenetrate each other. Mansour, Alechinsky and Matta form a trio in the musical sense of the term; their composition, encompassing texts and figures, shies away from mimesis. The complex reading that I have outlined functions like a shifting between order and chaos, terms that are present in the poem. There are poles which attract and repulse, and which by their displacements counteract any regularity. As Mansour intensifies the presence of death and decomposition, she generates disfigurations and transgressions which "are in tune" with the entanglements and outbursts of Alechinsky's often violent graphics. By multiplying grotesque and fantastic figures, Matta touches upon the narrative. His vignettes, simple anthropomorphic accompaniments, always present themselves in profile as if to suggest a question mark inscribed throughout the poem. As we tum the pages, we see contours prone to transformation, limbs strangely placed or displaced. Everything relates to erotic manifestations in the text, to its insistence on sexual organs. By representing disfigurations and growths, Matta participates in the game of exteriorization and interiorization which characterizes the text. And these reversals, as a last resort, render the surface and the depth equivalent. With vigorous brush strokes where lines overlap or strangle each other, Alechinsky develops a similar strategy.

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In addition, the inner images of the pages presenting color designs detach themselves, creating windows which facilitate still another dialogue between the flat surface of the page and the three dimensions characteristic of the "livre de peintre." The analogy between the artists intensifies when we take into account the metacritical aspects of the book, whether in script, language or lines, which surface and disappear alternatively. Writing, where the lines sometimes designate themselves, denies closure and turns movement into spectacle. Alechinsky's linear projections, Matta's aimless caravans, Mansour's voyeuristic invocations inscribe arrows pointing to a subversive elsewhere. It would appear that Alechinsky throughout his career has sought collaboration as a means to expand his creativity, though never at the expense of other members of his team. In Alechinsky's oeuvre, not only does expansion stand for unrestricted liberation, but it levels all barriers separating the interior from the exterior. Thanks to his wilful subversion of mimesis, appearances in his art assert their self-sufficiency.

University of California, Irvine NOTES Michel Butor and Michel Sicard, AZechinsky. Travaux d'lmpression, Paris: Galilee, 1992. Ibid., p. 9. Translations are by J. D. Hubert. 3 PierreAlechinsky, L'Autre Main, Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1988, p. 92. 4 Pierre Alechinsky, Roue Libre, Geneve: Skira, 1971. 5 Roue d' Ecriture is reproduced in Travaux d'lmpression, p. 102. 6 Comme un coursier indompte. Textes de la Revolution: Dominique Bozo, Jean-Michel Frony et Jean de Bengy; lithographies: Alberola, Alechinsky, Aillaud, Blais, Buraglio etAvidor Arikha, Paris: n. p., 1989. 7 Max Loreau, Dotremont, Logogrammes, Paris: Fall, 1975. 8 Pierre Aiechinsky, Michel Butor et Michel Sicard, ABC de Correspondance, Paris: Maeght, 1986. 9 Tom Phillips, A Humument, A Treated Victorian Novel, London: Thames & Hudson, 1980. 10 Joyce Mansour, Pierre Alechinsky and Sebastian Matta, Le Grand Jamais, Paris: Maeght, 1981. 1

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ASPIRING TO THE CONDITION OF MUSIC: HARDY AND HIS ART FROM THE 1840s TO THE 1890s

Thomas Hardy gave up on his chosen field of architecture, was only an occasional patron of art museums,l told friends that he preferred concerts to plays,2 and even stopped writing fiction. Yet, as he told a friend in 1909, "to be honest, I am never tired of music."3 He did not wax passionate about all types of music, however. True to his heritage, Hardy cherished the old folk songs and hymns of rural Dorset best; he mourned their demise, and never learned to like or even appreciate the new musical entertainments that replaced the old traditions in the public eye. Hardy's love and knowledge of folk music were so much a part of his life that they necessarily found a place in his art. His poetry has, for obvious reasons, been more the focus of musico-literary investigations than his prose writings. Yet the novels, not the poems, were written during a period of transition in the history of English popular music; and in these earlier works, Hardy subtly inscribed the decline of a beloved tradition, the rise of the mass entertainment of the twentieth century, and the effect the changes in music history had on generations - not only in his Wessex, but in the "real" world of nineteenthcentury England. Hardy clearly drew parallels between the history of music and the history of his own literary art, and gave his readers opportunities to recognize them as well. Not only was Thomas Hardy born into a family with a strong musical tradition, but he also insisted that his very existence was made possible by his parents' common love of melody. He described Jemima and Thomas Senior's courtship in his poem, "A Church Romance": She turned again; and in her pride's despite One strenuous viol's inspirer seemed to throw A message from his string to her below, Which said: "I claim thee as my own forthright!" Thus their hearts' bond began .... 4

Just as his father had been before him, Hardy's father was an enthusiastic member and conductor of the choir at Stinsford church, singing as well as playing several instruments. For generations, the Hardys were considered 71

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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amongst the best church musicians in the region, and the Stinsford church choir maintained "an easy superiority over the larger bodies in parishes near."5 In addition to practising two or three times a week and playing every Sunday for the church, the Hardys assisted other choirs "mostly to the high contentment of the congregations,"6 and organized and performed their wide-ranging Christmas carolling each year. And on an everyday basis, the Hardy household came alive with more secular musical entertainments, Thomas Senior wheedling folk songs out of his fiddle while his wife sang to her children. 7 It is not surprising, then, that Thomas Hardy's first memory was of receiving a concertina from his father at the age of four. 8 Like his father, he picked up the violin early, and with his parents' guidance was soon able to play "some hundreds of jigs and country-dances that he found in his father's and grandfather's old books."9 Hailed as a talented and enthusiastic performer at the local weddings and parties, Hardy was kissed by appreciative brides and even stopped in mid-song by a listener who feared that the little fiddler would "burst a blood vessel."iO From the beginning, then, the boy appeared willing and able to carry on his family's musical legacy: He was of ecstatic temperament, extraordinarily sensitive to music, and among the endless jigs, hornpipes, reels, waltzes, and country-dances that his father played of an evening in his early married years, and to which the boy danced a pas seul in the middle of the room, there were three or four that always moved the child to tears. 11

With his background, skill, dedication, and experience, why did not the young man set his sights on a professional musical career? Hardy's musically inclined parents never suggested this option to their son; in fact, his father "objected to [Hardy's musical performances] strongly"12 - and considering how ambitious they were on his account, it is not difficult to find out why. As Hardy's father well knew, there was very little money or opportunity for worldly advancement involved in the musical culture of Dorchester. Though the Stinsford choir was respected and admired, the members "usually received so little in payment for their performance that their efforts were really a labor of love," Hardy wrote in the "Preface" to Under the Greenwood Tree,l3 Additionally, Hardy noted that the time and energies consumed in practising and playing took so much away from the Hardy building business that his father spend 35 years making music "to no worldly profit - far the reverse, indeed."14 In the eyes of his parents, a career in music reserved for Hardy the fate, at best, of Eustacia's foreign bandmaster father, a "romantic" whose "pockets were as light as his reputation."15 Perhaps, too, Hardy's father had had a glimpse of the near future of British folk music - a future that did not include the musical traditions his son had

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embraced. Certainly during Hardy Senior's early years, folk musicians could find a "niche in the world that while not grandly remunerative offered satisfaction, respectability, and security," notes A. V. Beedell in The Decline of the English Musician, 1788-1888.1 6 But times were changing, even in villages like Stinsford. About 1841, the Reverend Edward Murray was replaced by a younger vicar; and while Murray had been an ardent supporter of the Stinsford choir and a violinist himself, the new vicar saw fit to replace the string quartet and choir with a secularly trained organist. I? No longer was there room for the amateur enthusiasms of a local choir; and just as quickly, the old favorite hymns were replaced by music that would better demonstrate the organ's - the organist's - capabilities. In 1896, Hardy expressed his regret at the replacement of the now-defunct orchestral choirs, attributing a major problem in the church to the musical changeover: The change has tended to stultify the professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of parishioners in church doings. Under the old plan, from half a dozen to ten full-grown players, in addition to the numerous more or less grown-up singers, were officially occupied with the Sunday routine .. , with a musical executive limited, as it mostly is limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and the schoolchildren, or to the schoolteacher and the children, an important union of interests had disappeared,I8

Dorset's old folk songs and ballads, transmitted orally for generations, would soon go the way of the favorite hymns inscribed in Hardy's grandfather'S music books. 19 "It is undeniable that the period after about 1840 . " saw an increasing unification of taste and repertoire encouraged above all by the railway, the music-hall industry, music publishers and, to a lesser extent, the expanding state education system," writes Dave Russell;2o indeed, Hardy himself remembered back to 1848, the year the railway was extended to Dorchester, and "the orally transmitted ditties of centuries (were) slain at a stroke by the London comic songs that were introduced,"21 Ballad sellers also brought current popular "hits" to rural areas, peddling the scores of musichall repertories,22 Additionally, Dorchester's proximity to two important commercial music centers aided the spread of modern popular music in the area. Weymouth (Hardy's "Budmouth," the station of Eustacia's "foreign bandmaster" father) and Bournemouth (Tess's "Sandbourne"), fashionable seaside resorts accessible by rail, drew talent from across the nation; Bournemouth was the site of the country's first permanent municipal orchestra,23 and was listed in the 1893 Dramatic and Musical Directory, which suggested four profitable itineraries for musical tours,24 What happened in Dorset was indicative of the trend in nineteenth-century British musical history away from orally based, amateur working-class enter-

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tainment: in short, it was "the virtual cessation of rural song creation from about 1850."25 Many studies confirm this phenomenon; for example, musicologist Cecil Sharp found that only those born before 1840 could sing old folk ballads, and Flora Thompson, in her writings about Oxfordshire life in the 1880s, noted that young men tolerated the singing of traditional ballads only on account of the singers' ages. 26 The major reasons for the decline of folk songs - the increased spending power, leisure time, and cosmopolitanism of the upper-middle, lower-middle, and working classes - were also the reasons why there was a huge expansion of popular music of almost all other types. 27 The surge in popularity is evident in the statistics. From 1856 to 1896, the number of brass band contests in England went from six to over 240;28 after the first custom-built music hall was erected in London in 1852, the response of the public led to the establishment of 250 more music halls in the city (and "at least 300" in the rest of the country) by 1860, and the development of "chains" of halls by the 1890s. 29 As the demand and resources for English popular music increased, so of course did the number of musicians and teachers; Ehrlich records the astonishing jump from 6600 music professionals working in England and Wales for 1841, to 38,600 in 1891. 30 Yet these increases must have meant very little to Thomas Hardy Senior and Junior. Not only were greater and greater percentages of musicians schooled in ways beyond the Hardys' financial means, but the new music these performers played represented an undesirable "modernity" and the demise of cherished traditions. Hardy may have never become a professional musician, but his "sensitivity to melody ... remained with him through life,"3l and his passion for playing music was never diminished. One of his first investments upon his arrival in London was a second-hand fiddle,32 an instrument he still "made speak" when he was 79, demonstrating the rhythm of an old country dance to the Hardy Players. 33 A cello much like the one his grandfather played34 figures prominently in a 1900 picture of his study35 and in a sketch of his own childhood memories entitled "Silent Christmas Voices. The Study, Max Gate."36 And from his very first days37 to his last,38 Hardy loved playing old ballads and hymns on his piano. As for his musical tastes, Hardy discovered "art music" - traditionally associated with Britain's upper classes - in London in his twenties. He enjoyed the operas of Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, and others currently in vogue, and "patriotically supported" the English Opera Company's inferior productions. 39 Throughout his life, Hardy associated his interest in classical

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music with his youth; a year before his death, Hardy admitted that "whenever [I] heard any music from '11 Trovatore,' it carried [me] back to the first year when [I] was in London and when [I] was strong and vigorous and enjoyed [my] life immensely."4o Though he continued to go to concerts even after he no longer called London home, his attendance was merely "socially de rigeur, whether accompanied by personal enjoyment or not."41 Clearly, Hardy was not particularly curious about or inspired by art music. He was uncomfortable talking with Edvard Grieg in 1906, though he "[did] his best to talk about music,"42 and in 1924 admitted that "he had heard no modern compositions, not even (Rutland Boughton's) immensely popular "Faerie Song" from The Immortal Hour."43 Hardy was more familiar with Richard Wagner's compositions, but felt that even the composer's most moving works could never express the full force and motivations of emotions. 44 Modern popular music fared even worse in Hardy's opinion. In 1890, for example, though Hardy "seems to have had a humour for going the round of the music-halls,"45 he only had negative things to say about the audiences and performances. "Am getting tired of investigating life at music-halls and police-courts," Hardy sighed in disgust at the end of his tour of London entertainments. 46 Hardy also found fault with the elitism of contemporary ecclesiastical musical tastes. Looking over his family's old homemade music scores and collections of ancient hymns, he noted, "Some of these compositions which now lie before me ... are good singing still, though they would hardly be admitted into such hymn books as are popular in the churches of fashionable society at the present time."47 Clearly, Hardy's musical passions always remained "old church and dance music," as he indicated in his entry in the 1916 edition of Who's Who. 48 The demise of the folk tradition in music weighed very heavily on the writer's mind - perhaps even more so than on his father's.49 Whereas Hardy Senior had happily participated in the playing, writing, and reinterpreting of ancient melodies for over 35 years, his son had never had the chance to hear the Stinsford choir at all. Raised to cherish sounds that were fast disappearing, Hardy worked all of his life to preserve those musical traditions. In later years, Hardy showed an interest in commemorating the musical past with a more serious kind of study than Under the Greenwood Tree,5o though this work was not to be written, Hardy memorialized the old hymns and folk songs in numerous songs and ballads of his own, and even planned to subtitle one of his poetic collections "Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music to have precedence."51 Hardy also treasured his father's violin and the timeworn family music books, adding songs, notes, and names of performers as he remembered

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them. 52 Indeed, when the Dorchester Dramatic Society presented "Under the Greenwood Tree" in 1909, Hardy was only too happy to supply the original music sung by the "Mellstock" choir. 53 The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy documents several of Hardy's attempts to rediscover or revive old, lost tunes. In one instance, Hardy chased down a bewildered, non-English speaking organ grinder, demanding "What's the name of that tune?";54 in another, Hardy searched throughout London for a score of the defunct song "How Oft, Louisa," only to be serenaded by a reminiscing, elderly music-seller. 55 Hardy's love of music and knowledge of musical history, so much a part of his life, were bound to become part of his art as well. Indeed, references to old folk songs and tunes abound in his writings, and critics such as F. B. Pinion and Elna Sherman have been exhaustive in their efforts to catalogue them.56 Both Pinion and Sherman give special attention to his poetry and his dramatic work, "The Dynasts," which most obviously exhibits Hardy's preoccupation with music. Joan Grundy's attempts to define the "musical qualities" of Hardy's poetry and prose are more ambitious but also more troublesome from a critical point of view, considering the ongoing debate concerning the compatibility of literature and music. What has not been noted concerning the musical references in the novels, however, is that Hardy inscribed the history of later nineteenth-century popular music as a subtext within them. His methods for doing so were more subtle than direct. Rather than listing facts outright, Hardy showed his characters responding to the old musical traditions or discussing the new styles; he sometimes provided musical "cues" in the background of a novel's crucial scenes, or traced the history of a musical instrument through the passage of years. No matter how he chose to inform his readers, Hardy accurately portrayed moments in musical history within each novel's time span, though he clearly emphasized the musical world's losses over its gains. For example, while describing the generation gap between characters, Hardy often revealed information concerning the changes in popular music. "Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folklore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings, and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood," the narrator relates of Joan and Tess Durbeyfield. 57 Tess' education had made it impossible for her to take spontaneous delight in the simple, rough songs her mother loved; unfortunately, her schooling had not provided her with an

alternative outlet for those powerful emotions her mother released while

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singing "The Spotted COW."58 Thus, while this child of rural Wessex had naturally inherited her mother's "innate love of melody,"59 she had excluded herself from her ancestors' musical tradition. Tess struggles throughout the novel to find her musical identity, but remains a woman without a song: she wishes she could remember the name of her favorite "old double chant" at church, thinking "how strange and godlike was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name."60 She wonders how she could have forgotten to whistle tunes, and "how she could have so grown out of the art which had come by nature."61 Angel, though not born into the tradition of rural folk song, comes to find beauty in it, as he finds it in Tess;62 but because the ballads were no longer an integral part of Wessex life, Angelleamed them from music scores ordered by mail. 63 Hardy made it apparent that, in addition to missing out on an important emotional outlet, Tess and her generation also lost the use of a practical and functional tool. Joan Durbeyfield and Dairyman Crick knew little about the teachings of the Industrial Revolution, but they did know the value of song in the workplace: Joan used the tunes to help her get into a rhythm with her chores, and to dispell the "unspeakable dreariness" of her surroundings;64 Crick "employed" old folk songs to keep his cows milking, and in all likelihood, to create a good-natured camaraderie at the dairy.65 Indeed, their generation had so understood the value of music that "some occupations required musical skills as an additional qualification"66 - as Mrs. d'Urberville's poultry workers were required to whistle. 67 Tess' young taskmaster at the Starve-acre farm, however, had only short-term profits on his mind; his workers suffered on in lonely silence. Tess eventually discovers the soothing dreamworld of song,68 but too late in her own history as well as in that of the ballads. Hardy's concern for historical accuracy is also seen in the novels that span greater periods of time. Within the forty years (1850-1890) that pass in The Well-Beloved, for example, the demise of the old folk-music tradition is clearly though succinctly related alongside other stories of loss and decline. At twenty years of age, Piers ton observes the attempts to make natural, vivacious Avice the First "an exact copy of tens of thousands of other people"; one of the ways in which this was to be done was "to drown the local ballads by songs purchased at the Budmouth fashionable musicsellers."69 Such activities were indeed underway in England in 1850, a year which marked the "speeding up" of the folk song's decline. 7o By 1890, there were no more local ballads to drown; most music was written and performed

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by professionals found in urban centers. Fittingly, Avice the Third "had the best (music) instruction that masters could give her. She was educated at Sandbourne."71 Music, once a wholesome, uncomplicated form of entertainment, is now a commodity - indeed, Avice's "modern piano," standing idly next to the "solid mahogany furniture" and "show bookcase,"72 is more a valuable showpiece than a priceless source of pleasure and fun. Hardy's accuracy for historical detail spanned not only Wessex generations and storylines, but novels. For example, Hardy's first novelistic success and last "failure" are connected in many ways, despite their obvious differences; as Simon Gatrell notes, "there is a temptation to see Under the Greenwood Tree by the light of its Preface as a thematic precursor of Jude the Obscure."73 Indeed, Jude the Obscure focuses on changes, declines, and losses that are in preliminary stages in Under the Greenwood Tree: Fancy Day's break from the traditional occupations of Mellstock women, and her spirited attempts to establish her own, new wedding traditions,74 foreshadows Sue Bridehead's total denial of a female legacy; the former Mellstock choir's new feelings of being "awkward, out of place, abashed, and inconvenienced by their hands"75 gives one a glimpse of the Christianity of Jude the Obscure - a religion which "for many had lost its rational justification."76 The history of nineteenth-century Britain's popular music scene is another carefully documented change running through the novels; reading the two novels in chronological order, one may absorb the history of the demise of the rural folk-song tradition. The stories of the two novels "frame" a crucial era in the history of English popular music. In his 1896 "Preface" to Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy claimed his book was a "fairly true picture" of the "orchestral bodies of fifty or sixty years ago";77 with Jude Fawley's death in the 1890s, the two novels enclosed the fifty years of perhaps the greatest changes in the English musical arts. Under the Greenwood Tree and Jude the Obscure also mark off important moments in the Hardy family music tradition. The breakup of the Stinsford choir around 1842 - the factual base for Hardy's tale of the Mellstock choir - marked the "beginning of the end" of a long-lived folk tradition, and the death of Hardy's father in 1892 represented the true demise of a musical legacy. Under the Greenwood Tree abounds with references to old ballads, though changes in the reception of traditional music are also apparent. Dick Dewey, the youngest member of the Mellstock choir, is less than concerned with the group's attempts to save itself, leaving the "ancient body of minstrels" anxiously awaiting the Vicar's decision;78 additionally, his respect and

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admiration for his wife's accomplishments probably prevented him from singing his beloved but rough rural cadences in her presence, though he had sung them to himself in the past. 79 By the time Jude and Sue are in their twenties, old folk songs have for all intents and purposes disappeared; indeed, not a single ballad is sung in the length of the book. The only major character who cares to make musical noise of any kind is Arabella - and even she must learn her songs from a book, rather than bursting out with an orally transmitted ditty. 80 A poignant symbol of the silencing of the ancient song tradition opens Jude the Obscure: Phillotson's old piano, left behind by the schoolteacher, does not find a place in a single home in Marygreen but is stored in a fuel-house instead. 81 To think that only fifty "fictional" years before, the wealthy vicar tempted Fancy into marrying him by promising, "You shall have whatever pianoforte you like!"82 Considering how Jemina Hardy had prized her piano and how Hardy gave his piano a special place at Max Gate, the image of the silent, dusty piano must have had special personal relevance for the author. Before the 1840s in Britain, traditional tunes were a significant part both of everyday goings-on and of important events, such as Fancy and Dick's wedding. As Britain's population grew increasingly urban, the crowded music halls, with their diverse and digestible music programs, became representative of the masses. 83 Indeed, after Jude wanders into one of these public halls, he finds "he had tapped into the real Christminster life. A band was playing, and the crowd walked about and jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon a platform and sang a comic song."84 Mellstock choir members had found the "new music" produced by brass bands moving and powerful;85 by the late nineteenth century, band performances like the one Jude heard were more pleasing background music than soul-stirring entertainment. As evidence of how out of touch such musicians were with the true feelings of their audiences, Hardy had the bands strike up at the most inappropriate times during Arabella's discovery of Jude's death, for example. 86 Church music, too, undergoes major changes from the times of William Dewy to those of the composer-tumed-wine-merchant in Jude the Obscure. "I don't know of a string choir left in existence," Hardy mourned at the turn of the century.87 Indeed, the successors of the organist introduced in Under the Greenwood Tree have all but taken over the jobs of old choirs by the time Jude marries. The retired Mellstock choir members who noted that "the simpler notes they had been wont to bring forth were more in keeping with the simplicity of their old church" probably never dreamed that churches would be built in which Fancy's "crowded chords and interludes" would

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sound more appropriate. 88 But just as their descendents would learn to take for granted the Gothic heights of late-nineteenth-century church architecture, Jude would become a weekly listener of "the great waves of pedal music [tumbling] round the choir."89 Unfortunately, the trend in both church music and architecture was away from the people, and church musicians would become as emotionally detached from their audiences as the brass band players. Thus, though organ music was "a subdued, large, low voice" in the room of the murder scene,90 and though "the powerful notes of that [church] concert ... reached so far as to the room in which Jude lay" on his deathbed,91 they never actually "spoke to" or "touched" him, as the Mellstock choir's more humble, simple chords had reached their listeners. Music may have changed with the times, but Hardy knew that the emotions evoked by the simple old songs were basic to human nature. Dewy Senior realizes that "nothing will spak to your heart wi' the sweetness 0' the man of strings,"92 and even the intellectuals Sue and Jude instinctively yearn for the emotional comfort and release of folk melodies. In a crucial scene, Sue and Jude finally "connect" both physically and spiritually "under the influence" of a hymn that has touched both of them. 93 The prototypical "new woman," Sue struggles to understand the primal but deep feelings the tune evokes: "It is odd ... that I should care about that air; because ... I am not that sort quite."94 Unfortunately, these hymns are not to be written anymore, as both Sue and Jude find out. "Music is a poor staff to lean on - I am giving it up entirely," the ex-composer tells a stunned and disappointed Jude. "You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays. The wine business is what I am thinking of."95 Hardy probably had many reasons for inscribing the sad fate of the British folk and church-music traditions into his novels. Most obviously, a character's place in musical history revealed something about his or her personality or about the conventional wisdom of a generation. After all, the decline of the folk song ran parallel to the demise of other traditions and established ways of life. As polished, mass entertainment replaced homely folk music, so did cosmopolitan city life put an end to a type of rural existence; so did a less personal and accessible Christianity replace a simple, homespun religiosity; so did industrialism and capitalism declare the end of a localized, "neighborly" economy. The masses may have "elevated" themselves through education, but they also lost touch with basic human instincts and feelings - those that had been stimulated and satisfied by the old ballads and hymns. Thus in Wessex, as in England, the silencing of folk music helped mark the end of a way of life;

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and indeed, when the composer-turned-wine-merchant announces the impossibility of the continuation of a tradition in Jude the Obscure, the ways of old Wessex must finally expire as well - as they do, when their last representatives die or enter into predictably childless marriages. Changes in music history did not only reflect what was happening in the world at large and or what would occur in the novels; they also affected Hardy as a novelist, and influenced the history of his prose art. Hardy did not hide the fact that he saw connections between his Wessex novels and the musical tradition in which he was raised. After all, for the folk of Dorset as well as the rest of rural England, "fiction" was a tale that was recited or sung; thus Hardy, who was always aware of his roots, "wrote as a ballad-maker would write if a ballad-maker would have to write novels."96 Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Native and most of the other novels were at least partially inspired by old ballads. 97 Additionally, many of his plots are reiterated or even elaborated upon in the songs and hymns quoted within them. Throughout Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for example, musical quotations inform the reader of subtleties concerning characters or events. 98 Hardy, like most nineteenth-century novelists, was susceptible to the same problems and pressures that musicians experienced at that time. The trend in music was away from amateurism or small-time professionalism and towards a "fully professional system" with "star singers" and the "industrial production of songs,"99 and larger, more diverse bodies of listeners required "collective" styles; literature, too, struggled against these forces of professionalism and commercialism. Hardy himself, instructed to give the public what it asked for, altered many of his original plans for the novels, induding the intended endings of The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders; he even maintained records of his experiences in upper social life - a "drudgery" to him - lest he was ever forced to write society novels. 100 In Hardy's last few years as a novelist, he became tired of sacrificing his artistic integrity to meet what he saw as questionable standards of public taste. The personal satisfaction he found in writing Tess of the d' Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure was not shared by his readership, however. If the masses no longer cared for the old folk songs, with their raw pictures of life, rough rhythms, and irregular, uneven melodies, they would certainly not appreciate the literary counterparts to these tunes - the only fiction Hardy truly cared to produce at this time. Just as the former composer in Jude the Obscure realizes that there is no room for his humble art in the world of crass commercialism, so Hardy knew that he would have to stop writing in order to preserve the integrity of his art. It is interesting to note that, at the very last,

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Hardy sang in the old style. Significantly, many of the insults hurled at Jude the Obscure - critics called the book "a grimy story," "all dirt, drivel, and damnation," and "Jude the Obscene" - used language that could easily describe Hardy's own favorite bawdy folk songs, "The Foggy Dew" and "The Spotted Cow." There is an enemy at the doors of folk music which is driving it out, namely, the common popular songs of the day; and this enemy is one of the most repulsive and most insidious. If one thinks of the outer circumference of our terribly overgrown towns, where the jerry-builder holds sway; where one sees all around the tawdriness of sham jewellery and shoddy clothes, pawn-shops and flaming gin-palaces ... it is for them that the modern popular music is made and it is made with a commercial intention out of snippets of musical slang. And this product it is which will drive out folk music if we do not save it. 101

It is one of "life's little ironies" that Hardy never became involved in London's Folk Song Society, whose inaugural address is partially quoted above. Founded by Sir Hubert Parry in 1898 - some months after Hardy had given up writing prose, and a few years after he had unofficially declared the demise of the English folk song tradition in Jude the Obscure - the group started with 110 members and expanded to include such important people in the musical arts as Ralph Vaughan Williams.102 Attempting to reawaken the public's interest in the old hymns and ballads, the Society actually succeeded in doing little more than producing "a brace of exhilarating orchestral works that have a unique Englishness."103 Hardy, who frequented London during the society's heyday, must have heard about the group and its activities from his cultured connections. What prevented him from becoming involved in a cause that had been so important to him? Perhaps Hardy knew too well the futility of the Society's goals; after all, he was well aware of folk music's ties with a way of life that was no longer possible in twentieth-century England. Ultimately, Hardy had more success keeping the old songs and ways alive in his memory, where he dwelled amongst them for much of the rest of his life. Columbia University NOTES Joan Grundy, Hardy and the Sister Arts (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979) 136. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982) 448. 3 Millgate 390. 4 Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: University of Georgia, 1985) 18. 1

2

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Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 14. Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 16. 7 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 18-19. 8 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 478-9. 9 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 26-7. 10 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 28. 11 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 15. 12 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 28. 13 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (London: Collins, 1958) 3. 14 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 17. 15 Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: The Modem Library, n.d.) 80. 16 A. V. Beedell, The Decline of the English Musician, 1788-1888 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 54. 17 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 17. Beedell notes that this was a common practice of the time (p. 54). 18 Hardy, "Preface," Under the Greenwood Tree 3. 19 For a reference to the music books, see p. 4 of Hardy's "Preface" to Under the Greenwood 5 6

Tree.

Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840-1914: A Social History (Montreal: McGillQueens University, 1987) 3. 21 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 25. 22 Richard Middleton, "Popular Music of the Lower Classes," Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (London: Athlone, 1981) 67. 23 Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 65. 24 Ehrlich 55. 25 Russell 10. 26 Middleton 66. 27 Nicholas Temperley, "Introduction," Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914 (London: Athlone, 1981) 3. 28 Russell 1. 29 Middleton 80-81. 30 Ehrlich 235. 31 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 21. 32 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 45. 33 Elna Sherman, "Thomas Hardy: Lyricist, Symphonist," Music and Letters XXI (1940): 147-148. 34 Millgate 415. 35 Millgate 546. 36 Millgate 443. 37 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 19. 38 Millgate 546. 39 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 45. 40 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 476. 41 Grundy 136. 42 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 188. 43 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 458. 44 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 181. 20.

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Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 237. Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 238. 47 Hardy, "Preface," Under the Greenwood Tree 5. 48 Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1962) 215. 49 See, for example, p. 336 of The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. 50 Hardy, "Preface," Under the Greenwood Tree 5. 51 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 255. 52 Millgate 37. 53 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 381. 54 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 126-127. 55 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 228-229. 56 F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (London: Macmillan, 1968); Elna Sherman, "Thomas Hardy: Lyricist, Symphonist," Music and Letters XXI (1940): 143-171. 57 Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1926) 25. 58 Hardy, Tess 20. 59 Hardy, Tess 108. 60 Hardy, Tess 109. 61 Hardy, Tess 73. 62 Hardy, Tess 442. 63 Hardy, Tess 155. 64 Hardy, Tess 20. 65 Hardy, Tess 143. 66 Ehrlich, The Musical Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century 52. 67 Hardy, Tess 71. 68 Hardy, Tess 443. 69 Hardy, The Well-Beloved (Oxford: Oxford, 1991) 19. 70 See Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin, 1907) 119; Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy (London: Harmondsworth, 1973) 69-75; and Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840-1914, 10. 71 Hardy, The Well-Beloved 149. 72 Hardy, The Well-Beloved 145. 73 Simon Gatrell, Introduction. Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree xiii. 74 See, for example, p. 243, 245, and 248 of Under the Greenwood Tree. 75 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 216. 76 Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford, 1985) xi. 77 Hardy, "Preface," Under the Greenwood Tree 3. 78 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 116. 79 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 21, 24. 80 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 331. 81 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 3. 82 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 223. 83 John Middleton, Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914, ed. Nicholas TemperJey 66. 84 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 121. 85 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 82. 86 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 428. 87 Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 337. 45 46

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Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 217. Hardy, Jude the Obscure 93. 90 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 356. 91 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 426. 92 Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree 46. 93 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 218. 94 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 212. 95 Hardy, Jude the Obscure 204. 96 Donald Davidson, "The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy's Fiction," Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Albert J. Guerard (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 12. 97 F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (London: Macmillan, 1968) 19,31. 98 Examples of music's relevance to the tone or plot of Tess can be found on pp. 20, 118, 266, 298,359, and 461. 99 Richard Middleton, "Popular Music of the Lower Classes," Music in Britain: The Romantic Age, 1800-1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley 65. loo Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 310. 101 Hubert H. Parry, "Inaugural Address to the Folk Song Society," Journal of the Folk Song Society 1 (1899): 2-3. 102 Ronald Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1975) 173. 103 Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music 177. 88 89

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COUNTERPOINT IN PRINT: OKOT P'BITEK'S SONG OF LA WINO AND SONG OF oeOL

Whether or not Okot p'Bitek's two long poems, Song of Lawino (1966) and Song of Ocol (1967), were influenced by his admiration for and early imitation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's better known narrative poem, Song of Hiawatha,l these poems are not modelled on any Western conception of a long poem. They cannot be described as epic; they are not ballads; nor are they private meditations of a poet. In conception and mode of composition, this East African poetry belongs to the oral tradition and so is closer to a musical score than to print on a page. This kind of poetry is written to be performed and, as such, it shares an affinity with the poetry of experience in the Nietzschean sense of "a poem which originates in song and passes temporarily through drama in order to articulate the song and refer us back to the song for meaning" (Robert Langbaum, 1974:228). Okot's poems can therefore better be described as "counterpoint in print", their counterpointing method embracing both form and expression. In this context, Song of Lawino is the simple Melody or, technically, the succession of single sounds to which its companion poem, Song of Ocol is added: the combination forming the Harmony. Song of Lawino echoes the acclaimed voice of Langston Hughes in his poem I, too. Hear the music of his sombre, yet provocative, words: I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes But I laugh And eat well And grow strong.

Compare the a cappella [unaccompanied voice music] opening stanzas of Song of Lawino in which, in a kind of "broken monody", the persona "sings" of a comparable, if more domestic, predicament: My clansmen, I cry Listen to my voice: The insults of my man Are painful beyond bearing.

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© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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My husband pours scorn On Black people, He behaves like a hen That eats its own eggs A hen that should be imprisoned under a basket (SoL:35)

For Lawino, her husband's vituperative language is both hurtful and incomprehensible: Ocol's tongue [she intones I is fierce like the arrow of a scorpion (SoL:35)

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Lawino's dirge-like plea for understanding takes its impetus from her bemused struggle to understand her cruel rejection by a husband who, in Song of Ocoi, counters, as if in an answering phrase, with the suggestion that hers are the ravings of a lunatic with a Serpent tongue Spitting poisons Lashing crocodile tail (SoO: 126)

The juxtaposition of powerful images such as these in the two poems is characteristic of Okot's counterpointing mode which, at once, emphasises and enlivens the contrasting, yet complementary, perceptions of husband and wife. As if providing the tonal modulation to a musical score, fellow East African, Frank Horley, has transposed these images into equally vivid pictorial representations, as can be seen. (See Figures 1 and 2.)

Fig. 2.

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Hughes's less graphic but more satirical poem is, of course, derived from the popular American chant, with its patriotic cantabile opening bars: My country, 'tis of thee Sweet land of liberty Of thee I sing.

With poignant irony, Hughes's American experience compels him to lament his plight and that of fellow Afro-Americans in a country which is supposedly the bastion of democracy and humanitarianism. Song of Lawino is also a lament, but a more complex one. This poem, with its snatches of authentic Acoli songs, dramatises the dilemma of the growing rift between traditional culture and the influence of progress: between the past and the present, between wife and husband, as Uganda undergoes its transition from colonialism to independence,2 and her people begin to experience the attendant neo-colonialist exploitation and corruption which, all too frequently, dash the hopes of the general populace in postindependence African states. In these newly constituted states, the poetry is "overtuned" and taut, as if a Middle C were vibrating at a frequency of 260 instead of 256, as Ocol implies: The blind poet's voice Is piercing thatch The arrow of his song Strikes the woman Like lightning (SoO: 131)

And the poem is full of such references to finely tuned songs, pregnant with meaning, meaning which Horley's bridge-passage illustrations augment significantly. (See Fig. 3.) This form of sustained dramatic lyric itself emerges as a "counterpoint" to the satirical and didactic poetry of the "negritude" movement, which like "the blues", conceives of poetry as "a weapon". By contrast to this latter poetry (often called "poetry of violence"), Okot's is soul poetry which aligns itself with the French symbolist movement in which the purist goal of poetry was the state of music. In Song of Lawino, the first signs of dramatic lyric are seen as early as the fourth stanza, as the traditional wife voices an injunction to her husband which forms the matrix to the argument of this poem: Listen Ocol, you are the son of a Chief, Leave foolish behaviour to little children,

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Fig. 3.

It is not right that you should be laughed at in a song! Songs about you should be songs of praise! (SoL:34)

In this ritual of respect and appeasement, Lawino's direct appeal, not to an as yet unknown audience but to her beloved husband, serves to underline the oral nature of Okot's poetry, and indeed of much African poetry which is thought to have its origins in the convention of the Praise Poem, such as the Zulu Izibongo. In fact, of course, the oral tradition has a much longer ancestry, one which, together with its musical accompaniment, stretches right back to Plato's Divine Rhapsodists. Here, the connection between transmission and very existence was, and is, an intimate one, and questions about the means of actual communication are of primary importance. The direct rendition by singer or speaker carries the impact. Whether recorded or not, oral literature is, by definition, dependent on its performance. In her discussion of oral composition, Ruth Finnegan (1976:2) makes the point:

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In this respect the parallel is less to written literature than to music and dance; for these too are art forms which in the last analysis are actualised in and through their performance ....

In the extract from Song of ulWino, quoted above, the music is that of the persona's soul - and, so too, of the poet's soul. It is the music of evolution and continuity; "the drama is the drama of the poet's experience" (Catherine Acholonu, 1991:133). The evolutionary point in Okot's poetry is the way in which it also serves not only to reflect but to "counterpoint" the indigenous Acoli cultural experience in Uganda. This is a culture "in which invocatory poetry is simply word magic: not the written word but the word which is sung and danced" (Janheinz Jahn, n.d.:159). Such word magic is revealed in Lawino's final appeal to Ocol to allow her to heal the breach between them and to restore his equilibrium through the redemptive power of traditional song and dance: Let me dance before you My love, Let me show you The wealth of your house ... (SoL:120)

As John Mbiti notes (1980:67): Music, singing and dance reach deep into the innermost parts of the African peoples, and many things come to the surface under musical inspiration which otherwise may not be really revealed.

What is revealed here is that, in a triumph of the creative ego reminiscent of Zorba the Greek, Lawino ultimately discovers a new voice, a new language, a new vision: Ocol my husband, Son of the Bull, Let no one uproot the Pumpkin (SoL: 120)

Here, the closing refrain derives from popular song. As part of the staple diet of the Acoli, the pumpkin symbolises the continuity of Acoli tradition, a tradition which, like the pumpkin, sustains life, and therefore should not be uprooted. In the closing lines of Song of Lawino, Okot's language becomes incantatory because of the fusion of the music with the actual situational drama, something akin to what Rimbaud refers to as I 'Alchimie du Verbe, so that the proverbial injunction not to "uproot" the pumpkin carries deeper allusions such as not destroying the household, and even not aborting the seed. In Song of Ocol, the poet subtly employs another symbolic situation to serve as counterpoint to the basic one in Song of Lawino. Ocol is so blinded

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Fig. 4.

by his new world, by his infatuation with the West that he can no longer hear the beauty of his wife's singing; nor is he able to appreciate the beauty of her dancing. He has taken a Westemised lover tellingly named Clementine, but whom his Acoli wife compares with a guinea fowl (Fig. 4); and has also adopted the Christian religion and embraced capitalist ideals. He has thus severed the ties of family and culture. His is a lost soul, as is testified by the bitter and singularly inharmonious inversion with which Song of Oeol begins: Woman, Shut up! Pack your things Go! (SoO:121)

The tragedy is, on the one hand, the anguish of severance for Lawino and, on the other, the fragmentation of essence from being, for Ocol. Counterpointing Song of ulWino, the music in Song of Oeol is transposed into the stricken cry

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of a man's blind soul as he flounders in the void, unable to perceive the bitter irony in his rejection of his African heritage which leads to a grossly discordant dismissal of his wife's singing: Song of the woman Is the confused noise Made by the ram After the butcher's knife Has sunk past The wind pipe. Red paint spraying On the grasses; It is a song all alone A solo fragment With no chorus No accompaniment, A strange melody Impossible to orchestrate ... (SoO: 121)

In Song of Oeol, the "music" becomes louder, the voice stronger yet more strident, as Ocol heaps scorn upon his wife's overtures: Song of the dead Out of an old tomb Stealthy cracking Of dry bones ... (SoO:121) Song of the woman Is the mad bragging Of a defeated General Ten thousand men Dead, dying ... (SoO:122)

In the crescendo of Ocol's scorn, the effect of such archetypal images from the abyss is cumulative and the cacophony reaches its climax in: Woman Your song Is rotting buffalo Left behind by Fleeing poachers (SoO: 122)

Ocol's song thus clearly belongs to the profane world as Horley's graphic depiction of this stanza shows (Fig. 5). Here, a giant vulture issues from the mouth of a head inspired by the Benin bronzes, its wing encircling a face already drained of life, cold as the bronzed metal to the touch. The talons of this African bird of prey are allusively drawn in skeletons, while the metal

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Fig. 5.

itself represents a medium foreign to traditional African sculpture. Done in bronze and ivory, this art form was successfully adapted by West African artists from imported models in the early days of Portuguese colonisation. There are five such illustrations of selected verses in Song of Ocol and another five in Song of Lawino. Those illustrating Song of Oeol are all based on the Benin bronzes, conveying the alien or exotic element highlighted by the poem itself, and all the images emanate from the mouth; while those illustrating Song of Lawino take their inspiration from authentic African wood and stone carvings, all of which centre on the African mask as leitmotif. Reflecting Frantz Fanon's adage of "Black skin, white mask'? the interplay of contrasting visual representations in Song of Oeol thus provides a fugue-like comment on the growing rift between husband and wife due to Ocol's mimicking of the West.

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This more sophisticated expression of "counterpoint" is even more apparent if Horley' s illustration of Lawino' s pragmatic sense of the significance of Time is considered. Lawino rejects the Western notion of fixed times, with its credo that "Time is money" (69) and the prescriptive demands that this places on the household, "metronoming" life and making man Time's fool: If my husband insists What exact time He should have morning tea And breakfast, When exactly to have coffee And the exact time For taking the family photograph Lunch-time, tea time, And supper time I must first look at the sun, The cock must crow To remind me. When the sun has grown up And the poisoned tips Of its arrows painfully bite The backs of men hoeing And of the women weeding or harvesting. This is when You take drinking water To the workers. (SoL:64-65)

Here, the tonal shifts in the poetry are particularly compelling and, by contrast to the static representations of Song of Oeol, the figures in the illustration of this scene - "the men hoeing" and "the women weeding or harvesting" - foreground the vitality of the community in a landscape which is energised by light emanating not only from the midday sun - so provocatively dubbed "grown up" and here evocatively shining through an African mask - but also from the ritual they are performing (Fig. 6). The fact that hoeing, weeding and harvesting are rarely undertaken simultaneously, and that this kind of subsistence farming is generally the preserve of the womenfolk, is unimportant. What is significant is that the verse and its primitivistic pictorial representation conjoin to make a symbolic statement on the communal ethos: in Africa, nurturing and sustaining life is primal and follows the natural laws of time, unbounded by the clock. The artist's reverence for the landscape as a place of spiritual life is as evident in the clean-cut lines of his drawing as in his deployment of the bright rays of the sun. For Horley, as

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Fig. 6.

for Okot and his protagonist, Lawino, the land is a potent presence that absorbs and contextualizes man. Another compelling correlation between Okot's poetry and Horley's illustrations accompanies two stanzas from Canto II in Song of Lawino and one from Canto 7 in Song of Oeol. Lawino questions the state of affairs in postIndependence Uganda, musing about the peace that was promised by Uhuru or "Freedom". Both the drawing (Fig. 7) and the poetry underline the detrimental effects of the poverty which arises from exploitation by the new political leaders, those comprador bourgeoisie, whose voraciousness cannot be assuaged even as political dissension rages: And while the pythons of sickness Swallow the children And the buffaloes of poverty

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Fig. 7.

Knock the people down And ignorance stands there Like an elephant The war leaders Are tightly locked in bloody feuds, Eating each other's liver. .. (SoL: Ill)

Horley captures the chaos of this new predatory environment by crowding the perimeters of the page with tumbling, supplicating, dead or partially consumed figures as a frame to the central motif of cannibalistic internecine

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Fig. 8.

strife. This illustration, in a ghastly echo of the verse, evokes a latent, even kinetic energy in the now sinister landscape. Here, the achievement emanates from the physical rather than the spiritual; the whole landscape "dances" with what the English painter, John Caxton, might have termed "a static movement" (Yorke, 1988:318). The venom and cynicism of Uhuru's new political elite is even more telling in both the staccato verse in Song of Oeol and its pictorial interpretation (Fig. 8): The lamb Uhuru Dead as Stone, The Shimmering flies Giving false life To its open eyes? (SoO: 143)

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The insertion of the dead lamb into the unseeing eye coupled with the elongated, intertwined flies' legs demonstrates how these illustrations offer an enduring view that complements the opposing world views of Ocol and Lawino. These two songs show how language and culture are interwoven, and how familiarity with both leads to a greater appreciation of Okot's poetry which, as already suggested, is the confluence of language and culture. Moreover, in a double counterpoint, the illustrations stress and enhance the sub textual meaning. Thus the illustrations to the poems, like the two poems themselves, are but variations on a common theme. A close reading of Song of Ocol confirms the unflattering portrait of Ocol in his own self-revelation, derived from Song of Lawino. For example, Lawino first asserts the acrimonious nature of her husband: My husband treats me roughly. The insults! Words cut more painfully than sticks! (SoL: 35)

Then Ocol later confirms and compounds this unpleasant personality trait, shouting insults at both his wife and his heritage: What is Africa Tome? Blackness, Deep, deep fathomless Darkness; Africa, Idle giant Basking in the sun ... (SoO: 125)

As G. A. Heron asserts, if Song of Ocol is a reply to Song of Lawino, then "it is a bad one" (Okot p'Bitek, Introduction:27): The two poems are not the thesis and antithesis of the argument from which the reader can deduce a synthesis. Unlike some other African writers, Okot doesn't consider a cultural synthesis to be the solution to Africa's problems ... Song of Okol does not fairly represent an alternative to Lawino's point of view. 4 (Ibid.)

These two songs should not be heard as competing violins. Any implication of the inferiority of Song of Ocol compared to Song of Lawino resolves itself if the two poems are taken as a coherent unit. As already indicated, Song of Lawino takes the form of a domestic drama exposing the dichotomy between tradition and progress, at once defending the African world-view and condemning its rejection in favour of a Eurocentric Weltanschauung. Song of Ocol extends and endorses the polemic set in motion by Lawino. Just as

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counterpoint in music usually presumes the realisation of a harmonic basis in the case of even the simplest two-part exercise, so too can Song of Lawino be read as the a priori basis - or the cantus firmus - for Okot p'Bitek's more comprehensive argument on the future of Africa. Thus, as already argued, the two poems can more profitably be defined as counterpoint in print. 5 Whereas Song of Lawino takes its impetus from a very real social problem in Africa: rural wives finding themselves increasingly estranged from their more educated, urbanised and politically ambitious husbands, Song of Deal provides the incentive for the first song's defence of indigenous culture. Moreover, appropriate to its context, Okot's language is carefully pared to a maximum of some ninety words in his English translation of the poem. Just as melody harmonization too frequently requires a knowledge of chord effect and chord progression far beyond the beginner's aural powers at that moment, so too would a sophisticated Eurocentric word bank confound the Acoli-speaking Ugandan audience to whom the poems were originally addressed. It would also undermine the essential intention of the two poems to reinstate the true value of Acoli traditions and mores. In these terms, Song of Deal is neither separate from nor conflicting with Song of Lawino but complementary to it; counterpointing it in form and expression, so that the polyphonic composition of these two songs enables the poet to present - poco a poco - an incisive and unique vision of the African dilemma. University of Pretoria

NOTES 1 Based on a traditional Luo tale, Okot p'Bitek's first poem A Lost Spear, now also lost, was, on his own admission, much influenced by Hiawatha. 2 Ugandan Independence was attained in 1962. 3 Cf. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1952. 4 Cf. Taban 10 Liyong in The Last Word (Nairobi: East African Printing House, 1969:206):

African culture is to be a synthesis and a metamorphosis - the order of things to come. It assimilates and it disseminates. It picks, it grabs, it carries on .... A racially and culturally mixed person is the universal man; all is in him; he identifies with all; he is kith and kin to all other Homo Sapiens. 5

Cf. the Webster Dictionary definition of counterpoint as:

One or more independent melodies added as accompaniment to a primary melody (as the cantus firmus); ... the combination of two or more related but independent melodies into a single harmonic texture in which each retains its linear or horizontal character.

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Acholonu, Catherine 0., 1991. "From Rhetoric to Occultism", in Eldred Jones, ed., African Literature Today, New Jersey: Africa World Press. Ca~:ton, John, cited by Malcolm Yorke, 1988. The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times, London: Constable. Finnegan, Ruth, 1976. Oral Literature in Africa, Nairobi: OUP. Jahn, Janheinz, n.d. A History of Neo-African Literature, London: Faber. Langbaum, Robert, 1974. Poetry of Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mbiti, John, 1980. African Religions and Philosophy, London: Heinemann.

SECTION TWO

DAVID LIPTEN

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE: "BEYOND ANALYSIS" REVISITED

Most often, music analysts try to explain the ways in which a work is put together by referring to a particular pre-existing system or systems of composition. The piece in question is usually explained by the degree to which its composition either adheres to or digresses from the logic of such a system. I do not intend to demonstrate only that which can be deciphered in this manner. Instead, the aim of this article is to describe musical meaning; not "what" a piece of music means, since such an essay would engage in a high degree of subjectivity, but "how" a musical work transmits whatever messages it may hold. To facilitate this discussion, I will use structuralist theories found in semiology. 1 First, I will discuss the need for such an approach to music analysis. Next, by describing semiology's application to language, I hope to determine its relevance and to measure its limits. I will then attempt to illustrate its worth by applying it to Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments from 1920, as well as to some of his other compositions. While addressing issues arising specifically from the analysis of twelvetone and serial musics in his landmark article "Beyond Analysis,"2 Edward T. Cone suggests that while such analyses may prove the interchangeability of certain row forms, the combinatorial potential of some of them, or the amount of tones common to different rows, the results of such endeavors are only of so much benefit. This is so because there are aspects of a piece of music which contribute to its communicative capacity for reasons not wholly attributable to the elements which these analyses describe. Also, the fact that there are so many erudite, yet contradictory analyses suggests another problem to Cone: the difficulty of deciding which reading of twelve-tone or serial music is most correct. He suggests that this problem highlights a: ... crucial point in the history of music. Up until now there has been no ambiguity between up and down ... there has been no question of choice between forward and backward since the appearance of the melodic cadence - and a fortiori, the harmonic cadence; there has been no transpositional relationship that could not be explained by reference to some sort of tonic .... If one accepts this conclusion ... one can accept it wholeheartedly, agreeing that there is no basis for choice ... beyond the convenience of accepting what is already given and the comfort of

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familiarity. But that only throws the problem back where it really belongs in the first place: on the shoulders of the composer. How did he make these decisions in these matters?3

While Cone's commentary deals specifically with only two major approaches to composition in the twentieth century, I believe that it pertains to all methods of composition. Music's syntax and grammar are defined by rules. However, good music adds up to more than just the sum of its parts. So, how do composers make choices within the confines of whatever rules they impose upon their compositional processes? Furthermore, how does a composer make musical choices in a world replete with a variety of approaches and styles, especially when lacking what had been known as a "common practice"?4 Or, to restate the question which Cone asks above, how does a composer make the choices that will insure that his or her creation will mean anything to anyone else but themselves? Cone suggests that if a work of art communicates anything at all, what it expresses is dependent upon what he calls "concrete [semantic] and analytical [syntactical] values." He argues that a piece of music's salient characteristics (those which afford a basis for comparison), depend, in tum, upon "absolute decisions" (those which are "independent of purely analytical considerations and unsusceptible of purely analytical justification)."5 Cone clarifies this point by referring to abstract visual art wherein it may be difficult to determine which way a painting is to be hung. This decision, he argues, must be: ... absolute. The reasons on which it is based will be external to the pictorial structure, whether the artist says simply "This is the way I like it," or more specifically, "The expressive effect of the picture would be harmed if it were inverted." ... Just as communication in a verbal language depends on both semantics and syntax, so artistic expression must involve both concrete and analytical values. Without the former, the structure could convey no message; without the latter, the message would be limited to the equivalent of primitive substantives and exclamations. Thus, the expressive power of an abstract canvas cannot stem from its design alone; it must depend on some covert representational or other associative element. 6

How does this apply to music, then? Is it possible that the expressive power of music must rely on this idea of covert representation, as well? As in visual art and in language, successful communication in music is dependent upon both syntax (the systematic arrangement of elements) and semantics (that which relates to meaning). Cone even makes the argument that in the best tonal music, the link between these two criteria is almost indissoluble. 7 But post-tonal music 8 has suggested other possibilities. Syntax has even taken over primacy in some examples. And, as Cone has pointed out, the backward, upside down, etc. has even become substitutable for the semantically normative forward in some

.

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of this music. However, one would assume that a more normal state of affairs would be necessary to insure optimal communication: One may ... feel intuitively that something is wrong; that retrogression in music, whatever its technique, should have as little general validity as in literature or in cinema. And certainly compositions planned according to traditional rhetoric - e.g., introduction, statement, development, climax, restatement, peroration - hardly admit of intelligible reversal ... these elements... are ignored in many analyses today. 9

As is inferable from Cone's criteria, optimal signification is greatly facilitated by what is more semantically familiar. This is not to suggest that a piece of music which employs different means is incapable of being understood. But familiarity is knowledge based on associations. Associations depend on one's ability to make comparisons. To determine that something is different from something else is to suggest an other's presence on some level, whether immediately or by association. Cone's suggestion that something may be "intuitively wrong" then suggests that intuition is not entirely innate and that, to a certain degree, it must be informed by history. In other words, intuition is partially learned. So, just as in visual art, composers must rely on some learned ("covert") elements in order to insure that their work will communicate through "associative" functions. Associations are one of the mental activities which semiology deems necessary for meaning to be conveyed. This is not, however, to disavow the signifying potential of syntax. Semiology recognizes the dependent relationship (or opposition) of the associative plane (paradigmatic) with the linear, syntactic plane (syntagmatic) and recommends a balance between the two for optimal transmission of meaning. Specifically, the syntagmatic plane contains a linear combination of signs (which, in turn, are made up of other analytical components; the signified and the signifier).l0 They are understood by virtue of their order in a chain, both by what precedes and follows them. According to Barthes, these signs are united in praesentia. ll By this, he is referring to a relationship between syntactical elements which relies primarily upon short-term memory in order to help discern between their similarity or difference as, for example, in the succession of pitches in a scale. The syntagmatic is, once again, linear. The domain of its signs, for my purposes, are primarily intra-musical. Its concerns are the orderly arrangement of musical parts or elements into a whole. The paradigmatic plane, on the other hand, is one of associations. Units which have something in common are connected in memory and are grouped according to these associations creating mnemonic devices. Barthes cites as examples:

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education [which] can be associated, through its meaning, to upbringing, to training, and through its sound, to educate, educator, or to application, vindication ... unlike what happens at the syntagmatic level, the terms are united in absentia; the analytic activity which applied to the associations is that of classification. 12

The expression "in absentia" implies the existence of a different sort of mental capacity. In this case, Barthes is referring to long-term memory. We are all capable of making associations with what is not necessarily immediately present due to an ability to access information which resides in this form of memory. Unlike information which presents itself in a linear fashion in real (diachronic) time, the ability to access long-term memory is dependent upon the idea of synchronic time. Synchronic time allows one to hear and understand music through its connection with history. The paradigmatic plane is, therefore, enabled by synchronic time, whereas the syntagmatic is equally enabled by diachronic time. The paradigmatic plane then refers primarily to signs which are inter-musical since what music refers to outside of itself (synchronically) is primarily other music. 13 In spite of the fact that exactly what music communicates is untranslatable, its ends are unquestionably informative. Since meaning is not solely the province of language, it is reasonable to assume that the syntagmJparadigm opposition would apply to any form of mental activity which, like language, has communication as its goal. I4 One can then assume that musical meaning is governed by the same opposition. Since Ferdinand de Saussure also believed that the syntagmJparadigm opposition is dependent upon the two forms of memory discussed above (linear/contiguous vs. associative) it is also reasonable to assume that both forms of memory are relied upon in order to make sense of music, as well as language. And, since semiology is also based upon this opposition, it is reasonable to subject music to semiological analysis. Evidently, the relationship between syntagm and paradigm is a close one. Barthes states that" ... the two planes are linked in such a way that the syntagm cannot 'progress' except by calling successively on new units taken from the associative plane."15 The syntagmatic plane's ability to signify would be greatly hindered without making substantial use of the paradigmatic. After all, syntax by itself can only connote other syntax. Perhaps this partially explains why some structurally sophisticated music may not reach many listeners, even if the audience for whom the music is intended is also sophisticated. However, the degree to which an audience is steeped in any musical "language" does help prepare it for the way in which an individual composer "speaks" that language. Obviously, the more music one

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is familiar with, the better one will be prepared to make the associations which facilitate meaning. Semiology describes another opposition which accounts for the way a speaker uses a language: "parole (speech - the [varied] combination of recurrent signs)" vs. "langue (language (or the system))."16 Like the paradigmatic plane, a system, whether musical or linguistic, is dependent upon its syntax for internal coherence. It is also dependent upon any number of associations for its ability to signify anything beyond the fact that perhaps its parts belong together. Therefore, expression in either a verbal, musical, or any other semantic system also relies upon the ways in which syntax is used to create associations. To express something is to convey something meaningful. The locus of meaning seems to lie, therefore, in the creation, transmission and comprehension of associations. Speech, on the other hand, is closer to the syntagmatic plane. The diachronic act of speaking relies, first of all, upon a linear arrangement of syntax for both its user and auditor, to make sense of it. The particular way a speaker uses language is determined by his or her manner of speech. However, to use a language is to refer to a system(s) which lies outside any speaker's particular usage. While there would be no associations and, therefore, no meaning without the building blocks of syntax, speech could not exist with just syntax and without a larger context or system to refer to. But, with history comes context. Context enables associations. Associations enable meaning. Speech conveys meaning. In the case of music, style is akin to speech. The way a composer chooses between the elements which a musical system(s) makes available is to be found in the composer's parole. Composers refer to a system or systems (or to the paradigmatic plane) in order to insure that their music will be capable of expression. This is so even in the most intuitive of endeavors, especially since intuition is partially learned. The residue of history remains whether one chooses to purposefully address it or not. The richness of a composer's style can be determined by the ways in which the planes of a musical system(s) and musical speech, so to say, intersect. How are we to proceed? How are we to determine which musical elements belong to which semiological category? What constitutes a musical paradigm or syntagm? With what do we start if we try and determine which elements constitute a musical signifier or signified? What qualifies as a musical sign? In Barthes' view, when confronted with an unknown system (as we will be when confronted with an analysis of Igor Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which is not wholly systematic):

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it is logical to begin the work with the syntagmatic division, since in principle this is the operation which supplies the units which must also be classified in paradigms; however, when confronted with an unknown system, it may be more convenient to start from a few paradigmatic elements empirically obtained, and to study the system before the syntagm.17

Are we to opt for logic or for convenience, then? To underscore the difficulty, as in the best tonal music, the link between the syntagmatic/paradigmatic or the syntactic/semantic levels is equally "indissoluble" in the best post-tonal music. First of all, the main work of semiology is to distribute pertinent facts along the syntagmatic/paradigmatic axes. These "facts" are the elements which constitute the sign. However, without an understanding of what makes up a musical sign, we still don't know what to place on these axes. One way of proceeding is offered by V. Kofi Agawu in his book Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music. Before he proceeds with his discussion, however, Agawu tries to justify the application of semiology to music through what he terms "a shadowy linguistic concern at alllevels."18 Using Leonard Ratner's and Charles Rosen's writings on what is ordinarily referred to as classical music to represent the spectrum of approaches on this subject, Agawu argues that while different in approach, they are both concerned with normative procedures of the style. 19 This focus: grows out of the feeling that the classical style approximates a language spoken .... The uniformity of intent necessary for this style to attain the status of a language can therefore be inferred from this characterization ... this feeling guides the formulation of the authors' concepts but is never made explicit. 2o

Must one be convinced of this "feeling" in order to justify the use of semiology in analyzing music? I believe the answer is no. While it certainly seems that since semiology grew out of linguistics, then linking music and language in some fundamental way would be necessary in order to do so. But semiology is the study of signs, and signs convey significance and meaning. Both language and composition are sign systems. In citing Saussure, Barthes states that such a system is "an associative field."21 These fields are made up of signs. Since language and music are both such associative fields, it stands to reason that both would be analyzable semiologically. It then also stands to reason that language should not be semiology's only domain. 22 However, this is not to slight the power of linguistic analogies which Agawu points out, as he does when citing Rosen, for example, who describes "the four-measure phrase ... as [a] 'paradigm' as distinct from the 'model.'''23 Despite the fact that semiology's reference to language is unnecessary to qualify its use in analyzing music, the criteria Agawu draws from such a

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comparison are, nevertheless, relevant since they help describe semiology's role in uncovering meaning in music. These are: first, it [semiology] must explain the laws that govern the moment-by-moment succession of events in a piece, that is, the syntax of music. Second and consequently, it must explain the constraints affecting organization at higher levels - the levels of sentence, paragraph, chapter, and beyond. It must, in other words, provide a framework for understanding the discourse of music. Third, it must demonstrate, rather than merely assume that music represents a bona fide system of communication, and must then go on to show what is being communicated and how. 24 [Emphasis added]

Agawu's first criteria (laws governing the succession of events) usually falls under the domain of traditional analysis. However, it also clearly refers to the syntagmatic plane (linear, syntactic arrangement of constituent parts into a cohesive whole). Agawu's second standard (higher level organization) refers to both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic planes. His use of the phrase "constraints affecting organization"25 implies the existence of a system which imposes limitations on usage. The construction, in time, of such a framework also implies syntactical organization. The third dictum, especially the latter part, refers to the intersection of the two planes of signification (the "what" referring to both syntax and paradigm; the "how" depending upon memory and the reference of either signifying process to the other). So, in spite of the fact that Agawu does try to justify his endeavors by creating an analogy between music and language, he still manages to create a specific context wherein it is possible to examine music semiologically. Therefore, I do not believe that one should look too long at linguistic analogies for an "interpretive framework [but to] accord [an] intramusical framework the highest status in analysis, but also to treat its similarity to other frameworks as fortuitous - or, at best, suggestive."26 Does this relegate musical semiology to a secondary analytic status? This question becomes particularly poignant if one accepts the premise put forth by Jonathan Dunsby and John Stopford that "semioticians have yet to find a comprehensive, definitive account of what the discipline of semiotics may be."27 This difficulty arises, in part, from the fact that there have historically been two groups of musical semioticians which Agawu labels as "taxonomic empiricists" and "semanticists."28 He finds the analyses of the first group overly tautological, ignoring the music in favor of too rigorous a methodology. Agawu also finds the second group's investigations wanting for the opposite reason, due largely to a lack of rigor resulting from a heterogeneity of approaches. However, Agawu states that "it is clear that we need both modes in order to gain the richest understanding of... music."29 I

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concur with him for the following reasons: first, without an agreed upon methodology (which is still being withheld) the results of an analysis which may be called semiotic will remain highly subjective, relying too heavily upon arbitrary or, at best, empirical data. But, an over-reliance on method runs the risk of becoming anti-intuitive. It also may have the effect of neutralizing active analytical modes of inquiry which musicians are already familiar with. There is, after all, a rich history of rendering in words what music may convey; one which, as musicians, we are comfortable with no matter how unfamiliar this tradition remains to most people. 3o I would add that we need both approaches for an understanding of musical significance, especially in light of the predominance of an overly syntactic view of music perpetuated by traditional music analysis. This is what Cone seems to be calling for in his above-cited essay, "Beyond Analysis." Before proceeding with a semiological analysis, it is necessary to determine which musical elements qualify as semiotic objects. Since a sign is the result of the union between the signifier and the signified, one must first determine what the smallest significant units are (signifiers). Despite the fact that a single pitch removed from its musical context seems incapable of signifying much of anything, it nevertheless seems logical to regard a pitch as such a unit since its context's presence will be taken for granted. A change in a single pitch may be enough to alter a musical sign's meaning (as, for example, in a 12-tone piece where changing a pitch may affect the relationships between the different forms of a row, or in a tonal piece where, for instance, scale degree six is substituted for scale degree five in the case of a deceptive cadence). These changes are generally recognized by traditional analysis,3l They can also be thought of as possessing purely intra-musical significance which would accord them the highest semiological status. However, if broader significance is what we are after, then it is more logical to consider signifiers larger than a single pitch. Therefore, the recognition of the signifier/signified opposition and, consequently, the sign should be determined at a higher level, namely through the langue/parole opposition. This dualism relies more heavily upon inter-musical references which fall under the domain of the paradigmatic plane. Therefore, while I have accorded syntax the highest possible status for the reasons stated above, it seems that the conveyance of the largest degree of musical significance is to be located in the paradigmatic plane. Unlike traditional analysis, semiology enables a more complete examination of this aspect of music. If musical signs rely upon the langue/parole opposition for their significance, as well as on the cultural context in which they are created and

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heard, they are dependent signs. This condition seems to render any universality of musical meaning void, especially in light of the status which I had accorded the intra-musical domain earlier. It also argues against the development of semiology into a system capable of categorizing all reality in terms of its signs. 32Agawu underscores this point by stating that: There can be no single definition for "sign" in music, for each of a work's dimensions displays a unique mode of signification ... signs denoting topic are significant only within a cultural context that recognizes the conventional associations of certain kinds of musical material. 33

However, the fact that musical signs are not universal does not invalidate a semiological investigation of the ways and degrees to which music refers to other music's signs. This also can be accomplished through a paradigmatic analysis. In the previous citation, Agawu makes his first reference to "topics."34 Topics are musical signs which are "subjects of musical discourse ... they provide a framework for discussing various kinds and levels of associative signification."35 Topics, like all paradigms, are comprised by syntagmatic chains which are repeated and important. The recognition of such a chain as a unit classifies it as paradigmatic or as a self-referential, self-contained sign. Their ability to be recognized depends upon their difference from other topics (like Barthes' "oppositions"). Further, topics are signs whose signifieds, in the case of classical music, are "conventional labels drawn mostly from historiography (Sturm und Drang, fanfare, learned style, sensibility, and so on)."36 For example, in Ratner's analysis of Mozart's Symphony No. 38 in D Major ("Prague") K. 504, first movement, he provides his readers with a list of all of its different topics and where to find them (see Ex. 1),37 Ex. 1.

Topics, Mozart, "Prague Symphony," K. 504, 1786, 1st movt.

Measures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Singing style, alia breve Brilliant style, learned Fanfare I Singing style, learned Alia breve, brilliant style Brilliant style, learned Brilliant style, modified stile legato Fanfare II Brilliant style Cadential flourish (new material)

37-40 41-42 43-44 45-48 49-50 51-54 55-62 63-65 66-68 69-70

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Singing style Alia breve, brilliant style Learned, brilliant, alia breve Storm and Stress Singing style, later set in learned style

71-74 75-76 77-87 88-94 95-120

Ratner also goes to some length to define these topics more specifically by describing their [surface] functions (as he does, for example, in discussing Ex. 2. Rhetoric and structure in Mozart's Symphony in D Major ("Prague") K504* Movement one, mm. 1-16 _ _ coups d"an:bct

uonIium OmroclUClion)

Adagio

RaIneI'. Analysis

f

-

p

p

f

sensibility ontithttsu

p

grotkJtiO (sequence)

sin,iogstylc

transposition

IInlilhttsu

p

p

QIItithesis

·see nn 41

115

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

fanfare ptrorat;o (conclusion)

cadence

dislributio (breakinl up of figure)

duhitotio (uncertainty unexpected 111m)

sensibility

11

11

fanfare perorolio (conclusion)

ombro (supernarura) apostrophe (digression [0 another topic)

15

J'"

15

~--=

f

15

(I)

melodic rhetoric, describing, among many other things, an exordium as an introduction or a gradatio as a climax or sequence).38 However, Agawu goes one step further in his analysis of the first sixteen measures of the same movement 39 (see Ex. 2). His intention is to link the descriptions provided by Ratner to their structural importance in order to "outline an interpretive framework for classical music in which ... two central concerns ... expression and structure, engage with each other."40 By using the concept of topic as a central tenet, and by requiring that all topics be validated by "an intramusical discourse, formulated after Schenker [then] it is within the confines of this play between the two modes that we may apprehend the rich meanings that underlie ... classic music."41 But, if topics rely on such an "intra-musical discourse" which describes structure, they, like other musical signs, are also dependent. And, if topics also describe expression, then expression is similarly dependent upon structure for its ability to signify and to convey meaning. Since topics describe both expression and structure, they should remain semiological objects, central to any paradigmatic analysis and an understanding of how music comes to mean.

116

DAVID LlPTEN

In accepting the premise above, it is necessary to examine a number of other conditions affecting the makeup of topics and how they are to be applied. First, while it is theoretically possible for a musical work to be imbued with an unlimited number of topics (limited only by the actual length of the piece), if it is to prove comprehensible, it must contain only a limited number in order to control the amount of syntax necessary to support them. Secondly, topics are contextual. The same configuration of pitches mayor may not signify the same thing from one piece of music to another, nor would they necessarily signify anything to an audience without the necessary cultural competence. The relative quality of topics underscores the fact that music is not autonomous or wholly abstract but "is concerned with socio-cultural norms that structure its discourse."42 Third, topics succeed one another temporally. They unfold linearly (or syntagmatically) and may also overlap. However, they are grouped and contextualized paradigmatically. So, while a topic's syntagmatic unfolding may be prepared by another's, and it may, in turn, prepare the way for others to follow, it is to the associative plane that we must turn in order to determine a topic's ultimate significance. Agawu separates the distribution of syntagmatic and paradigmatic elements into two procedures which he labels "introversive vs. extroversive serniosis."43 Citing Roman Jakobson's linguistic studies, Agawu defines these processes as follows: [introversive semiosis is] "the reference of each sonic element to the other elements to come" (and presumably those that have come before) ... [while] extroversive semiosis denotes "the referentiallink with the exterior world" ... the mutual presence of [these] qualities ... are analyzable with respect to the two processes of semiosis. 44

Introversive serniosis is used to describe both the syntagmatic plane, as well as a work's internal paradigms, while extroversive serniosis primarily engages the paradigmatic. While I have established that the primary benefit of a semiological perspective is one which takes greater account of the latter, disassociating a topical discourse from syntax would be incomplete (as in Ex. 1). Without an orderly arrangement of syntax into a viable structure, there could be no discourse. However, unlike words in a language, topics in music are not grammatical units. There is little about them which helps to determine their order. Topics, themselves, are without rules of syntax. While the preceding underscores, once again, the priority of an intra-musical discourse, it nevertheless demonstrates the interrelatedness of both planes of signification quite clearly. Without the semantic nature of music which topics describe, listeners would be left only with structure and no means of expression.

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

117

In analyzing classical music, Agawu ties topical descriptions to structure by way of a "beginning-middle-end paradigm."45 In his view, a certain number of expressive prototypes are used by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (again, which he describes through rhetorical labels drawn mostly from Ratner).46 At times, these occur in places in the structure which reflect the functions of this paradigm (a cadenza over a cadential dominant, for example). According to Agawu, the "play" in classical music occurs in artfully avoiding the coincidence between the many varied topics and the underlying structure until such time as the goals of an overriding unity were made to prevail. In his view, this is what distinguishes all classical music. 47 However, composers in the nineteenth-century began a practice which was characterized by a more "private"48 means of expression. In general, the individual utterance was more highly valued than a quest for universal human expression. This is one of many attitudes still in effect today in composition and other creative (and not so creative) endeavors. One of the consequences of this attitude is that the necessity of musical unity has become questionable. Therefore, the specificity of the topical description which Agawu employs becomes difficult to support in later music except at larger, more general levels of structure. In fact, much of the rhetoric he uses is applicable only to classical music, unless some topics are read inter-textually49 (e.g., aria as a general category in opera and as it exists as a specific topic in classical music; march in the context of Agawu's discussion and, say, in John Philip Sousa's music). But since he calls the music he discusses "classic," it is logical to assume that much of the music which has followed it in western culture draws upon it for many of its own paradigms. Assuming this is true, while the entire world of topic as it is applied to classical music may not pertain to later music with the same degree of specificity, a topical analysis which draws on some of classical music's larger, more general paradigms should prove to be sound (this may be especially so in music which has been called "neo-classical"). I contend that just as a beginning-middle-end paradigm is one possible template for classical music, it and other large-scale topics (such as tension and resolution, directionality, balance, symmetry, order, meter, even harmony, melody and rhythm, as well as structure itself) are just as valid for much twentieth-century music; not necessarily in the sense that any of these might govern an overall stylistic procedure, but in the sense that these topics are identifiable and are meaningful musical objects. The ways in which these paradigms are either similar to or different from other historically established ones may help guide an understanding of the discourse of some recent music. In order to demonstrate the ways in which a topical reading may prove useful for an understanding of the ways in which meaning may be conveyed, I will tum my attention to such an examination of a work by Igor Stravinsky.

118

DAVID LIPTEN

Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments of 1920 is not a symphony in the classical sense. Here the word "symphony" means something more akin to an earlier understanding of the word, namely of sounding together. The work is not scored for an orchestra with all of the romantic trappings usually associated with the idea of a symphony. Instead, it is scored without strings or percussion. Therefore, the use of this term, together with the actual sound of the music, provokes a confrontation between expectation and reality. By eliminating the instruments mentioned and by using the term "Symphony" in his title, Stravinsky allows himself to play with the expectations aroused by the term. These conditions also help him to create a different context, not only for the term, but also for the "new" music which is associated with it. This re-contextualization seems fresh because of the span of time that the actual music has from its referent. While the polysemous connotations of the title are important, the connections that this music makes with an earlier epoque are more important. 5o In spite of the temporal distance from the baroque and the difference in the way musical materials are handled from one style period to the other, Stravinsky still manages to forge a link between his audience and a shared cultural past. This association helps to transmit meaning. The associations, in this case, are primarily inter-musical. Certainly, this is not the only instance in which Stravinsky availed himself of such a connection. 51 The form of the Symphonies is constructed out of highly contrasting materials (see Ex. 3).52 Ex. 3. Form: Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1947) I. Prelude z motive - mm. 1-6 reh. 1 z motive - reh. 2 C subject - reh. 3 o subject - reh. 4-2 mm. after reh. 5 y motive - 2 mm. before reh. 6-reh. 6

o subject -

II. Exposition - of A(i) subject - rehs. 6-7 and A(ii) subject - reh. 8 III. Interlude (Interruption) z motive - reh. 9 to 1 bar after reh. 10

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

119

D subject as interruption - pick up to 2 mm. after reh. 10 to reh. 11 y motive - 1 bar before reh. 11 D subject - reh. 11 interrupted by w motive - 1 bar before reh. 12 D subject continues through reh. 12 to 2 mm. before reh. 13 interrupted by w motive again which goes through rehs. 13 and extended (developed) through reh. 14 IV. Exposition of B subject - rehs. 15-20 V. Interlude (Interruption) B subject interrupted by w motive at reh. 21 and again at 2 bars after reh. 23 to 4 bars after reh. 23 B subject continues until ended by interruption of y motive at reh. 26 followed by z motive at 3 mm. after reh. 26 combined with y motive at 1 and 3 mm. after reh. 27 to 1 bar after reh. 28 interrupted by D subject at 4 mm. after reh. 27 this is followed by y motive interruption at 3 mm. after reh. 28 VI. Recapitulation of B subject - rehs. 29-33 B subject continues but is interrupted by w motive at reh. 33 which goes until 2 mm. after reh. 33 and again at 2 mm. after reh. 34 VII. Interlude (Interruption) B subject continues again until interrupted by y motive at reh. 37 and then by z motive at 3 mm. after reh. 37 VIII. Recapitulation of A(ii) subject at reh. 38 IX. Interlude (Interruption) A(ii) subject interrupted by z motive at reh. 39; interrupted by y motive at 2 mm. before reh. 40 to reh. 40 X. Recapitulation of A(i) subject at reh. 40 XI. Interlude (Interruption) A(i) subject interrupted by x motive at 1 bar after reh. 41

120

DAVID LIPTEN

continues with D subject at reh. 42 interrupted by x motive at rehs. 43-45 C subject at reh. 46 to 3 mm. after reh. 47 x motive at 3 mm. after reh. 47 through reh. 50 XII. Exposition of C subject at rehs. 51-55 XIII. Interlude (Interruption) D subject at reh. 56 x motive at reh. 57 XlV. Recapitulation of C subject at rehs. 58-63 Xv. Interlude (Interruption) x motive at reh. 64 XVI. Exposition of D subject at reh. 65 to end The differences between the musical ideas are highlighted by the incisive nature of the wind instruments used (Stravinsky's orchestration choices, I am sure, were made to enhance this possibility rather than to call attention to any intertextual features of the title). The primary arguments of the piece each have their own character. Each of the main sections or "episodes"53 is preceded by either a prelude or an interlude comprised of musical material made up of other parts of the piece which interrupt the flow of the music. Because they regularly recur and seem to serve a purpose, these interruptions take on weight. In semiotic terms then, these interruptions are topics. 54 The interruption topics are like miniature slices of time through which a listener may hear different parts of the piece as if the music were visible through a kaleidoscope. In a sense, real time is put on hold while snapshots of other moments in the piece are brought into focus. The interruptions also make one aware of the intersection of synchronic and diachronic time. Therefore, signification benefits from both short- and long-term memory. The interruptions do not recur in the same form. In addition to being made up of material derived from the main subjects of the piece, they also contain other motivic fragments 55 (see, again, Ex. 3 and Exs. 4 & 5). Stravinsky introduces the work by juxtaposing one of the smaller motives (see Ex. 4z) with one of the main subjects (one which is not fully exposed until the end of the piece - compare subject "D" at reh. I (see Ex. 5D) with mm. 305-370,

121

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

Ex.4w.

Motive w-1 mm. before reh. 12

cb. 1 and 2

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122

DAVID LIPTEN

Ex. 5A(i).

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123

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

rehs. 65-75). These small motivic fragments eventually assume more of a life of their own (compare, for example, motive "z" in mm. 1-6 (see, again, Ex. 4z) with the same motive found at rehs. 9-10 (see Ex. 6) and again at 3 mm. after reh. 26 through one bar after reh. 27 (see Ex. 7». While initially performing a subsidiary role, the smaller motives "progress" by taking up more temporal space, reaching forward to their next appearance while assuming higher functions (as, for example, the combination of motives "z" and "y" in mm. 181-187, (see Ex. 8). This type of procedure is not entirely

Motive z - rehs.9-10 + Subject D - reh. 11

Ex. 6.

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DAVID LIPTEN

Ex. 7.

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new either but has precedence in development sections of some sonata forms where fragments of themes unfold in new and, perhaps, increasingly independent ways (as, for example, in the scherzo of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A major (1828), wherein "the motifs of the first phrase are rearranged at

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

Ex. 9. Schubert Sonata Op. posth. A maj. Scherzo mm. 1-16, 49-78

125

126

DAVID LIPTEN

the beginning of the second part to create an entirely new pattern.")56 (see Ex. 9). Here, Stravinsky establishes another association, taking advantage of a historically determined paradigm. The interruptions also fulfill another role. They connote the function of bridges or transitions (as, for example, motive "z" does (in mm. 47-54 rehs. 9-10» by reintroducing another occurrence of the main chorale subject at reh. 11. (see, again, Ex. 6). This is so in spite of the fact that they do not function exactly in the same way as a bridge or transition would, joining together the two main subjects of differing keys in a sonata form movement. While the way Stravinsky assembles these passages is quite different from most tonal music (despite the fact that the harmonic materials of the piece are themselves often quite diatonic, or even bi-tonal - i.e., mm. 216-225 (see Ex. 10) which suggest an EblBb area), their use, nevertheless, creates associations with similar sections from the standard repertoire. They do not bridge gaps occurring between more substantial subjects of a piece but, in fact, create them. This fact also calls attention to them, making them seem more topical. However, as I stated, the role of an interruption is not identical with that of a bridge or transition. And by using the material, at least initially, in a subsidiary role (a role which is underscored by the relative length of the motives which make up the interruptions), Stravinsky manages to create an analogy with already established musical paradigms, thereby creating intermusical associations. In other words, Stravinsky uses pre-existing aural topics in the case of either a bridge or transition, without literally re-using them. While he does not invent anything new, Stravinsky re-invents and recontextualizes established norms which reside in the memories of his audience. Whatever meaning the music may hold benefits greatly from such associations. Also, the increasing independence of what had been subsidiary musical material helps call attention to it, allowing it also to be recognized in its own right as a(n intra-musical) topic. The interruptions do not, however, become confused with their more established counterparts. One of the factors which helps them maintain their status as independent structures is the speed of their constituent motives. Both the larger subjects and the smaller motives are associated with different tempi (see, again Exs. 4 & 5). Each tempo in the piece is a multiple of the other. Three of the larger subjects have the same speed, while the two remaining ones have closely related speedsY The way the subjects and the motives are combined results in the most temporal variety between interruptions and subject expositions. This demonstrates that Stravinsky's primary concern was the creation of maximum differentiation between successive time segments.

127

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

Ex. 10.

EblBb area - rehs. 45-57

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" bb~ d ~ ob~.

1,2; cor ingI.

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Through each successive interruption Stravinsky creates a fresh context by allowing his listeners to hear where the present music has come from while combining previously exposed music in new ways each time. This

128

DAVID LIPTEN

helps to create a unique intra-musical discourse. However, this practice is not without precedent since it is similar to the idea of recapitulation. But like his attitude toward the symphony orchestra, it is also an idea which he radically rethought. In addition to other, more traditional recapitulations (for example, like the one beginning at reh. 29 and continuing until reh. 51 which restates three of the main subjects (in reverse order) immediately following their exposition)58 (see, again Ex. 3), the interruptions also eventually reiterate previously exposed musical material. However, unlike other recaps, the interruptions are not responsible for summing up all of a work's major arguments under the rubric of an all-encompassing (harmonic) whole. But such an association is no less powerful as long as long-term memory can be called upon in meaningful ways. The interruptions also serve a number of other important functions. In Cone's view, whereas it was fashionable to regard Stravinsky's style as one which was characterized by a great deal of "inconstancy,"59 the opposite has become clear. Among the supposed causes of this seemingly negative trait are the points of interruption themselves. However, Cone believes that the discontinuous character of much of Stravinsky's music is responsible for the success of his style. 60 He goes so far as to make interruptions the focus of an entire article ("Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method"), describing a number of different categories in detail. Cone believes that one of their primary purposes is to set up: a tension between successive time segments. When the action in one area is suspended, the listener looks forward to its eventual resumption and completion; meanwhile action in another [area] has begun, which in tum will demand fulfillment after its own suspension. 61

Like the need for resolution created by dissonance and by the tonic/dominant polarity, the interrupted flow of pre-established musical time creates an expectation in the minds of listeners for the eventual resumption of the music which was cut off. By creating these expectations, Stravinsky also triggers a listener's long-term memory. This procedure substitutes for harmonic means of tension and release. This analogy refers to one of tonality's essential paradigms. It is perhaps the most important paradigmatic reference of any I have listed so far, since it is so basic. Tension and release is a universal function pertaining to all tonal music. It is independent of style as a category and it does not depend upon it to be understood. The degree to which Stravinsky creates an analogy with the topic of tension and release lends credence to Cone's statement regarding the success of his style. It also adds

weight to my earlier statement regarding the import of topics as semiological musical objects.

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

129

Ex. 11. Symphony of Psalms Movement 1 mm. 1-8

~)I~::J<:~ 1:=:1:::1: ~: I ~!::::I:=I:=I:~ : 1 Interruptions, fulfilling a variety of functions, remained important in Stravinsky's approach to form throughout his career, no matter what method of pitch organization he chose to employ. In the Symphony of Psalms of 1930, 1st movement, they reoccur with each of the prominent, though brief E minor chords (see Ex. 11). Interruptions are also a notable feature in his serial pieces. They remain prominent even in Stravinsky'S last major work, the Requiem Canticles (1966), from the breaks in the repeated sixteenth-note figurations of the Prelude (see mm. 33-35), to the sustained instrumental chords of the Exaudi (see mm. 58), to the interjections found in the Dies [rae (see Ex. 12), among others. The setting of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which demarcate the verses in the De Elegia Prima and De Elegia Tertia from another of his serial works, Threni: Id Est Lamentationes Jeremiae Prophetae (1958) are a prominent form of interruption (see Ex. 13). According to White, they: Usually serve as a kind of marker. .. but in the Sensus Spei section some of them are prolonged into pedal chords that accompany the following passages .... The effect... of these brief harmonic glosses give them a curious kind of nimbus. 62

These pedal chords also change the local meaning of the interruptions by integrating them into the flow of the piece. 63 New meaning results from a change in the signifier (interruptions now as pedal chords). This changes the signified (from interruption to locally functional harmony), resulting in a transmutation of the sign. Before I return to my examination of the Symphonies, I would like to summarize my previous points. The topics of an extroversive view of the work include inter-musical references to terms associated with other forms

130

DAVID LIPTEN

Ex. 12.

Requiem Canticles - Dies Irae

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and style periods, such as symphony, whether classical or romantic, or baroque (in the sense of the term's meaning of sounding together), or to episodes or subjects in the baroque, development and recapitulation in sonata forms. These also include paradigms which have more of an intra-musical function - one such topic is the interruption. These, in tum, are comprised of other intra-musical topics, including the main motives of the piece (many instances of this idea are found in J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No.5 in D major (see Ex. 14) where Bach re-uses the first part of the consequent phrase of the ritomello from m. 3, first in m. 21 in the solo flute part in aug-

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

Ex. 12.

131

(cont.)

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mentation, to interrupt a recurrence of the ritornello and to reassert the primacy of the ripieno's material). The interruptions make the listener aware of the existence of synchronic and diachronic time. These topics refer to some of the others listed above without making direct use of them. Most importantly, Stravinsky refers to the basic paradigm of tension and release without literally resorting to conventional methods of harmonic organization or, at least, not obviously. By using all of these references, Stravinsky creates connotations which call upon a store of memory and shared cultural information for their ability to signify. He manages to reinterpret history without duplicating it. Stravinsky's reliance on established paradigms insures that the meaning(s) behind his composition will be transmitted.

132

DAVID LIPTEN

Ex. 13. Threni - De Elegia Tertia 1. Querimonia - first two systems + 2. Sensus Spei mm. 1-3

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The topics of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments do not depend upon traditional pitchlharmonic relationships in order to convey their meaning. However, Stravinsky does undergird the Symphonies with procedures which are analogously tonal, thereby reinforcing the call to one's inner ear. According to Jonathan Kramer, the piece contains "an underlying background continuity of voice leading."64 While voice-leading in such a piece may serve the same purpose as it would in a tonal piece, it does not do so under the same set of rules. Its presence in a post-tonal piece connotes associations with more traditional music. Therefore, voice-leading may be considered a topic. The way that such an intra-musical topic conveys its significance is the purview of an introversive analysis. In an article entitled "A Principle of Voice Leading in the Music of Stravinsky,"65 Joseph Straus begins from the premise that some music of the

133

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

Ex. 13.

(cont.) 2. Sensus Spei (mm. 1-3)

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twentieth century is organized around functional tonal centers without being functionally tonal. His discussion centers around a method, informed by Schenker, whereby pitch elements of the foreground can be accounted for by some sort of relationship with the harmonic and contrapuntal matrix of the background. The approach is to use traditional ideas to explain the organization of such works. However, there is a twist. Straus describes a feature of voice-leading which he calls "pattern completion." In his words: According to this principle, a certain unordered collection or set of notes (generally a tetrachord) is established as a structural norm for the composition, pervading the surface of the

134

DAVID LIPTEN

Ex. 14. Brandenburg Concerto No.5 Movement 1 mm. 3 & 19-21

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music (both melodic and harmonic) and governing the tonal motion at all levels of structure. Through repetition, this normative unit becomes so engrained in a listener's consciousness that the sounding of part of the pattern creates an expectation for the completion of that pattern ... this principle is also valid for structurally related tones of a repeated normative tetrachordal pattem. 66

Succinctly put, if three notes of a repeated tetrachordal pattern are sounded (whether inverted or transposed), an expectation for the eventual sounding of the missing note will be created, as, for example, 3 measures before reh. 8 where two transpositionally related trichordal subsets of such a normative tetrachord are heard in each of the accompanimental flute parts (fl. 2 - Cb, Db, Eb; fl. 3 - C, D, Fb - see Ex. 15). In addition, the melody contains a representation of a complete tetrachord (Gb, Ab, Bb and Cb). The last pitch of each incomplete major tetrachord is then sounded at reh. 8 (E in fl. 2; F in fl. 3). The sounding of the missing notes creates closure and paves the way for the beginning of a new subject. Straus contends that this process permeates both the foreground and background organization of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. This idea is quite similar to the one

135

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

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pertaining to the interruptions which I posed earlier. Just as Stravinsky creates a sense of expectation for events which were temporally cut off to eventually complete the discourse which they had begun, he creates the same set of expectations through his choice of pitch. In tonality, expectation or tension is created by a need to resolve dissonance, culminating in the harmonic cadence. While Stravinsky does not achieve either tension, release or closure according to the same rules, his music calls for an analogous psychological response. This demonstrates his reliance on another fundamental paradigm drawn from history which allows the intra-musical topic of voiceleading to signify. The existence of closure itself implies directionality and arrival. In a certain sense, both of these are also referential. However, Straus attributes other ends to the process of pattern completion in addition to closure. Primary amongst these is the control over large-scale tonal motion. He contends that pattern-completion also controls the background organization of the piece. Straus demonstrates the composing out of one of these tetrachords through successive transpositions which directs the long-range motion from F to C. This motion is underscored by a bass descent from F to E and to D (see Ex. 16). The missing C is withheld until the climax of the piece at reh. 54 and is restated again at the end. This pitch completes the descending fourth background motion begun at the beginning of the piece. Its absence from the normative tetrachord creates an expectation of closure. Its eventual presence demonstrates that the foreground and background of the piece are regulated

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DAVID LIPTEN

by such a tetrachord. And, in Straus' estimation, both are also controlled by the process of pattern-completion. While it is debatable whether one can hear this organization, this type of analytical approach may provide us with another piece of the puzzle. It demonstrates the Symphonies' cohesiveness in quite a comprehensible and seemingly rigorous way. It also shows that the work can be heard and understood as a totality by virtue of its fully integrated parts. However, it does not explicitly tell us what it is that is inherent in a listener's psychology that is satisfied either by pattern-completion or even by the fulfillment of expectations which this process both creates and fulfills. While it also accounts for some of the ways in which Stravinsky refers to still more paradigms (like closure and directionality, albeit indirectly), it does not consider the appeal to memory that he makes. As I have demonstrated, memory is necessary in order to make sense of both what is present (or what is recalled when a work is performed), and what is absent (the cumulative history which the piece refers to). The greatest measure of signification any piece of music may hold is ultimately dependent upon both forms of recall. What is more immediately present is made sense of by interpreting signs which reside in the syntagmatic plane. More distant memories are explained by interpreting those signs which are found in the paradigmatic plane. The functions of both forms of memory are described by introversive and extroversive semiosis. Therefore, we may be helped by semiology in accounting for the ways in which a composer makes his or her musical choices. Despite the fact that there have been attempts to use semiology in place of other types of analysis (Nattiez), semiological music analysis is indebted to other, more established means. Indeed, such an approach does not supplant other methods at all. Instead, semiology allows one to regard the results of other analyses in a different light. For example, one may determine how a piece of music cadences by employing traditional means. One may then ask what consequences this occurrence has for the unfolding of the rest of the piece. And by adding a semiological approach, one may then ask why this matters beyond the obvious or, more importantly, how. In other words, semiology allows one to entertain the question of what is significant about the fact that a piece cadences at all (beyond the mere fact that it does so and that the way it does is either more or less similar to other examples). It may seem to some that these endeavors will only elicit frivolous results. It seems to me, however, that since the main goal of musical semiology is to help explain how music communicates, then its application may prove to be important.

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

137

NOTES I Roland Barthes cites Ferdinand de Saussure's definition of semiology as being a "general science of signs ... [which also] aims to take in any system of signs: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification," in Elements of Semiology, tr. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Hill and Wang, New York, 1964), p. 5. 2 Edward T. Cone, "Beyond Analysis," Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, Benjamin T. Boretz and Edward T. Cone, eds. (New York: w.w. Norton & Co., 1972). 3 Ibid., pp. 81-82. 4 See Donald Jay Grout's and Claude V. Palisca's A History of Western Tonal Music (New York: w.w. Norton & Co., 1988), pp. 354-55, for a summary discussion of the evolution of "common-practice" tonality. 5 Cone, p. 85. 6 Ibid., p. 85. 7 Ibid., p. 86. 8 I am using the term "post-tonal music" to encompass all compositional procedures which have arisen since the end of what is referred to as the common-practice period. It is difficult, if not impossible to affix an exact date to this occurrence since it neither came about in a single event, nor has it been absolute. Consequently, I choose to use the term loosely. 9 Cone, "Beyond Analysis," p. 76. 10 Barthes, Elements of Semiology, chap. 2 passim. According to Barthes, 'The nature of the signified ... is not a 'thing' but a mental representation of the 'thing' ... [it is] a concept: the signified of the word ox is not the animal ox, but its mental image." Barthes goes on to define the signifier in terms of the signified: "The nature of the signifier suggests roughly the same remarks as that of the signified: it is purely a relatum, whose definition cannot be separated from that of the signified. The only difference is that the signifier is a mediator: some matter is necessary to

it."

Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. 13 This is not to say, however, that music cannot connote other discourses. I am merely trying to delimit the application of these terms for my own purposes. 14 On the subject of music as communication, see Nattiez, Musicologie Generale et Semiologie (Paris: Union Generale, 1975), Chapter I, especially pp. 38-51. IS Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 62. 17 Ibid., p. 61. 18 V. Kofi Agawu, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 7-10. Agawu discusses in this context Joachim Burmeister's Musica Poetica, Johann Mattheson's Vollkommene Capellmeister, writings by Heinrich Koch. He also mentions Allan Keiler's "Bernstein's 'The Unanswered Question' and the Problem of Musical Competence," Mario Baroni's "The Concept of Musical Grammar," David Lidov's "Nattiez's Semiotics of Music," idem, "Musical and Verbal Semantics," idem, "The Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh," Fred Lerdahl and Raymond Jackendorff's A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, and Harold Powers' "Language Models and Music Analysis." 19 Ibid., p. 10, citing Charles Rosen's The Classical Style, and Leonard Ratner's Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. Agawu also cites Friederich Blume's Classic and Romantic Music in this context. 11

12

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DAVID LIPTEN

Ibid., p. 6. Barthes, p. 71. Barthes describes Saussure's understanding of the system as being "a series of associative fields, some determined by an affinity of sound ... some by an affinity of meaning." 22 Agawu, pp. 9-10. In discussing the relationship of music and language, Agawu states that "because it [the communication issue] is so closely bound up with the status of language as an interpreting system, [it] becomes more and more complex .... Viewed from the perspective of post-Saussurean linguistics, the engagement with language in the writings of Rosen, Ratner, and Blume is also an implicit engagement with semiotics. The danger with such a claim, however, is that it may stretch the purview of semiotics so widely that it takes in practically all signifying phenomena. Yet such an enterprise in no way contradicts the fundamental motivation of semiotics, which is a sharper delineation of the ways in which we know things." 23 Ibid., p. 8. 24 Ibid., p. 9. 25 Ibid., p. 9. 26 Ibid., p. 10. 27 Jonathan Dunsby and John Stopford, "The Case for a Schenkerian Semiotic," Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 3 (1981), pp. 49-53. 28 Agawu, pp. 12-13. 29 Ibid., p. 14. 30 There is a price to be paid for this comfort: the division of audiences into two categories that of the specialist and the relatively uneducated, the consequences of which are apparent and too numerous to go into in the present discussion. The same kind of specialization of knowledge and terminology in semiology as in traditional music analysis also threatens the universality of meaning which it portends to uncover. 31 Analogous kinds of changes are also recognized by semiology, both in terms of the signifier/signified opposition and in terms of linguistic units called phonemes which are used to distinguish between other types of linguistic units called musemes. Raymond Monelle, citing Charles Seeger, states that the phoneme is the "smallest and meaningless unit of signaling [which] combines to form units of meaning [a museme]." Simply put, phonemes are linguistic units which are used to distinguish one moneme from another. In musical terms then, a phoneme may consist of a single tone or beat, while a museme would consist of their combination. See, "Music and Semantics," Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music, Eero Tarasti, ed. (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995) for a more complete discussion. 32 Agawu cites Emile Benveniste's views on Charles Sanders Peirce's broad aims in developing semiotics into a system of "distributing all of reality, the conceptual, and the experimental into various categories of signs," p. 10. The onus on anyone who chooses to employ semiotics then is to delimit its application in order to focus its analytical methods and results. 33 Ibid., p. 16. 34 "Topic" is a term which Agawu borrows from Ratner. According to Ratner, "music in the 18th century developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures ... Some [of these] were associated with various feelings and affections; others had a picturesque flavor. They are designated here as topics." See Leonard Ratner's Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, especially pp. 9-27. 35 Agawu, p. 19. 36 Ibid., p. 49. 37 Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), pp. 27-28. 20 21

SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL CHOICE

139

Ibid., pp. 91-92. Agawu, pp. 17-18. 40 Ibid., p. 17. 41 Ibid., p. 17. The fact that this music is considered "classic" by western standards suggests the possibility of its having remained the standard against which all other western music is measured. The possible existence of this standard is perhaps central in understanding not only the history of much of the music which has followed it, but also where this music draws its paradigms from. 42 Ibid., p. 50. 43 Ibid., p. 23. 44 Ibid., p. 23. See, also, Roman Jakobson's "Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 704-5. While, for example, a harmonic progression can refer to other harmonic progressions and, therefore, can be analyzed extroversively, it seems to be more valuable to restrict the use of the term to topical significance. Just as semiology views the relationship between signs as being more important than any intrinsic properties of those signs, I believe that the ways in which topics refer to one another convey the most meaning. 45 Ibid., pp. 51-79. 46 See, again, Ratner, pp. 9-27. 47 See Agawu's analysis of Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, first movement, for a discussion of how the topical discourse avoids coincidence with the main structural points and how this disjunction is largely responsible for the work's expressivity, pp. 110-126. 48 See Charles Rosen's The Classical Style, pp. 451-452 for a discussion of the relationship between the classical style and the style of music which followed it. For example, he states that Robert Schumann's reference to the last song of Beethoven's cycle An die ferne Geliebte in his Fantasy in C Major, Op. 17 is "in all significant respects unclassical: even the appearance of Beethoven's melody is itself unclassical by its reference to a personal and completely private significance." 49 See Joseph N. Straus' Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition, p. 16 for a more complete discussion of inter-textuality. Straus goes so far as to state that "No text can be truly discrete .... Rather every text [piece] is interpenetrated by others and speaks with a variety of voices... coherence depends upon the ability of... [a] new musical context to hold the older elements in its grasp." See, also n. 15. 50 See Edward T. Cone, "Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method," Perspectives of New Music, Vol. I, No.1, p. 19. Cone connects the Symphonies with the first movement of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto where Bach uses incomplete statements of the ritornello, thereby creating an expectation for its eventual completion. 51 This is so in the case of Stravinsky'S neo-baroque works like Pulcinella (1920) and the Concerto in Eb ("Dumbarton Oaks") of 1937-8 and the one in D ("Basle"), of 1946. Other associations are created by works which are said to belong to his neo-classical period, like the Piano Concerto (1923-4), the Capriccio (1929), the Violin Concerto (1931), the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos (1935), up to and including the Symphony in C (1939-40). A case can be made for the same type of associations created by the title Mass which, while intended for actual liturgical service is, nevertheless, demonstrably different in language and even affect from traditional masses. This category may also include the Requiem Canticles (1965-6), among others. 52 See Eric Walter White, Stravinsky, The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 293-294 for a complete formal analysis of the Symphonies. The ter38 39

140

DAVID LIPTEN

minology used in referring to the building blocks of the piece (subject, motive, etc.) are borrowed from this book. All references to the Symphonies are from the revised edition of 1947. 53 Ibid., p. 293. White's use of this term suggests another inter-musical reference, perhaps to baroque fugue. 54 These topics may not necessarily signify by "conventional" rules but may do so by analogy. 55 It is possible that these smaller motives supply the connective tissue otherwise missing from the piece due to the absence of strings from the ensemble. 56 Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York, etc.: W. W. Norton & Co.), p. 274. 57 The speeds are, respectively: quarter =72, quarter = 108 - a tempo which is I and 112 times as fast as the initial one, and quarter = 144, twice as fast as the original. 58 White., p. 293. 59 Cone, "Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method," p. 18. 60 Ibid., p. 18. Cone claims that from Le Sacre du Printemps on, Stravinsky's textures have been characterized by "sudden breaks affecting almost every musical dimension: instrumental, harmonic and modal, linear and motivic ... [with almost all of these being present] in the first dozen measures of the Symphonies of Wind Instruments." 61 Ibid., p. 19. 62 White, p. 503. 63 By re-casting the interruptions in a new way (here, as pedal chords), Stravinsky may be demonstrating their latent organicism. This forces us to consider them from another perspective. 64 Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music (Schirmer Books: New York), p. 211. 65 Joseph Straus, "A Principle of Voice Leading in the Music of Stravinsky," Music Theory Spectrum, vol. 4 (1982): 106-124. 66 Ibid., p. 107.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agawu, V. Kofi. Playing with Signs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Bach, Johann Sebastian. Brandenburg Concerto No.5 in D Major (London, etc.: Ernst Eulenburg, Ltd., 1928). Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Annette Lavers, trans., Colin Smith, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964). Benveniste, Emile. "The Semiology of Language." Semiotica special supplement (1981): 5-23, reprinted in Semiotica: An Introductory Reader. Robert Innis, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University press 1985): 228-46. Cone, Edward T. "Beyond Analysis." Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory. Benjamin Boretz, ed. and Edward T. Cone, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1972): 72-90. Cross, Jonathan. "Music Theory and the Challenge of Modern Music: Birtwistle's Refrains and Choruses." Theory, Analysis, and Meaning in Music. Anthony Pople, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 184-194. Dunsby, Jonathan. "A Hitchiker's Guide to Semiotic Music Analysis." Music Analysis, 1 (1982): 235-242. __ . "Criteria of Correctness in Music Theory and Analysis." Theory, Analysis, and Meaning in Music. Anthony Pople, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 77-85. _ _ . "A Schenkerian Semiotic." Music Theory Spectrum, 3 (1981): 49-53.

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Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Grout, Donald. A History of Western Music. 4th edition. Clause V. Palisca, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). Harrison, Daniel. "Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music by V. Kofi Agawu." Integral, 6 (1992): 136-50. Hatten, Robert S. "Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music by V. Kofi Agawu." Music Theory Spectrum, 14 (1992): 88-92. Innis, Robert E. Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings II: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). Kramer, Jonathan D. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988). __ . "Discontinuity and Proportion in the Music of Igor Stravinsky." Confronting Stravinsky, Man, Musician, and Modernist. Jann Pasler, ed. (Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1986). Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4. John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Cape, 1970). Monelle, Raymond. Linguistics and Semiotics in Music (Chur, etc.: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992). __ . "Music and Semantics." Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music. Eero Tarasti, ed. (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995). Morgan, Robert P. Twentieth Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton. 1991). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Fondements d'une Semiologie de la Musique (Paris: Union Generale, 1975). Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles Hartshorne, ed., Paul Weiss, ed., A. W. Burk, ed. 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958). Pople, Anthony. "Systems and Strategies: Functions and Limits of Analysis." Theory, Analysis, and Meaning in Music. Anthony Pople, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 108-126. Ratner, Leonard G. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980). Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style (London: Faber, 1971). __ . Sonata Forms (New York, etc.: W. W. Norton, & Co. 1980). Ruwet, Nicholas. Langage, Musique, Poesie (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Straus, Joseph N. "A Principle of Voice Leading in the Music of Stravinsky." Music Theory Spectrum, 4 (1982): 106-24. __ . Remarking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music. Arthur Knodel, trans., Ingolf Dahl, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947). __ . Requiem Canticles for contralto and bass soli, chorus and orchestra (London, etc.: Boosey & Hawkes, 1967). __ . Symphonie de Psaumes pour choeur mixte et orchestre, arr. (Berlin, etc.: Edition Russe de Musique, 1930). __ . Symphonies of Wind Instruments, revised ed. (London, etc.: Boosey & Hawkes, 1947).

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__ . Threni ed est: Lamentations Jeremiae Prophetae for Soli, mixed chorus and orchestra (London, etc.: Boosey & Hawkes, 1958). Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique generale. Rudolph Engler, critical edition (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1968). Tunstall, Patricia. "Structuralism and Musicology: An Overview." Current Musicology (1979): 51-64. White, Eric Walter. Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1966).

JAMES PARSONS

WHEN IS A WORK OF MUSIC REAL?

Too much inquiring after the sources of things is dangerous. We should rather concentrate on phenomena as given realities. Goethe

Although the celebrated Renaissance music theorist Johannes Tinctoris could confidently affirm in 1477 that "there does not exist a single piece of music not composed within the last forty years that is regarded by the learned as worthy of hearing," the same statement - at least as it concerns art music could not be made today.l In the event, the excitement and anticipation that in previous eras greeted the musically new, nowadays is reserved for "authentic" performances of compositions from a curiously constructed past. Admittance into the canon of acceptability demands not only that a musical work have withstood the test of time, but also that it possess an unimpeachable pedigree. In other words, compositions bearing the labels "creator unknown" or "creator little known" are not granted space in today's musical museums. At the outset two questions present themselves: why this radical shift and who is it that decides such matters? Flying in the face of good judgment - not to mention the rules of musical counterpoint - I should like to attempt an answer to the last question first by way of a philosophical musing I will label as countersubject, a compelling formulation by Nino Pirrotta wherein he reminds us that the word "musicology" is a relatively recent invention. "It is modeled," he writes, after the old and glorious name of philology. But whoever invented the older name set the accent on love - love of beauty in speech; every subsequent derivation has emphasized instead the logos component, with inelegant verbosity and, in the name of objectivity, with a detached, almost aggressive attitude toward its purported subject. Lovely and loving Philology was deemed by a poet the worthy bride of Mercury: I can think of Musicology only as a maiden, whose secret love for no lesser deity than Apollo will never have a chance until she gets rid of her heavy glasses, technical jargon, and businesslike approach and assumes a gentler, more humanistic manner.2

For many people one of the more vexatious manifestations of this "almost aggressive attitude" is the way musicological research has tended to shrink rather than swell the catalogues of the great composers. Bach has been shorn of fourteen of the church cantatas once counted as his, among them the beloved Schlage doch, gewiinschte Stunde, No. 53, and the popular Uns ist ein Kind geboren, No. 142.3 Giovanni Battista Pergolesi has had whole 143

© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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JAMES PARSONS

library shelves of music taken away from him, including everything Igor Stravinsky used in Pulcinella; as is now known most of the pieces Stravinsky quarried are by none other than Domenico Gallo, a composer about whom next to nothing is known. 4 The Brahms-Haydn Variations, Opp. 56a and b (for orchestra and piano respectively), the so-called "St. Anthony Variations," are now Brahms-Anyone's Guess. 5 And "Pur ti miro," the ravishing duet for Nerone and Poppe a that caps "Monteverdi's" L'incoronazione di Poppea, may not be by the aging composer at all - "the glowing sunset" of his "long career" - but by Benedetto Ferrari, Francesco Sacrati, Filiberto Laurenzi, or Francesco Cavalli. 6 Mozart's Requiem - to detour momentarily from the issue that will be my primary concern - presents a comparable but also subtly more complex conundrum. Here the difficulty centers not on whether or not Mozart had a hand in the Requiem, but on how much of the authorial hand is his.7 The question has had a venerable and oftentimes tempestuous career, the seeds for which were planted a mere nine years after Mozart's death when his one-time pupil Franz Xavier Stissmayer wrote to the publishing house of Breitkopf and Hartel stating that it was he who had completed the Lacrymosa and "composed afresh" the Sanctus, Osanna, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. 8 From here the seeds of skepticism first bore fruit in 1825 when Gottfried Weber impugned the genuineness of the piece in his legalistically-argued "Uber die Echtheit des Mozart'schen Requiem";9 a year later Mozart's old friend Abbe Maximilian Stadler responded to Weber's charges with his Vertheidigung der Echtheit des Mozart'schen Requiem; 170 years later the issue still lacks resolution. So much so, in fact, that Richard Maunder recently embarked on an edition that attempts, as he puts it, to come "a little closer than its predecessors to what Mozart might have written if he had lived to finish the Requiem."10 Such an aim, as Thomas Bauman has noted, is one that "opens a new direction to the theory and practice of Werktreue by swearing fealty to an artwork not as it really was, but as it might have been."ll Thus Maunder discards altogether anything he deems to be not by Mozart, in short the Sanctus, Osanna, and Benedictus. Yet curiously enough, in view of his aim to transmit the Requiem in a version "as faithful as possible to what can be deduced of the composer's intentions," Maunder's own additions are judged worthy of standing alongside what Mozart himself completed. Thus the edition contains Maunder's own revision of the Agnus Dei, a new version of the Lacrymosa, the completion of an Amen Fugue exposition by Mozart dating from 1791 discovered by Wolfgang Plath in 1962,12 as well as a complete overhauling of the orchestration.

WHEN IS A WORK OF MUSIC REAL?

145

Whatever one decides about Siissmayer's involvement in the Requiem, Maunder's additions and completions forcefully underscore the problems to be encountered in questions of composer authenticity. How, for instance, do we respond to a work wholly by Mozart? Do we respond differently when we know the composition to be the joint effort of MozartSiissmayer or Mozart-Maunder? Do we respond to the work or the name of the person responsible for the work? Is it possible or desirable even, to ask this last question? Does the work exist outside of the composer? Is a composer's music nothing more than the means by which we attempt to piece together a picture of his or her personality? If we agree with Aristotle that art has its "origin ... in the maker, not in the thing made," must we also agree that the meaning, too, resides exclusively in the maker?13 As we shall see, when the issue at hand is the authenticity of a work, questions of this sort almost never receive an answer because they so rarely are asked in the first place. Nonetheless, the tempers and passions of those who involve themselves in the problems of composer authenticity almost always run high. This point is very much at the heart of the attribution problem I will take up in depth now, the dispute over who composed the six Opus 3 String Quartets traditionally ascribed to Franz Joseph Haydn: Haydn, or as current wisdom would have it, his near contemporary Roman Hoffstetter? To judge by the amount of ink spilled over the topic, not to mention the considerable display of unbridled ego, the dispute very well may be the most arresting of all such concems. 14 But first let us take a look at the critical stock of the Opus 3 Quartets before Haydn's authorship was called into question. IS Haydn's respected nineteenth-century biographer Carl Friedrich Pohl, although he predated the controversy by a good seventy years, never registered the slightest doubt either that the quartets were by Haydn, or, even more to the point, that they were worthwhile compositions. Of the Opus 3, No.1 "andantino grazioso" third movement, he enthusiastically observed: "The first violin sings the melody, while the second accompanies in sixteenth notes." The movement is "a true serenade, full of simplicity, happiness, and innocence - a rose bush abounding with blossoms that allows one to forget the cares of the world."16 The Minuet and Trio of Opus 3, No.3, Pohl found "enchanting, perhaps the most beautiful in the whole [Opus 3] set." Not only this, "in it Haydn is about twenty years ahead of his time. Were one to insert this movement into any of his later quartets, one would hardly be able to tell it had been written beforehand."17 Fifty-four years later Donald Francis Tovey found little reason to disagree with Pohl's entirely positive

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endorsement; as he noted in his article on Haydn for Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music: If Pohl demands a postdating of five years for study preparatory to Haydn's Op. 1, it is strange that he should not demand another five years to account for the great progress made between Op. 2 and Op. 3; a progress which makes it impossible to put the first eighteen quartets into one group. The difference is obvious to practical musicians and the general public; for, with Op. 3, Haydn enters into the public repertory of modem quartets players. Pohl cites the case of a famous quartet party that used to substitute the delightful Dudelsack [bagpipe] minuet of Op. 3 for the minuet of one of the finest later quartets; and the whole of Op. 3, no. 5, with its wellknown and irresistible serenade ... has recently been chosen by the Busch Quartet for a gramophone record. The Dudelsack minuet, the serenade, and its twin-brother the andante of Op. 3, no. 1, are examples of luxury-scoring, contributing with all their charm, no more than the art of Boccherini to the development of quartet style and dramatic sonata-activity. They are not out of place in the works as a whole, for everything that enlarges the range of contrast between the middle and outer movements is a contribution to sonata style .... The andantino grazioso [Opus 3, No.1] is not inferior to its twin brother, the famous serenade in Op. 3, no. 5. In fact we are emerging from the regions of progressive musical history into those of permanent beauty, though we are not yet under its full sway. IS

Although other scholars likewise have had favorable things to say about the Opus 3 Quartets,19 I conclude my survey of the positive evaluations of the set with one from the field of journalistic criticism, to whit C. J. Luten's 1953 review of a then new recording of some of the Opus 3 pieces. "The famous serenade," he remarks, "is the only familiar music here. The rest ... is first rate, ... and attests to the ease, maturity, and mastery the great Austrian master had attained by the 1750s."20 By 1960, however, following Laslo Somfai's first article on the Opus 3 question, what had heretofore been held up as evidence of "luxury-scoring" and compositional "maturity and mastery" began to be viewed rather differently. "The whole trouble with Opus III," Somfai protests in his second article on the subject, is its "overall style: unHaydnish in the brilliant, glossy finish, the slick virtuoso treatment, set against an empty spiritual content."21 Other scholars have seen fit to agree. James Webster, within the pages of his 1974 dissertation, dismisses the entire Opus as a "rather dilettantish production,"22 while Oivind Eckhoff condemns all but No.5 - which he pronounces a "masterpiece" - with "compositional crudeness," "noticeable shortage of invention," as well as a "paucity of ... harmonic invention," the latter the result of a composer clinging "stubbornly to the very simplest and most elementary harmonic functions."23 Eckhoff furthermore censures Nos. 1--4 and 6 for what he terms their "fundamental incoherence" and "inability to build up tension and to release it at the right moment."24 What is more, the five

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are indicted as well for the way in which the development sections of sonataallegro movements lack lasting interest, being on the whole "glib and vapid, bringing no surprises, no[r] dramatic elements of any sort."25 Eckhoff also takes exception to the "Bagpipe" minuet third movement of No.3 - the same movement which, Pohl maintained, found Haydn "about twenty years ahead of his time" and which Tovey proclaimed "delightful" - as the "pinnacle of crudity," all because a "transition from E Minor to D Major [in measures 12-13] is effected simply by an emphatic parallel dislocation from one topic in root position to another."26 Elsewhere Eckhoff employs such words as "slipshod," "clumsy," "offensive," "awkward," "meaningless," and "incomprehensible." Given the previous faults he enumerates, not to mention the volley of vituperative epithets, his summary sentence comes as something of a jolt: "Bearing in mind such facts as these, my unbiased observer will admit that the man who wrote the five quartets discussed here [Nos. 1-4 and 6], must have been rather lax in his compositional work."27 Eckhoff's dictionary obviously defines the word "unbiased" rather differently than does mine. To put the matter bluntly: was the music only "first rate" when it was thought to be by Franz Joseph Haydn, a respected and acknowledged great composer? Can Somfai, Webster, and Eckhoff really be talking about the same music as were Pohl, Tovey - a critic who according to Webster, writing in another context, is arguably one of the "greatest analysts of this century"28 - and Luten? Can the same music be on the one hand "first rate," reflecting "the ease, maturity, and mastery" of "the great Austrian master," and possess moments of "permanent beauty" that allow the listener to "forget the cares of the world," yet on the other hand be "vapid," "dilettantish," "vulgar," and devoid of all "spiritual content"? Revealingly enough, Eckhoff is unwilling to deprive Haydn of Opus 3, No.5. The rationale is not difficult to uncover, especially when one recalls that the piece contains the celebrated "Serenade," a movement described by Alan Tyson and H. C. Robbins Landon as "perhaps the most famous quartet movement ever written."29 Indeed, given the movement's long-standing fame, one wonders how much notice the whole Opus 3 question would have garnered had it not been for this movement. By the same token, given that the quartet Eckhoff regards as a "masterpiece" is the same one that contains the "Serenade," one must ask whether or not it was the movement's fame or its musical merits that induced him to reach this conclusion. And why must the entire quartet be a masterpiece? Why not just the "Serenade"? To my way of thinking a case could be made that Eckhoff does not apply the same stringent criteria to Opus 3, No.5, as he does to the five other Opus 3 quartets.

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To begin with, his criticisms of the quartets in Opus 3, Nos. 1-4 and 6 are very specific. Not so his subjective praise of No. 5. Save for the references to measure numbers, his remarks just as easily could apply to any number of compositions from Haydn and his day, to Hugo Wolf a century later. "The superior artistic quality of Quartet No.5 as compared to all the other works of the Opus 3 set is easily demonstrable in all four movements," Eckhoff asserts. The most obvious of the aspects testifying to this superiority is the far greater melodic inventiveness shown by the composer of this work. Thus, the first movement has no less than four attractive and tuneful themes - two principal ones (the main theme, and the one beginning in m. 41, last beat) and two subordinate ones (beginning, respectively, at m. 28 and m. 73). The first of these subordinate themes forms part of the transition, whereas the second dominates the concluding section of the exposition. Both melodically and rhythmically, each of the four themes has its own, distinct individuality; but at the same time there are subtle affinities between them a trait which is not very typical of the ... [other Opus 3] works. 3D

Of the "Serenade," Eckhoff effuses: The worldwide reputation of the second movement ... is well deserved and justified. This Andante cantabile is certainly one of the most melodious of all string quartet movements in existence. Here too, there is a profusion of ingratiating themes: main theme, transition theme (beginning in m. 2, last beat), second principal theme (from m. 19, 1st beat, to m. 27, third beat); and codetta theme. In addition, there is a new transition theme in the recapitulation, beginning on the last beat of m. 47 .... The magic of this continuous, ever-flowing melody, its exquisite grace and gentle tenderness, is such that the listener never gets any feeling of monotony - despite the fact that the three lower instruments have nothing to do but to furnish a simple, chordal pizzicato accompaniment to the wide melodic arches of the muted first violin. It gives a feeling resembling the enchantment experienced when listening to much of Schubert's instrumental music. 3l

We need not go on. "Exquisite grace and gentle tenderness" notwithstanding, when all is said and done tuneful expansiveness and thematic individuality are all Eckhoff can adduce to buttress his contention that Opus 3, No.5, is a "masterpiece" over the rest of the set. But is this really enough? That such in fact is not enough may be targeted by a brief look at a number of quartets indisputably known to be by Haydn. As it happens, not only did Haydn set considerable store by the first group of works I have in mind, but scholars, too, have found in them a rich storehouse reflecting Haydn's burgeoning compositional command. The composer's own testimony on the topic of his Opus 33 Quartets comes, of course, in the famous and often-quoted statement set down in a number of letters penned 3 December 1781 to various influential music lovers, in which he makes known their availability in prepublication manuscript copies. The Quartets

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are of "an entirely new and special kind," Haydn promises, "since 1 have written none for ten years."32 Taking Haydn at face value that the Quartets do reflect something "entirely new and special," Ludwig Finscher has found in them the full realization of a wholly "classic" idiom, one Charles Rosen has said "represents a revolution in style." The first page alone of the opening work in B Minor, Rosen maintains, heralds this revolution in the innovative relationship between melody and accompaniment. "I do not yet know of an earlier instance," Rosen writes, "of an accompaniment figure changing imperceptibly and without a break into the principal melodic voice."33 More recently still, Gretchen A. Wheelock has seen in the Opus 33 Quartets a display of "audacity in manipulating the most familiar of conventional gestures," a boldness that Haydn in turn "used to advantage as artful strategies that engaged the participating voices [of the performers] as well as the communities of listeners for whose pleasure the [musical] conversation is played OUt."34 How lucky for us all, then, that no one has thought to challenge the authenticity of the Opus 33 Quartets. If Eckhoff could deride the "emphatic parallel dislocation" from D Minor to E Major in the Minuet of Opus 3, No.3, as "the pinnacle of crudity" or the presence of consecutive octaves and fifths in mm. 42-48 of the first movement of Opus 3, No.4, as confirmation of "the uncritical and slipshod way" its composer was accustomed to working, not to mention the overall "textural monotony" of the work as a whole, one can only surmise what his "unbiased" ruminations would make of the following. Note, for instance, the flagrant octave doublings in the thirdmovement Andante of Opus 33, No. 1. 35 Is this yet another "curious inclination," to quote from Eckhoff's words on the Opus 3 Quartets, from "a composer wishing to develop a distinctive quartet style"?36 Then, too, how ought we to respond to the hidden octaves between the first violin and viola in the Presto finale of Opus 33, No.2, in the first full measure of the movement, a measure we shall hear many times more given the movement's rondo structure? Or what of the ostensibly "ill-placed thinning out of sonority at [a] climatic" moment, as in the three-voice unison doubled at the octave below in the D-Major Quartet, Opus 33, No.6, the very sort of quartet texture Eckhoff assures us "never occurs in Haydn"?3? Or, to move now to the subject of harmony as well as to yet another Haydn opus, how should we view the supposed infractions to be found in the opening movement of the Quartet Opus 54, No.3, a movement praised by Rosen as "a model for dramatic and yet conversational dialogue"?38 Consider the stretch of music beginning in measure 41, a climatic moment indeed

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given that we are led to expect cadential confirmation of the movement's second key area. Following measure 40's half bar silence for all but the first violin, measure 41 initiates movement to the second key with its dominant seventh: F-sharp, A-sharp, C-sharp, E, leading to a triad on B. Yet notice how the resolution to the second key is brought about. That is, notice that the A-sharp (the leading tone of B) does not resolve "properly" up by half step in the second violin nor does the dominant's seventh resolve "properly" down by half step in the viola; the second violin descends a seventh and the viola descends a fifth. The "second chance" five bars later is similarly unorthodox: here the seventh of the dominant fails to resolve "properly" again. And the opportunity to make amends in the movement's recapitulation likewise is missed. For the sake of argument, let us hypothesize that evidence came to the fore establishing that Haydn was neither the composer of the Opus 33 Quartets nor of Opus 54, No.3. How would we view the supposed transgressions adduced by Eckhoff above? Would we assert that the declaration about an "entirely new and special" way of writing quartets was in reality nothing more than a hoax? Would we still find in these works the deft interplay between melody and accompaniment lauded by Rosen or the assured manipulation of gestures praised by Wheelock? And what of the harmonic irregularities in the first movement of Opus 54, No.3? Would we begin to find in all of these "infringements" confirmation of "compositional crudeness" whereby a "dilettantish pen" succeeded in pawning off music of dubious "spiritual content"?39 In his article "Early Music Defended against Its Devotees," Laurence Dreyfus frames his remarks by noting that "Early Music signifies first of all people and only secondarily things."4o One wonders, in view of the disapproving critical assessments leveled against the Opus 3 set, if it might not be possible to extend Dreyfus's evaluation to encompass the question of composer authenticity as well. Are the motives we have for wanting to know the genuine author of a composition really related to music? Just how difficult this last question is may be illustrated by recounting a story in which I happen to have played a tangential role when, some years ago, I was asked by the Wilmington, Delaware Grand Opera House to write the program annotations for an upcoming recital by the violinist Itzhak Perlman and the pianist Samuel Sanders, a request to which I was honored to accede. As fate would have it, the opening work was to be Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's Sonata No. 12 in E Major. A few days later, program in hand, I made my way to my neighborhood library to begin my initial research by

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running down the names and dates of all the composers in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. That accomplished, I proceeded to do the same thing with the musical works themselves. I hit a snag on the very first piece. I could find no Sonata No. 12 with the particular complement of movements I had been given in the work-list accompanying the entry on Pergolesi. I began to scan the article on Pergolesi, and it was then that I became aware of the fact that Pergolesi had been divested of a staggeringly large number of the instrumental works at one time attributed to him. A little more digging and, this also included the "Sonata No. 12." Its author was the aforementioned Domenico Gallo, the composer responsible for a great deal of the music traditionally ascribed to Pergolesi. Later on the same day, I wrote to Wilmington stating that the first work on the program was not by Pergolesi but by Gallo. Guessing that the edition of the "Pergolesi" Sonata the performers were using likely made no mention of the information I had just uncovered, I attempted to lessen the impact of what I imagined would be only a slight annoyance with the following bit of diplomacy, included in the second and final paragraph of my notes devoted to the work: But make no mistake, just because we now know the work to be from the hand of another composer doesn't mean it is suddenly without merit. Its worth cannot change just because of a change in attribution. The actual composer of the Sonata ... is none other than Domenico Gallo, a composer about whom we know almost nothing, save for the fact that he forever will be linked with the name of one of the most posthumously popular composers from the first half of the eighteenth century, Pergolesi. And yet one thing is clear: if Gallo fooled so many for so many years, his music obviously has a great deal to offer41

Imagine my surprise when I picked up the program shortly before the recital's start and read the following at the top of my notes, with the second paragraph intact exactly as given above: "Giovanni Battista Pergolesi ... Sonata No. 12 in E Major." I recount this story not to document my own brush with greatness - in this case with the violinist - but to highlight what seems to be a fact of life in the world of western art music today. Somewhere along the line, someone either the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, the artist's management, or the performers themselves - obviously had decided it simply would not do to have a recital by a performer with the drawing power of Itzhak Perlman begin with a piece by a composer no one had ever heard of. Whatever the answer, to the extent one can point the finger of blame in this story, it is clear, to paraphrase Dreyfus, that the decision to not list the work as being by Gallo had more to do "first of all," with "people and only secondarily" with "things," in this instance music.

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Does music ever come first in questions of this sort? Under special circumstances the answer can be yes. We have all had the experience of turning on the radio to a classical music station after a work has already begun; consequently we may know neither the name of the work nor its composer. Sometimes the revelations can be surprising, especially when during the course of our listening we engage in critical and aesthetic evaluations. One of the more surprising discoveries I have had of this kind - so surprising in fact that I blushingly tell it now only to make my point - came many years ago when I tuned in to a performance of a work for solo piano. As the piece progressed, it quickly became apparent that it was cast in variation form. By the time it began drawing to a close, I was fairly convinced it was by a composer of the second rank - a Kleinmeister - written sometime during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a composer moreover who had come under the sway of Beethoven, but who very much lacked the expressive depth and scope I believed to be the hallmarks of Beethoven. If I were lucky, I smugly thought, I would never have to hear the piece again. The feeling of self-satisfaction at having figured all of this out abruptly came to a halt, however, when I heard the announcer intone after the work's conclusion: "We have been listening to the Thirty-three Variations for Piano on a Waltz by Antonio Diabelli, Opus 120, by Ludwig van Beethoven." Again, I would like to state that this experience was very much a sin of my youth, a fact that mitigates (I hope) my not yet being able to assimilate the often startling juxtaposition of extremes present in Beethoven's late music. The embarrassment of having not known this work aside, this serves well to illustrate my point here. I had no idea who the composer was and, to the extent that such is ever possible, I was listening to the music without the usual network of associations and expectations - usually of the self-fulfilling kind - that by and large result when one knows in advance the composer's name and other details. Let me hasten to say that I am not suggesting that the most desirable way to experience music is by the "drop-the-needle" method, but simply that the habit of knowing beforehand such factors as the composer, the name of their piece, and even sometimes the name(s) of the performer(s) often can stand in the way of listening to and experiencing music on its own terms. And there can be little question that listening to a work one has heard numerous times before presents a plethora of potential problems, foremost among them being the challenge of active as opposed to passive listening. Although this last statement would seem to hold true whatever the music's vintage, it is worth noting that one encounters the problem of composer

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authenticity only in old music. (When the complication does crop up in music by living composers it almost invariably will relate to the question of plagiarism or out-and-out theft, a problem ultimately relating to legal as opposed to aesthetic issues and one that will not concern us here.) And yet if the issue under discussion here relates only to music that has withstood the test of time, how can history help us in coming to terms with the question of composer authenticity? As it happens, even in the nineteenth century, when the idea of a body of enduring canonical masterpieces first came to be formulated, the context in which music was performed and in tum listened to was radically different from what is prevalent nowadays.42 MuItimovement works, to take but one example, frequently were not treated as entities. Nor were concerts as rigidly categorized as they are today, being on the whole marked by a far greater sense of variety with pieces drawn from an assortment of genres. Exceptions to this norm seem to have been grounds for complaint, as the prima donna Marianna Sessi discovered when a recital she gave in Vienna in 1805 consisting entirely of vocal pieces was reviewed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on 26 June of that year; as the critic declared: "The absence of instrumental pieces ... made the concert become monotonous."43 And audiences appear to have been in the habit of not always giving the music at hand their undivided attention, as we learn from a concert notice of 22 October 1800 at which the reviewer grumbled: "First a quartet or a symphony, which basically is viewed as a necessary evil (you do have to start with something!) and therefore to be talked through."44 Even the work of an acclaimed master was not immune from such treatment. As the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for 29 May 1805 reported: "The concert opened with a Haydn symphony, which, as is usual with opening pieces of concerts, was only half heard."45 Rather clearly, then, in many instances the relationship between the performer and the medium of music, not to mention the audience and the purported attraction, took place within a framework of far greater freedom and casualness in the nineteenth century than is current today. As Richard Crocker has observed, "Throughout the ... century we know of the important role of the performer as 'interpreter,' under which rubric he or she could do and did an endless variety of individual things to whatever written record [i.e., score] there was." In other words, the musical text itself had not yet been elevated to the position of religious relic. "The fact that a work can be established to have one original, authentic form," Crocker continues, "may not reflect the composer's final authoritative determination, but only that he was never occasioned by performance opportunities to rethink it."46

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And what of the century before the nineteenth, the century of Bach and Handel, and of Haydn and Mozart? Here we need look no further than that most public of musical forums, opera. The high-minded convictions of the likes of a Benedetto Marcello notwithstanding - to wit his acerbic advice to the would-be composer that it will be best if he has spent time as a copyist for "some noted composer" so that he might steal "from them"47 - composers and their audiences appear to have had little difficulty in fashioning and, in tum, responding to an opera that was not always an "original" musical creation. That is to say that varying quantities of the opera could have been borrowed from the work of another composer. John Walter Hill has persuasively shown how such a procedure in part accounts for how a composer like Vivaldi could claim to be responsible for 94 operas - and Alessandro Scarlatti 114 and Reinhard Keiser 100, to mention two other prolific contemporaries. As Hill trenchantly notes: "While [Vivaldi's] ... critics wrote pamphlets, opera lovers went to the theater."48 And what about Handel's pasticci? As Reinhard Strohm says in the one of the most impressive studies devoted to Handel's involvement in this genre, while "the pasticcio is in itself a despised form" according to present sensibilities, it nonetheless "plays a by no means contemptible role not only in Handel but in the general history of Italian eighteenth-century opera."49 As Strohm goes on to point out, the pasticcio provided a highly satisfactory medium for a star singer to present his or her favorite arias, something London audiences were most eager to sanction, especially for "Italian singers with big names."50 And in Handel's case, beginning in 1729, the genre must have seemed positively irresistible, for starting then, he was paid the same fee for an opera whether the music was wholly by him or derived in part from the work of others. 51 Although we may agree with Carl Dahlhaus when he writes that "nobody can escape the omnipresence of the musical past,"52 it would seem that there are certain aspects of our musical past that make us uneasy. To judge from the examples cited above, audiences of the past without question responded - as we do today - to music as an acoustic experience. But did they place such a premium on the contingencies of author authenticity? While an absolute aesthetic yardstick for determining the value of a work of music is clearly an impossibility, what good is an aesthetic even partially premised on a hazy and historically fragmented cult of originality? If history is to play a role in our judgments about the musical past, let us also attempt to rekindle some of the immediacy with which some individuals from the past have responded to music. How many of us could say that our response to music always, or ever, approaches what George Sand described in a letter to Franz Liszt in 1835:

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How noble and sweet is the art to which you have dedicated yourselves! How dry and disagreeable is mine by comparison! I must work in silence and solitude, while the musician lives in harmony, sympathy and union ... music is taught, is revealed, is disseminated and communicated ... yes, music is prayer, it is faith, it is friendship, it is the preeminent form of association. 53

Then again, how many of us could say that our sensibility for music matches that suggested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he compared music to painting and concluded that while "painting is closer to nature ... music is dependent on human art." It is music's contact with the human, its propensity for relating "man to man," Rousseau claimed, that makes it the "more interesting." "Voice augurs a living entity. Only animate bodies sing. Music can convey you to the depths of the desert," he contended, "but as soon as vocal signs strike your ear, they announce to you a being like yourself."54 The idea of music as a "human art" of "association" is one a growing number of scholars have sought to encourage. 55 And the thought seems a frankly appealing one. Still, as one writer recently has observed, we resist. "The traditional emphasis on the recognition of superficial hallmarks of style has seemed a sufficient acknowledgement of the historical in musical art." Not only this, but, The tradition of limiting the historical to external stylistic descriptions has made it easy for us to be lulled into the deceptive, sentimental lure of facile history. The use of musical style as a distinguishing hallmark of the past has made music an instrument of nostalgia .... We identify music as historical in terms of style and at the same time respond along lines that appear spontaneous and based on aesthetic criteria and judgments of meaning not contingent on any historical circumstances. 56

This is a long way from the question nominally raised by the Opus 3 String Quartets. Then again, perhaps not. Despite all the head scratching and disquietude evinced by all those who took up the issue, never once did I encounter a sentence that read, or else implied, "I like this music" or "I no not like this music." Never once did I come away with the impression that the music, whether it could in the end be called good or bad, meant much one way or another to any of the authors who so concerned themselves with this matter. In other words, they lost sight of the given reality, precisely the danger that Goethe seems to have had in mind in the statement used as an epigram at the start of this essay, when he spoke out on inquiring too much into the sources of things. And in thus losing sight, the end result comes perilously close to what Goethe elsewhere termed "destructive criticism," an enterprise at once very easy, for one need only set up an imaginary paradigm, some model or other, however foolish it may be, and then boldly assert that the work of art under consideration does not

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measure up to that standard, and therefore is of no value. That settles the matter and one can, without additional bother, declare that the poet has not come up to one's requirements. In this way the critic frees himself of all obligations of gratitude toward the artist.

"The opposite of destructive criticism," Goethe goes on to say, "productive criticism," is a good deal more difficult; it asks: what did the author set out to do? Is this plan reasonable and sensible? And how far did he succeed in carrying it out? If these questions are answered with discernment and sympathy, we may be of real assistance. 57

The same concern over losing sight of the given reality and, by implication, of an awareness of music's human and humanizing qualities, would appear to have been shared by the Leipzig music theorist Johann Adam Hiller, when he reflected in 1779 that just as valuable as mathematical, arithmetical, and systematic know ledges may be in and of themselves, it is nevertheless to be wished that less fuss be made about such things; and that one should not thrust so much of them upon music toward its putative illumination. For to conceive of notes as quantities; to represent their relations in lines and numbers; to wrap intervals, like a thread into a ball - this is a far cry from that which is required to bring forth a good melody and clean harmony. It would be better to cultivate the rhetorical or aesthetic part of music more. 58

Does the question of authorship impinge on the value we assign a work of music (or art)? For some people the answer is an emphatic yes. The following rather Byzantine pronouncement aimed at the Opus 3 issue would seem to speak for many. The resolution of [composer] authenticity questions would " ... help prevents works that are not by Haydn," our writer assures us, "from being played on the concert stage or recorded under his name and expand the number of pieces that could be played."59 But what does a remark like this really mean? The difficulty that lies behind it becomes a bit clearer if one asks, again for the sake of argument, what if just one of the disputed Opus 3 works is by Haydn? And having asked this, one begins to wonder what if two works were to tum out to be by Haydn, or three? It matters not if one ultimately concludes that the music is not particularly good. Let us not fall victim to the trap that great composers always write great music. That such invariably is not the case is arguably proven by my own favorite example, a monument to banality if ever there was, Richard Wagner's Grosser Festmarsch, first performed in Philadelphia on May 10 1876 during the centennial celebrations of the United States of America. It seems a long time ago that I announced that Biretta's reflection on the

origin of the word "musicology," the discipline's tendency toward objectivity,

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and his call for a "more humanistic manner" would form a kind of countersubject for this essay. Many measures have gone by and the countersubject is still in need of being put in its proper place. I will attempt to do so now. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in concluding her article "Contingencies of Value," wisely counsels that the value we assign a work of art "is continuously produced and reproduced .... What are commonly taken to be the signs of '" value are, in effect, also its springs." In striving to clarify what she means by this statement, she goes on to say: the endurance of a classical canonical author such as Homer, then, owes not to the alleged transcultural or universal value of his works but, on the contrary, to the continuity of their circulation in a particular culture. 60

Scott Fruehwald would have us believe that the continuing circulation of works such as the Opus 3 Quartets is the result of special lobbying on the part of music promoters out to tum a fast profit. "Record companies," he cynically posits, "tend to retain the original attribution of discredited pieces to attract ... audiences thinking (probably correctly!) that Haydn and Pergolesi will sell while Hoffstetter or Gallo won't."61 We have reached only the codetta of the unusual fugue that is this study, and fugal codettas, by their nature, look backwards as well as forward, fulfilling the purpose of linking what has come before with what will come next. As to the latter, its progress remains an open-ended proposition, the outcome of which in large measure is dependent upon whether or not our communal criticism of past music is to be premised on imaginary and foolish paradigms, to hark back to Goethe, or on criteria founded on "gratitude toward the artist" from which we might "be of real assistance." And what about what has come before? In looking back over some of the arguments I have cited on the question of the Opus 3 Quartets, I can only agree with Pirrotta that in many instances musicology has been burdened with "inelegant verbosity," "heavy glasses," and "technical jargon." To be sure, Haydn himself once complained of the "heavy glasses" approach when he inveighed against the scholarly penchant for "pedestrian rules." Informed that the Viennese composer Johann Georg Albrechtsberger wished to purge all fourths from the purest style, Haydn is said to have retorted: "What does this mean? Art is free, and will be limited by no pedestrian rules. The ear, assuming it is trained, must decide, and I consider myself as competent as any to legislate here. Such affectations are worthless. I would rather someone compose a really new minuet."62 Still, the reasons for the "detached objectivity" may not reside solely with musicology. Society at large, or at least that part of society

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interested in art music from the past, has been deceived and thus confused, as Botstein has reflected, by a "facile" kind of history. As it is at work here, the deception has come about in making the dispute over authorship an attribute of the music whose composer is unknown or uncertain. Perhaps it would be better if we were guided by an aesthetic conditioned by history. As M. H. Abrams has persuasively set forth in his landmark study of early Romantic literature, the predominant critical orientation of all the arts before roughly the nineteenth century was one predicated on "getting something done," namely inducing in the beholder an emotional response. An aesthetic stance dubbed by Abrams "pragmatic," such a view, he writes, stretches back to Classical Antiquity and informs the majority of Western criticism down to the late eighteenth century. Only with the advent of Romanticism did this doctrine give way to what Abrams has called the "expressive" orientation, a critical outlook wherein the artist's "self-expression" came to dominate. Moreover, the orientation was one in which the artwork itself came to be linked as never before to its creator. 63 With all this in mind, is it possible that a preferable strategy would be to determine whether or not a work partakes of the "pragmatic" or "expressive" orientation? If so, and if a composition subscribes to the former, then perhaps we should remember what individuals who were contemporaneous with its precepts advocated. Johann Georg Sulzer, for example, maintained that the best music was that in which the artist's presence is undetected, for our "attention to the sole object we should be contemplating disappears the moment any circumstance causes us to detect the hand of the artist."64 Speaking of all art, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing insisted in 1767 that the presence of the artist must not intrude on the thoughts of the beholder. "How frail must be the impression made by the work," he asks, "if in that very moment [of experiencing an artwork] one is curious about nothing else but the figure of the author? The true masterpiece," Lessing continues, "fills us with itself so completely that we forget about its creator and perceive it not as the product of a particular individual, but rather of nature as a whole."65 The question of just what it is we respond to in a work of music - the music itself or the creative force behind the music - serves to remind us that music is not always neat and tidy, nor in the end even very safe. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps not, for if ever there was a time to be troubled by all that music is capable of, that time is now. Even as recently as twenty years ago "classical" music played a by no means negligible role in the lives of a significantly large number of people. Evidence everywhere at hand tells us that those days are gone. Although it would be grossly unfair to say that safe and distancing

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accounts of music have been responsible for this, common sense dictates that they are not winning converts for music of the past. In much the same way that Michel Foucault concluded in his essay "What is an Author?" when he wrote that "the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work," but rather "the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning," a great deal of twentieth-century musicology unwittingly has served to distance, sanitize, and make safe all that might disturb us about music of the past. 66 Instead of skirting questions of meaning or denigrating those inclined to ask them, maybe we should own up to the fact that meaning also is to be found in the nexus of issues that possess the potential to disturb us; sometimes even in the grain of controversy surrounding a work whose author ultimately eludes us or whose actual identity underwhelms us. To conclude, the Opus 3 Quartets mayor may not be great music, but they most emphatically are not bad music just because after having been thought to be by Haydn they are then said to be by Hoffstetter. Perhaps it is time to return at length to Pirrotta's observation on the origin of the word "musicology," to invest a little more into its practice the concept lying behind its model: "the old and glorious name of philology" wherein the accent is on love. To contend and practice otherwise is to condemn Dame Musicology to perpetual spinsterhood. Southwest Missouri State University

NOTES 1 Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti [1477], trans. Albert Seay (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), p. 14. 2 Nino Pirrotta, "Ars nova e stil novo," in Rivista italiana di musicologia, 1 (1966); trans. as "Ars Nova and Stil Novo," in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 26. 3 The two cantatas, along with twelve others, are listed in the "doubtful and spurious" category in the work-list accompanying the article on Johann Sebastian Bach in The New Grove Bach Family (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 189; the former is now thought to be the work of one "M. Hoffmann" while the latter has been assigned tentatively to Johann Kuhnau. 4 See Helmut Hucke, "Die musikalische Vorlagen zu Igor Strawinskys Pulcinella, " Helmuth Osthoff zu seinem seibzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Ursula Aarbun and Peter Cahn (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), pp. 242-50. For the little that is known of Gallo, see Charles Cudworth, "Gallo, Domenico," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), Vol. VII, p. 128. 5 See the work-list to Heinz Becker's article on Brahms in The New Grove Dictionary of Music, Vol. III, p. 174.

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See variously, Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 194-96, for the most balanced assessment; Alan Curtis "La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music to L'Incoronazione (1643)," Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (Spring 1989), 23-54, who also argues that other music in the opera may not be by Monteverdi; and Ellen Rosand, Opera in SeventeenthCentury Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 336f. The evaluative quotation above is Curtis's. 7 See further Paul Moseley, "Mozart's Requiem: A Reevaluation of the Evidence," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1989), pp. 203-37; as well as Christoph Wolff, "The Composition and Completion of Mozart's Requiem," in Mozart Studies, ed. Cliff Eisen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 61-81, and Wolff, Mozarts Requiem: Geschichte, Musik, Dokumente, Partitur des Fragments (Kassel, Basel, London, and New York: Biirenreiter, 1991). 8 Cited in Richard Maunder, Mozart's Requiem: On Preparing a New Edition (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 2. 9 Ciicilia: Eine Zeitschriftfur die musikalische Welt, 3 (1825), pp. 205-29. 10 Richard Maunder, Mozart:\· Requiem: On Preparing a New Edition, p. 6. 11 Thomas Bauman, "Requiem, but No Piece," 19th-Century Music, Vol. XV (1991), p. 152. 12 See further "Uber Skizzen zu Mozarts Requiem," Bericht Uber den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Kassel 1962 (Kassel: Biirenreiter, 1963), pp. 184-87. 13 Nicomachean Ethics, vi. 4, 1140a 10-16; trans. David Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). 14 Perhaps the best general introduction to the Opus 3 question is to be found in the published round-table discussion, Haydn Studies, Proceedings of the International Haydn Conference, Washington, D.C., 1975, ed. Jans Peter Larsen, Howard Serwer, and James Webster (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981). See particularly "Problems of Authenticity - 'Opus 3'" pp. 95-106. Elsewhere, see James Webster, "External Criteria for Determining the Authenticity of Haydn's Music," pp. 75-78; note well Webster's opening sentence: "The problem of authenticity has long been the most important issue in Haydn scholarship." 15 Readers of this essay interested in correlating my comments with the music itself should consult, for the Opus 3 String Quartets, 83 String Quartets by Josef Haydn in 3 Volumes (London and Mainz: Edition Eulenburg, n.d.), Vol. I, Quartets No. 13-18; for Opus 33, discussed below, see Joseph Haydn: Werke, Series XII, Vol. III, ed. Georg Feder and Sonja Gerlach (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1974), pp. 105-188; for the first movement of Opus 54, No.3, also discussed below, see Joseph Haydn String Quartets Op. 42, 50 and 54, ed. Wilhelm Altmann (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), pp. 199-207. 16 Carl Friedrich Pohl, Joseph Haydn (Berlin: A. Sacco, 1874), Vol. I, p. 340: "die erste Violine hat den Gesang, die zweite bebleitet in Sechzehnteln. Est ist ein ausgesprochene Serenade voll kindlicher Einfalt, Seligkeit und Unschuld, ein Rosenbusch, der uns mit neidloser Freigebigkeit mit Bliithen iiberschiittet und uns alles Leid der Welt vergessen lasst." Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 17 Haydn, Vol. I, p. 341: "vielleicht das schonste der ganzen Sammlung. Auch hier ist Haydn wieder urn zwanzig und mehr Jahre voraus. Eingeschohen in eines der spaterer Quartette wiiurde kaum Jemand dessen friihzeitige Entstehung ahnen." 18 "Haydn," Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, compiled and ed. Walter Willson Cobbett, Vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 524-25. 19 See, for example, Marion Scott, "Haydn's Opus Two and Opus Three," Publications of the [Royall Musical Association, Vol. LXI (1934-35), pp. 1-19. 6

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Quoted in The American Record Guide, Vol. IXX (January 1953), p. 162. "Zur Echtheitsfrage des Haydn'schen 'Opus 3'," The Haydn Yearbook, Vol. III (1965), p. 165. Somfai's first article on the subject is: "A klasszikus kvartetthangzas megsziiletese Haydn vonosnegyeseiben [The Evolution of Classical Quartet Style in Haydn's Quartets)," Zenetudomtinyi tanulmtinyok, Vol. III (1960), pp. 295-420. 22 James Webster, The Bass Part in Haydn s Early String Quartets and in Austrian Chamber Music, 1750-1780 (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1974),244. Webster restates the evaluation in his "The Chronology of Haydn's String Quartets," The Musical Quarterly, Vol. LXI (1975), p. 17: "We must also bid farewell to the spurious 'Opus 3,' very probably from the dilettantish pen of pater Romanus Hoffstetter." 23 Oivind Eckhoff, "The Enigma of 'Haydn's Opus 3,''' Studia musicologica, Vol. IV (1978), pp. 10, 11, 12, and 14 respectively. 24 Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 14. 25 Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 17. 26 Eckhoff,op. cit., pp. 21-22. 27 Eckhoff,op. cit., p. 17. 28 Webster, "The Form of the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in Beethoven Forum (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 40. 29 "Who Composed Haydn's Op. 3?," The Musical Times, Vol. LV (1964), pp. 506-7. Following Somfai's first article wherein he expressed his uncertainty as to whether or not Haydn might in fact be the composer of Opus 3, Tyson and Landon were the first to suggest Hoffstetter as the most likely candidate. 30 Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 35. 31 Eckhoff, op. cit., pp. 35-6. 32 Of the likely sixteen such letters, three at present are known: to Johann Caspar Lavater in Zurich, a leading figure of the literary Strum und Drang; Prince Krafft Ernst bttingenWallerstein of Bavaria; and Robert Schlect, Abbot of Salmannsweiler in Gaden, Germany. See further Denes Bartha, Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel and New York: Biirenreiter Verlag, 1965), Nos. 39-40, pp. 106-6; also H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, II: Haydn at Eszterhdza (Bloomington, Ind., and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 115. 33 Ludwig Finscher, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts, 1. Die Entstenhung des klassischen Streichquartetts. Vond er Vorformen zur Grundlegung durch Joseph Haydn. Sarbriicker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, ed. Walter Wiora, Vol. III (Kassel: BarenreiterVerlag, 1974), pp. 237-44. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), pp. 116-7. It should be pointed out that the G-Major Quartet now known as Opus 33, No.5, was the opening work in the original edition issued by Artaria; see further, the foreword to Joseph Haydn: Werke, Series XII, Vol. III, op. cit. 34 Gretchen A. Wheelock, "Engaging Strategies in Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets," EighteenthCentury Studies, Vol. XXV (1991), pp. 14 and 30 respectively. 635 The octaves return in measures 83-87 of the same movement in the violins. 36 Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 20. Eckhoff limits his tally of textual "curiosities" to outer movements and non-minuet movements. As he notes, p. 43, fn. 11: "In minuets, three-part and, still more, two-part writing was quite common at the time; and, as every Haydn connoisseur will know, simultaneous octave unison between the violins and between viola and cello form a characteristic feature of his particular minuet style, producing an excellent effect, and creating a satisfactory contrast to the textures of the adjacent movements." 20

621

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Eckhoff,op. cit., p. 21. Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 142. 39 Whatever the answer to these questions reasonably might be, it should be noted that at least some of Haydn's contemporaries were troubled by such supposed stylistic laxity. Thus one reads in Ernst Ludwig Gerber's Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkiinstler (Leipzig: 1. G. I. Breitkopf, 1790-92), Vol. I, col. 611: "Schon seine [Haydn's] ersten Quatros, welche urn das Jahr 1760 berkannt wurden, machten allgemeine Sensation. Man lachte und vergniigte sich auf der einen Seite an der ausservordentlichen Naivetat und Munterkeit, welche darinne herrschte, und in andern Gegenden schrie man iiber Herabwiirdigung der Musik zu komischen Tandeleyen und iiber unerhorte Oktaven" [Haydn's "first quartets, which became known around 1760, made a great sensation. On the one hand, the extraordinary naivete and gaiety that prevail in them were smiled at and delighted in while on the other, the degradation of music to comic trifles and unheard-of octaves was deplored"]. 40 Laurence Dreyfus, "Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century," The Musical Quarterly, Vol. LXIX (1983), p. 297. 41 Quoted from James Parsons, "Notes on the Music," program booklet, The Grand Opera House, Wilmington, Delaware, 14 December 1987. 42 For more on the development of a permanent musical canon, see Joseph Kerman, "A Few Canonic Variations," Critical Inquiry, Vol. X (1983), pp. 107-25; reprinted in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 177-95. 43 Quoted from Mary Sue Morrow, Concert Life in Haydn s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing Musical and Social Institution, Sociology of Music No.7 (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1989), p. 141. 44 Morrow, op. cit., p. 143. 45 Ibid. 46 Quoted in Kerman, "Canonic Variations," Canons, p. 180. 47 From Marcello's Il teatro alia moda (1702), quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 526. 48 John Walter Hill, "Vivaldi as Dramatic Composer: Sources and Contributing Factors," Opera & Vivaldi, ed. Michael Collins and Elise K. Kirk (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), pp. 327-46; the quotations are from p. 328. 49 "Handel's Pasticci," in Reinhard Strohm, Essays on Handel & Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 164. On the pasticcio in general see the excellent overview by Curtis Price, "Pasticcio," The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), Vol. III, pp. 907-10. 50 Strohm, op. cit., p. 166. 51 Strohm, op. cit., p. 165. 52 Carl Dalhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Siegmund Levarie, Monographs in Musicology No. I (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983), p. 23. 53 Franz Liszt, An Artists Journey: Lettres d'un bachelier es musique, 1835-1841, trans. and ed. Charles Suttoni (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 207. 54 Rousseau, "Essai sur l' origine des langues," in Oeuvres de J. J. Rousseau, nouvelle edition, avec des notes historiques et critiques, ed. M. Mussay Pathay (Paris: Werdet et Pequien fils, 1826), pp. 210 and 208-9: "On voit part Iii que la peinture est plus pres de la nature, et que la musique tient plus ii I'art humain. On sent aussi que I'une interesse plus que I'autre, precisement parce qu'elle rapproche plus l'homme de I'homme." p. 208: "La voix annonce un etre sensible; il n'y a que des corps animes qui chantent." P. 210: "[La musique] elle peut vous transporter au 37 38

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fond d'un desert; mais sitot que des signes vocaux frappent votre oreille, ils vous annoncent un etre semblable vous," 55 See, for example, Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music, Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 56 Leon Botstein, "Between Aesthetics and History," 19th-Century Music, Vol. XIII (1989), p.169. 57 From Goethe's preface written for Opere poetiche di Alessandro Manzoni (1827), cited in Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespriiche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), 830:

a

Jene [destructive criticism] ist sehr leicht, denn man darf sich nur irgendeinen Masstab, irgendein Musterbild, so borniert sie auch seinen, in Gedanken aufstellen, sodann aber kiihnlich versichern: vorliegendes Kunstwerk passe nicht dazu, tauge deswegen nichts, die Sache sei abgetan, und man diirfe, ohne weiteres, seine Forderung als unbefriedigt erkHiren; und so befreit man sich von aller Dankbarkeit gegen den Kiinstler. Die produktive Kritik ist urn ein gutes Teil schwerer, sie fragt: Was hat sich der Autor vorgesetzt? ist dieser Vorsatz verniinftig und verstiindig? Und inwiefern ist es gelungen, ihn auszufriihren? Werden diese Fragen einsichtig und liebevoll beantwortet, so helfen wir. Hiller, preface to George Friedrich Linke's Kurze Musiklehre (Leipzig: 1. G. I. Breitkopf, 1779), p. vii. Trans. from Mark Evans Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.70. 59 Scott Fruehwald, Authenticity Problems in Joseph Haydn's Early Instrumental Works, Monographs in Musicology No.8 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1988), p. 3. 60 Barbara Hermstein Smith, "Contingencies of Value," in Canons, p. 34. 61 Fruehwald, op. cit., p. 3, fn. 8; italics mine. 62 Georg August Griesinger, Biographische Notizen uber Joseph Haydn [1810], in Vernon Gotwals, trans. and ed., Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 61. 63 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 14-26. 64 Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der SchOnen Kunste, 2nd ed. (1792-94; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967-70), Vol. IV, p. 515. 65 Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Sechsunddreissigstes Stuck (1 September 1767), in Werke, ed. Jost Perfahl, Vol. II, pp. 425-26: "wie schwach muss der Eindruck sein, den das Werk gemacht hat, wenn man in ebendem Augenblicke auf nichts begieriger ist, als die Figur des Meisters dagegenzuhalten? Das wahre Meisterstiick ... erfiillet uns so ganz mit sich selbst, dass wir des Urhebers dariibers dariiber vergessen; dass wir es nicht als das Produkt eines einzeln Wesens, sondern der allgemeinen Natur betrachten ... Die Tiiuschung muss sehr schwach sein, man muss wenig Natur, aber desto mehr Kiinsttelei empfinden, wenn man so neugierig nach dem Kiinstler ist." 66 Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 119. 58

SECTION THREE

STEPHEN BROWN

MACHINE-TIME, PASSION-TIME, AND TIME THAT TREMBLES: DEBUSSY AND BAUDELAIRE

The heated minutes climb The anxious hill, The tills fill up with cash, The tiny hammers chime The bells of good and ill, And the world piles with ash From fingers killing time. If you were only here Among these rocks, I should not feel the dull The taut and ticking fear That hides in all the clocks And creeps inside the skull If you were here, my dear. Louis MacNeice, "The Heated Minutes"

There is no escaping time in music; music enforces its own time. You have no choice, unless it is to walk away - as long as you listen you are in the music's time. Even as a performer, your liberty is limited. You're not like an actor who can introduce pregnant pauses and changes in tempi at will. Music has an internal clock which cannot be ignored. In the Classical period that clock showed itself on the music's surface. The signature accompaniment of the period was the Alberti bass [Ex. I], which in the precision of its back and forth movement echoes the clock's mechanical workings. l

Ex. I. The Alberti bass (as used in Mozart's C-major piano sonata).

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© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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STEPHEN BROWN

Haydn wrote a "Clock Symphony" [Ex. 2],

Ex. 2. Opening measures, second movement of Haydn's Symphony 101, "The Clock."

and also - supposedly2 - a "Toy Symphony" and there is a relationship between the two. Clocks for the 18th century did not regulate the blowing of factory whistles; the most they regulated was the tolling of the Angelus three times a day. Clocks were toys, wonderful mechanisms. When Louis XVI, at his famous interview with Necker, ignored the great economist and went around the room winding his clocks, it was not reality, but escape, he was after. Not the world, but a fantasy - a dreamworld where things happened predictably and consistently, and, of course, on time. 3 The clockwork world of Classical-period music models a fantasy which the Enlightenment wanted to take as real: that the world itself is a clock, with Newton's God as its watchmaker. Or it will be like a clock as soon as we discover the principles it runs on. So with the human being. Once we take it apart and find out "what makes it tick," its actions will become predictable. 4 What happened to this model has been catalogued often enough. Perhaps it is enough to say that other realities intruded on it, one of which was the industrial revolution. The clock acquires a new meaning in an industralizing world, where there is no longer anything toy-like in the mechanical,5 Machines themselves, the schedules, routine, and time-clocks of commercial enterprise, the structuring of life around arbitrary times, which then acquire their own symbolic identity, like "9 to 5," these are what allow Mac Neice to talk about "The dull/ The taut and ticking fear/ That hides in all the clocks/ And creeps inside the skull .... " Of course it creeps inside our skulls, and we become inescapably aware of time's minuted progress. It is why we take vacations at the beach, we yearn so much for a world where time is sunrise and noon and sunset, and not that useless committee meeting we're five minutes late for. Romantic composers instituted a revolution in time, with, as its single most recognizable characteristic, a new and flexible rhythm. The word for it is rubato, literally "robbed," where time is taken from one note and given to

MACHINE-TIME, PASSION-TIME, & TIME THAT TREMBLES

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Ex. 3. Opening measures of "Ich Grolle Nicht."

another, as in Schumann's lch Grolle Nicht, a setting of words by Heine [Ex. 3]. Instead of a clockwork mechanism, a flexible time appears through a series of throbbing chords. I use the word "throbbing" advisedly, since this is the rhythm of the heart, the pulse that quickens in response to the passions. These feelings are not occasioned by the outside world, but by the inner one, and it is the inner reality which rubato expresses. The narrator here is listening not to the reality of his girlfriend, but to the dream of her: "For I saw you in a dream,! and saw the night that reigns within your heart! and saw the serpent that gnaws upon your heart .... " Try this same melody, these same words, with a new accompaniment - or, rather, an old one, the Classical period's Alberti bass [Ex. 4]. What is wrong with this picture? The music demands time which robs - whose beats are irregular, governed by the passions, the soul, the inner voice, not the clockwork mechanism.

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auch wenn du

Hen

auc:h

bricht.

Ex. 4. "Ich Grolle Nicht" with Alberti bass.

Chopin wrote waltzes, but they were in a sense dream-waltzes - music whose rhythm indicates not the physical act of dancing but the mental one of remembering. Dance rhythms pervade his music, nocturnes and ballades as well as waltzes and polonaises, but they are rhythms not for a real dance floor but for a dream space, a ballroom of the soul [Ex. 5]. Playing this same music in strict time relieves it of its interior dimension and flattens it into the daylit reality of the senses 6 [Ex. 6].

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STEPHEN BROWN

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The Chopin-George Sand circle comprised a Bohemian aristocracy who despised both the traditional aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Musset, in The Confessions of a Child of the Century, defines the Romantics in terms of their new standards of emotion, feeling, dream state, and subconscious, against the rational and pragmatic, the businesslike. Just as Chopin's time is pliant and flexible, responsive to the inner voice, Mussel's Romantics are pliant and sensitive, concerned only with the truth of the emotions. His poet is explicitly weak, literally a weak reed, about to be trampled on by the harsh successes of the bourgeois age.? This is an early formulation of a key Romantic myth - the artist despised and rejected. 8 The myth was to become difficult (although never impossible) to sustain, as the Romantic movement became embarrassingly successful. It turns out that the despised bourgeoisie also wanted to escape from the industrial and commercial world into a world which obeys the inner clock. Already by 1839, Daumier was drawing cartoons poking fun at petit bourgeois living in a quotidian world while reading of moonlit, lovesoaked landscapes. There is a betrayal at the heart of Romanticism. For all its talk of dreams and love, of passion, despair, death, of nostalgia for a golden age, for all its rejection of bourgeois materialism and bourgeois values, Romanticism is tightly bound to the bourgeois age. It can deny but it cannot escape its own commercial success. An art based on passion is, among other things, an art

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which has found a lowest common denominator with which to reach its new, anonymous audience. Romantic music frees time, but exalts an idea close to the bourgeois heart: the idea of progress. Progress is the essence of the bourgeois philosophy: not being, but becoming. For political scientist Edward C. Banfield, the very concept of the middle class only has meaning in terms of orientation towards the future. The bourgeois are, in short, "goal-oriented." As is their Romantic music. Striving, reaching, longing, building, progressing, achieving - no wait, not quite achieving, falling, picking itself up again, starting, striving reaching longing wanting yearning achieving, no not quite achieving, and so on and on. Romantic music provides an escape, but not a fundamental one. It is as though the music were a character in a Greek tragedy - it tries to avoid its fate, but finds itself back in the cozy sofa of bourgeois culture. On a micro level, Romantic music denies the bourgeois, industrial clock, but on a macro level it accepts it, escaping from the ticking of necessity but acceding to the calendar of desire. The late nineteenth century did not see the music world in quite these terms. Especially in Germany, the Romantic style so dominated music that it seemed to be music. The conflict was between classical and modem, the school of Brahms versus the school of Wagner. Perhaps a revolution against Romanticism could only occur in France, where setting yourself against German tendencies was patriotic, and where music was not quite such a serious business. As the musicologist Hugh Macdonald has pointed out, "To the French, music is something to talk about over these long meals in their restaurant culture, but that does not mean they really like it."9 More significantly, France (and more specifically Paris) was the home of the great aesthetic revolution which was giving birth to modem styles in painting and poetry. In 1898, Debussy was 27, recently returned from a miserable time as a winner of the French Conservatory's Prix de Rome in composition. He was dissatisfied with the Romantic musical language, and only slowly working his way towards a new one. Since the style he eventually arrived at was called Impressionism, there is a tendency to associate him with the Impressionist painters and with their habit of painting "en plein air"; that is, to assume that he received his instruction from nature. In fact, Debussy developed his new style not through the inspiration of nature, but in the workshop of poetry, writing songs to poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme and others. It was in attempting to find a musical language suited to the symbolist aesthetic that he found the vocabulary of his own - and music's - new style. \0 In 1889 he wrote a song setting of Baudelaire's Harmonie du Soir. In 1910 he returned to the poem, this time basing a piano prelude on it, named after

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its third line, "Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir." In the distance between these two works and in their relationship to Baudelaire's poem it is possible to see the development of a modernist style and its new approach to time. Voici venir les temps ou vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s' evapore ainsi qu'un encensoir. ... (Here again comes the time when trembling on its stem Each flower turns to vapor like a burner of incense .... )

Grammar and common sense indicate that the phrase "vibrant sur sa tige" belongs with the flowers of line 2; in other words, that the flowers tremble, not time. But this is not a poem governed by grammar or common sense. In lifting the second and fourth lines out of each quatrain to use as the first and third lines of the next, Baudelaire defines the line as the poem's structural unit, giving it independence and freeing it from grammatical constraint. As lines are freed from grammar's bondage, words are snipped from the stems of meaning, and signifiers no longer reliably signify. Instead, their resonances linger, sounds and perfumes that mingle in the air. Sequence is defeated. As the lines shuttle back and forth, times does tremble. Although there is movement, there is no progress, and time can flow backwards and forwards simultaneously. This presents a substantial challenge for a composer, and it can't be said that Debussy meets it with complete success. In fact there is something schizophrenic in his approach, which oscillates between an old, Romantic-

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Wagnerian style and a new style hesitant to be born. Debussy's craft as a composer is sufficient to obscure the song's divergent tendencies, but I think they become evident if two lines are isolated. His setting of "Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir" uses consonant harmonies and intervals, pedal tones, parallel motion, and elements of bi-tonality and polyrhythm - all characteristics of what would become his mature style [Ex. 7]. But the line which follows immediately on its heels, "Le violon fremit comme un coeur u'on affiige," uses a late-Romantic, Wagner-influenced vocabulary, typified by wide leaps, diminished intervals, chromaticism, dissonant harmonies, contrapuntal writing, and gradually increasing energy and tension [Ex. 8].

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The contrast can be justified - Baudelaire's poem is divided between the Romantic and the modern as well - but it seems fair to say that there was a reason for Debussy to return to the poem in 1910. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans I'air du soir. The line provides one of 1889 song's loveliest moments [Ex. 9]. But it is one which certainly carries an emotional charge: the voice's upward leap of a sixth which then slowly works its way back down against

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the accompaniment's rising figure which meets the voice for a unison appoggiatura embodies a typically Romantic longing and regret. Personal emotional qualities like these are not available in the piano prelude. Instead Debussy creates a musical reality analogous to the reality of the poetry, that is, musical images which correspond to the images of the poem. It is in the creation of this analogous reality that Debussy employs the elements of musical resource in new ways. Without attempting an exhaustive analysis of the piece, I will try to indicate something of Debussy's approach to time by examining just its opening measures. An A-natural pedal tone is sounded. Above it rises the opening motive, a series of chords beginning with an upward movement of a fourth, then reaching an apex only one half-step higher, with a chord whose function is not so much to frustrate the motive's rising motion as to absorb it, allowing it to fall back upon itself and return to its starting place [Ex. 10]. The pedal tone sounds again, this time reinforced by an approach from a fifth above. The opening theme is restated in varied form, not falling back

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Ex. 11.

immediately but first releasing upward to an F sharp which then falls a fourth [Ex. 11]. In each of these two statements the motive is suspended melodically and harmonically above the pedal tones, and suspended rhythmically in the middle three beats of the 5/4 measures. Then comes a short passage which is remarkable in its disobedience to traditional rules. There are three strands to the music. The lowest is the A pedal. Although the piece is in 3/4 time at this point, the pedal tone sounds once every four beats. In the middle range are a series of dominant seventh chords. In traditional tonal music the dominant seventh chord is the chord which progresses to the tonic, the chord based on the tonal center; perhaps the single most basic rule of tonal music is that the V chord goes to the I chord [Ex. 12].

Ex. 12. How a dominant chord is "supposed" to resolve.

But in this passage Debussy presents a dominant seventh chord which doesn't go to its tonic, but to another dominant seventh chord; and then he does this over and over again. These chords, cut loose from their tonal function, seem to float; their rhythm follows a three-beat pattern. The top strand is a short descending motive, echoing the final notes of the opening motive. It arrives on every second beat. So there are, in effect, three different rhythms occurring simultaneously, along with three strands of music, one of which is completely

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static, one of which moves without a tonal function, and the third of which, reiterating an echo, seems to fold back in on itself [Ex. 13]. Suspended harmonies, melodies which tum back on themselves, chords which refuse to resolve, evolve, or progress, a motive which hiccups like a glitch on a tape, each strand of a musical texture granted its own rhythmic voice - here Debussy has achieved the analogue to Baudelaire's sounds and perfumes turning in the evening air. This brings me to the point of contact between Debussy and phenomenology - which is also the point of their divergence. Debussy's music searches for the realm of pure sensation, like that naively experienced in a child's first contact with the world. Its ultimate goal is to make us all like the Pan of Mallarme's Afternoon of a Faun: a simple, sensuous being, for whom experience is so unmediated by consciousness that he is unable to distinguish between the memory of experience and the memory of dreams. Indeed the Pan theme is a recurrent one in Debussy's work. He wrote a song called "La Flute de Pan," another song called "Le Faune," his famous solo flute piece "Syrinx" ("Pan-Pipe"), and of course his masterpiece, based on Mallarme's poem, Prelude a l'apres-midi d'unfaune. It is this search for pure sensation which aligns Debussy with the Impressionist painters, particularly Monet, who wished he had been "born blind in order to gain his sight and be able to paint objects without knowing what they were."ll Debussy and the Impressionists here forecast the advent of phenomenology, if, as Joseph Kockelmans says of Husserl, "philosophy is a phenomenology precisely because it has as its starting point a field of primordial phenomena."12 Kockelmans comes back again and again to this search for primordial phenomena as key to a new grounding for philosophy, and it is fair to say that for the Impressionists this search similarly represents a new grounding for art and music. But with the word "grounding," the basis for the similarity evaporates. For what is central to Debussy's music, and what Debussy's music teaches us is central to the Impressionist movement and to

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the project of modernist art, is a release from the necessity for grounding. The ultimate quality of Debussy's mature style, its inescapable signature, is that it floats free. Neither emotionally arching melodies, nor the gravitational pull of the tonal center, nor the dance-like characteristics of repeated rhythmic patterns serve to tie it to the earth. There are two ways of looking at this "setting free." One is to see it, with Donald Kuspit,13 as the "therapeutic" function of the avant-garde, where art strips away the built-up layers of tradition, convention, technology and bourgeois morality to return us to the freshness of primordial experience. The other is to see all such effort as what Adorno calls "hypermodernism." Hypermodern art first observes, then accepts, then uses the disintegrating effects of modem culture to make an art which teaches us to relish our decentered existence. Alienation, such art says, can be fun. Realism is put into reverse; art no longer looks like reality; now reality looks like art. The world is just one big objet trouve, "existing" only in the way it is seen, constructed, aestheticized, and made subject to critical theory. When you listen to Debussy after listening to Wagner, the most obvious change is in the absence of anxiety. Wagner is still struggling to hold things together - the mythic past and the anguished present, the things which fall apart. His music is grandiose and foolish, marvellous in its ambition, filled with angst, and always on the way somewhere (though sometimes slow to arrive). Debussy's music is free from anxiety because it is its own autonomous world, and it has been set free. So what if the center cannot hold? Then there is no center. The world is just an assortment of realities, in some of which time runs forward and in some of which time runs back. NOTES I Musicologists tend to emphasize analysis of harmony over all other aspects of music (this is reflected in musical education as well); rhythm is the least popular element to discuss. Charles Rosen's The Classical Style, generally viewed as the best work on the subject, treats the Alberti bass as follows: "This accompaniment blurs the independence both of the three contrapuntal voices which it theoretically contains and of the chordal or homophonic harmony which it supposedly illustrates. It breaks down the isolation of the voices by integrating them into one line, and of the chords by integrating them into a continuous movement" (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 29. 2 The piece was once considered one of Haydn's most famous works, but the attribution is apparently a mistaken one. 3 If Louis's action were a commentary on Necker, it would be a way of pointing out that economics are a mechanistic fantasy as toy-like as the clocks. The clock-fantasy was not confined to the ancien regime. The revolutionaries of 1789 were also fascinated by the clock, and proposed a new, even more rational one, that would divide time into decimal units.

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It was this belief which made the Enlightenment credulous with regards to robots (and makes our time credulous with regards to "artificial intelligence"). 5 Lawrence Wright writes that "From the day when machines had been installed in any factory, all workers had to start and finish at the same time, with foremen to keep them at it; no one could pause even briefly, because the machines did not. The mills were being lit by gas from 1802, so that working hours need be limited only by human endurance. There was now no season or weather when work need cease." Clockwork Man (London: Elek Books, 1968), p. 118. Wright quotes Lewis Munford to say that "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age" (p. 208). 6 The waltz itself - a nineteenth-century invention - escapes strict time, pushing the second beat and delaying the third. 7 'Then they formed into two camps: on the one side the exalted spirits, sufferers, all the expansive souls who had need of the infinite, bowed their heads and wept; they wrapped themselves in unhealthy dreams and there could be seen nothing but broken reeds on an ocean of bitterness. On the other side the men of the flesh remained standing, inflexible in the midst of positive joys, and cared for nothing except to count the money they had acquired. There was only a sob and a burst of laughter, the one coming from the soul, the other from the body." Translation by Kendall Warren, in Volume VIII, The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset (NY: James L. Perkins, 1908), pp. 16-17. 8 In music, Schubert had given profound expression to the myth in his settings of Miiller's poems, Die Winterreise. The last song in that cycle, "Der Leiermann," shows an organ-grinder, barefoot in the snow, off on the outskirts of town, with only snarling dogs for an audience, and the poet asking him: Can I go with you? Will you sing my songs? 9 Macdonald goes on to say that the French "are not humbled by music the way the English and Germans are." Quoted in Rice, Patricia, "Snatched Back from Oblivion," St. Louis PostDispatch, March 19, 1995, p. 4C. 10 The composer Paul Dukas is often quoted as saying, "The strongest influence on Debussy was that of writers, not musicians," and Debussy himself is said to have preferred that his sty Ie be called Symbolist rather than Impressionist. 11 Quoted in John Canaday, Mainstreams of Modern Art (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 226-227. 12 Kockelmans, Joseph J. Phenomenology and Physical Science, trans. Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1966) pp. 30-40. 13 Kuspit, Donald B. The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). 4

CYNTHIA OSOWIEC RUOFF

BAROQUE AND CLASSICAL AESTHETIC VISIONS

Although Wilfried Floeck in Esthetique de la diversite states that the literature of the mid-seventeenth century in France "est indeniablement marquee par Ie style baroque," he points out that a baroque literary vision and a classical aesthetics coexisted and stimulated artistic creation. l Evolving from the Renaissance crisis of knowledge and from principles of rhetoric, the Baroque existed in France as an independent literary and artistic vision between 1575-85 and 1650-60, and manifested itself in particular works rather than in a developed, organized, and established theory written at that time. The absence of such a codified manifesto is the logical consequence of the nature of the Baroque, which promoted liberty, diversity, imagination, and change. In contrast, classical aesthetics, insisting on order, clarity, proportion, and reason, consisted of homogeneous rules, first codified by Jean Chapelain in 1620,2 and reached its height in the literary texts written between 1660 and 1680. Emerging as a reaction against the Renaissance ideals of order and clarity, and then continuing its rebellion against the system of rules devised in reaction to contemporary notions of diversity and liberty by seventeenthcentury French classicism, the Baroque released imprisoned imaginative forces activated by sense experiences and liberty. Order, proportion, and harmony form the foundation of Renaissance perceptions and appreciation of beauty, nature, and Antiquity. In rhetoric and in poetics, beauty without order and harmony is impossible to envision. NeoPlatonic inspiration reinforces this conception by seeing in artistic work an expression of divine beauty and its concomitant concrete representation of the harmony and order of the universe. In this way, the beauty of the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm of the work of art. 3 Further contributing to its emphasis on clarity and order, Renaissance humanism seized the "entite du monde" through a selection of what was most representative, and suppressed an abundance of details and seemingly insignificant elements. 4 Ronsard's "Hymne de la justice," for example, praises nature as a harmonious whole directed and controlled by reasonable laws. However, if the order of nature is not perfect, man, through artistic intervention, exercises his power to correct, improve, and ennoble nature. Since the Renaissance humanists believed that the works of Classical Antiquity already imitated nature perfectly, the poet simply had to tum to Antiquity for his inspiration

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and models. Consequently, the Renaissance humanists transformed the imitation of nature into an imitation of the Ancients. 5 During the second half of the sixteenth century, a "crise de conscience"6 undermining the unity of the civilized world prompted the development of a divergent aesthetic vision. Prior to the Renaissance, the medieval Christian believed that every man came from God, and, that by avoiding sin, every creature could earn eternal salvation in a final return to God. This religious outlook reflects the perceived unity and order of the universe. Although the goal of Copernicus was to demonstrate this harmony in the perfection of the universe, in reality, he brought about a break with this Aristotelian conception and with the Scholastic and Christian perspective reflected in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The surge in knowledge, the result of scientific and geographic discoveries, created a tension in man difficult to resolve. As a result of the expansion of knowledge and the development of reason, to know and to believe were no longer synonymous. Man still believed in God, but his belief was not instinctive. 7 Montaigne confessed: "c'est la foi seule qui embrasse vivement et certainement les hauts mysteres de notre religion."8 When one speaks of a scientific and rationalist "esprit" at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, skepticism and pessimism characterize this outlook in which man no longer exists as the highlight and center of a closed universe. As late as the midseventeenth century, Pascal, in Les Pensees, said that man cannot acquire certain knowledge outside of his own experiences, and he described man as existing in an incommensurable infinity of eternal silence. According to Pascal, man bases his uncertain certainty on uncertainty. 9 Although baroque discourse attempted to lead the readers/audience to Absolute Truth, it still reflected the changing and uncertain world which the baroque man inhabited. Gisele Mathieu-Castellani points out: Au coeur de tout grand texte baroque, nait une incertitude, masquee par la parole d'autorite, guindee, un peu trop sure d'elle-meme pour qu'on ne puisse y lire, 11 de fragiles indices, une interrogation secrete. Le questionnement produit un texte divise. 1O

Her quotation emphasizes the speaker's own uncertainty and internal conflict masked by an air of authority. Sponde's Sonnet XI "Et quel bien de la mort" emphasizes the poet's recognition of the illogical pattern of life. The poet's voice is divided between resignation and rebellion as he asks: "C'est benediction que de vivre, pourquoy nous fais-tu mourir?" The query's basic contradiction is overcome only by an act of faith which bypasses reason and exists as an uncertain certainty.l1 In Jean de Rotrou's play Le Veritable Saint

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Genest (1645), the pagan actor Genest's belief in God and conversion to Christianity are also based on faith, not reason, and his faith is born from his own uncertainty and receptivity to sense impressions. Baroque aesthetics, an international phenomenon emerging from the "crise de conscience" and man's uncertainty, was rooted in the last third of the sixteenth century and evolved as a reaction against the normative and rational precepts of order and harmony emphasized by the European Renaissance and modeled on Classical Antiquity.12 While replacing Aristotelianism, NeoPlatonism provided for the baroque a differentiation between a harmonious world of ideas, representing absolute good, and a disordered material world representing evil; 13 it opened the way for an aesthetics based on questioning reality.14 Literary depictions of the chaos of the universe and a display of ambiguity, change, uncertainty, and abundance reflect the upheaval of traditional Renaissance values. In "Le Chaos," the poet Du Bartas describes the beginning of the world as a "forme sans forme" and "une pile confuse ... sans reglement" which, through time and the course of nature, changes, "de laid beau, de mort vif, et parfait d'imparfait.. .. "15 TMophile de Viau's ode beginning "Un corbeau devant moi croasse" portrays this "monde a l'envers" by including images of blood flowing from a rock, a stream flowing back to its source, and a serpent destroying a vulture (Rousset 2, 72-73). Disorder and confusion became the basic categories of baroque beauty, and perceptions of beauty, formerly judged against a universal standard, became relative since beauty differed according to country, region, and even individuals. This new outlook invited the creation of an aesthetics based on diversity, change, and liberty. In addition to the influence of Neo-Platonism, ever since Petrarch, imitatio through variatio, a traditional concept of rhetoric important for sustaining listener interest, gained prominence and allowed the poet to develop his own style. 16 In "Elegie a une Dame," Theophile de Viau writes, "La regIe me deplait, j'ecris confusement.. .. J'approuve que chacun ecrive a sa farron,"I? while Pierre Corneille in his "Dedic ace" to La Suivante (1637) comments "Chacun a sa methode; je ne blame point celle des autres, et me tiens a la rnienne .... " As a result of the erosion of confidence in the correlation between knowledge and faith and the apparent dissolution of a unified and harmonious universe, writers insisted on freedom and turned to the diversity and disorder displayed in nature as the path to follow in their quest for permanence. Influenced by these perceptions of freedom and diversity, Rotrou's actor Genest, for example, in mid-performance effectively rejects the rehearsed dramatic text, "the Martyrdom of Adrian," and freely creates and enacts his new role in God's theatre.

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By "diversity," these baroque authors meant "une abondance anarchique et un mouvement continu de changement et d'instabi1ite."18 Since an aesthetics of diversity dissociates itself from the order, harmony, and permanence represented by God, in an attempt to reunite God's representation with that of the world, theologians in the first half of the seventeenth century, such as Yves de Paris in Theologie naturelle, located the roots of diversity in the divine essence composed of three Persons in one God; for them, the diversity seen in this world was an expression of God's infinity and omnipotence based on multitude. 19 For these theologians, the variety in nature reflecting God's diversity justified the aesthetics' propensity for moving and ephemeral subjects, a proliferation of objects, a disintegration of clearly ordered composition, the irrational, extensive description in baroque poetry, a mixture of genres and styles, an alternation of themes, and increasing structural complexity, such as the use of the play-within-the-play in Le Writable Saint Genest. While Renaissance humanism focused on man's appreciation of order and harmony, the baroque aesthetics emphasized man's enjoyment in the surprising and changing diversity in nature which God created for man's pleasure. In Peintures morales (1640-1643) the Jesuit priest Pierre Le Moyne, for example, prefers the naturalness of a spring landscape in flower to an artistically arranged bouquet of flowers. 20 Each new day presents to the artist or poet the possibility of dazzling the spectator/listener/reader with a new palette of colors and a novel unexpected arrangement and distribution of flowers in nature's spontaneous and creative demonstration of its beauty. The classical movement reacted against the diversity, disorder, and liberty characteristic of the baroque aesthetics, and established an analogy between nature and reason. In place of the baroque writer's detailed description of terrestrial phenomena, the classical creator concentrated on man's moral and psychic nature and searched out what was typical, unchangeable, and universal. This switch in focus resulted from a basic difference in the concept of beauty for the two aesthetics. In reaction to the baroque diversity and liberty, classicism dissociated sensual beauty from spiritual beauty, and as in the Renaissance, defined beauty in terms of simplicity, order, clarity, and regularity. In both the Renaissance and the classical period, if nature did not follow these criteria, the artist had to improve and perfect nature. 21 Although in the sixteenth century, Ronsard, in "Abrege de I' art poetique fran9ais" preferred a carefully ordered and clearly disposed composition, it was seventeenth-century classicism which established rules of poetics and absolute norms based on philosophical rationalism, not simply on the imitation of Antiquity.22 Jean Chapelain, an influential spokesman and

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promoter of classical aesthetics for the Academy, who examined the legacy of Aristotle and Italian doctrine,23 first codified classical literary doctrine around 1620 in his "Preface" to Adonis. In it, Chapelain emphasized respect for rules, the importance of reason, dependence on models from Antiquity, poetry as a means of moral instruction, principles of verisimilitude and "bienseances," and the unities of time, place, and action. Ten years later, around 1630, these rules began to attract the attention of writers. 24 Therefore, it is not surprising that Rotrou, in Le Writable Saint Genest, addressed the conflict between reason and sense experience. Both writers and art critics associate rules, reason, and regularity with classical aesthetics and highlight freedom, diversity, and sense experience in baroque aesthetics. The dramatist Racine, in his discourse of January 2, 1685 on the occasion of Thomas Corneille's acceptance into the Academie Franc;aise, described the French theatre at the beginning of the seventeenth century and placed it in direct opposition to classical aesthetics: Quel desordre! quelJe irregularite! Nul gout, nulJe connaissance des veritables beautes du theatre. Les auteurs aussi ignorants que les spectateurs, la plupart des sujets extravagants et denues de vraisemblance, point de moeurs. point de caracteres: ... en un mot, toutes les regles de I' art, celJes meme de I'honnetete et de la bien seance, partout violees. 25

Marcel Reymond summarizes the essential distinction between the classical aesthetics based on the authority of reason and the Baroque, an expression of freedom and spontaneity: Les classiques sont les defenseurs du principe d' autorite, de la tradition, du maintien des formules; Ie Baroque, c'est la liberte. De tous les mots qu'il a dits: beaute, joie, tendresse, feminite, et ceux de sante robuste, de force et de majeste, Ie mot qui nous reste Ie plus cher est celui de liberte. 26

The baroque writer or artist freely unfolded his creative imagination in new potential visions of reality in architecture, art, literature, and performance. Sense perception rather than reason expanded baroque vision. In the baroque perspective, images "transmitted by the senses from the exterior world or produced by the imagination, unquestionably possessed a real value .... "27 Critics also contrast the classical principle of "vraisemblance" with the baroque vision of the "merveilleux." For Jean Chapelain, the marvelous, defined as "contre I' attente et contre I' ordinaire," is the antithesis of verisimilitude; "une poetique axee sur Ie merveilleux sera Ie contraire d'une poetique axee sur Ie vraisemblabIe."28 Littre confirms Chapelain's perceptions and defines "merveilleux" as "ce qui dans un evenement, dans un recit, s' eloigne du courant ordinaire des choses; ce qui est produit par les etres sur-

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naturels; ce qui suscite l' admiration. "29 In baroque aesthetics, the greatest artist is the creator of the most marvelous illusions. Implied in the word "merveilleux" is a spectator or reader who responds to the creation by expressing astonishment or surprise. Since the verb "mirer," to look, is the stem for "admirer," "admiration," "miracle," and "merveilleux,"3o the marvelous is a key element of the artist's and spectator's creative imagination. The concept of "gloire," a multi-faceted term with religious and political associations, promoted the baroque aesthetics' propensity for the marvelous and the need to display. Moliere's poem "La Gloire du Val-de-Grace" (1669) glorifies baroque aesthetics 3! and Louis XlV. In Moliere's poem, "gloire" refers to Pierre Mignard's baroque fresco in the dome, a representation of the divine Persons in God, the angels, and saints which surprised "1' esprit" and enchanted "l'oeil," but the author also directly praises "Ie grand" Louis XlV. While this baroque church was built in thanksgiving for the birth of the king, it still stands as a perpetual reminder of his "gloire." The absolute monarch of this era identified himself in terms of glory,32 whose acquisition was not limited to the ruling class. Since death is common to all, even a common man such as Genest, in his insistence on martyrdom, could realize aspirations for glory. Extraordinary manifestations of the grandeur of the king and the marvelous reached their height in the seventeenth-century "fetes de cour baroques," such as Les Plaisirs de l'Isle Enchantee (Versailles, 1664), and the festivities celebrating the marriage of Leopold I (Vienna, 1666-68), which displayed the originality and fantasy of the artistic directors. In order to demonstrate their political superiority and repress their feelings of insecurity on the theatrum europeum, each monarch, even princes of minor states, attempted to imitate and surpass the magnificence of all other "fetes de cour," especially those at Versailles. To achieve this goal, the monarchs and princes introduced the spectacular or "jamais vu" in order to elicit the astonishment and admiration of the viewers, particularly heads of state and foreign dignitaries. Magnificence, the "merveilleux," heroic actions, and "un d€guisement mythologique, allegorique ou romanesque" made each "fete de cour baroque" an elevated and imaginary representation of the court itself, 33 testifying not only to the grandeur of the reigning monarch, but also to the "gloire" of baroque aesthetics. While staging the spectacular and the marvelous, the artistic directors of the "fetes de cour baroques," in reality created substitute universes for the European monarchs. Germain Bazin identifies the essence of the Baroque with man's creation of substitute universes. 34 These baroque festivals revealed an outlook on life in which man's identity exists in seeming rather than being, a

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perspective characteristic of the seventeenth century. The desire to escape through make-believe into an ideal existence has its roots in man's anxiety over Divine Grace and the uncertainties attached to the concept of life after death. Man projects himself into an imaginary world and becomes an actor portraying his life as he envisions it; as a result, the actor represents the entire Baroque Age. The Chevalier de Mere (1610-1684), a French moralist and critic of Voiture, advises that one should be a "good actor in life," "regard what one does as a play," and "imagine one is acting a part."35 Genest, an excellent example of the Chevalier de Mere's commentary, freely relinquishes his role on the Roman stage and recreates himself to become an actor once again, but this time an actor in God's theatre. This mindset encourages spontaneity, creativity, change, and freedom as man replaces one mask with another. During the seventeenth century, there was a continual tension between classical restraint and the baroque desire for creative freedom. Even in classical writers, baroque tendencies emerged when they referred to "new" and "bizarre" aspects of beauty. Boileau confesses the importance of "nouveaute": "Quand je fais des vers je songe toujours a dire ce qui ne s' est point encore dit dans notre langue,"36 while in Refiexions diverses, La Rochefoucauld affirms: "On voit ... des femmes d'une beaute eclatante, mais irreguliere, qui en effacent souvent de plus veritablement belles."37 Bazin recognizes the interplay between these two aesthetics in his perceptive comment: "For 'classical' and 'baroque' are not opposites. More reason enters into the composition of the one, more fantasy into the composition of the other; but both are facets of a lost world of make-believe."38 Western Michigan University NOTES I Wilfred Floeck, Esthetique de la diversite: Pour une histoire du baroque litteraire en France, trans. Gilles Floret (Paris: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1989) 24. 2 Rene Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1966) 359. 3 Floeck45. 4 Floeck 35. 5 Floeck 57-59. 6 Floeck 72. 7 German Bazin, The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes (New York: Norton, 1968) 8-9. 8 Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres completes, ed. A. ThibaudetfM. Rat (Paris: Bib!. de la Pleiade, 1962) 417-418. 9 See Blaise Pascal, Pensees, ed. Ch.-M. des Granges (Paris: Garnier, 1964) 85-139 for a discussion of man's belief in God.

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Gisele Mathieu-Castellani, "Discours baroque, discours manieriste. Pygmalion et Narcisse," Questionnement du baroque, ed. Alphonse Vermeylen (Louvain-Ia-Neuve: College Erasme, 1986) 71. 11 Mathieu-Castellani 71. 12 Floeck 136-137. 13 Bazin 9. 14 Jean Rousset, "Peut-on definir Ie baroque?", in France Baroque, Philippe Minguet (Paris: Hazan, 1988) 388. 15 Jean Rousset, ed. Anthologie de la poesie baroque, vol. II (Paris: Colin, 1968) 11-12. All further references, unless indicated, refer to this edition and are incorporated in the text in parentheses. 16 Floeck 56-67. 17 Theophile de Viau, Oeuvres poetiques I, ed. J. Streicher (Geneve: Textes litt. Fran~., 1951-58) 10-11. 18 Floeck 59. 19 Floeck 56. 20 Pierre Le Moyne, Peintures morales, IV (Paris: 1669) 59. 21 Bray 151-57. 22 Floeck 142-43. 23 See Bray 49-62 for a discussion of the cult of Aristotle and 34-48 for an examination of Italian theorists. 24 Bray 359. 25 Jean Racine, "Discours prononce ill' Academie Fran~aise ilia reception de MM. Corneille et de Bergeret," Oeuvres completes (Paris: Seuil, 1962) 413. 26 Marcel Reymond, "De Michel-Ange iI Tiepolo," in France Baroque, Philippe Minguet (Paris: Hazan, 1988) 386. 27 Giulio Carolo Argan, The Baroque Age (New York: Rizzoli, 1989) 9. 28 Fernand Hallyn, Formes mtitaphoriques dans La poesie Lyrique de l'age baroque en France (Geneve: Droz, 1975) 41. 29 E. Littre, "Merveilleux," Dictionnaire de la Languefranfaise (Paris: Hachette, 1875) 528. 30 Marlies Kronegger, "Games of Perspective in Baroque Art and Poetry," Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 8.15 (1981) 272-75. 31 Moliere, Oeuvres completes, ed. Pierre-Aime Touchard (Paris: Seuil, 1962) 665--68. Moliere glorifies baroque aesthetics by praising Mignard's fresco in Val-de-Grike for its invention, diversity, movement, chiaroscuro effects, and the ability to dazzle the spectator. 32 See E. Leonardy, "Les Fetes de cour baroques," Questionnement du baroque, ed. Alphonse Vermeylen (Louvain-Ia-Neuve: College Erasme, 1986) 121-28 for a discussion of "Repraesentatio et glorificatio majestatis." Don Diego Saavedra Fajardo, a Spanish diplomat in the court of Philippe IV and author of "Idea de un Principe Politice Cristiano" (1640) considers the glory of the prince as proof of the prestige and power of the country he represents. In France, Louis XIV, writing his Memoires during the "Classical Age" states that the first duty of the prince is the realization of "sa propre splendeur et sa propre magnificence ... " and the ruler's first goal always must be "Ia conservation de notre gloire et de notre autorite" (124-25). 33 Leonardy 119. Each "fete de cour" is an original work of art orchestrated by an artistic director who draws from past traditions, genres, and forms, looks for inspiration in the "fetes de cour baroques" of other European countries, and then relies on his freedom and creative imagination to outshine the others. Incorporating fireworks, water, theatre, ballet, tournaments, 10

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and "Ie trionfo," he strives to produce a unified spectacle from these diverse components. Theatrical machines and trompe I' oeil devices create an atmosphere of illusion and enchantment to dazzle both spectators and participants. 34 Bazin 11. During the sixteenth century, man established and maintained his identity through the exercise of power in continual conquest, symbolized by Hercules chained to his interminable tasks and exemplified by Charles V. During the "Classical Age" represented by Louis XIV, the prototype of the royal idea, power belonged to the king by divine right. For the monarch, the "fetes de cour baroques" filled the void left by divine-right monarchs who exercised classical restraint and avoided displays of power and grandeur through conquest. In the shift to the divine-right theory of ruling, the Olympian god Apollo replaced the demi-god Hercules as the symbol of power and monarchy. 35 Bazin 47-48. 36 Nicolas Boileau, Oeuvres (Paris: Garnier, 1962). 37 Franl(ois de la Rochefoucauld, "Du vrai," Refiexions ou sentences et Maximes morales, Refiexions diverses (Geneve: Droz, 1967) 206. 38 Bazin 12.

TONY RACZKA

TO CONSOCIATE AND FOSTER THE SELF

My current drawings and poems suggest a very important aspect of life in general - sensitivity beyond logical thought and conviction. Such sensitivity, I believe, invokes wonder and delight - not calculated or determined, but felt within one's experience, both consumed and radiated by the individual. Each of my works conveys and suggests mUltiple concepts and emotions. The fine border between the abstract and the figurative encourages selfdirected perceptions, ideas, and feelings within the viewer. I think that the complexity and abstraction of my drawings and poems can raise within the viewer the question "What matters (to me)?", or a realization (a sense of awareness and/or arousement of understanding) that the nature of one's experience is largely based upon presumptions, beliefs, and perhaps, imagination. I believe that the question "What matters in life?" is basic and vital. Within young people, for instance, I have seen answers vary between "Nothing matters," which I have heard sincerely and repeatedly expressed by a seven-year-old girl from India when I was a graduate student at Northern Illinois University in 1980; and "My fingernail design, tennis shoe brand, particular video games, and the innumerable T.v. programs I watch tonightor all day, everyday! - are what really matter!", which I've seen expressed by many children in our culture. In the case of the young Indian girl, "Nothing matters" suggests that she doesn't fear or worry about possible and generally unpresumable outcomes or events, or perhaps, even the occuring results of events or situations. Fear and worry generally discourage and disrupt one's conception and feeling of hope, as well as the direction and accomplishment of aims. Consideration and caution, on the other hand, are generally supportive and protective. The interests and desires of many young children of our culture are often rooted in visual appearance, as well as entertainment, and are often unachievable based on financial capability. Unfortunately, the concentration on such desires and concerns can result in the putting aside of education and development. What should matter to people (primarily for their health and happiness) is love of self and of others, health, happiness, education, and insight. My drawings and poems are based on the notion that much of an individual's experience should be focused and concentrated on the here and now - largely free of conceptualization, assumption, judgement, and memory. My work expresses the potential to see between and "hear" beyond the 189

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rational mentality. My abstract representation (even of "things" invisible in everyday life, i.e. forces, feelings, and imaginings) involves symbols and characteristics which encourage positive notions of human conditions and relevant emotions, a suggestive rendering of a world view in the flow of phenomena. My works emphasize the relevant notion that an individual's experience is largely a form of creation, based on the complexity and selective possibility of one's thoughts, moods, perceptions, actions, etc. This creative aspect of one's life is most effectively based on awareness, choice, and will power. In experiencing my drawings or poems, I encourage each viewer to engage and observe his or her moods or states of mind, and this takes a good amount of time and effort. The viewer will, presumably, add a wide range of ideas and feelings - and is encouraged to witness and evaluate the perceived images, as well as his or her responses. Related to this is the notion that when a person does think of past, present, and/or possible future experiences and conditions, it is to his or her advantage to do so in a state of self-awareness and self-control. My works are based on my interest in minutely enriching and enlightening the individual; and in a more general sense refining and defining the progression of human relations. My drawings, for instance, present a complexity and related sense of wonder based on their activation of a viewer's ongoing perceptual and notional formation, for the drawings are characterized by motion, change and rhythm. This encourages "silence" - a non-thinking state of mind and awareness, which can result in a sense of self beyond one's ideas and feelings. My drawings and poems, more generally, evoke an especially subtle yet demanding intake of impressions and relevant meanings, as well as the invented images and apparent meaning on behalf of the viewer. The viewer's experience may thus become focused on intrigue and sensitivity, interest and delight. To have and communicate such experiences is to consociate and foster the self by increasing one's interpersonal convictions of constructive adherence and shared delight. Such experience, I believe, emphasizes the attributes of creative tendency and the endurance of growth. The creative thoughts and actions involved in the making of my "artworks" are a dramatic blend of morality, humor, conviction, and absurdity ... partially incomprehensible, but hardly nonsensible. Curiosity, playfulness, and resultant discovery and invention on the part of the viewer wield the enjoyment of immediate and primarily self-directed awareness - culminating, I hope, in a sense of wonder and joy.

TO CONSOCIATE AND FOSTER THE SELF a spire of aims renewed in everyday life Climbing the hairs of careful study to the hillgrown stream of life and dream that dances with wonder and active feelings chosen for their fate

CHANGING THE GUARD Cunning dwellers casting themselves in savage regularity gleaming its forgetting edge (unforgettable) They're in a journey of reopened comparable which can touch the lives of all who sustain and fortify themselves With cool expectations (close to flawless) when coping with a swarm of bees on a lot of your soul along the streambank obligated to unfold even the narrowest of tracks stretched ahead and tailored to your needs! in the peril of chagrin For low key splendors were already set with the scent of your hope and the scale of concern basking in the sun with the involvement of the heart carrying lights aimed at overhead restlessness, looking at the world which waits in ambush

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TO CONSOCIATE AND FOSTER THE SELF yet is retouched and reawakened by the hyper-densed advantage of nectar flowers in mass planting amid dynamic, compelling waves literally racing around and needing to overturn the paths that appear leading to the tea garden allied with a bond of the imaginings changing the guard

WITH COLOR TO CATCH Whatever clouds our dreams is, generally, detailed by a swift crop of associations and feelings almost oblivious to memory and conjecture. Send the summons! (for we have invented ourselves). The question is, "Why and how did we build the role we now play?" Armed with our best guess and estimate on a tall tower beside a cliff; for patience pays off from quite a height! we see the emergence of something that some have never seen before - a great magnet in the flight of fascination, piercing the tongue of the unthinkable which links the gaps between the choice of singular doubles with sides of the same, and options no longer diluted by dew, and no longer locked in the lawn of order. There are watchers who have (among other things)

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TO CONSOCIATE AND FOSTER THE SELF translated absurdities and dictions, slamming fateful assurance with a pretension of desire, based on an intertwining integrity of virtue and veracity revolving endlessly ... They are ventilators of aerial feats, with bends of fortune and strategic foray recompromising the expectations which drew their elements and shuttled as they shifted compelled to retract and unravel, and retract, repeatedly; with a soundness clearly enhancing each marvelous moment with color to catch

SOAKED TO THE SKIN A manifestation of methods leaves only a short walk between the mountains combining youth and maturity for lure and sentiment glow from the veritable factory of circulation felt to speed all repairs and ease pressure as you take care of swimming baths in the heart of a daily chorus - birdstending the arcs of thirst and pond or, at least, a feast of meticulous rapport for the movement of the floating palace can be tolerated only when you know that the white starlight changes the acts, or rather, the actors

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TO CONSOCIATE AND FOSTER THE SELF maneuvered by an act of unusual cooperation and a huge model of all levels of society with lifts and ramps engulfed by the sea calm amidst a smoke which lingers and utterly transforms a silk essential grasp of gratitude with the commotion of notion (potentially as dry as bone) crowning the vines which sweep beyond the edge of their domain stabilizing the scent of interest and luck, which is hard to measure at the margins of a succession long gone now but still the rain falls diving at the trees and then soaked to the skin

THE LIGHT OF DAY Think again! and mold your sensibility on the brink by the peach palm, committed to a sampling lulled with the art of watching and wondering. Herald the realm of reactive initiative, to project a circumstance of servivability blending truth and buzzing salvation Pushing to observe the comings and goings and to reach for filling in the fruit of self-discovery with wanderings of faith amid the demands of the day

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TONY RACZKA Sipping thoughts of splendor, and undoing the creative incapacity of fulminating fatigue ... leaning into the new threshold of an otherwise piece of levity Unexpectedly doing more with less, with language coding and decoding the cravings of simple and obvious ascent at the sound of certain ideals which add to the dauntless dash along the ponds, behind the bulk of riverboats unsuitable to serve taken into a lump Between two bell-shaped flowers of generating charm amid bursts of buzzing and the nerves of the electrics They encourage the interplay of secrets and audible argument, and flow through fashion and dramatic ordealin jubilant affirmation to relent the modes of appearance and renew the accoustic symbols of the inner ear in the spot of atomic To scurry the claim of comic nature yielding to any scrap held sacred which had fallen, and then reigned the strands of possibility now submerged in the wonderfully mindless round of the crowd - the curving alliance of supply, profit and sprinkling grace upon moments of brilliant and willful acts of exchange With choice floating next to chance along a stream of abundance blaring as the lotus widens (to dally longer) into the light of day

SECTION FOUR

SECTION FOUR

MICHEAL VANPELT

INANIMORATA: THE DREAD OF THINGS

"Human being has been delivered over to beings which it needs .... " (Martin Heidegger). You don't know the half of it, bud.

Some time ago, my friend and colleague Prof. Charles Harvey wrote a paper concerning inanimate objects and their possible deontologization. I In that article, Charlie proposes that inanimate matter is at odds with animate beings and that this animus causes events which leave us puzzled: socks disappear, books move from place to place, cars re-park themselves, and things get lost and lost things return. When something is needed most desperately, it cannot be found. When its use is most sought, it ceases to function. Sometimes it does seem as though things have it in for us, and are willfully disobedient to our demands. Perhaps they have a will, and that will is turned against us simply because we are the blessed animata and they the cursed inanimata. We have assumed for quite some time that the inanimate has no being such as we, that it is dumb, mute, dependent, and without volition. Charlie proposes the opposite, and with good reason: they (inanimate entities) seem to be out to get us or at least to confound us. Is it possible that he is right and that we have been wrong about one of the basic assumptions of western culture? I must contend that Charlie has uncovered part of the truth, and that he has made an initial cut into the recovery of a truth long lost. In some points he has erred, and those errors have led him away from the full reality of the situation: things aren't out to get us, it is just that we notice when things lose their being. Charlie begins his article by saying, "I lost my car twice." Based upon the theory which I will propose, he would more properly say, "My car got lost twice." Things can lose their being, and they do so in definite, albeit indeterminate ways. When your car starts re-parking, it has begun to lose its being - don't blame yourself, sell it quickly! When your socks disappear, it's not because of something you have or have not done. It is simply that the car or sock is losing or has already lost its being. We must be cautious in this analysis, for it is too easy to ascribe will where it mayor may not belong. Equally ought we to be careful in ascribing a lack of will where it does belong.

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Our assertion that rocks do not have will is based primarily on no one ever having seen a rock move of its own accord. No rock has spoken to me (at least, not since the sixties). No rock has yet written a magnum opus like Sediment and Time. As Charlie rightly points out, while they have never done this to our face, we may not be so certain as to their behavior when our backs are turned. Perhaps they do have will and conspire together against us. We might well imagine some cartoon physics of things: we tum our backs and they run crazily to and fro, only to rearrange themselves when we return. While we are amused by such a picture, we must also admit that it is a possibility. We face some of the questions of essential being and existence which have been discussed since the Ionians and possibly even before. One can well imagine some Neanderthal, searching for a "misplaced" club, scratching his head in wonder. Where did the damn' thing go? We have some answers now, but under careful scrutiny we realize that these are mere assumptions based on but half the evidence. Because we assumed that the inanimate had no will, we have assumed that all losses are to be blamed on ourselves or on others. B.C. might blame the loss of a favorite club on his own absent-mindedness or on some other person, Clumsy Carp for instance. This may well have been the start of a profound misapprehension of being which has founded our concept of existence. What if this apprehension is a miss? We must find some way to ascertain whether or not the inanimate are simply present-at-hand. Past writers assert that there is no evidence that the inanimate are possessed of will. We cannot gain relevant evidence except by observation or experience, and we have no direct experience of the willed behavior of things. Yet there remain two other possibilities: First, that our experience is not in accord with the actual, second, that being observed changes the behavior of the inanimate. We may appeal here to the investigations, principles, theories and mathematics of quantum physics. Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle proposes that, at the subnuclear level, we can know either the position or the velocity of a particle (where it is or how fast and where it is going) but not both position and velocity.2 If we cannot know something so simple as where a thing is and where it's going, then we certainly can have no direct knowledge of its state of being. Were the uncertainty principle true at the everyday level, things about us would be constantly shifting and moving, and there would be nothing so certain that we could develop any meaningful relationships between things, causes and events. We could not BE, not at all, for our very existence

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depends upon those relationships. There are, however, other principles discovered by the quantum physicist which may help us complete this truth which Charlie has uncovered - the hitherto unknown but real being of beings. First, we have discovered that each and every quantum particle is linked, somehow, with each and every other particle, and that action upon one particle will cause immediate change upon another particle even though the two particles may be millions of light years apart. 3 Pity the physicist, she must now explain something assumed impossible for so long - direct action across space without direct causal link. Second, we know that some quantum particles not only move through time as we do, but also move just as easily and readily backwards and sideways in time as well,3 Again, we must extend our pity to the physicists; they must be having some long nights. We have assumed for so long the linearity of objective time; but it seems that only we animate beings are so limited. Third, as Hawking and others relate, things along the event horizon of a black hole are beyond anything we can imagine. One of the things that happens is that particles wink right into existence, apparently from nowhere, from nothing. 4 One picosecond nothing, the next, something. To paraphrase Mr. Harvey, popped-in, right into being. Again, a thing which we assumed impossible - creatio ex nihilo - has proven a sure bet, which occurs quite regularly. Fourth, actions and events are influenced by observation and thus by the observer. As Heisenberg, Feynmann, and their colleagues have shown this to be essentially true and necessary, I shan't go into an involved explanation. Should you doubt this fact, pick up their books, for they can explain this far better than I. 5 Fifth, as we are all aware from high school science courses, there are the universal laws of the conservation of mass and energy. Strictly speaking, we cannot lose anything at all. Although energy may appear lost, it has merely converted to another form. Matter likewise transforms either to some other form of matter or to some form of energy. Thus, the books and socks and pencils which we appear to lose are not truly lost, nor have they jumped ship, they have merely changed, in less than a wink, into something else somewhere else. Charlie rightly notes this, but cannot explain it beyond the ascription of inimical will based on anecdotal evidence. The truth is far more insidious and holds far-reaching implications for us mere animate beings. In order to reach toward that truth, to explain this apparent inanimate animus, and to point toward some of its implications, we must combine

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Charlie's observations and the principles of quantum physics with a dollop of Heidegger. Once done, I hope to have presented a version of the Harvey Theory of Inanimate Animus that reaches deep into the essential and uncovers that which has been lost for thousands of years. We shall finally know where all those socks have gone. First: every quantum particle is linked with all others; action upon any particle causes immediate change in other particles, regardless of distance.

This principle, uncovered over fifty years ago, links every subatomic particle in the universe to every other such particle in the universe, intractably, inextricably, and unbelievably. Although this was first proposed by mathematical models and disbelieved, there is now empirical evidence that simultaneous, instantaneous influence across great distances is a constant state of affairs. The upshot of this is that we now know that direct action/reaction at a distance without direct causal link is a truth of the universe and that every subatomic particle in the universe is intimately related with and somehow connected to every other. We could say that every particle somehow "knows" the entire universe. For us, this means that every particle making up a sock is intimately, immediately connected to every other particle in the universe. That sock "knows" the entire universe in a way which we cannot even begin to fathom. Each and every particle in the universe somehow knows what is happening to each and every other particle and responds to changes in the state of being of any other particle simultaneously and instantaneously. Certainly we can never say that for our animate selves. Most of us are barely able to keep two things going at the same time, and we certainly are not aware of very much (especially after a few beers in a jazz club). Heidegger points this out when he refers to the Horizon of Care: at any one time, we are aware only of those things which most concern us. So long as we are directly concerned with a thing, it remains inside the horizon of Being; it exists, either as that useful ready-to-hand or that "merely" presentat-hand. Once we move on to other concerns, and that thing stands outside the horizon, it no longer exists for Dasein. Thus we can have no direct experience of what the inanimate does outside of a particular existence. Some have taken this to mean that Heidegger is some kind of punky idealist, with items winking in and out of existence as needed. With our added knowledge, we know that this cannot be so. The object is simply no longer an item of concern. Yet it is there, but not for me. If all those quarks, muons, hadrons, leptons and bosons are so intimately and directly connected, they certainly

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remain long after I have gone on to some other project and turned my attention from them. For the inanimate, things are quite different: everything in the universe constantly, always exists for it and with it. Your sock knows more of the universe right now than all humankind shall ever know, for it is more intimately connected with everything than we ever will be. What a burden it must bear to be so constantly aware of everything that is and everything that's going on with everything everywhere. It knows where everything else is, what is changing, how those changes are taking place and have taken place, and responds appropriately and simultaneously with those changes. The same can be said for every inanimate object. Second, sub-nuclear particles move forward, backward, and sideways in time with equal ease. 3 While the animate universe is limited to the peculiar notion of linear, objective time, that seems not to be too important to matter. Feynmann's diagrams are interesting graphics, for they show the backwards, forwards, and sideways movement of particles within this which we call time. Added to our first bit of data, we can infer that these movements back, forward, and to and fro take place instantaneously. There may be a sub-nuclear particle in your sock that has just come from a long past, less than a picosecond ago. Some sub-nuclear particle from your sock may have just now disappeared into some long distant past (and heaven only knows where). These are instantaneous changes of being that can only be emulated in the animate by a cat's frightened transmutation across measurable distances in an immeasurably short time. The cat, however, cannot move instantaneously backward in time, nor can we. Only the inanimate can do this. It is part of its apparent mass deception of us poor, weak, blind, and limited animate beings. There are startling implications here. We can assume from this evidence that these particles exist in an ever-constant Now. They live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. This means that, for the inanimate, its demise is not imminent Being-towards-Death, but an always already immediate right now. That right now is a constant presence. Imagine, if you can, living with the moment of your death constantly in your mind and feelings, always already going on. Imagine also that your death is some traumatic rending to be scattered across the universe. Surely, this might be a bit distracting. We cannot even begin to fathom what it must be like for the inanimate to live constantly in the full horror of death.

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Third, along the event horizon of a black hole, particles wink right into existence, from nowhere, from nothing; popping into and out of being, willynilly.

First proposed in theory, modeled mathematically, this creation ex nihilo has subsequently been proven experimentally. Things can and do simply pop into being and then back out as well as backwards, forwards, and up, down, and sideways through time. This seems to give us a first cut into an explanation of the disappearing sock phenomenon: It's going to and fro in time and up and down in it. But this does not explain where it is going or why it is doing so. Prof. Harvey suggests that this is the result of some animus. I must propose an entirely different theory. Remember that every particle is intimately connected and "knows" every other particle and what it is doing (in a sense we cannot imagine). They are each and all fully aware of and dependent upon each and the other. They know when there is need for some particles to feed this creatio ex nihilo along the event horizon of black holes. You may have already jumped ahead of me to this conclusion: your sock doesn't just disappear. Socks know that matter is needed at some event horizon and are sacrificed to keep the universe in balance. We can only ask whether the sock willingly sacrifices itself to keep existence whole, or whether it just sits, unable to effect the outcome, waiting in dread for the moment when it will cease, to be scattered far and wide across the universe. Such dread, such anxiety could be beyond the ken of even the most despairing of all pessimistic existentialists. This could be a matter of will. Things may willfully and willingly sacrifice themselves. If this is so, then there must be some rebellious things, dreading their demise so strongly that they strongly resist their going into that dark night. The result would be a strong pull into not-being opposed by a strong desire to remain being. This would cause the object to be pulled to and fro, oscillating ontologically, to appear and disappear, moving away from and back to being. Perhaps this explains Charlie's car: it resisted the pull to go and had enough will to go only so far. What concerns me is the repetition of this action. Charlie's car was surely riding the jagged edge of existence. This behavior may help prove that the inanimate is possessed of some kind of will, albeit different from our own. Fourth, actions and events are influenced by observation and thus by the observer. To observe is to change.

You ask why this does not happen when an object is within the horizon of concern. Heidegger and Heisenberg give partial explanations for this:

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so long as that item is my concern, it cannot disappear (not that the little bugger might want to). An entire object cannot disappear while we watch, because we are holding on to it. Because of its link to the subatomic particles which constitute us, it is fully aware of our focus, knowledge, and concern. Only the unobserved items can disappear or change place. This explains why the space shuttle couldn't possibly disappear on the launch pad; too many people have focussed their being on it. Since we cannot observe all particles, all the time, some can escape however, but only just enough to make things work or to act oddly. This explains why things can suddenly go wrong for no apparent reason: just enough particles have escaped to influence the action of the overall object. Notice the next time the shuttle is about to be launched, that there are myriads of problems both before and after launch. Little things going to and fro, and just enough to make things go wrong. NASA requires a huge staff to suborn the effects of subatomic particles going their own way. In his article, Charlie refers to an incident involving himself and his buddy Jim Garrison. In a bit of hysterical confusion, Jim's copy of The Antichrist gets lost on its way to a black hole and switches places with a nun's drawers (one or both resisted the pull to nothingness and exchanged places halfway). In an effort to get back his copy of The Antichrist, Jim is keeping the nun's drawers up on his bookshelf exactly where Nietzsche should be (so to speak). His belief is that eventually, while his back is turned, the two items will switch back, and his book will reappear. Disappointingly, this can never happen so long as the underwear is where it is, well inside his horizon of concern. So long as his attention is fixed, however tentatively, upon this matter, it cannot move. Better to put the underpants in a box and move to another city. But even this is still no guarantee, for having freed the matter to assume its necessary place in the universe, both the shorts and the book may become landfill for a black hole. While this is unfortunate for Jim and the nun, it is fortunate for us, because of its necessity. The universe needs that matter somewhere else, and it's trying to get it there. Quite frankly, Jim is holding things up. If he doesn't straighten up pretty soon, something drastic may happen. The existence of the universe and our reality may very well depend upon his acquiescence. We observe, however, that no major discernible changes in our fundamental existence have occurred since the beginnings of this affair or because of it. Thus, Jim's behavior, though somewhat derelict, has not

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produced great, sweeping changes. How can this be, if my theory is correct? Since the universe hasn't collapsed for lack of particles, we can safely make this assumption: Jim's obdurate refusal to let things be as they must is causing untold damage to those close to him. His neighbors and colleagues are losing socks, glasses, jars of marmalade, and God knows what all at an alarming rate. His students are probably in a constant state of confusion, searching for pencils that are no longer, for keys that have scuttled away in the night like roaches, and for pens that have gone astray like lost sheep. There may well be a great influx of psychic investigators into his neighborhood just any day now. We can see that none of these items are really lost, they have simply moved on (willingly or not) to another state of being - winking into being God knows where on the far side of the universe, right outside the edge of a black hole. Amazingly, this proves the old joke partially true, those socks have disappeared into a black hole. It is no longer necessary to blame yourself or loved ones, students, or neighbors; rather, blame the fundamental structure of the universe. Don't get too upset, those socks and keys and pencils are needed by the universe to sustain itself, and thus, us. They are giving back to us just as much as we have lost, albeit not as ready-to-hand. If they weren't, the mass of the universe would be surely, steadily decreasing. Since this does not appear to be the case, there must be some merit to this theory. Fifth, the law of conservation of mass and energy.

Sub-nuclear particles are peculiar things, more like a quantum wave of energy than a true particle. In part, this helps to explain their behaviour so deviant from our Newtonian experience. They are not constrained by the general principles of mechanical physics, since they are not possessed of the same characteristics as large objects. But as any mass or energy, they are stuck with some of the immutables. Energy cannot be lost in the universe, it can only convert from one form to another. This helps us understand how they can move through time in peculiar ways and how things apparently lost have simply transmutated to something else and somewhere else, whether that elsewhere is in space or time. They are not lost, just changed. If this theory is correct, lost items are put to good and fair use, sustaining the very foundations of existence. Without them and their cooperation, the universe could not exist as it does. Items must disappear; this is the necessity of their being. We depend upon it.

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Now you can plainly see that Charlie was as right as he was wrong. Things are disappearing, but not for any animus towards you or me. They are simply doing what they must to preserve the natural order. Still, this leaves us with the question which, I think, we must endeavour somehow to resolve for our own well-being and in order, once again, to live in tune with nature. These dumb, mute, immobile objects mayor may not be willing to be or to do. They may be possessed of Will, in whatever sense. They may be aware in many of the same ways in which we are; they may be, in some sense, cognitive beings. This may be a fair assumption, since we do not know that changes in one will result in simultaneous and instantaneous changes in another at some remove. We might safely assume that they are aware of themselves and of all other matter and that they are aware of past, present, and future, albeit this awareness may be different from our own. On the other hand, if they do not want to go and their sacrifice is unwilled but forced upon them by the immutable laws of the universe, then things are quite different. Consider that time for particles may mean a constant knowledge not just of the "now," but a constant awareness and experience of one's own demise. Suppose that you know the day, the hour, and the way of your demise. Suppose that you know your demise to be an instantaneous dispersal of all your particles throughout the universe. Suppose further that there is not one blessed thing you can do about it. If you were that sock, how would you feel? A bit contrary - I would guess. In some ways, this is not dissimilar to our own situation. We know that we shall surely die, though not the day, time, nor manner of passing. In spite of this, we plan, project, participate, love, envy, hate, rejoice. We can respond in many ways to the exigencies of existence. We try to put angst aside by actively projecting towards some indefinite future. We try to put our death aside through hope and expectation. Anxiety comes to us only at those odd moments when we are forced to feel it. Thus, we live with nothingness as a shadowy background kept willfully at arm's length. The inanimate cannot so exist. If dread shapes our Being, how might it shape the existence of the inanimate, unable as it is to make plans, to project, love, envy, or rejoice? We can well imagine ourselves as some tiny rock somewhere, unable to do much except wait for that day and time when we know we shall surely cease to be. That rock's dread might be more awesome and awful than we could possibly imagine. Merely to be and to wait, ticking the seconds by, and then simply to wink out. The human recoils in horror and pity: To need to scream, but to be unable to.

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On the gripping hand, knowing that the very existence of the universe depends upon its death and transfiguration, might not all this inanimate stuff rejoice in its role, anticipating the hour of cessation. It would seem like an important thing, carrying the fate of the universe on your back. This leaves us in a new situation. We now know that these trivial disappearances are not an inconvenience, "Oh, silly me. I forgot where I put my glasses again," nor some inimical conspiracy against us, "That damn desk is out to get me." Our very existence depends upon these disappearances and losses. Instead of anger and frustration, suspicion, paranoia, or anxiety, we ought to be happy in body, mind, and estate whenever a sock disappears or a book pops out of existence. Each and every one of these occurrences is an occasion to rejoice that the inanimate things are keeping our world in order; they are doing their silent part in ordering the universe. So give a rock a hug, it deserves it, and it may very well need it. But I still worry - do they go kicking and screaming? I would. Philander Smith College Little Rock, Arkansas NOTES Harvey, Charles. "The Malice of Inanimates," Phenomenological Inquiry, Vol. XIX, October, 1995. 2 Uncertainty Principle: Bohm, David. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (1971). Bransden, B. H., and C. J. Joachim. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics (1989). Cassidy, D. C. Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (1992). Heisenberg, Werner. The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1949). 3 Quarks & Sub-Atomic Particles: Feynmann, R. P. Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (1988). Fritzsche, Harald. Quarks (1983). Gribbin, John. In Search ofSchrodinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality (1984). Gribbin, John, and Michael White. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (1992). Jammer, Max. The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (1966). Jausch,1. M. Are Quanta Real? A Galilean Dialogue (1973) and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1968). Schiff, L. I. Quantum Mechanics, 3d ed. (1968). Waldrop, M. M. "The Quantum Wave Function of the Universe," Science, Dec. 2,1988. Weinberg, Steven. Subatomic Particles (1983). Wichman, E. H. Quantum Physics (1967). 4 Hawking, Stephen. Black Holes and Baby Universes (1994). Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time (1993). 5 Dirac, Paul. The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Oxford U. Press, NY, 1982. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy, Harper and Row, NY, 1959. 1

ROBYN GANGI

MUSICAL AND VISUAL ENCOUNTERS: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

This paper focuses on a study conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson which is described in The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson interviewed and surveyed curators of art museums - people whose schooling, training, and professional experience dealt with the visual arts - throughout the U.S. in an attempt to understand the nature of the aesthetic encounter. Through these interviews and surveys they formulated a model of the aesthetic encounter in respect to the visual experience. My thought after reading the study was to see what would happen if I held the model up to my own work with my choral students: What would cancel out? What would apply to both? Would there be some qualities unique to each area, the visual and the musical, that might alter the model? How so or to what extent? Is not an aesthetic experience an aesthetic experience no matter what the object is, or is its nature different according to the object being engaged by the perceiver? The model proposed by Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson was based on the feedback of experienced and highly trained "see-ers" who were employed by some of this country's finest museums. Their responses were based on their encounters with tangible objects - objects of the plastic arts. But of the temporal arts - dance, music, theatre - which only exist for the time they are being created, what would be the feedback on encounters with these intangible objects from a very different group of artists: my high-school students? Could there be anything in their experiences that might find a parallel within the same model constructed by Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson? How wide an applicability does the model have? My spring concert took place in late May with all of the choral groups (a 160-voice concert choir, a 40-select-voice chamber choir, and a 16select-voice camerata) performing in one evening. The program consisted of some of the finest works in the choral literature: one of the Vespers by Sergei Rachmaninoff; the "Ave Verum Corpus" of William Byrd; "The Dark-Eyed Sailor," a folk-song arrangement by Ralph Vaughan Williams; "My Sweetheart's Like Venus" by Gustav Holst; John Dowland's "Can She Excuse My Wrongs"; the round "Old Joe Has Gone Fishing" by Benjamin 211

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Britten from the opera Peter Grimes; "Tota Pulchra Es" by Maurice Durufle; from Leonard Bernstein's musical Candide, "Make Our Garden Grow"; and, for double chorus, Franz Biebl's setting of Ave Maria - these were some of the highlights of the two-hour concert. It was truly a great evening of music and musical performance. After giving us a standing ovation, parents, students and administrators openly shared how deeply moving this concert was. For days later the feedback was equally moving. The performers, my students, were also deeply affected by what occurred. While the evening was still fresh somewhere within them, I thought I would have them get some of their thoughts down on paper. Could they put into words the transcendence of the previous night's performance? Would their responses somehow correlate with those of the museum curators? The initial questionnaire to my students, who answered using pseudonyms, was as follows: 1. Can you put into words your thoughts/experiences from the spring concert? 2. Did you come away with something more than or changed from when you went into the evening? 3. Were there certain activities or occurrences in rehearsals that prepared you for this experience, i.e. would you have had this experience without the rehearsal procedures you have been through? What were those activities and how did they enable you to have these experiences? 4. An aesthetic experience can possibly be defined as an intense involvement of attention in response to a visual or aural stimulus for no other reason than to sustain the interaction. The experiential consequences of such a deep and autotelic involvement are an intense enjoyment characterized by feelings of personal wholeness, a sense of discovery, and a sense of human connectedness. But to make it possible there must be a challenge contained in the object and the viewer or listener must have certain skills. Choosing one or more specific examples, what was the challenge in the music and what skills did you possess so that your interaction with the work was heightened? After receiving their answers to this first round of questions, a week later I asked them to write again, still maintaining their anonymity: 1. Did you ever sense some sort of connection with those of the time frame of the songs you were singing, or as someone of that time and/or place? That is to say, "Yes, I know that (feeling, thought, or desire), too." 2. Did you ever feel you were where the songs took place? Did the song or the singing of it transport you somewhere? This may not have been a

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specific place or time. But was there something unreal or surreal experienced during the singing? 3. Did the music ever make you ask questions? For example: What was it like there? What was it like then? Why does this text or music cause a reaction in me? 4. Do the thoughts enter your mind while you are singing or after? But even though the words weren't right there, did that "orb" of thought affect your singing? How has your encounter with the music changed over the several times you have sung it? Choose one or two pieces and be specific. 5. Did you ever wonder whether, if you knew more or less about a song before learning it, this would alter how you eventually experienced it? In other words, would you have sung the song with more or less ___ had you known when the song was written or for whom it was written or under what conditions, either political or religious or geographical, the composer wrote it? Sifting through the responses of 160 students, I found that there are indeed many places within their responses that were parallel to those of the curators' studied in The Art of Seeing. There are some places in the model where their answers do not fit simply because two very different art forms are involved. Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson focus on the visual arts - static, fixed in time and space, always there to be revisited. The performing arts, however, are dynamic, ever moving in time and space; they must always be re-created in order to be re-heard. Re-creation is susceptible to the circumstances of the event: the performers may be tired or emotionally keyed up; the performance may be the last concert on a tour; the first piece on the program may have a different energy from successive pieces; concert dresses or costumes may fit too snugly; the varied skills, the training, and the experience of the performer(s) profoundly affect how the music will be transported from the two-dimensional page to aural and time-bound space. Going through the responses, I began to jot down my own questions or thoughts about the work I was getting into. For example: 1. Training a musician may be akin to training a painter to be a painter of paintings: to translate or transport and transmit the symbols set forth by someone else, i.e.: [A] Painter paints -7 work is completed -7 perceiver (viewer) encounters the work (does not need to be a trained painter in order to look at it, which is what is meant to be done with the work) -7 this engagement creates a new work unique to the perceiver.

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[B] Composer composes ~ work is completed ~ perceiver (musician) encounters the work (does need to be trained enough to be able to translate symbols into sound in order to listen to it, which is what is meant to be done with the work) ~ this engagement creates a new work unique to the perceiver (musician) ~ perceiver (listener) encounters the work (does not need to be a trained musician) ~ this engagement creates a new work unique to the perceiver but which is dependent on the perception of the performer. For a fair example, listen to the two recordings, separated by twenty-some-odd years, of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations of J. S. Bach. Same music, same performer - two distinct renderings of the work. Which one is the work written by Bach? Can the performer be unthreaded from the final work enough for us to know what the composer meant? In doing so, though, has the work been rendered impotent and dismantled enough so there is nothing left to perceive? Can the performer get totally out of the way of herself in order for the creator's intentions to come through? Or is this an impossibility? Even if the painting was meant to hang in the closet for none to see except the artist, it is still there to commune with someone. The music has not fulfilled its life if it has not been brought off the page and given life, if for no one else than the performer. The creation is meant to be: To commune and breathe with something beyond itself. 2. Could it be that teaching is the art of making education an aesthetic experience for the student, no matter what the subject matter? 3. Does the seven-period day, with the repetitive, rhythmic ringing of bells (an enlarged effect of TV with all of its darting images), disrupt the focus of the students, reminding them of their time-full status (as opposed to the timeless one experienced in an aesthetic encounter), hemming in their learning experience - educational strokes moving in contrary motions to those of the aesthetic experience? 4. Why do we want to experience something that removes us from our present state? "I really pity people who are not artists most of all, for they have no refuge from the world," Vanessa (Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister) wrote in 1939, " ... I often wonder how life would be tolerable if one could not get detached from it, ... even artists without much talent can, as long as they are sincere" (The New Yorker, June 5, 1995). C. S. Lewis sees this yearning for something beyond ourselves as a desire for our original and intended state: Our home is of a timeless realm and not governed by the physical bonds we live in daily. We are literally fish out of water: "How time flies!" as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that

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would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal. (138)

The above are some of the questions I have. The following is an outline of Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson's study. From the responses they received from the museum curators, they were able to surmise that the aesthetic encounter could be described as having four dimensions that are distinct yet inseparable from each other: the perceptual, the emotional, the intellectual, and the communicative. They also concluded that common to these four dimensions of the aesthetic experience, there appeared to be other qualities that were also related to Csikszentmihalyi's description of optimal experience or the flow model: a focus of attention, a limitation of the stimulus field, a loss of ego or transcendence; and that one's skills are adequate to overcome the challenges found in the work. Adding to these, they notate the process of discovery experienced by the perceiver and the inherent human quality and temporal element of all art. Within the outline of the study, I am placing pertinent excerpts of the students' responses where parallels exist between the visual experiences of the curators and the musical performance experiences of my students. Because of the different nature of the experiences resulting from interaction between the object and the perceiver inherent to the two arts dealt with here, there are areas where the students' responses fall outside of the model. I have created an extension of the model offered by Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson proposing that, indeed, there is a difference between the aesthetic experience of the visual and musical performing arts. Those responses of the students taken from the first set of questions are notated by a I-page number, and those responses of the second set of questions notated by a 2-page number. Page numbers listed as 33 refer solely to the text The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter.

OUTLINE: THE ART OF SEEING JUXTAPOSED WITH STUDENTS' RESPONSES

l. Perceptual Dimension (29)

A. What was the physical nature - what is seen 1. Considerations: a. real v. reproduction b. size or scale c. form, line, color, surface

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2. Curators' responses reflect traditional principles of order, harmony, balance. 3. Sometimes their perceptions extend beyond the visual to other senses. 4. Other physical features in the work provide access to the creative process by which the work came into being. II. Emotional Dimension (33)

A. What was the emotional nature - upon the seeing ... ? 1. Considerations: a. The work creates emotions. I felt as though I was no longer performing, but that everything was happening inside of me. It was an experience that has never, and may never again be equalled. It was amazing to me that within only half an hour, I could feel so many emotions. I felt as though I was expressing every feeling I've ever experienced, just laying it all out in my own little world. (1-67) I learned new emotion; and that's the greatest power ever to be learned. (1-87) I was amazed that I was able to feel such passion for a work of art. (1-94) b. There is a connection to personal feelings, past associations. It flowed out of me, representing my emotions from the past: the hurt, the pain, the love, the hopes and dreams .... It was special to me because my grandfather had just died and I felt like I was singing it for him. (1-133) c. There is a physical or visceral reaction ("it grabbed me"). I was shaking after the end of [the concert]. (1-73) We were all working so hard I felt the electricity going through our music. (1-175) 2. There can be a development of reaction over a period of time: a. Some said that an initial reaction must be positive before the work is given any serious thought. b. Others said that there need not be an initial response of any kind before engaging with a work. c. An initial dislike need not deter one from the work. In order to sing "Slava v vish ni Bogu" [one of the Vespers by Sergei Rachmaninoff] I needed to feel the music. At first

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I was not into this one at all but I then began to listen to the sopranos and altos and I could not believe everything that was going [on]. Every time we sang that piece I was mesmerized, I was put into a trance. (1-94) B. Emotional apprehension (40): 1. It is a salient feature of the aesthetic experience. 2. It is not homogeneous. 3. The quality of the emotional dimension is dependent on the time spent with the work. III. Intellectual Dimension (41) - Engendering Thoughts

A. Considerations: 1. Characterized by a need to sleuth out ... a. The work's inner or hidden message, or ... I ask many questions when we sing. Like why does music make us feel so bold yet frightened and exposed and joyous? And how is it that just one song can uncover unfelt feelings, things you never would've imagined thinking or things that you never felt were possible to feel? It makes you wonder what were these composers thinking of when they wrote this and what kind of people they were? Did they possibly understand the powers that they possessed by bringing this music to life? (2-2) b. The work's history or nature, or ... c. An attempt to label, to place in a historical setting. 2. It impels one to search out new ways of seeing a work, to discover another dimension to it. 3. Its historical quality evokes an atmosphere of its era to the person in the present.

B. For some this came into play after the perceptual, emotional, or visceral: I think going into the music blindly is better because you need to just learn it first - but when you know it when you start, or you are at the point where you can become it, then if you learn the background and/or the time-frame - you know the little details. Yes, you would sing the song with more intensity if you can relate it to something. If you have knowledge of where it came from. The more you know

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about something, I think, the more personable you can make it, to yourself, to your audience, and to you and each other. (2-3)

IV. Communication Dimension (62) - Discourse Ensues A. Considerations: 1. The work gives you something in return: you engage with it. a. The emphasis could be on differences between past and present ideas, era to era, culture to culture . ... Why have we become what we have? We have taken our musical virtues and talents and replaced them with crashing vocals and screaming windpipes. These songs make me ask, "Why was I born here, and not back then?" But then I realize that I appreciate it much more now because I realize the difference between real music and imitation. (2-66) b. The emphasis could be on the continuities found between ideas past and present or between ideas all found in the present boundaries of space and time dissolve, allowing an interpersonal exchange to occur: "With the help of information, imagination, and empathy, the viewer can in fact share the dreams, the emotions, and the ideas that artists of different times and places have encoded in their work." (71) (Here is an example of communication with a work of the past set forth in a present medium. A kind of aural pentimento): In "Make Our Garden Grow" [by Leonard Bernstein from his musical Candide based on Voltaire's work] my personal performance - as I think [were] many others' - was greatly affected by a story Mr. Gangi had told us one day in chorus. I was then able to relate the words of the song to my experiences and regrets, allowing the song to become more personalized. The little anecdotes we get during chorus are very important, because they stick with us and influence us more than you could imagine. (1-97) 2. The work can be a vehicle for stimulating fantasy and imagination: In the past four years I've been a monk, walking and praying; an angel; a young lover rolling in the grass; an arrogant young beau, and the hand of the elegant young

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belle that slapped him! All through the music and your focusing lens. (1-112) 3. This can lead to reflecting on one's present state: I realize more than often how hectic the world is, after being so devoted to one particular activity. It is sometimes difficult to get back "in the swing of things" in the whole complicated process of life, after being so involved and dedicated to singing; it feels almost as if my head were in the clouds. (1-85) 4. The work can stimulate associations (it looked like ... ; it sounded like angels ... ): I could picture great battleships on an ocean - just sailing off into the sunset. Corny isn't it, but it was like the setting sun. Angels awakened from heaven and sent their blessings, sang down their warmest regards, ... holy but ancient as if part of a ritual or religious ceremony. (2-1) 5. It may have a transcending quality - it removes one from the present and transports one to a timeless realm: I don't know if there are words to describe the way I felt the night of the concert. When I left the concert that night my parents were asking me why I was so quiet, but I couldn't describe to them the way I felt. On the ride home I just sat and stared out the window not paying any attention to anything but my thoughts. I remember looking up and realizing I was home. It seemed like I was in the car for only five minutes. Basically the feeling I got from being in the concert was like being in a dream. (1-83)

OTHER FORMATIVE QUALITIES OF THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

V. Attentional Element - The Focusing of Attention (119)

A. Object directness - "I was so wrapped up in it a bomb could have gone off': I find myself feeling like I am no longer where I actually am. There seems to be no one and nothing else in the world except for me, Mr. Gangi, and the music. It is a feeling that is hard to describe, but it is one that I experience nowhere else but while I am singing. I seem to put every bit of my energy and concentration into the singing; it is like being "taken over" by the music. (1-85)

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B. Limitation of the stimulus field: 1. The specific circumstances wherein a work is engaged, enhancing the interchange between the perceiver and the object and thereby altering the perceiver's orientation of time and space - the lighting and room size where the paintings were displayed, or seeing the Guernica in Spain with Franco's guards outside the museum v. in New York at MOMA. I remember one practice, a class day when it was pouring outside and you could hear the pitter-pattering of the raindrops. We sang "Slava v vish ni Bogu." It was as if the angels were crying for us. All I could picture were the gods in heaven rejoicing and praising us for the miracle we had given them - the lights were low, everyone was still and quiet. It was moving. I don't think moments like that are made for words. (2-2) C. Loss of ego or transcendence - losing the most human of qualities: self-consciousness (122): [Mr. Gangi] made me see that music wasn't black and white things on paper written by a person who died 200 years ago. Music is inside you, it's a living, breathing thing that just takes you over. That was my challenge, to let the music take me over, and when it happened, I was changed forever. (1-88)

VI. Skills and Challenges

A. Skills: 1. Each of the dimensions (perceptual, emotional, communicative, and intellectual) are skills that are each found to be stronger in some people than others. 2. These continue to grow over time. 3. They also grow by interaction with other people of similar interests and by continually exposing oneself to more works as well as returning to already seen works. B. Challenges (127): 1. "Cracking the code" requires knowledge in other areas. 2. The challenge is to apply this information to what is seen. 3. There is the challenge of rediscovering the same work or reusing the information at one's disposal, having a tenacious curiosity.

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I think the challenge for me was to look inside myself and say, "What am I doing here? Am I good enough to be here? Do I have what it takes?" The challenge for me was to answer those questions. (1-88) VII. Discovery

A. Usually there is the discovery of one's potential or unrealized skills: 1. "The content of the various discoveries closely parallels the four major foci of the aesthetic encounter: perceptual, emotional, intellectual, and communicative." (128) Music is so often the language that my thoughts flow in, I believe. Hence, I often find words hard to come by. Leaving this setting make me frightened to think that no one's going to be able to interpret my thoughts - the thoughts that can only be expressed through music, and not words. (1-47) B. Discovery of the work can lead to discovery of one's self and/or one's relationship to the world around them, either specifically or generally: I remember the end of the song when I looked at everyone. They were like shaking or ... quivering, my eyesight couldn't adjust. It was like their souls were being released or let go like they were fighting to be released, struggling to break free from the chains that had kept them intact for so long. They had found somewhere better and they didn't want to return and in effect part of us remained behind, but the place isn't forgotten, it's just unrecognizable. A fight between heaven and earth. (2-2). C. The process of discovery contributes to a significant encounter with the work: Near the end of our last Chamber Choir rehearsal before the concert, just as we were about to sing "The Dark-Eyed Sailor" [arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams], you said something that truly made me think. You said we should "keep a little bit of what you love in everything you do" (or something to that effect). That made me realize how wonderful music could be if you truly love it. I think that this enhanced my experience of the concert, and has greatly affected the way I will live the rest of my life. (1-53)

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VIII. Human Quality

A. It connects us with others: A connection ... like a complete understanding of what those people went through. Yes ... time-frame - 1 can say 1 did with "Slava v vish ni Bogu" - 1 guess it was like 1 belonged in that era, as if some part of me reawakened when we sang that song. Like a past life or something. 1 could imagine it just so vividly: a life, a death, a sweet offering from heaven. (2-1)

"Slava v vish in Bogu" often made me ask myself what it would have been like to sing that song when it was originally written - not for a high school chorus concert in 1995, but for the purpose for which it was originally written. (2-14) B. Its imprint of humankind is upon it: 1. "I am communicating with someone." a. "The aesthetic encounter inevitably involves some realization that humanity is communicating with humanity." (132) The music never made me ask questions, but it did make me realize just how little human nature changes over time; for a teenager in 1995 to be able to relate so much to something written 400 years earlier is pretty amazing. (2-12) IX. Temporal Element

A. The time in history when the work comes into existence: ... certain songs that we sang would remind me of, or make me think about what went on in the time when a certain piece was written. Who sang it? How did it sound when they sang it? And why was [it] sung in the first place? And furthermore, ... (2-18)

B. The time in history when the viewer lives: ... if they heard it now, how would they say we were doing it? (2-18) C. The time over which the viewer sees the work (how long do they look at it, how many times do they see it?): That one time when we tied our shoes over a five-minute period of time. 1 could've sat there and done that for hours.

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Just to sit there and experience time. It's such a real and human experience. Certainly nothing you would do on a normal day-to-day basis. (1-110) Although we have been singing Ave Maria [by Franz Biebl] since the beginning of the year, every time I sing it, I sing it for a different reason, but each time I do sing it I feel more whole. (1-182) When singing "Slava v vish ni Bogu," we transformed from Masuk High Concert Choir to a group of people singing praises to God in a distant land. It was an incredible experience. This cannot happen unless you are comfortable enough with the music that you can enjoy it. I began feeling this once I was comfortable with the music. The most intense feeling of this was Thursday night at the concert. The song wasn't just notes anymore, it was music. (1-92) Here I depart from Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson. I am developing qualities in this next section based on the students' responses and my experience which are unique to the choral aesthetic experience. AREAS CONTAINED IN THE CHORAL MUSIC PERFORMING MODEL NOT FOUND IN THE VISUAL ART MODEL

X. The One Work as Experienced by Many People Simultaneously, the Group Experience

A. The performer's experience via a four-fold relationship: 1. The performer's relationship to the group with whom they are performing: I have never been in a chorus like the one at Masuk [High School] - it amazes me. How we can all be in our separate conversations with completely different things on our minds at one minute, and at the next, it seems we are one voice, creating a beautiful musical masterpiece; our differences seem to momentarily fade into nothing. It is a feeling like no other that I have ever experienced. (1-86) IS0-some-odd people stretched across the stage and into the pit, and for the first time I understood fully "a chain is as

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strong as its weakest link," because there were no weak links. Without any physical connection we connected. It was not me alone crescendoing, ... or flowing ... it was the energy between us all. That soprano or tenor ten feet away moved my sound as I in tum did for someone else. How could a group of people this size, come together for an hour of every intense emotion existing, every day, 180 days a year, sharing and trusting - without bonding into one soul or energy or life or something? I have shared more of my inmost feelings with this group than anyone else in my life. (1-111) 2. The performer's relationship to the music they are creating and perceiving: The Ave Maria was probably the most beautiful piece of music of any kind that I have ever heard. Somehow, I didn't realize that I hadn't given my all for the rest of the concert until we got to that piece. From the first note of that piece I guess I could say I was captured by the feeling. And when I sang I gave it everything I had. I almost shut my eyes when I was singing. I felt like I was a part of the music. When I hit all those incredibly high notes I felt like I was soaring. And at the very end when it was all over I collapsed on my friends. I just couldn't stand anymore. I was exhausted and it hit me the minute the concert was over. During the concert, if I was tired I couldn't tell. Though the whole concert was the cause of my exhaustion, it was mostly the Ave Maria. That piece has such power and beauty. (1-201) 3. The performers' relationship to the conductor from whom they are receiving direction as to how to go about performing the music: We had so many meaningful rehearsals, it would take a book to hold them all, but chorus isn't a class, it is an experience. It has made me realize what an art music truly is, and Mr. Gangi has instilled in me a desire to experience life, instead of just going though the motions. (1-57) It wasn't until the other night that I realized something, one thing that I should have known earlier. During Ave Maria everything was just like normal rehearsal, when I took a quick moment to look at who was standing in front of me. Naturally, I was in the front row, so you were the only one in

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front of me. The thing I realized was how grateful I should be to have such an opportunity to spend a year, and hopefully three more, working with such a talented man. Every time I try to describe you, I can only think of two words: brilliant genius. This one man in front of me took an enormous group of kids, some of them who had never sung a note in their lives, and turned them into such an incredible group of performers. So for another brief moment I just looked and could see how much you appreciated what we (the choir and yourself) had accomplished. I see you as a role model ... I'd base my life on you and what you've taught me. 0-89) 4. The performer's relationship to the audience for whom they are performing: I feel that I did come away with something more that evening - I always do - even sometimes after class ... perhaps that's when we are truly ourselves. There's no one to impress or put on a show for. We are in touch with us. And maybe we can't understand it because we're always trying to cover it up - to protect it, so on one will hurt us. We're afraid to be hurt. When we sing it's as if we're naked, free of everything we're normally afraid to show. I think maybe we are free and naked when we sing. Totally pure and naked, and innocent like a newborn child. In touch with ourselves and you and each other. We communicate. (1-109)

XI. The Performer as Both Perceiver and Creator (Is Not the Viewer of the Painting also Creating the Work?) A. The activity of singing as a creative process is due equal attention to that of the perceiving process. 1. The activity of singing as a creative process is transformative. Singing involves the preoccupation, the attention and the awareness of the work along with the intense physical and imaginative engagement with it as it is being created. a. This results in an enlarging of the self: I think musicians feel so much more than regular people. They see things that no one else can see. (1-65)

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Many people will never know what it's like to feel things so deep inside themselves. I think others don't even know it's there. For me to be able to find out so much about myself, I think I am blessed. I left knowing that if I never do something like this again, for four years of my life I was a real musician because I gave what was in me. (1-77) b. This is due to the natural prerequisite for this activity which is for the individual, either consciously or unconsciously, to release the self: allowed to roam freely amongst this complex array of sensations, the self is able to expand: In a sense I lost a part of my soul to that concert, but I also gained a new perspective on who I am, ... I experienced a wholeness that I had never felt before. (1-79) c. In giving the self over to the music the performer becomes the vessel through which the work finds its venue, its fleshing out, its skin: During Ave Maria, my God, ... I wasn't me anymore. It was like I was music and realized that I wanted, needed to feel this exhilaration every day of my life. (1-87) The music was a part of my whole being and generated sort of a light or glow around me. (1-61) d. The creating and the perceiving are one activity: one perceives as one creates and one creates (puts "it" together, understands it, arranges the symbols into an individually coherent message) as one perceives: You guys are singing Ave Maria right now and it still makes me want to cry. How can we make such beauty? (1-19) e. Sometimes in the act of singing a performer puts on the work as if it were clothing and fills it with hislher self: You help me to come to reality sometimes, ... and enjoy the music we are making. When I sing, I sing with my heart and soul. I put me in it. I let me shine through my voice. (I-59) 2. The activity of singing is more than an activity, a mere doing. It can go beyond this and become a process of experiencing or re-living. Also, a big challenge for me was to worry less about having each note right, and instead to be able to make each song my own personal experience. Thursday was one of the few times when I was able to stop saying, "Why the hell are we

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singing about a garden?" and see the real meaning of what I was singing. You helped me to do this when you'd give examples, sometimes from your own life, of what the song meant. Then, instead of doing it, I was experiencing it. (1-68)

XII. Preparation for the Occurrence when the Work Can Be Perceived

A. Performance skills are developed. 1. This facilitates a person's ability to perform the work in such a way as to illuminate it for those listening and, also, increases that person's ability to engage with the work. The exercise that helped the most was lying on the floor and letting the music draw you into a world you never even dreamed of, carrying you off and becoming one with the entity that captured the soul. (1-79) B. Since the performer is both the perceiver and the creator, the rehearsal period may be seen as the time for culling through the work's nature. As the sculptor moves the clay in the hand warming it, shaping it, letting the Muse find its way through the fingers and into the work, a singer sifts through the sounds in the body and on the tip of the tongue, lets the Muse enter the breath and seek out its shape in the aural space surrounding the singer or instrumentalist: "True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind" (Rilke, 231). But the axis of Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson's study is the visual aesthetic encounter of the perceiver in relation to the work seen as a separate entity, complete in itself. They do not explore the visual aesthetic encounter in its fullest sense: the triune relationship of the painter/creator to the painting/work to the perceiver/creator. The idea that the perceiver is also an integral part of the work in its entirety due to the fact that the perceiver is creating - or re-creating - the work as he/she sees it, is touched upon in one passage where they discuss how beneficial it is to come to a work with some knowledge about it. Viewing art is not only a receptive process, he [the curator] exclaims, but a creative one as well: and the one way you become creative as a viewer is to keep going to exhibits, going to the galleries, going to the shows, read the art journals and magazines, prepare yourself as much as possible, and you'll be amazed at how much more you'll enjoy looking at art if you have that kind of background. (119) (153)

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In music, as in the other temporal arts, the aesthetic encounter involves both the perceiving and the creating experience, since the work is always subject to the perceiver's creative process before it can be perceived at all as it was meant to be - music to be heard or dance and theatre to be both seen and heard. Beethoven's sonatas were not meant to remain as ink markings on paper. They were meant to be translated into sound so as to be heard. Enter the pianist - the re-creator. The preparation the re-creator goes through before presenting the work to others is akin to the painter painting the painting, the sculptor chiseling the stone, the weaver threading the colored strings of wool through the loom. The other exercises did what they were supposed to, prepared my body to sing and let my mind and spirit run wild. (1-103) The rehearsal is more important than the performance. Every part of every rehearsal served to prepare me. I learned how to give (and accept) back rubs. I learned how to put energy and feeling into my music. I learned to rely more on the director than on a sheet of printed paper. I learned how to relax and be myself. I learned the importance of warming up. I learned how to apply knowledge from many areas to many [other] different areas. (1-11) The warm-up exercises help us all to get focused ... that is what I love about the activities such as the v, f, sequence thing that ends in the ah ... I feel so relaxed and refreshed and know where I'm headed in the song. (1-22) It [the warm-up exercises] makes us aware of our bodies and the uses for them even in everyday life. People are very disconnected from their bodies and don't realize that the mind must be connected to the body. (1-35)

The breathing procedures were helpful when we put one hand to someone's back and one to ourselves. I then found out how to sing through my diaphragm and within, instead of through my throat as I had first started. With the touch I was able to feel how people used this and breath to create a variety of sounds. And also what everyone used within,

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especially in their spirit to make the words creative ... .1 was helped with this to express my feeling and create the mood I needed as my support to form the song. In this I found my starting point from which I could really begin. (1-41) We always had to feel the sound. If our bodies couldn't do it "the little piece of flesh in our throats the size of our thumb nail" wouldn't be able to. 0-112) I feel that the exercises of melting into the sand and using breath to lift and release our bodies have helped [me] to learn how to focus and how to become more in touch with myself and my feelings. If it weren't for these exercises I don't think I would know as much of who I am as I do today. (1-127) I think the exercises that we did before our performances really helped us to get a grip and got us to the point where we were totally able to go out there and sing. 0-143) When we all lie down and you talk to us as if we were on the beach, drifting into the sand ... when people came around trying to lift other people's heads off the ground immature people might not understand the meaning or importance of these activities, but they, in their own way, moved me as much as the concert did. 0-145) ... The way we worked the singing in with the body movements made me realize that singing isn't just with the voice, but with the entire body. 0-202) The exercise that comes into my mind is - you told us to let our minds wander, and to count how many thoughts ran through our minds. When you told us to concentrate on just one thought, I really had to try hard to not allow my mind to wander. So, in order to get the most I can out of an experience, I feel that I really need to be in tune and concentrate on what I am doing. (1-179)

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C. Passion can be learned. You pulled me into a whole different aspect of life through the years .... Learning passion for what I sang also helped me have passion for the rest of what goes on in my life. (1-105) I've learned to look deeper into songs instead of just listening to lyrics. I've learned to know the spirit, dedication and pure joy that goes into being a conductor, musician and even being human. (1-104) A lot of times in our life (my life, every day) people don't communicate - we tend to keep things to ourselves. You teach us to express what we feel. You're real and so human. You bring out a side in us that everyone normally wants to keep sheltered and hidden. That changes. (1-109) No one says, "Can I trust you with this?" or ''I'm baring my soul now, so be ready." We just give and take and share .... You developed a code with us. It was either words, or a face, or a flick of the wrist - but there was a motion for each sound. And with that simple motion we all clicked on to the same channel and it became music. It's like taking all the different energy particles and focusing them in through a big bright light. All it took was a wink or lift of your arm and BOOM. I can't even explain it ... it was ... MUSIC! (1-111) I felt a sudden rush of many emotions just rush into me and suddenly for a brief moment everything made sense, everything that we have done, all the exercises, everything came together and made sense. (1-127) People access passion when deep meanings are engaged; deep meanings, therefore, are at the core of intrinsic motivation .... In part, deep meanings provide a sense of direction because they govern what people look for and what they are willing to do, whether in sports, computing, music, finance, or writing poetry. And, in part, deep meanings are a source of the energy that people are capable of bringing to bear on a task or activity (Caine and Caine, 97).

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XIII. The Peiformer Comes to Own the Work through the Perceiving/Creating Process

I felt in a way the songs we sang became mine, and everyone else's who was a part of the production. (1-81) The music became mine, I sang it as though it came from my soul. (1-133) You had completed your job of giving us the tools to make beautiful sound. We made the evening our own. (1-151) It felt like we had a tiny secret that the audience was about to find out, a little surprise for them. 0-189)

XlV. The Therapeutic or Healing Quality Found in the Perceiving/Creating Process

There are times when I can't open my eyes when we're singing because I don't want to see anything that will hurt ... it smoothes over all the rough edges in my life because it is such an inward personal spiritual experience pushing out all the demons and pain in my life. (1-100) It's such a good way to release the tension. Music is my medicine. (1-133) I saw myself flying over the world looking through wider and more "cleansed" eyes and I felt at peace both inside and outside my body. When I'm singing, the same feeling comes back and I feel as though I'm making a difference to myself and whoever is listening. It might be small and insignificant to someone else, [however] by singing I'm expressing myself in a way I usually can't. (1-102) The audience not only heard our voice, but our song, the song that each one of us holds in our hearts and that reveals our most private joys and heartaches. This concert allowed me to release all the pain and anguish that I had been keeping bottled up inside. (1-81)

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In looking over my students' responses as they fit in with the outline of Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson, the one area in the visual aesthetic experience that wasn't addressed by the students was in the perceptual dimension and the area of skills. I believe there is reason for this. As for the perceptual dimension, there were no questions given to the students that addressed the point. I did not ask them to write about the form of a piece or the relationship between one voice part and another and how the composer used this to create a certain affect because, though it is consistently addressed during rehearsals and provides the form out of which the rehearsal procedure develops, it is also seen as the springboard for the pursuit of the other dimensions: a good diving board is good to have, but a good diver can dive with or without one. How a composer or painter or choreographer constructs a work is all-important: the brush strokes in Van Gogh's Irises, the sensual smoothness of The Age of Bronze by Rodin, the staggered entrances in the final moments of Charles Villiers Stanford's motet Beati quorum vita. Yes, this must be addressed when training the eye or the ear. But too many teachers, if they get that far in their instruction, go no further. What is the result of Stanford staggering the entrances, from the lower voices upward, how does this act upon the resolution of the motet? Such a finish on the bronze, especially in comparison to Rodin's later works, what does it do to the viewer? Does it make the figure more lifelike? Does it make it more enticing to the senses? Does it embarrass the viewer? The construction is important, but in its being put together in a certain fashion, something happens, something goes forth from it to those outside of it who are engaged with it. "It is safe to say that a philosophy of art is sterilized unless it makes us aware of the function of art in relation to other modes of experience, and unless it indicates why this function is so inadequately realized, and unless it suggests the conditions under which the office would be successfully performed" (Dewey, 12). Hence the emphasis on the other dimensions, the emotional, the intellectual and the communicative. Though the nuts and bolts of a work cannot be ignored, neither can it be assumed that from an awareness solely of the vocabulary the poet will spring forth. In regards to the area of skills, an analogy might speak to this more directly. The analogy crystallizes in the purchase of hiking boots so as to climb the trails of the Presidential Mountain Range in New Hampshire. There are two groups of people at the base of one of these trails, with their newly purchased hiking equipment, ready to make the climb to the summit of Mount Washington. The first group is about ready to make the ascent when

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the trail guide tells them all to remove their hiking boots and undo the laces. "Now let us look at the patterns on the bottom of your shoes. Aren't they fascinating? Let's compare the patterns of everyone's shoes. In fact, count how many there are of each pattern amongst yourselves. Can you design any other patterns? Why don't we take a few minutes to break up into groups and do this. And notice the laces. How many different ways can we lace these boots?" Etc., etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The second group, with new boots on their feet (where they belong) stands before their trail guide who says, "Let's go." The boots were made to get you somewhere. Yes, the design on the bottom is interesting, all of the questions put forth by the first guide could be answered and more. But while the first group is still looking at and discussing their boots and laces, the second group is well on their way up the mountain. Yes, the first group has discovered their boots and laces and are now aware of their equipment, but the other group is now clearing the treeline and getting on to the summit. The point of having some knowledge, the point of the skill is to take one to a place where one has not been before. Just as a child can be made into a pyromaniac by over-emphasizing the dangers of fire, escape routes, don't do this and don't do that, so can a student come to be obsessed by skills to the point where the life in the art is totally lost. Many artists can testify to having teachers who were obsessive in their regimen and oppressive in the area of skills to the point where their love of writing, singing, playing, painting was smothered. In some cases it took years for the person to recover what was lost. Parents who push their children to excel ... succeed in perverting music into the opposite of what it was designed to be: they tum it into a source of psychic disorder. Parental expectations for musical behavior often create great stress, and sometimes a complete breakdown. Lorin Hollander. who was a child prodigy at the piano ... tells how he used to get lost in ecstasy when playing the piano alone, but how he used to quake in sheer terror when his demanding adult mentors were present. When he was a teenager the fingers of his hands froze during a concert recital, and he could not open his clawed hands for many years thereafter. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 112)

It is an art itself to be able to teach something to someone without that person even knowing she has been taught. Where the activity between the teacher and the student is a seamless current of information and action, there is a pas de deux of minds and bodies wherein so little needs to be labeled and so much can be owned. The more developed a person is in a skill, the less she has to go back to square one and relearn it, relabel it, review it. Considering that this is where my students are in their musical training, it is no wonder that the area of skills it not more abundantly addressed. To ask my teenager

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what he does to get ready in the morning to go to school would elicit a blank look with a question behind it akin to, "Is this a trick question?" But if you asked my five-year-old the same question, he would proudly sit up and begin to go through the long list of (boring?) details as to what he does to get ready in the morning. The areas that were not in the model of Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson, but were found in the model based on my students' responses, are unique to the musical, specifically choral, aesthetic experience because, as I discussed earlier, the musician is in the unique position of being audience and creator. Therefore the musician's preparation for the performance or re-creation of the work, which would be akin to the painter's time of creating the painting, is like a second time of creating the work: the first being when the composer composed the work, and the second, when the musician rehearses it. Most performing, but certainly not all, involves performing along with someone else, hence that communal experience that John Huizinga refers to in his book Homo Ludens: A play-community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over. Of course, not every game of marbles or every bridge-party leads to the founding of a club. But the feeling of being "apart together" in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game. (12)

This may not necessarily be found in the experience of the viewer, but it may possibly be found in that of the painter during the creation of the work: having friends, buyers, curators, etc. over to the studio to view the work in progress. Also, there is the area of a relationship between the conductor and the singer found in the model I set out but not found in the visual model. The person who acts as a camera taking in the light and colors: adjusting the amount of light into the lens; determining the angle of the shot; judging how to frame the object; ascertaining what to focus on in the object before the camera - delivering this all to the "film" behind it: the audience. It is this relationship between the performer and the conductor, at least in this choral medium, that is vital to the overall process of creating the work: it becomes a co-creative act, a symbiotic relationship of creative energies. The scope of this relationship is beyond the bounds of this paper, but needed to be mentioned. In the visual experience the closest thing that can be thought of to compare with the role of the conductor would be that of the guide/teacher who illuminates the work for the viewer.

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Once again, it becomes even more evident how much the performer is the creator of the work. Are we hearing Bach or Glenn Gould? Or can we never hear Mozart in space, time and sound without hearing Alicia de Larrocha as well? Are creators destined to be grafted or woven into the performers/interpreters, the second creators? MOZART: Look at us! Four gaping mouths. What a perfect quartet! I'd love to write it - just this second of time, this now, as you are! Herr Chamberlain thinking: "Impertinent Mozart. I must speak to the Emperor at once!" Herr Prefect thinking: "Ignorant Mozart. Debasing opera with his vulgarity!" Herr Court Composer thinking: "German Mozart. What can he finally know about music?" And Mozart himself, in the middle thinking: 'Tmjust a good fellow. Why do they all disapprove of me?" [Excitedly to VAN SWIETENj. That's why opera is important, Baron. Because it's realer than any play! A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another to represent this second of time. The composer can put them all down at once - and still make us hear each one of them. Astonishing device - a vocal quartet! [More and more excited] I tell you I want to write a finale lasting half an hour! A quartet becoming a quintet becoming a sextet. On and on, wider and wider - all sounds multiplying and rising together and then together making a sound entirely new! ... I bet that's how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us! [To SALIERI]. That's our job! That's our job, we composers: to combine the inner minds of him and him and him, and her and her - the thoughts of chambermaids and Court Composers - and turn the audience into God. (Shaffer, 57)

An audience turned into God. Not a passive God, who merely reclines and receives the reverberations of the creation, but an active God, the continual creator in relationship with its work. Persons in relationship with a creation from another person. A work set out before all who have come to see or hear in order to co-create and give rise to a new multi-individual work. In the musical experience, the work's first audience, the first person to experience the work is the individual singer, or pianist, or violinist - it is the performer who will translate the visual symbols into sound - who will at some further point in time re-create the work for his or her own audience the second audience - to experience as sound. Regardless of the performer's individual experience while performing the work (see section XI in the outline), and though the co-creating may be choreographed by the conductor, it is still the individual singer who walks away with her own, individual creation. It is not merely one grandiose work churned about and turned into a generalized blurb by a hundred troops and shot out of a canon into the open fields of the concert hall. Like anything found in nature, the one piece that makes up the whole experience and which is integral to the overall process of events also has its own, unique essence.

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In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and interest to its successive portions greater than exist in the homogenous portions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors. (Dewey, 36)

It is the unique advantage of the musical experience that a person can participate in the creation of a work with other musicians while the work is passing through them to the listeners around them; that musicians can receive and re-create within them the work for themselves. But the performer must not only parrot what lies before him or her in the score if the work is to take on a life of its own. Works of art are, visibly and palpably, human achievements, renderings of the ways in which aspects of reality have impinged upon human consciousness. What distinguishes one art form from another (music from poetry, say, the dance from painting) is the mode of rendering, the medium used, and the qualities explored. But all forms must be encountered as achievements that can only be brought to significant life when human beings engage with them imaginatively. (Greene, 163)

This is where most musical experiences break down and become humdrum-going-through-the-motions-let's-put-on-our-white-gloves-and-showmom-and-dad-what-I-can-do type of experiences, regardless of whether it is in the concert hall or the rehearsal room. The essence, the work's is-ness remains woefully dormant when the imagination of either the museum-goer or the singer is left idle. Works of art cannot be engaged with imaginatively until the imaginative ability has been developed in the person doing the engaging. This is the whole purpose of the study conducted by Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson: to understand the form or nature of the visual aesthetic experience in order that museums and art educators might better grasp how to develop people's ability to engage with works of art. Formulating a model of the aesthetic experience is one matter, but drawing from that the wherewithal to create a pathway or curriculum for people, either students or the general public, to come to have significant encounters with works of art, is no small task. A way of stimulating the imagination of the singer has been the lifelong work of Kristen Linklater. The objective of her work with the human voice has been, and is, a voice in direct contact with emotional impulse, shaped by the intellect but not inhibited by it. ... To free the voice is to free the person, and each person is indivisibly mind and body. Since the

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sound of the voice is generated by physical processes, the inner muscles of the body must be free to receive the sensitive impulses from the brain that create speech. The natural voice is most perceptibly blocked and distorted by physical tension, but it also suffers from emotional blocks, intellectual blocks, aural blocks, spiritual blocks. All such obstacles are psycho-physical in nature, and once they are removed the voice is able to communicate the full range of human emotion and all the nuances of thought. Its limits lie only in the possible limits of talent, imagination or life experiences. (2)

But this involves the training of the performer's entire person, the whole instrument - the body, the psyche, the emotions - so as to penetrate the text or song more deeply and, in doing so, enjoin the listener in the same activity. Does not the performer, then, need to have also trained the eye, the inner eye or the inner ear to hear what is going on within the text or the music of the song in order to be able to justly convey the work of the author or the composer? This is what Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson are addressing: what about training not of the painter, but of the one who is at the other end of the artistic route, the final component of the aesthetic roundelay, the audience, the untrained viewer or listener? To review the first question I had: isn't training a musician akin to training a painter to be a painter of paintings - to translate or transport and transmit the symbols set forth by someone else? Aren't Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson talking about how to go about training viewers to be painters? To train people not only to be able to translate what they see but to also be able to transport and transmit what they see to themselves, if no one else? To be able to articulate to their selves what they are seeing? To know how to unlock the doors not only for others to get in but for themselves to get in? Is it not enough for the singer to be able to sing well, to sing his or her own song, as a painter paints his or her own painting. Or must a singer also be able to not only sing well but also to sing another's song well? To do more than quote, but to create. How is that done? Can it be done? There are many people who can analyze a song, its text, its history, its musical structure and all that can be said about it just as there are those who have well trained instruments, who sing beautifully. But the one who embodies both the bard and the song of Orpheus? A god can do it. But will you tell me how a man can penetrate through the lyre's strings? Our mind is split.. .. Song, as you have taught, it, is not desire, not wooing any grace that can be achieved; song is reality. Simple, for a god. But when can we be real? When does he pour

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the earth, the stars, into us? ... True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind. (Rilke, 231)

I have had the experience of going into a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and seeing a painter sitting at a distance from a great painting, with his or her canvas, brushes and paints, repainting the painting. I would look back and forth from one to the other several times. I could not help but notice how the painter's work, as good as it might be, just did not make it. I was unable to enter into a dialogue with it that would in any way resemble the dialogue I would have with the original painting. Something was missing. Going beyond the many technical differences, there was a quality or entity in the master painter's work that could not seem to be found in the painter's painting. In reference to a master's paintings, Dewey would assert that they are fine art only because the anonymous artist lived and experienced so fully during the process of production. An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experienced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience of making and of perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in art and what is not. ... Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being esthetic. (Dewey, 26)

In Artistry in Teaching, Louis J. Rubin's assertion about teaching can apply to this and other areas as well: " ... although we can show them gadgetry, tricks, razzle-dazzle devices, and clever maneuvers - all of these are the symbols, not the source, of artistry.... Ordinary teachers may use skillful artistic procedures, but the end result is not authentic artistry. Hence, formula and rule have but limited utility." (160) In his book Flow, Csikszentmihalyi observes that, "Even when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises: too much emphasis is placed on how they perform, and too little on what they experience" (112). The painter in the museum performed. The master painter experienced. Is this not what needs to happen? Not having the student painter imitate what is seen, but experience what is seen. Not for people to be solely exposed to the symbols of artistry, but for them to be brought through the experience of the source of artistry. Not for the singer to perform what is on the musical score, but to experience the music as it may have run through the composer's blood when the hand put pen and ink to paper. Not for people to look at Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, but to experience The Burghers of Calais. Wouldn't

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this complex and multi-dimensional quality of teaching bring a student to the doorstep of the mysterious? The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty (quoted in Jones, Albert Einstein, 42).

If it is the composer's job to "turn the audience into God," and if the performer and the audience are taken to be co-creators of the work at hand, and the performer is both performer and audience, then it is not only the audience that is turned into God but everyone involved in the entire process: all participate in this God-likeness. All are transformed. Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Feelings for whom? 0 you the transformation of feelings into what?: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out, holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable. (Rilke, 147)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, Leonard. Findings. New York: Anchor Books, 1982. Caine, Renate Nummela and Geoffrey Caine. Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain. Alexandria, Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1991. Cogan, Robert and Pozzi Escot, Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1975. Flow: The Study in Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, Pub., 1990. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Rick E. Robinson. The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter. Malibu, California: J. P. Getty Museum, 1990. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen. Talented Teenagers. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.

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DeBruyne, Edgar. The Esthetics of the Middle Ages. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1969. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934. Feldman, David Henry, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. Changing the World. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1994. Fowler, Charles. The Crane Symposium: Toward an Understanding of the Teaching and Learning of Music Peiformance. Potsdam, NY: Potsdam College of the State University of New York, 1988. Getzels, Jacob W. and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Creative Vision. John Wiley & Sons, 1976. Greene, Maxine. Landscapes of Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 1978. Harnoncourt, Nikolaus. Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1988. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study in the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950. Jones, Dewitt and Eleanor Huggins. What the Road Passes By. Portland, Oregon: Graphic Arts Center Publishing Co., 1979. Jones, Frank Pierce. Body Awareness in Action: A Study of the Alexander Technique. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1976. Kagan, Sergius. On Studying Singing. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Kivy, Peter. Sound and Semblance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. ____ . Music Alone: The Musical Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Langer, Suzanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. New York: The New American Library, 1942. _ _ _ . Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953. Leppard, Raymond. Authenticity in Music. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press 1988. Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1958. Linklater, Kristin. Freeing the Natural Voice. New York: Drama Book Publishers, 1976. Lippman, Edward. History of Western Musical Aesthetics. Lincoln: Nebraska Press, 1992. Meyer, Leonard. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1956. Nachmanovitch, Stephen. Free Play: Improvisation and Life and Art. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1990. Reimer, Bennett. A Philosophy of Music Education. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1970. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Rubin, Louis J. Artistry in Teaching. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1985. Shaffer, Peter. Amadeus. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1980. Shepherd, John. Music as Social Text. Polity Press, 1991. Tovey, Donald Francis. The Forms of Music. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1972.

RANDAL DAVIS

" ... WE NEED NOT FEAR ... " EXPRESSIVITY AND SILENCE IN THE EARLY WORK OF JOHN CAGE

In John Cage's career as a composer, spanning nearly six decades, the years 1951 and 1952 provide for many purposes a convenient line of distinction. From the earlier year came the Concerto for Prepared Piano and the Music of Changes, Cage's first compositions to make extensive use of chance operations, followed the next by 4'33" - the "silent" piece. While it is certainly true that his subsequent works and methods compel their own attention, indeed presuming new analytic tools, it is not unreasonable to regard these compositions as epochal, defining the aesthetic and philosophical positions which made Cage the most broadly influential artist of the second half of the century. Does the recognition of such a defining point presume discontinuity? In this case, historiographically, yes - what could be written of the "two Cages" might notably diverge. At the same time, certain features of Cage's work of the middle and late 1940's evidence a line of development which may be followed through the later indeterminate compositions. To trace this line is, however, less a task for the musicological apparatus than a question inviting consideration of a phenomenological project. For Cage, the use of chance operations in musical composition afforded a means of freeing the work - and, by implication, the composer, performer and listener - from tastes, preferences and, taken broadly, the normative properties of development and continuity which would, in their various forms, appear to be attributes of virtually all musical expression. In short, Cage sought through the practice of indeterminacy a liquidation of, or freedom from, intention. His use of the term undoubtedly derived from common denotation, and not its specifically phenomenological sense, though Zvie Bar-On has persuasively argued for the importance of the relation between the colloquial and technical usages, a relation "neglected," he notes, by both analytic philosophers and phenomenologists. l A thorough reading of Cage in this context would be fascinating, albeit beyond the scope of this essay.2 Proposed here is an investigation, then, smaller but perhaps finally no less significant, an essay on selected instances of the functions of silence and timeconsciousness in these compositions. In "Forerunners of Modern Music" 241

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(1949), Cage identified the "opposite and necessary coexistent" relation of sound and silence, concluding from this the notionally "correct" means of structuring composition. 3 This relation also figured in the question of intentionality, as Cage pointed out in "Composition as Process: Communication" (1958): When silence, generally speaking, is not in evidence, the will of the composer is. Inherent silence is equivalent to denial of the wilL ... Nevertheless, constant activity may occur having no dominance of will in it. Neither as syntax nor structure, but analogous to the sum of nature, it will have arisen purposelessly.4

Purposelessly is sure to invite question, but it should again be remembered that Cage's sense of it was more colloquial than technical. In this silence, one might "hear each sound just as it is, not as phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception," as he observed elsewhere in "Composition as Process."5 This is surely suggestive language, and in Cage's proposal for "a composing of sounds within a universe predicated upon the sounds themselves rather than upon the mind which can envisage them coming into being," one may begin to make a translation into difficult, yet profoundly phenomenological terms. 6 Robert Snarrenberg's unusual analysis of Anton Webern's Orchestral Pieces (1913) provides a useful point of departure. In contrast to the positivist formalism characteristic of much musicological research, Snarrenberg sought to document the "diachronically emergent awareness of this work's aestheticity" in prose evoking the refractive and reflexive complexities of Webern's compressed musical universe. 7 Snarrenberg's analysis is an admirable, yet finally only barely successful, attempt at a phenomenology; "emergent awareness" is often confused with the euphoria of a rather prolix impressionism. 8 Methodological laxity did not, however, preclude his formulation of a fundamental question, although mediating against his ability to fully articulate an answer. Invoking "the envelopment of silence," Snarrenberg was concerned with differentiating the condition of "ending-in-silence as opposed to the more usual ending-with-silence," correctly arguing that "the effect of this enveloping silence ... is a blurring of the characteristic boundary between a work and its frame of silence."9 Perhaps most important in this context was his conclusion, again in marked departure from the methodological conventions of musicology: this envelopment was not, he noted, "an experience empirically or rationally determinable; rather it is an intersubjective meaning."io

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It is clear - as he, in fact, acknowledged - that this envelopment is a phenomenon of the horizon. As Cornelius Van Peursen notes, in resonant terms, the horizon represents this movement of embracing the world."ll Another way of understanding this is, of course, as a simultaneous function of the movement of the horizon in time and its containment of relation, as Van Peursen has it, "in a meaningful coherence."12 Also apparent, though, and this is the fundamental question, the being-in and being-of silence problematizes that necessary demarcation. Maria Bielawka's critique of Husserl's familiar diagram of time underscores this difficulty, first rejecting its suggestion of a "punctual, momentary being of inner consciousness" and second, its over-elaboration, a "structure ... more complicated than reality itself."13 That these two objections are perhaps not entirely consistent will go further unremarked; my purpose is neither categorical acceptance nor repudiation of her argument, but consists instead in its use as a framing for this inquiry. One need hazard no assertions for the complications, or lack thereof, in reality, to note that the basic model of retention, impression and protention in time-consciousness is, as evidenced in HusserI's own exposition, appropriate to a phenomenology of musical experience, at least insofar as that experience is considered to be itself contained within the horizon of certain explicitly normative conventions. 14 This qualification is obvious, perhaps, but so significant as to merit careful and complete statement. That is, one's experience of Bach's Musical Offering as a temporal object names a "meaningful coherence" of horizon - also to say a coherent relation of impression, retention and protention - which the experience of Earle Brown's November 1952 is likely to efface. IS In taking the score as the representation of a space of possibility, influenced by the sculpture of Alexander Calder and gestural Abstract Expressionism, Brown's notation scatters pitch materials through a minimally and ambiguously bound field. The immediate casualty of November 1952 or Cage's own Music for Piano series, using imperfections in the music paper to determine events, is the distinction between the primary processes of impression, retention and protention and the secondary processes of memory and expectation. Faced with this collapse, a deeper question emerges: whether, or in what sense, might a work such as November 1952 or the Music for Piano be considered a temporal object? Jonathan Kramer has proposed that the metaphor of "motion" in tonal music reflects an essentially linear and at least implicitly teleological, model

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made increasingly untenable by the chromaticism of the later nineteenth century,16 When, as is common to much experimental music since 1950, and is certainly evident in Cage, the experience of linearity at even the level of the phrase is denied, a transformation of time-consciousness occurs: The result is a single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite "now" that nonetheless feels like an instantY

This, in Kramer's terms, is vertical time, and his formulation clearly apprehends the necessary relation of the questions of the constitution of the temporal object and the time-consciousness. Kramer's model is also remarkably consistent with Bielawka's argument, and, following the line of her second objection, the familiar model would indeed seem inadequate for the reality of such indeterminate works. Less a conclusion itself than a redirection, one returns to the first of her objections, which, in contrast to the "momentary being" presumed in the diagram, proposes instead the regard of inner consciousness as "an all-embracing present."18 Or, put differently, and in the specific terms of this investigation, is it possible to regard Cage's movement toward indeterminacy as just such a speculative phenomenology, a testing ofthe temporal horizon? Four Walls (1944), an hour-long piano solo with an interlude for solo voice, has an unusual history; Cage's longest work to that date, it was also his first major collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Despite these signal attributes, the work was lost for nearly forty years and, it seems, largely forgotten by the composer himself.19 Four Walls is also interesting for its explicitly dramatic character - Cunningham's own chronology of works identifies it with the subtitle, "a dance play," another unusual attribute for a collaboration predicated upon the independence of dance and music. 2o Cage's music of the middle 1940's was, however, by his own admission, composed with conventionally expressive intent. The prepared-piano Amores (1943), "concerned the quietness between lovers," while, Cage recounted in "A Composer's Confessions" (1948), The Perilous Night, from the same period as Four Walls, "concerned the loneliness and terror that comes to one when love is unhappy."21 Although its idiom was surely unfamiliar to listeners of the time, it is not difficult to hear in the jagged syncopations of The Perilous Night the tremulous uncertainties of a lover's anguish. How, then, might one describe the emotional space of Four Walls? Margaret Leng Tan hears its diatonicity "suggesting the influence of Erik Satie," an observation echoed by David Revill. 22 Yet the overt gestural drama of the repeated chords and explosions of frenetic ostinati occurs at great

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affective remove from the diffidence of Satie, a difference alluded to by Revill and his provocative notion of Four Walls as "a case study of existential placement." I am, however, less sanguine about his sense of the work as "seek[ing] balance in the suspended stillness of contemplative rapture." One's general impression of Four Walls is surely of a calmer surface than the feverish intensity of The Perilous Night, yet its structure is far from unconflicted. The circumstances of Cage's personal life in the middle 1940s were, in a word, difficult. He had, "acknowledge [d] by his early teens," Thomas Hines reports, "that he was predominantly homosexual," while maintaining close relationships with several women. 23 In 1935, aged 22, with the flush of what he remembered as "love at first sight," he married Xenia Andreevna Kashevaroff, a liaison that would last some ten years. Cage met Cunningham in 1938, beginning a relationship which, as Hines notes, "ultimately far superceded his waning commitment to Xenia."24 By the early 1940's, this had evolved into what Cage to Hines referred to as an "open marriage" and menage atrois. 25 It was also at this time, according to Revill, that "Cage became so disturbed that several friends advised him strongly to undergo psychoanalysis." This personal context is notable not because it is extraordinary; it demands attention here rather for its quotidian aspect, although neither is that to minimize the immense anxieties Cage must have felt at this time. That is, it is precisely the direct nature of the representation of this experience that makes Four Walls anomalous among Cage's works, and that may indeed account for his later disinterest in the composition. Silence, contrary to Cage's later aesthetics, seems like something to be feared in Four Walls, directly emblematic of confinement, imprisonment. The title of In a Landscape (1948), for piano or harp solo, like Four Walls, invites programmatic interpretation, although suggestive of a program of a quite different sort; the crises of the mid-1940's had receded, and In a Landscape is, in some ways, an antithesis to Four Walls. Both, though, may fairly be seen to anticipate minimalism, as Eric Salzman and Mark Swed point OUt. 26 Yet within this minimalist avant-lettre, an important difference obtrudes. Wim Mertens argues that "traditional dialectical music is representational," relating form to expressive content, while minimal work, lacking this "musical argument ... is no longer a medium for the expression of subjective feelings."27 Mertens' distinction is apposite here; redolent of Cage's fondness for Erik Satie, the continuous legato of In a Lanscape summons something like the "interior immobility" suggested by Satie for

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Vexations, the eight hundred and forty prescribed repetitions of which consume some eighteen hours. That the musical surface and substance of In a Landscape is less conventionally expressive of "subjective feelings," as Mertens argued, does not imply that it fails to model a subjectivity. One may first take the slow melodic undulations in the pictorial sense, the contours of a gently rolling landscape; one may also take, with more interesting consequences, the line to represent a walk through that terrain. The aural terrain of In a Landscape is, in a sense, continuous: the pervading impression is of an essentially unbroken, though only eccentrically directional, line. This is certainly in profound contrast to the marked fragmentation of Four Walls, yet there is more to this relation than simple opposition. If one takes In a Landscape to represent less the landscape itself than a certain mode of experience, a being-in-Iandscape, it is possible to hear the work as the spaces - in pitch and time - between the notes, an embracing silence, if you will, broken then only by isolated events in the lowest register. The assertion that In a Landscape is, in this sense, a single silence might at first seem a willful, even gratuitous, misreading, yet it is also a deceptively complex composition. Margaret Leng Tan concisely captures this quality of openness, a continual becoming, in noting that "non-directional non-emotive meanderings and repetitions fuse and fade into harmonic resonances."28 At once linear, in Kramer's terms, it also refuses the teleology of closure in a deeply problematic, if not in fact paradoxical, continuity, existing at the boundary where the horizontality of linear time is poised to assume an encompassing verticality. This interpretation of In a Landscape is directly supported by the String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), Cage's last major work composed before the Concerto for Prepared Piano and the Music of Changes, and his subsequent reliance on chance operations. The sustaining capability of the strings is used to spectacular effect in the quartet; the first three movements, via the device of a doubling of the basic rhythm unit, present what is in effect a temporal expansion of a restricted gamut of sonorities. This slow motion effect is made explicit in the titles of the movements: "quietly flowing along," "slowly rocking," and "nearly stationary." James Pritchett, with some understatement, rightly describes this as "produc[ing] an ordering of sonorities that owed nothing to the world of harmonic progression."29 In a letter to Pierre Boulez in February, 1950, just after completing the quartet, Cage boldly asserted, "there is no counterpoint and no harmony."3o This is not, of course, to say that there is no perceptible verticality

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(understood conventionally, not in Kramer's sense) but that, as Pritchett observed, such occurrences are fortuitous. Hence the unusual title for the work: one reasonably assumes a quartet to have four parts, but Cage wished to make clear that this "line in rhythmic space," as he described it to Boulez, was the result of four essentially independent parts. The notional development of the quartet, in fact a progressive refusal of the rhetoric of continuity, manifests Kramer's "single present stretched out into an enormous duration." Cage intended the architecture of the quartet to reflect the passage of the seasons (summer, fall, winter, spring) and, in a charming compositional coup, compressed the time scale for the final movement to make a delightful quodlibet. With these few measures, however, Cage bid a final farewell to any normative continuity. By the later 1950's, even this vestigial landscape had dematerialized in favor of the continuous present of what Cage often described as "simultaneities and interpenetrations. " One might, for example, take the spare appearance of Winter Music (1957), twenty unnumbered pages for one to twenty pianists, as evoking the isolation of the composer's rural home at Stony Point, New York. Such a reading could generally shape the parameters of a realization, although nothing in the score or its instructions mandates such an interpretation. Significantly, though, even if such global constraints are imposed, the notational complexities of the score, allowing different sequences and overlappings of pages, and particularly the devilishly intricate scheme by which chance operations map the notes of each chord to a clef, guarantees that the result cannot be other than profound discontinuity. In proposing this model for the analysis and description of Cage's work, I depart from current musicological practice, which has proven unfortunately resistant to questions of indeterminacy whether, in Pritchett's terms, "due to conceptual or methodological problems."3l But it is also true that phenomenological analysis has hardly proven more adequate. Andrzej Pytlak, for example, seeking to adapt Ingarden's framework to contemporary composition, has written of the "urgent need to question" certain of his theses, but fails to formulate those queries accurately or adequately, taking indeterminacy as synonymous with improvisation. 32 Peter Simons, emphasizing the particular issues posed by computer-assisted composition, addresses the "inherent vagueness" of the identity of musical works, yet, not unlike Pytlak, treats the "vague boundary between composed works and improvisations" as strangely absolute, thereby eliding substantive consideration of indeterminate works.33

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Assumed by both is the propriety of the work, evidenced clearly in Simon's peculiar oscillations, although it is precisely as the consequence of indeterminacy that such identity is undermined, a point generally acknowledged by at least the few theoreticians to have made significant explorations of this area. 34 To refigure the work not as an object but as a disseminative potential is a convenience, in the best and worst senses; for the former, a sophisticated critical apparatus of intertextual theory is mobilized, one which effectively exposes, finally obviating, the timidities of Pytlak and Simons. 35 At the same time, in the latter sense, a convenience may be just that, an immediately operational advantage which does not, finally, advance fundamental questions. Husserl, we know, considered the question of time-consciousness a vital issue for phenomenology, and these few observations of the specific issues raised by the role of indeterminacy in John Cage's compositions only underscore that primacy. In a recent discussion of the poetics of intentionality and the I-Ching - interestingly, Cage's consistent model for, and source of, chance operations - Gregory Tropea concludes: To know oneself means at the very least to know what appears as self. Because as with an existent being, the self is changing continually, the work of knowing oneself is no more able to be completed than the work of creating oneself can come to any end other than the cessation of consciousness. 36

It seems, therefore, only appropriate that one of Cage's last published texts, a dialogue with Anne Gibson on the meanings of continuity and discontinuity, carried the title "Music without Horizon Soundscape that Never StopS."37

Syracuse, lVew York This essay is dedicated to the memories of my parents, Allene & Richard Duea, and to Robert W. Corrigan.

NOTES *The title of this essay is taken from John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing" (1959): "This space of time is organized. We need not fear these silences - we may love them." In John Cage, Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 109-10. 1 A. Zvie Bar-On, " A Problem in the Phenomenology of Action: Are There Unintentional Actions?," Analecta Husserliana XXXV (1991), p. 378. 2 Such an inquiry would begin by reading Bar-On in parallel with Tom Johnson's "Intentionality and Nonintentionality in the Performance of Music by John Cage," in John Cage

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at Seventy-Five, eds. Richard Fleming & William Duckworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987), pp. 262-69. 3 John Cage, Silence, p. 63. See Christopher Shultis, "Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Intentionality of Nonintention," Musical Quarterly 79:2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 312-350, for the most complete discussion presently available of the relation of silence and intention in Cage's work. 4 John Cage, Silence, p. 53. 5 John Cage, Silence, p. 23. 6 John Cage, Silence, p. 27. 7 Robert Snarrenberg, "Hearings of Webern's Bewegt," Perspectives of New Music 24:2 (Spring/Summer, 1986), p. 389. See Don Ihde's discussion of the problems attendant upon phenomenology's "radical description" in Listening and Voice (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 104-5. Snarrenberg, interestingly, cites this text but seems to have ignored its caution. 9 Robert Snarrenberg, "Hearings of Webern's Bewegt," p. 390. 10 Robert Snarrenberg, "Hearings of Webern's Bewegt," p. 390. Snarrenberg allows, correctly, that common performance practice admits a ready, if trivial, solution to the question by recourse to visible downbeats or releases. That pianist David Tudor reversed this convention for the premiere of 4'33" - closing the keyboard cover for each of the three movements - is most suggestive, deftly repudiating a regard of the work as merely a neo-Dadaist gesture and, in the specific context of this analysis, brilliantly demonstrating the phenomenological subtlety of the issues raised. 11 Cornelius Van Peursen, "The Horizon," in Husserl: Expositions & Appraisals, eds. Frederick Ellison & Peter McCormick (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 193. 12 Cornelius Van Peursen, "The Horizon," p. 191. 13 Maria Bielawka, "Does Man Co-Create Time?," Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991), p. 59. 14 There are numerous restatements of this exposition, but the most useful is John Brough's "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness," in Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 272-73. 15 One could take here virtually any composition from the Western tradition from the Renaissance through, say, Wagner's Tristan. Yet the example of Bach seems particularly clear for its suggestion of a musical teleology; the structure of the Canon a 2 per Tonos, the "endlessly" modulating canon, makes a vivid contrast with Brown's pointillism. 16 Jonathan Kramer, "New Temporalities in Music," Critical Inquiry 7:3 (Spring, 1981), pp. 539-41. Kramer later expanded this model with the book-length The Time of Music. 17 Jonathan Kramer, "New Temporalities in Music," p. 549. 18 Maria Bielawka, "Does Man Co-Create Time?," p. 59. See also her "The Majesty of Time in Roman Ingarden's Philosophy," Analecta Husserliana XXXVII (1991), especially her conclusion that "the true ego ... is not created in ever-new contemporariness, but. .. exists beyond time" (p. 115). These remarks should not be read as necessarily supporting that conclusion, as they suggest, if anything, an undermining of the assertion of a "true ego," but her treatment of the question remains compelling. 19 David Revill, The Roaring Silence (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), pp. 85-87. 20 Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), p. 204. 21 John Cage, "A Composer's Confessions," in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), p. 40.

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Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco: New Albion NA037CD, 1991), n.p. David Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 86. Subsequent remarks by Revill on Four Walls are taken from this discussion, pp. 85-88. 23 Thomas Hines, "Then Not Yet 'Cage': The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938," in John Cage: Composed in America, eds. Marjorie Perloff & Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 81. 24 Thomas Hines, "Then Not Yet 'Cage': The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938," p. 93. 25 Thomas Hines, "Then Not Yet 'Cage': The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938," p. 95. 26 Eric Salzman, notes to the recording of Four Walls by Joshua Pierce & Jay Clayton for Tomato Records (New York: Tomato 69559, 1989), n.p. Mark Swed, notes to the recording of Imaginary Landscape by Anthony De Marc for Koch International Classics (Westbury: Koch 37104, 1992) n.p. 27 Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music, translated by J. Hautekiet (New York: Alexander Broude, Inc., 1983), p. 88. 28 Margaret Leng Tan, notes to her recording of the work for New Albion Records (San Francisco: NA070CD, 1994), n.p. 29 James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.55. 30 Pierre Boulez & John Cage, The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 55. 31 James Pritchett, "Understanding John Cage's Chance Music: An Analytic Approach," in John Cage at Seventy-Five, eds. Richard Fleming & William Ducksworth (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987), p. 251. The opening remarks of his recent The Music of John Cage treats the regard of Cage as philosopher harshly, but this should be read not as a rejection of the philosophical challenges of Cage's work but instead as emblematic of Prichett's desire for a musicological recuperation of Cage, a direct assault upon the critical apparatus which has for too long regarded Cage as merely a philosopher. 32 Andrzej Pytlak, "On Ingarden's Conception of the Musical Composition," in On the Aesthetics of Roman Ingarden, eds. B. Dziemidok & P. McCormick (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 241-42. 33 Peter Simons, "Computer Composition and Works of Music: Variations on a Theme of Ingarden," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19:2 (May, 1988), pp. 143-147. 34 The essential texts here are Umberto Eco's Opera Aperta (1962), published in English as The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Leonard Meyer's Music, the Arts and Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Herman Sabbe's "Open Structure and the Problem of Criticism," Perspectives of New Music 27: I (Winter, 1989), pp. 312-16, is a useful summary of these positions. Yushiro Takei's "The Aesthetics of Process and Human Life," Analecta Husserliana XLVII (1995), pp. 165-82, opens the discussion to a broader range of phenomenological concerns, in part those of time-consciousness. 35 "The text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed ... the text is a methodological field." Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 156-7. 36 Gregory Tropea, "I Ching Divination and the Absolutely Poetic Reconstruction of Intentionality," Analecta Husserliana XLVII (1995), p. 207. 37 In John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), pp.267-81. 22

CANDACE K. SKORUPA

BERLIOZ'S PROGRAMME AND PROUST'S SONATE: PARALLEL QUESTS TO BRIDGE THE GAPS IN MUSICOLITERARY EXPRESSION

Working within the increasingly ambiguous boundaries of disciplines addressed by the field of Comparative Literature, I have become quite interested in bridging the interdisciplinary gap between music and literature, particularly in France in the nineteenth century, and in understanding the role of voice and narrative as expressive elements of both literature and music. In this paper I would like to examine examples of musico-literary expression from two artists who, in my mind, are hard to "categorize" as either simply artist or musician - specifically because of their chosen, quite interdisciplinary, forms of artistic expression. These two artists are Hector Berlioz, primarily known today for his Symphonie fantastique, and Marcel Proust, primarily known for his cup of tea and madeleine cookies; both represent noteworthy examples of musicoliterary experimentation that highlight and problematize the very distinctive boundaries traditionally constructed between the fields of music and literature. My interest in examining the connections between music and literature in these two writers centers on a textually-based exploration of how music can inspire and influence the works of authors of literature - and, inversely, how literature, words, and narrative can have similar effects on composers of music. By tracing the relationship between music and narrative in a "musical text" or in "narrative music," the reader-listener can see the very transformation between the two arts - of the musical art into words, and of the literary art into music. My very choice of the word "writer" here - to describe both a composer of music and an author of literature - helps to point out the similarity of their artistic enterprises and the very creativity of their impulse, perhaps not initially in form, but rather in the strategy and resulting expression that seems to start bridging the gap between the traditionally separate fields of music and literature. As exemplified by Berlioz and Proust, the many variations and combinations of artistic professions represented by a single artist - as a writer of music, writer of music criticism, writer of fiction containing (descriptions of) music, writer of music containing fictional narrative - become possible within these increasingly ambiguous discipline boundaries, and leave the reader or listener with the impression of being in a vague semantic field of creativity somewhere between music and literature. 251

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While most listeners of classical music are familiar with Berlioz's bestknown symphonic work, many do not know that the piece was first performed in 1830 under the compound title of Episode de la vie d'un artiste: symphonie fantastique en cinq parties, with its modern-day appellation serving only as a subtitle to this musical "episode."! Furthermore, at the first performance of the symphony, its composer Hector Berlioz distributed to concert-goers a so-called programme, a narrative written by himself to recount the seemingly autobiographical plot of his multi-voiced orchestral work. With Franz Liszt in the audience and the famed conductor Habeneck at the podium for this concert honoring the victims of the recent July Revolution,2 the Parisian audience read the narrative of this musical "episode" in their pink programs and thus followed the story of the dreams, passions, and tumult of the amorous artist fixated on his so-called "Beloved" (l'image cherie). The orchestra tore through the five unorthodox movements of the symphony, while the public responded most enthusiastically to the revolutionary echoes in the Marche, with its coup fatal alluding to the all-toofamiliar thud of the guillotined head. 3 Ever since that fateful day when Berlioz presented this gesture of explanatory narration as textual accompaniment to his musical composition, the composer and his programmatic symphony have been the scapegoats of an impassioned, ongoing debate among musicologists about the relative merits of "program music," with its accompanying written story to explain or enhance the music, and "absolute music," a purportedly purer form of expression that neither has, nor needs, words to explain its semantic or affective content. Because of his almost obligatory posthumous inclusion in this century-old debate, Berlioz the writer is a provocative example by which to engage numerous relevant interdisciplinary aesthetic questions about narrative and music - and specifically about the creative impulse behind the instrumental voice of his own musical narrative. The other subject of my investigation in this paper is Marcel Proust and his narrative masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. In Proust's novel, instrumental music literally "plays" a crucial role and informs the text with a subtle interdisciplinary perspective on these two complementary art forms. As a composer of literature, Proust attempts textually to render the mimetic moment of "hearing" a piece of music - accomplished most effectively through the music of the composer Vinteuil - and to transmit and reproduce, in words, the affective experience of that significant moment and its longterm effect on the novel's narrator Marcel. Notably, Proust incorporates music into his text as an indispensable, integral part of the plot, for Vinteuil's

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music remains a crucial element in the novel for actually making possible the author/narrator's final self-reflexive revelations about authorship and artistic creation. Certainly the artistic similarities between Berlioz and Proust as writers are quite interesting to note and often quite beautiful to hear or to read; yet, more importantly, in order to understand the creative and narrative importance of such interdisciplinary connections, one must ask several crucial questions: "What does music in a literary narrative attempt or accomplish?" and "What do written words impart to the instrumental composition?" Finally, to bridge the gap between the obviously different goals and intentions of each of these arts, one must ask, "What kind of common (instrumental) voice emerges from both literary and musical narratives?" The specific musicological anxiety about the encroaching influence and role of words in La Symphonie Jantastique - and of the literary themes, Shakespearean plots, and characters in Berlioz's other orchestral works4 superficially suggests why music historians and critics have long relegated Berlioz and his musical talents to an unmerited inferior status among his musical contemporaries. Berlioz's awareness of his revolutionary role, specifically exemplified by his novel techniques as a musician, is shown by a footnote that he himself wrote and later added to the programme, in response to criticism from his musical peers: The aim of the program is by no means to copy faithfully what the composer has tried to present in orchestral terms, as some people seem to think; on the contrary, it is precisely in order to fill in the gaps which the use of musical language unavoidably leaves in the development of dramatic thought, that the composer has had to avail himself of written prose to explain and justify the outline of the symphony. He knows very well that music can take the place of neither words nor picture; he has never had the absurd intention of expressing abstractions or moral qualities, but rather passions and feelings (my italics).5

Despite Berlioz's defensive self-justification for his attempts to fill in the expressive gaps between the narrative and musical arts, his later status as a scorned musical exile suggests his appropriateness as a provocative case study of nineteenth-century critical assumptions and prejudices about musical "purity," as well as a specific means of exploring traditional theories about instrumental music and its relationship to words and narrative description. Since the theoretical and philosophical framework that developed throughout the nineteenth century has been carefully traced by such music scholars as Carl Dahlhaus,6 I will not enter or try to solve this debate about absolute and program music - but will instead try to extract the productive aspects of the argument for my discussion about Berlioz and Proust.

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A careful programme-less listening to the Symphonie fantastique helps to highlight what happens musically in Berlioz's music and also suggests why the programme in instrumental music has such a problematic status. Without the program, the listener can discern the dreamy, reflective quality of the first movement, the dancing waltzy tumult of increasing passion in the second movement, the pastoral longing of the shepherd's ranz des vaches, the obviously march-like character in the fourth's plodding rhythm, and finally the grotesque parodies and devilish turns of phrase of the final movement's Dies irae. With the program, the listener can understand specific details offered by the composer about the protagonist, and the very circumstances of the hero's musically hinted-at longing. Yet, even without the original accompanying program, the power and beauty of the music remain intact, though less specifically referential; indeed, by following the progression of the music's recurring themes, the most frequent of which is known today as Berlioz's idee fixe, the attentive listener can perhaps intuit the presence of some unified character. In this way, while the idee fixe serves as a musical explanation of an external reality, the programme functions in a complementary way by offering a textual explanation of internal musical events, whether fictive or true. However, without the plot clues offered in the programme's narrative, most attempts to "fill in the gaps" about the specific thoughts, heartbreaks, and wandering of the episodic hero represent a risky cognitive leap, a mere musically groundless guess that will either intrigue or infuriate the listener. Indeed, today one usually hears the Symphonie fantastique program-less in concert, and it is certainly possible to enjoy and appreciate the music without having Berlioz's original programme or even knowing its detailed narrative content. Yet, once the classical music fan knows of the "story" and programme that inspired and originally accompanied the Symphony fantastique, the specific details and developments of its plot are difficult to forget or ignore. Nevertheless, the average modern listener can still intuit the tumultuous implied story line of the piece through the rather specific "titles" of its five movements, which refer indirectly to each tempo by evoking a certain musical genre, such as the dance, a pastorale, or a march. These movement titles are still usually printed, without further narrative explanation, in the listing of movements in a typical modern concert program: "Reveries-Passions," "Un bal," "Scene aux champs," "Marche au supplice," and the diabolical "Songe d'une nuit du sabbat." Most interestingly, in his apparent uncertainty about this literary component of his symphony, Berlioz abandoned the practice of actually distributing the

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programme and relied on the titles of these movements to tell his story; at a later point, the program was reinstated, then again discarded, by the composer.7 Thus, the very existence of the programme was ultimately to be forgotten by most concert-goers, except the few "in the know." Although Berlioz the musician seemingly pasted the programme onto his music by his original distribution of the story line at the concerts, his later indecision about its exact relationship to the symphony seems to mark his troubled negotiation of this musico-literary connection. Berlioz's creative uncertainty sets into question the complementarity, or even the possible expendability, of the program itself and also problematizes the musician's conception of the artistic role of narrative and language for his purely instrumental symphony. However, by originally intending the piece to be performed with a written narrative accompaniment, Berlioz the writer created a unique and crucial position for himself in the history of nineteenth-century music, and exposed its underlying tension-charged literary and narrative connections. An examination of the long-debated position of Berlioz's music in the larger field of French musico-literary connections highlights the provocative differences between the literary and musical fields, particularly in the way each values or disdains the combination of several arts in one artistic domain. Nevertheless, Berlioz himself had few initial reservations about his quasi-literary ambitions or literary techniques of musical composition, as evident in his bold autobiographical statement about the work, " ... voici comment j' ai tisse mon roman, ou plutot mon histoire, dont il ne vous est pas difficile de reconnaitre Ie heros."8 As suggested here, Berlioz uses his program, with its fictionalized story line, to complement his symphony as a novelistic, though somewhat uncertain, gesture at detail-specific narrative accompaniment. As I will discuss later, Proust, in an opposite move, incorporates a fictionalized sonata into the narrative structure of his novel; while affectively and semantically complementing the written narrative, the sonata is a much less easily "removable" form, for Vinteuil's music becomes an essential component of the story. As similarly creative impulses toward a higher plane of artistic expression, the intent of Berlioz's and Proust's artistic processes seems parallel, with the only difference being the specific art form used as a complement; yet, the musical passages of Proust's novel are praised and admired as a successful combination of various levels of artistic expression,9 while the literary elements of Berlioz's musical output are scorned by musicologists as mere inferior examples of symphonic music. 10

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In an attempt to rehabilitate the status of Berlioz's program music for use as a new narrative model that could help to bridge the gaps between two kinds of artistic expression, I would like to consider this musical composer's programme as a type of profound speaking narrative, a voice chosen by the composer to speak directly and specifically - through words - about his work through his work. In this sense, the programme is not an entirely dispensable component of his symphonic creation, precisely for the revolutionary metanarrative possibilities it brings to his music. Just as its narrative line interacts with the musical line of the symphony in a relationship of complementarity in which each enhances the semantic and expressive content of the other, Berlioz's idea of the program can possibly shed light on the role of narrative in literary texts, such as Proust's, that contain a substantial musical component. Although both of these writers dare to confront two arts and to link them into a single work, Berlioz is rarely praised for aspiring to the condition of language, while Proust is certainly praised for his opposite quest, that of aspiring towards the condition of music. ll Nevertheless, I hope to show that the differing reception of their techniques by their respective peers is not a reflection on the success of their individual artistic attempts, but, rather, an indication of the prejudices and expectations inherent to each discipline, and a suggestion of the ever-problematized relationship of any art to other forms of expression or language, be it music or text. As a gesture towards sounding out the interdisciplinary connections in the works of two rarely-linked artists, the title of this paper, "Berlioz's Programme and Proust's Sonate," hints at the possible complementary aspects of their creative projects. Of course, for the title's pairing of writers, one could juxtapose other artistic techniques or methods - such as the idee fixe of the Symphonie Jantastique with the petite phrase of Proust's Vinteuil, which are, respectively, tropes of perhaps proto- and post-Wagnerian Leitmotiven. 12 Yet such a pairing - idee fixe and petite phrase - would essentially only emphasize the revolutionary musico-literary aspect of Proust's creation. The "little phrase" is contextually not the grammatical structure of his linguistic sentence (which, in any case, chez Proust is never little or short!), but the musical phrase incorporated into the very plot of his narrative; the idee fixe, itself a musical motif in Berlioz's musical work, is expected and acceptable in the field of music. Indeed, in the many idee-combinations possible for this paper's title - the very variety and number of which emphasize the numerous productive links between the two arts and, most surprisingly, between the two most oddly matched specific artistic products of Berlioz and Proust - one could also replace the word sonate with septuor. However, by choosing to

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focus on the sonata - the earlier genre of music composed by Vinteuil that eventually gives life to the septuor at the end of Proust's novel, I wish rather to emphasize the artistic development from this traditional musical embryo and the importance of sound, as reflected in the word's etymological Italian root sonare ("to sound") - and its consequently crucial relation to the written musical word in Proust. By the specifically chosen pairing of terms in my title, I thus seek to show how each writer seeks a complementary voice in a different artistic medium and uses the instrumental voice, as represented by the performing sounds of musical instruments, either in a type of musical narrative in an author's voice, or in a type of narrative music expressed in written words. Most crucially, neither Proust nor Berlioz looks to a singing human voice to enhance his written text, for the musical presence of an actual speaking or singing voice would transform their chosen genre and compete with, rather than complement, their artistic and expressive projects involving musical text and narrative music, effected specifically through the instrumental voice. In this way, both the programme and sonate represent an authorial search for other artistic forms of productive instrumental voice in a vague area between music and literature. My understanding of narrative, in drawing these connections between literature and music, is based on the idea that listeners of music naturally create cognitive structures and organizing narratives as they hear a piece of music; such construction of a narrative or plot seems to be an almost innate impulse in relation to stories and tales, as well as a useful device for making sense of a piece of music. 13 To simplify the novel aspect of the literary connections suggested here, I call this creative, narrative impulse simply "literature in music." Although twentieth-century music critics are loath to weave a story that supposedly "explains" what is happening in the music, as Berlioz described the weaving of the story for his symphony, such a narrative tendency was the norm for musical criticism of the nineteenth century, although not usually as an actual element of the composed piece. In fact, as a central figure of musical criticism in the early part of the century, Berlioz was then known much more for his quite interesting, story-like critiques of the contemporary music and opera scene than for his own literarily-inspired musical compositions. Thus, to his contemporaries, Berlioz's tendency toward narrative was neither surprising, nor even particularly noteworthy - neither in his musical criticism, nor in his operas, and actually, to the nineteenth-century trained musical ear, not really in his symphony either. 14

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In this spirit, the Parisian opera-saturated milieu of the 1820's contextualizes Berlioz's revolutionary move to create a narrative for his symphony. The composer himself acknowledges this operatic legacy in the explanation of his explanatory programme: Le plan du drame instrumental, prive du see ours de la parole, a besoin d' etre expose d' avanee. Le programme suivant doit done etre eonsidere eomme Ie texte parle d'un opera, servant 11 amener des moreeaux de musique, dont il motive Ie earaetere et I' expression. 1s

Indeed, for a Parisian public attuned to the ever-popular operas of Rossini and Meyerbeer, the presence of a program written by the composer to accompany an instrumental symphony did not seem especially odd, even though its form was admittedly unusual, since it had no sung words as in an opera; instead, other things about the Symphonie Jantastique shocked his listeners, such as its harmonies and orchestration. 16 Nevertheless, the very idea of the programme has historically been especially distasteful to the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentiethcentury critical mind, following in the aesthetic tradition of German Romantic musical sensibility that scorned Berlioz and other composers for their reliance on the "crutch" of words. Indeed, "absolute music" - purely instrumental music, without the contribution of spoken or written words has historically been perceived as a superior or ultimate means of expression, a hierarchical position particularly reinforced by the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer.17 Yet as a literary scholar, in a decidedly post-modern interdisciplinary setting, I find Berlioz's approach to both words and music fascinating, as he gestures toward the narrative structures of fiction; this unique technique seems more decidedly narrative than that of other recognized programmatic composers, such as Liszt or Mendelssohn, and perhaps also more surprisingly innovative than his own use of the new-fangled idee fixe, which would later become a common, more refined musical strategy in the works of other composers such as Strauss and Wagner. To breathe a cross-century cross-artistic souffle into my examination of Berlioz's expressive methods, I would now like to take a look at the work of Proust, a fin-de-siecle writer still very steeped in the cultural and aesthetic ambiance of the nineteenth century. While many kinds of music enhance A La recherche du temps perdu, in this paper I will overlook its many references to real musicians such as Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and Wagner - no, Proust, unfortunately, doesn't mention Berlioz - and focus on Proust's fascinating and beautiful integration of instrumental music into his novel. The

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novel's violin and piano music - apparently a fictive melange of various pieces by Saint-Saens, Franck, Faure, Schubert, and Wagner 18 - is primarily the creation of the fictional Vinteuil; surrounded by the mundane mediocrity of his social world, Marcel narratively expounds upon the almost divine character of the essential musical "message" contained in the sonata and septet of VinteuiL Although there are many other works of literature, such as Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreuzer Sonata and Thomas Mann's short story "Tristan," that attempt such a cohabitation of the arts in a written form of musico-literary expression, no one pulls it off as well - or on such a vast scale - as Proust. Indeed, A la recherche paradigmatic ally encapsulates many of the issues of artistic expression that I have teased out of Berlioz's symphony, particularly its coupling of music and narrative. In Proust, the virtual "translation" of music into written verbal expression and description reaches an aesthetic climax that results in the successful transmission of a speaking instrumental voice through the novel's violin and piano, as well as in a narrative most beautifully saturated in the atmosphere, culture, and music of the nineteenth century. The crucial artistic importance of this musical narrative experimentation is beyond the words. In order to understand the relevant links between the musico-literary projects of Berlioz and Proust, a look at the crucial Vinteuil episodes of A la recherche will be helpful to fill in the reader's memory gaps. Living in retirement near Combray, Vinteuil was the former piano teacher of Marcel's grandmother'S sisters; although Swann remembers having met him in that capacity (I 327),19 only much later after the teacher's death does Swann hear and recognize one of Vinteuil's compositions, the sonata played by a pianist at the Verdurins' soiree. Gradually la petite phrase (the little phrase) becomes the "hymne national" (national anthem) of Swann's love for Odette (I 337). As a recurring theme in Swann's life and in the novel, the phrase almost resembles a Berliozian idee fixe and assumes a larger, almost overwhelming, influence in its development and evolution in the novel's narrative, musically marking changes in Swann's life and symbolizing lost elements of his past. Indeed, when Swann later hears the sonata again at Mme de Saint-Euverte's soiree, he is reminded of his now-lost happiness, memories that reawaken his past through the material quality and real essence of the sounds, which remain for him an irreducible purely musical impression (/483). Again Swann is deeply affected by its notes and the very voice of the violin (I 482), which together assume a speaking quality reminiscent of Wagner's Tristan theme (/485), of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, or even perhaps of the

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shepherd movement of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Proust's narrator describes the music's effect on Swann: Le beau dialogue qu'il entendit entre Ie piano et Ie violon .... D'abord Ie piano solitaire se plaignait, comme un oiseau abandonne de sa compagne; Ie violon I'entendit, lui repondit comme d'un arbre voisin .... Est-ce un oiseau, est-ce I'ame encore de la petite phrase, est-ce une fee ... (/487).20

This purely musical quality gains larger personal resonance in a scene that emphasizes the temporal link between two love-obsessed generations, the scene in which Odette, as Mme Swann and Gilberte's mother, plays the little phrase on the piano for Swann and young Marcel (II 199). By hearing the music again, Swann suddenly realizes that the fervor of Odette's past love for him will never be revived, the sonata loses its mysterious power over him, and its once intensely significant metaphorical content becomes virtually indecipherable (II 204). Simultaneously, the perceptive Marcel becomes enchanted by the intangibly expressive possibilities of the sonata and its indescribable effect on him; as it emanates from beneath the indifferent fingers of Odette at the piano, the sonata and its petite phrase subtly assume control of Marcel's own destiny and begin to color his perception of time and memory. Vinteuil's sonata later assumes the greatest resonance when the now-older Marcel hears familiar strains of a piece of music at the Verdurins' soiree (V 350). In the interval between Swann's and the mature Marcel's interactions with the piece, Vinteuil has attained extraordinary prestige as a well-known pianist and contemporary composer - all details which encourage Marcel to reflect generally on artistic creation and on the artist's creative development and struggle for expression. Although initially the musical intervals of the sonata symbolize the generational gap from Swann to Marcel in a type of temporal succession of amorous obsessions, the music also progressively, spatially and artistically bridges, in the novel, the intervals between Vinteuil's compositions and Marcel's own forays into writing. This metaphorical notion of the interval to which I have referred 21 is quite useful for understanding why a composer or author, such as Berlioz or Proust, perhaps chose a particular musico-literary form of expression for his creative work. Certainly the musical interval itself is significant for both of these writers, for it marks the actual sonorous gap between two musical notes - as in Swann's detailed description, during the Saint-Euverte soiree, of the notes in the petite phrase: "c' etait au faible ecart entre les cinq notes qui la composaient et au rappel constant de deux d'entre elies qU'etait due cette impression de douceur ... " (I 484).22 The basic musical definition of the

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interval is only enhanced when further interpreted as a temporal divide, marking a gap in time that illustrates the changing sensibilities and feelings of these narrative heroes in their episodic amorous adventures. For Proust, music presents many narrative possibilities through the suggestive artistic values of the individual notes of the phrase, their specific architectural arrangement and sonorous order, referring to an inner reality and complex noeud of semantic revelation that is entirely connected to the larger gesture of narrative. Indeed, in a later volume of Proust's novel, the narrative creation of the Vinteuil septuor and the textual rendering of this fictionalized music marks the culminating stage of an authorial search for voice and the literary realization of the semantic potential of instrumental music (V Prisonniere 350 ff); in this way, the interval of time allows Marcel's maturation as an author, dispels the personal romantic errors and regrets of his past, and finally bears significantly on these later recreations of truth and expressive discovery now possible through his art. Through Marcel's mastery of the interval, the revelation of truth is progressively made possible and gives MarcellProust the space to explore retrospectively the gap between his previous ignorance and present knowledge, a gap that helps to produce his art. Indeed, for Proust, the interval here is emphasized first in its basic musical definition, the precise musical interval between the notes of Vinteuil's phrasing, and later as a creative marker of Vinteuil's artistic career, shown by the similarities and differences between the composer's earlier and later works. Such metaphorical intervals are also mirrored in the temporal gap marked in the novel by the lives of Swann, Marcel, and Vinteuil, between their first and most recent listenings to the piece, and in the intervening years that have allowed Marcel, in the meantime, to form his own artistic opinions, prejudices, and tendencies; all of these instances show Proust's, and the narrator's, eagerness to entertain the possibility of learning from and emulating other types of artistic form and expression. Similarly, despite a lesser emphasis on the actual musical interval, except in the idee fixe, the various movements of Berlioz's Symphony musically and temporally mark different events and moments in the development of the artist's obsessed thoughts about his "Beloved." In this sense, both Proust's and Berlioz's narratives - in the literary musician's "Episode of the Life of an Artist," or in this musical novelist's Search for Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) - are significantly marked by moments of solitude and reflection, as well as temporal, musically endowed, intervals of self-reflection and selfquestioning.

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Shedding light on Proust's self-reflexive and inevitably autobiographical narrative stance in his novel, the music of Vinteuil reveals a new understanding of the crucial elements of memory and time in the novel; such insights are metaphorically composed through the recurring musical interval, ensconced in the affects of memory and love, yet serving as a cognitively distinctive element in his obsessions. Indeed, the narrator's amorous liaisons seem to follow the pattern ofVinteuil's artistic development, and through the recurrence of the "petite phrase" and its creative reappearance in a new guise in the septuor, Marcel takes a crucial artistic step, an interval beyond Swann's understanding of the phrase, to relate the extent of the composer's entire oeuvre to his own stuttering attempts at authorship. In this way, Marcel can trace the theme and variations of amorous episodes in his life, in counterpoint to the preceding amorous adventures of Swann and the older man's lesser familiarity with Vinteuil's music. The musical phrase and the specific tonal interval represent and symbolize the centrality of love and amorous relations in both Proust's and Berlioz's narratives, and thus mark an interesting connection between these fixated protagonists, for both autobiographical narrators are obsessed with the passage of time and its effect on their amorous liaisons. Interestingly, both Berlioz and Proust find their authorial voice within the encapsulated musical interval - the idee fixe and the petite phrase - as each of these seem to mark the conjunction of semantic meaning and musical expression within the work's larger narrative. Despite the different tones of their endings,23 in Proust's novel, language aspires to the ultimate expression of music, while Berlioz's music makes an opposite, yet parallel, gesture in the composer's similarly unexpected reliance on story, with the help of which his music perhaps aspires to the expressive qualities or content of language. While the idee fixe recurs in each of the five movements in some permutation, its significance reverberates especially through its overall evolution, as seen in the development of Vinteuil's works during Proust's narrative. Indeed, Berlioz did not question the inclusion of the idee fixe in his symphony, for its motivic function is a more readily acceptable musical element than the literary narrative of his programme. Yet, the semantic specificity he seeks is most completely expressed in the programme, the larger narrative plan of his symphony and the radically musico-literary expression of his creative impulse; he long struggled with its appropriateness for his work. Such a precarious balance highlights the programme as perhaps the more substantive and broadly significant aspect of Berlioz's creative endeavor; while the idee fixe is emphasized in music textbooks, undoubtedly for its Wagnerian sug-

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gestions and higher musical respectability, it is the programme that contains and supports the idee fixe, which can only exist and signify within the structure of the musical narrative of the symphony. Similarly, Marcel remarks on the importance of the petite phrase throughout his various loveobsessions, and even once refers to his idee fixe (V Fugitive 208) and his need for a programme while listening to the septuor (V Prisonniere 351). In Proust's milieu, the musical interval also only gains its primary significance in the larger interval of his artistic life, in the scope of the entire narrative of A la recherche. Interestingly, much of the critical objection to Berlioz's programmatic music - primarily from traditional musicologists seeking absolutism and formal purity - also lies in the very existence of certain textual signifiers that seem to point toward an autobiographical character, an unnamed hero who rather too uncomfortably mirrors its creator and his obsession with the famous Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson, who had taken Paris by storm. Such a target of criticism seems, perhaps, not so different from Marcel Proust's novel and its narrator Marcel's romantic fixation on Albertine, autobiographical intimations that, during certain literary trends, have also been critical targets. Indeed, from the very beginning, the saturation of Proust's novel in self-reflexivity, with the autobiographical collapse of the narrator and author into one persona of unparalleled self-consciousness, has been the subject of endless debate, reflective of that centered on Berlioz, about its characteristic artistic complexity. In the crucial musical scenes of Proust's novel, the violin sonata and septet highlight the crucial intervals of the narrator Marcel's life, particularly the changes and obsessions that linger and are described within the novel's own lengthy narrative structure. Already struggling in his own efforts to find a writing voice, the narrator Marcel becomes fascinated by the phrase and the musical piece, for he can now hear and understand, for the first time, the joy and living presence of its composer, an old family friend, and the truths contained in his music. In the novelist's remarkable attempt to translate into words the mysterious, truth-harboring notes that emanate from the violin, these moments of the narrator's musically-inspired ecstasy - that add up to make what I will call a parallel or simultaneous musical narrative - seem to function on a different semantic plane from the traditional word-laden narrative and thus encapsulate a complex nexus of narratological and aesthetic issues that resound from within the inevitably self-reflexive and meta-narrative structure of Proust's novel. By participating in and musically commenting on the various layers of language, voice, metaphysical

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experience, and narration in the novel, Vinteuil's music becomes the means by which Marcel gauges the merits of his amorous liaisons, compares his reaction to Swann's earlier, rather different and musically inept, response to the same composer's music, and comprehends the very evolution and creative progress of an artist, as well as the very power and meaning of art. In this later revelatory hearing of the septuor by Vinteuil, the instrumental music - and Marcel's own enigmatic relationship to the notes that trigger linked amorous and musical memories - enable the narrator to envisage himself in an artistic time-line, where he can better understand his ongoing tumultuous relationships and textually unravel the unspoken knots and memories of his life. With more intensity than ever before, Vinteuil's "blanche sonate" (white sonata) - heard in relation to this later piece, the "rougeoyant septuor" (glowing red septet) (V Prisonniere 350) - now assumes the status of an emotionally and psychologically charged associative device in Marcel's life, much more artistically significant and creatively provocative than its function as a flat, undeveloped idee fixe in the life of Swann. As the national anthem of Swann s earlier love affair, the sonata was endowed with a programmatic quality, a basic "qua/iM materielle" (I 326) that served to explain and trace the ups and downs of the man's romantic life; however, for Marcel the sonata is no mere programme, as the ideas seemingly signified to him in the music encompass the whole of his writing endeavor and creative life. Indeed, because of Marcel's ability to transfer the creative possibilities inherent in the sonate and the septuor to a larger framework than that envisaged by Swann, the narrator successfully demonstrates the radical potential of his narrative gift through this specific bridging of the gap or interval - musical, temporal, generational, and semantic - represented by Vinteuil's music. Whereas Swann could only remain fixated on the programmatic value of the petite phrase and its individual notes, Marcel delves into the musicoliterary relevance and meaning of the larger, more mature and developed work of the septuor; he applies the semantic content of the interval to the larger musical narrative that is simultaneous with the novel's entire plot. Thus, his understanding of the broader possibilities and implications of the sonate's musical expression are implied through the time and space that he surrenders to this musical narrative, which ultimately fills in the gaps of his traditional written narrative. Vinteuil's music, accompanied by Marcel's narrative commentary, adds meaning-laden levels of expression to the plot of his novel and imparts uniquely vague and elusive semantic aspects to the narrative, in a way that words cannot emulate because of their opposite

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tendency to specify and concretize. This tension between what words and music - separately and together - can accomplish and convey is confronted by both Proust and Berlioz. In my seemingly odd linking of Berlioz and Proust as authors, I have tried to shed light on the correspondences and similarities in their formal approaches to expression in music and literature, as well as the very different historical receptions of their interdisciplinary work. Indeed, the music that appears in the narration of Proust's novel seems to have an effect similar to that achieved by the narrative structure of Berlioz's textually-enhanced Symphonie fantastique, yet the novelist is able to escape the ultimate consequences suffered by the composer for his own interdisciplinary foray. As a beautiful aesthetic element uncriticized for its very presence in his literary text, the narrative music written by Proust attempts to "say" what is unspeakable or unspoken in mere words; using a musical element thus to go beyond the capacity of straightforward verbal expression, Proust is not accused of being unable to find the right words. Obviously, such a statement wouldn't be true, for, as we know by the thousands of pages he produced, Proust was at no loss for words, and good ones, too. Nor was Berlioz at a loss for good notes, as shown by his many and formally varied compositions; yet, his musico-literary efforts are often scorned for the very fact that he seemingly had to resort to words, to "say" precisely that which could not be specifically expressed in music. Certainly, transposing or rendering musical effects or a musical moment into words and verbal expression is no easy task for an author, and infinitely problematizes and complicates the task of writing - for a writer transposing either his own music into programmatic words or the music of other composers, imagined or real, into the narrative of a novel. Berlioz composed the particular chords, notes, and harmonies of his symphony, as well as the specific words of his programme; with this artistic combination, he then could let his musical and narrative ideas collectively fill in the cognitive gaps between these aesthetic forms of expression. In contrast, Proust began the sonata sections of his narrative with the idea of a particular musical piece, or a hybrid of many possible actual pieces, presented to the reader through his acknowledgeably difficult descriptive task of transforming musical notes into words. The reader's subsequent task of synthesizing Proust's written expression and pairing its musical importance with the narrative story line is facilitated by the sheer musicality of Proust's very words, which absorb the reader and make specific explanation unnecessary, or undesired, in the novel's evocative atmosphere. In Berlioz's case, the playful suggestions of a

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creative narrative logic and impulse in his symphony similarly attract the interest of listeners, even without their prior knowledge or intuition of his programmatic endeavor, and similarly charm its audiences. The authors' success in these demanding artistic projects has high stakes, for the results can potentially transport the reader to other imaginative affective realms and virtually enact the translation of the unspoken or inexpressible into another semantic system that bridges the gap between the literary and musical modes of expression. Thus simultaneously demanding the reader's auditory participation and collaborative skills of perception, the writer/composer/author evocatively reconstructs the musical event or scene, and also gestures toward that peculiarly ineffable, unanalyzable, and seemingly untranslatable aspect of music, full of linguistic and profoundly expressive potential. Proust succeeds in creating these simultaneous narratives, for the plot written in words and the underlying signification of the emotions suggested by the narrator's musical description become central to the novel and to the narrator's ultimate philosophy of life. In this way, Proust's efforts serve as a model by which to judge the ultimate effectiveness of Berlioz's similar quest to bridge the divide between two forms of art, traditionally unamenable to the strict musicological definition of instrumental music. In this context, one cannot ignore the longstanding debate about absolute and program music that has always revolved around Berlioz's music, for such a controversy implicitly problematizes the very formal and expressive standards for music and literature. Indeed, are the standards of creative expression and of pure form stricter or higher for music? Does each artistic realm, specifically music and literature, have entirely different goals and aims for artistic expression? That is, is it wrong even to attempt to draw a parallel between the creative impulses of an artist seemingly dabbling in several means of artistic expression? Finally, are such inquiries a mere mismatched attempt to glean similarities of expression in deceptively similar modes of narrative form and structure? Certainly, as I have tried to show in this paper, the musical artist or composer shares some qualities with the narrative writer, and in some sense becomes a writer with a distinct voice, who only chooses a different medium to process the cognitive and expressive worlds. But why this or that medium? And what of that very choice? Ultimately, the matter at hand - and what I have tried to emphasize in this paper - is not which form of expression is more perfect, but rather to pose the crucial question: what is gained by each form of expression for a certain writer in a hybrid form of expression, the musico-literary work of art?

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While in this Work-in-Progress inquiry I have no quick answers to such questions, something certainly is to be learned from and gained by these artists' perhaps not entirely conscious interdisciplinary approaches. At this gathering of sympathetic scholars studying such fascinating interrelationships between various forms of human expression, I do not have to convince anyone of the productive aspects of creativity between and among the arts. For this reason, I'd like to finish my talk by retreating a bit and looking at the contemporary scene of literary theory, musicology, and musical criticism. Since fruitful results abound from seeking the interdisciplinary correspondences between music, musical themes, or musical ideas in literature AND literary ideas or stratagems in music, as a literary scholar I have also experimented by investigating contemporary criticism and theory from the two fields and by seeking productive links by "using" music theory for literature AND literary theory for music. Certain musicologists, such as Susan McClary in her book Feminine Endings,24 have already begun to revolutionize their once-insular and staunchly conservative field by importing literary theory and feminist terminology to examine the creative impulse behind music. From a distinctly literary perspective, I have tried in my own work to show how these recent musicological studies can help a literature scholar to see literature - and specifically literature containing music and a type of musical voice - in a new way, and to interpolate beyond the musical matter at hand, back to the very field of literature. I have been talking a lot about "voice" today, an idea inspired by a recent musicological study by Carolyn Abbate, entitled Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the 19th Century.25 In this work she suggests that, while music obviously has speaking and singing voices in opera, all music "sings" and has its own voice. Her rigorous scholarship is quite indebted to Edward Cone, the same musicologist who produced much scholarship on Berlioz, and his book called The Composer's Voice,26 where he identifies within music a composite of different voices. By asking many questions about the power of speech in music with his refrain, "If so, then who is speaking?" Cone schematizes the different voices that are all somehow linked to the composer - categories such as the vocal persona, the instrumental persona, or the complete musical persona. Such a view enables a literature scholar to imagine the voice of the composer and the narrator/author in similar terms, and adds the possibility of organizing the semantic implications of a text's narrative line and the role of a secondary musical "plot," just as Vinteuil's music in Proust gives a second dimension to the narrator's seemingly univocal voice. Indeed, Cone suggests that while someone is speaking

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through this music, it is not necessarily the autobiographical voice, although such a vocal aspect undeniably exists, as is evident in the narrative of Proust's Marcel. The very idea that dramatic utterance depends on an act of voice-related impersonation seems like a fruitful way of examining who is speaking in an instrumental work like Symphonie Jantastique - who is the speaking voice of the musician or composer in Proust's novel A la recherche, or what is the "voice" of the violin - and what such ambiguously autobiographical, musico-literary voices accomplish. Indeed, voice is one way of understanding both sides of the many dilemmas suggested by interdisciplinary expression involving both literature and music. While scholars of literature are used to talking about "voice" in a text, and scholars of music are used to talking about the singing human voice or the instrumental "voice," it is less apparent to think of those two different types of voices as a similar phenomenon in fundamentally different art forms. But, why not imagine the voice of the violin as an expressive means toward a new semantic, musically enhanced level of narrative? Why not imagine the written narrative voice of the musical composer as a new form of musicoliterary authorship? By imagining and creating new possibilities for narrative voice, Berlioz and Proust have shown indirectly in their work how the very idea of "voice" can encapsulate various means of artistic expression - the composer's voice, the author's voice, the critic's voice, and finally the voice of the musical instrument - that are transmitted through the actual physical performance of a musical piece, like Berlioz's symphony, or expressed through the narrated rendition of music appearing in Proust's novel. Such an analogy allows one to imagine a possible golden mean between the two arts, an ideal mode that can communicate expression most perfectly or most completely, or as much as perhaps needs to be expressed directly, in a work of music or musical narrative. By presenting a revolutionary hybrid pedigree of voice - through the forms, emotions, and impulses expressed within and by their specific artistic medium - these two authors, Berlioz and Proust, create strikingly novel possibilities for music as a language, despite the obvious differences in their ultimate narrative projects. Of course, while Proust represents musical affects and intervals in a written description that is partly explanatory and partly mimetic of the novel's scenes of musical performance, the reader cannot actually hear this music emanating from the pages of the novel. On the other hand, Berlioz textually describes the actual musical performance that, hopefully, the reader of his programme would be hearing in person. As he

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himself stated, Berlioz did not attempt to create an equal of, or substitute for, his music in words, but, instead, sought to create the greatest whole of creative expression through the most productive means, regardless of its artistic provenance. Proust, too, sought - through musical description and his simultaneous musical narrative - to enhance the semantic content of what he could successfully, though only partially, transmit in words. By linking the musical and verbal impulse through narrative, both Berlioz and Proust gesture toward wholeness and the completion of a narrated life-story or episode, necessarily full of gaps, but perhaps fuller than one without such musico-literary experimentation. Just as Berlioz "a tisse son roman" (wove his story) through the narrative transcription of a musical work, many scholars suggest that Vinteuil is a musical transposition of the life of the writer Proust and that, in his novel, "Proust a compose sa propre musique. "27 Indeed, by examining these artistic soulmates who sought similar ends of musico-literary expression through overlapping interdisciplinary forms, one can see how, indeed, Berlioz wrote his novel and Proust composed his music. Certainly it is erroneous and narrow-minded to categorize Berlioz as "just" a musician, or Proust as "just" a novelist, for their talents in expression extend far beyond these artistic boundaries of creativity. Through Berlioz's programme and Proust's sonate, the sublime voices of these two artists resonate and soar in their attempts to find artistic links and to bridge the expressive gaps in this ambiguous field somewhere between music in narrative and narrative in music. Yale University NOTES I Both the original programme from the concert of 5 December 1830 and its definitive form later published with the 1845 score include this title. The entire original program is reprinted in Edward T. Cone, "The Symphony and the Program," in Symphonie Fantastique (Norton Critical Score), ed. Edward Cone (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1971),20-25. 2 Fran,
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4 Through the titles of his compositions, Berlioz often evokes specific works of literature as informative narratives for his music: e.g. Harold en Italie, Romeo et Juliette, and La Damnation de Faust. 5 Edward T. Cone, "The Symphony and the Program," 28-29. 6 For a detailed historical overview of this history, cf. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea oj Absolute Music, trans!. Roger Lustig (Chicago: UP Chicago, 1989). 7 Cone, "The Symphony and the Program," 31. 8 "Here is how I wove my novel, or rather my story, of which it is not difficult to recognize the hero" (Berlioz, Correspondance genera Ie I, 319). 9 A representative example of literary praise for Proust's interdisciplinary "translation" is that of Julia Kristeva in Le Temps sensible: Proust et l' experience litteraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), where she speaks of his musical genius as the "organisateur privilegie du monde sensible" (260). An early musicological assessment can be found in Florence Hier, La Musique dans l'oeuvre de Marcel Proust (New York: Institute of French Studies, Columbia University, 1933), especially chapter VI, "Le Role de la musique dans la theorie artistique de Proust" (110-132). 10 Such opinions were apparent even in the criticism of Berlioz's contemporaries, such as Schumann, who scorned all Frenchmen's seeming inability to understand music without the aid of a program, which he asserted only hinders the interpretative faculties and judgmental musical perception of the typical German listener (Cf. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul Rosenfeld (New York: Pantheon Books, 1946), 179). Despite his praise for Berlioz's visionary music, Richard Wagner later similarly assesses the composer's reliance on the program: " ... he falls into that devilishly confused musical idiom, striking in its novelty, with which he stuns and wins over the gaping mob, while he scares off those who could have understood his meaning from within, but who scorn to take the trouble of feeling their way from without" (Cf. Wagner, "On Berlioz and the Fantastic Symphony," Dresdener Abendzeitung, 5 May 1841). 11 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1980): "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" (106). 12 Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995),542. 13 For a more detailed study of plot structure and the narrative impulse, cf. Peter Brooks, Reading Jor the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984),3-36. 14 In his review of the concert in the Revue musicale, the critic Fetis seemingly overlooks the radical implications of Berlioz's predictable tendency toward narrative and, instead, seems rather annoyed by the presence of the program: "Attached to the symphony is a program explaining the subject of each of its five movements. I have already observed several times that such programs derive from the narrowest possible interpretation of music, for the full power of this art to affect our feelings is due to its essential vagueness and indeterminacy. I shall therefore not inquire whether each section agrees with the outline of the composer's program, because I know that music cannot express what he has demanded of it, and because I see in this demand one of the causes of the poor results he has obtained" (Fran~ois-Joseph Fetis, Revue musicale, 1 February 1835,219). 15 "The plan of the instrumental drama, deprived of the help of speech, needs to be explained in advance. The following program must thus be considered as the spoken text of an opera, serving to present pieces of music, of which it justifies the character and expression." Reprinted in French in Cone, "The Symphony and the Program," 20-25. 16 Mostly interested in the possible autobiographical links apparent in the work, many critics were generally less disturbed by the Symphonie Jantastique's programmatic nature than by the

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strange effects of the piece on the listener; for example, Joseph d'Ortigue proclaims of Berlioz, "Mais Ie demon musical Ie possedait dejiI" (Revue de Paris, 3 Dec. 1832,283). 17 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. 1. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966). 18 Pierre Meylan, Les Ecrivains et la musique (Lausanne: Editions La Concorde, 1944), 63. 19 All Proust references from A la recherche du temps perdu, 10 volumes (Paris: Fiammarion, 1987). 20 "The beautiful dialogue that he heard between the piano and violin .... At first the solitary piano cried out, like a bird abandoned by its partner; the violin heard it, responded to it like a neighboring tree .... Is it a bird, is it still the incomplete soul of the little phrase, is it a fairy .... " 21 For inspiration about the idea of the "interval," I am indebted to a lecture given by Evelyne Ender, "The Art of Bridging Intervals: Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust," Harkness Hall, Yale University, 1 April 1996. 22 "It was to the slight interval between the five notes that composed it [the little phrase] and to the constant recall of two among them to which this impression of sweetness was due." 23 While Marcel glimpses the possibility of achieving the clarity of reality and truth, the obsessed hero of Berlioz's narrative dreamily wallows in an opium-induced dream-state, temporally marked by the tolling of the Dies irae. 24 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991). 25 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991). 26 Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (California UP, 1974). 27 Ernst Robert Curtius, Marcel Proust (Paris: La Revue nouvelle, 1928), 27.

INDEX OF NAMES

-A-

-CCage,1. 241-250 Calliope 16 Castiglione, B. 22 Cavalli, F. 144 Caxton, 1. 99 Chapelain, J. 179,182-183 Chirico, G. de 40 Chopin, F. 169-170 Clio 16 Cole, T. 37-38,51 Cone,E. 105-142,267 Copernicus, N. 180 Corneille, P. 181 Cosgrove, D. 39 Crocker, R. 153 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 211,213,215,223, 227,232-234,236-238 Cunningham, M. 244

Abbate, C. 267 Abrams, M. 158 Agawu, V. K. 110-113,115-117,137-139 Alberti, L. 23-24, 26 Albrechtsberger, J. 157 Alechinsky, P. 57-70 Apollo 50, 187 St. Thomas Aquinas 180 Aretino, P. 33 Aristotle 145 Armenini, G. 20

-BBach, J. S. 130, 139, 143, 159 Ballamy, E. 51-52 Banfield, E. 171 Bar-On, A. Z. 241 Barthes, R. 46,54, 107-110, 113, 137-138 Bartoli, P. 27-28 Baudelaire, C. 167-168 Bauman, T. 144 Bazin, G. 184-185 Beedell, A. 73 Beethoven, L. van 152 Bell, V. 214 Beneviste, E. 138 Berlioz, H. 251-271 Bielawka, M. 243, 249 Bocchi, F. 21-22 Boheme, J. 36 Boileau, N. 185 Boulez, P. 246-247 Brahms, J. 144 Brown, E. 243 Brunelleschi, F. 25-26 Butor, M. 57-58, 61

-DD'Este, l. 21 D'Ortigue, J. 271 Da Vinci, L. 21 Dahlhaus, C. 154, 253 Daumier, H. 170 De Kooning, W. 40 Debussy, C. 167-178 Degas, E. 3-5 Dewey, J. 236,238 Dotremont, C. 60-61 Dreyfus, L. 150 Dukas, P. 178 Dunsby, J. 111 Dyson, F. 42-43

-EEckhoff, O. 146-150, 161

273

274

INDEX OF NAMES

Erato 13 Erlich, C. 74 Euterpe 16

-FFanon, F. 95 Felibien, A. 20 Ferrari, B. 144 Felis, F.-J. 270 Feynmann, R. 203, 205 Finnegan, R. 91 Finscher, L. 149 Floeck, W. 179 Foster, H. 52 Foucault, M. 159 Freud, S. 27-28, 42-44, 51 Friedrich, C. 36-37 Fruehwald, S. 157

Hercules 187 Heron, G. 100 Hesiod 16 Hill, J. 154 Hiller, J. 156 Hines, T. 245 Hirst, D. 54 Hoffmann, M. 159 Hoffstetter, R. 145, 157, 159, 161 Hollander, L. 233 Horley, F. 89-90, 94, 96-98 Hughes, L. 87, 90 Huizinga, J. 234 Husser!, E. 176, 243, 248

-1Ingres, D. 4 Irving, W. 35 Iverson, M. 46

-GGallo, D. 144, 151, 157 Garrison, J. 207-208 Gatrell, S. 78 Geronimo 39 Glueck, G. 47 God 182 Goethe, J. von 143, 155-157 Gonzaga, F. II (Duke) 21,24-25 Gould, G. 214 Greenberg, C. 40 Greene, M. 236 Griffin, N. 53 Grundy, J. 76 Gussow, A. 47

-HHandel, G. F. 154 Hardy, J. 71-72,79 Hardy, T. 71-85 Hardy, T. Sr. 71-75 Harve~C. 201-204,206-207,209 Hawking, S. 203 Hawkins, S. 42 Haydn, J. 144-150, 156-157, 159, 162, 168, 177 Heidegger, M. 201,204,206-207 Heisenberg, W. 203, 206-207

-JJahn, J. 92 Jakobson, R. 116 Jones, D. 239 Judd, D. 40 Jupiter 25-26

-KKant, I. 49 Kashevaroff, X. 245 Keiser, R. 154 Kockelmans, J. 176 Kramer, J. 132,243-244,246-247, 249 Kuhnau, J. 159 Kuspit, D. 177

-LLa Rochefoucauld, F. de 185 Lacan, J. 28-29,34,46,51,54 Landon, H. C. R. 147,161 Langbaum, R. 87 Laurenzi, F. 144 Le Moyne, P. 182 Lessing, G. 158 Levi-Strauss, C. 53 Lewis, C. S. 214-215

275

INDEX OF NAMES Linklater, K. 236, 237 Lippard, L. 45 Liszt, F. 252, 258, 269 Littre, E. 183-184 Locke,1. 53 Longfellow, H. 87 King Louis XIV 184,186-187 King Louis XVI 168, 177 Luten, C. 146-147 Lyotard, 1. -F. 49

-MMacdonald, H. 171,178 MacNeice, L. 167-168 Mallarme, S. 176 Manetti, A. 25-26 Mansour, J. 58,65-66,68-70 Mantegna, A. 22-23, 33 Marcello, B. 154 Mathieu-Castellani, G. 180 Matta, S. 65-70 Maunder, R. 144-145 Mbiti,1. 92 McClary, S. 267 Melpomene 16 Mendelssohn, F. 258 Mere, c. de 185 Merleau-Ponty, M. 27,34 Mertens, W. 245-246 Michelangelo 3 Mignard, P. 184-186 Moliere 184, 186 Monelle, R. 138 Monet, C. 176 Montaigne, M. de 180 Monteverdi, C. 144, 160 Mozart, VV.A. 144-145,235 Munford, L. 178 Musset, A. de 170, 178

-NNewman, B. 40 Newton, I. 42

Olmstead, F. 41-42 Ovid 29 Owens, C. 50

-PParry, H. 82 Pascal, B. 180 Peirce, C. 138 Pergolesi, G. 143-144, 150-151, 157 Perlman, I. 150-151 Philip of Macedonia 25-26 Phillips, T. 63-64 Pinion, F. 76 Pirrotta, N. 143, 156-157, 159 Plath, W. 144 Pohl, C. 145-147 Polyhymnia 16 Pritchett, J. 246-247,250 Proust, M. 251-271 Pytlak, A. 247-248

-QQuatremere de Quincy, A. 20

-RRacine, J. 183 Ratner, L. 1l0, 113-115, 138 Revill, D. 244-245 Reymond, M. 183 Rilke, R. M. 227,237,239 Rimbaud, A. 92 Robinson, R. 211,213,215,223,227,232, 234,236-237 Rodin, A. 232 Romano, G. 19-34 Ronsard, P. de 179,182 Rosen, C. 110, 138-139, 149-150, 177 Rotrou,1. de 180-181, 183 Rousseau, J.-J. 155 Rubin, L. 238 Runge, P. 36-37 Russell, D. 73

-0Oedipus 50-51 Okot, P. 87-102

-SSacrati, F. 144

276

INDEX OF NAMES

Sand, G. 154-155, 170 Sartre, J.-P. 28 Satie, E. 245 Saussure, F. de 108, 110, 137-138 Scarlatti, A. 154 Schopenhauer, A. 258 Schubert, F. 124-125, 178 Schummann, R. 139, 169,270 Seeger, C. 138 Sessi, M. 153 Sharp, C. 74 Shatter, S. 41 Shave, T. 40 Shepherd, P. 47 Sherman, E. 76 Sicard, M. 57,61 Simons, P. 247-248 Smith, B. 157 Smithson, H. 263 Smithson, R. 35-55 Smohalla 38 Snarrenberg, R. 242, 249 Somfai, L. 146-147, 161 Sponde,J.de 180 Stadler, M. 144 Stanford, C. 232 Stella, F. 40 Stopford, J. 111 Strada, J. 20-21,30 Straus, J. 132-136, 139 Strauss, R. 258 Stravinsky, I. 118-124, 126-136, 140,

144 Strohm, R. 154

Sulzer,1. 158 Siissmayer, F. 144

-TTan, M. 244, 246 Terpsichore 16 Thalia 16 Thass-Thienemann, T. 47 Thompson, F. 74 Tinctoris, 1. 143 Tovey, D. 145-147 Tropea, G. 248 Tsai, E. 44 Tudor, D. 249 Turner, J. 37 Tyson, A. 147, 161

-UUrania 16

-VVan Gogh, V. 232 Van Peursen, C. 243 Vasari, G. 19-20,22,28-30 Viau, T. de 181 Vivaldi, A. 154

-WWagner, R. 75,156,177,258,270 Weber, G. 144 Webern, A. 242 Webster,1. 146-147, 161 Wheelock, G. 149-150 Wright, L. 178