NOTE: this is an unedited version of the transcript for the lecture-cast. It may differ from the final recorded version. That version and the other two parts of the lecture-cast can be found at the links below:
DESCRIPTION: We are going to take a piece of music (Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question) and look at how Bernstein and Adorno used it as a means to delve deeply into these questions regarding the meaning of crisis and the expression of social transformation. As a preliminary to that discussion, in part one we are going to review a few examples of the varieties of expression and experiences of Bernstein's "crisis of ambiguity". Can music be expressive of a time and place, and if so, what is the meaning of these expressions? Is Pierre Boulez correct when he says that: “An idea does not exist until we realize how it may be used. In musical terms, there is no such thing as an idea in itself, it is a reaction to our whole cultural environment." – Pierre Boulez. “Idea, Realization, Craft.” Music Lessons: Lectures at the College de France.
This recording was prepared for the course SS.235, Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise, Department of Social Science & Culture Studies, Pratt Institute. Spring 2020. Additional materials are available on the course LMS site.
Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, Part I.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-one
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html
Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html
Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, part II: Music and the Culture Industry.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-two-lq
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html
Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on_9.html
Ives, Bernstein and Adorno on the Crisis/Crises of the 20th Century, Part III: An Anti-Critique.
https://archive.org/details/brbiii-20th-century-crisis-bernstein-ives-adorno-part-three-anti-critique
https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/04/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on.html Unedited Lecture Notes & Slides: https://culturalstudieslectures.blogspot.com/2020/08/ives-bernstein-and-adorno-on_7.html
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Greetings Everyone,
I hope you are well and taking great care during this time of dark hopes and bright fears. As it so happens, our next couple of classes were to be on the general topics of crisis and whether music is or can be expressive of an event or era. So, the idea is to take a bit of time to consider what we even mean by the phrase “the crisis of the 20th century” in relation to music. and moreover, what social facts are being “expressed” when we say that music is expressive.
We are going to take a piece of music (Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question) and look at how Bernstein and Adorno used it as a means to delve deeply into these questions regarding the meaning of crisis and the expression of social transformation. And we are going to follow them in discussing mostly European classical music because it is our very distance from this once popular music that might allow us some perspective on the politics of expression.
Now, let me point out that I am going to leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about how this relates to the current moment. Indeed, these notes were written, mostly, about a year ago and only revised slightly during the first two months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Our talk for this session is divided into three parts.
1 The first part briefly discusses several varieties of the expression and experience of crises
2 The Second part focuses on the different conceptions of expression, of who expresses and what is being expressed, but also what is not expressed.
3 Part Three responds to a critique from a quite insightful colleague about the original lecture notes.
Slides, links, along with both audio and visual versions will be posted on on the course site and on my personal blogs and sites.
As always, we will start where we should: with some sounds. Because we are going to focus on Ives’ Unanswered Question, let first hear two short pieces that were composed at roughly the same time. These give us a sense of what Ives contemporaries were doing at the time, though he would have been unknown to them and they were mostly unknown to Ives.
The first by Erik Satie and the second by Anton Webern.
Now, let us remind ourselves of Ives’ Unanswered Question with Bernstein conducting.
In this case, it is important who conducts and performs because Ives’ score actually leaves a fair amount of the instrumentation up to the performers, so that are several possible combinations, but since we are discussing Bernstein, let’s hear his performance and analysis of Ives’ The Unanswered Question:
By the way, for more on Charles Ives, I have included links to composer Samuel Andreyev’s excellent recent analysis of The Unanswered Question: https://youtu.be/IEAa_MH0iCw?t=1
And his three videos discussing Anton Webern’s work as well:
Composer Samuel Andreyev
Anton von Webern, explained in 10 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt2SJrcIJh4
Anton von Webern's Drei Lieder, Op. 18: Analysis
https://youtu.be/IEAa_MH0iCw?t=1
Anton Webern's Zwei Lieder, Op. 19: Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK1iqTTrphM
For Bernstein, The Unanswered Question is a question that is musical, but precisely because it is musical, it is at once social, universal, and individual. It is a question that, as Franz Kafka would say, arrests and holds music, society, and ourselves over for interrogation.
Now, Let’s trace the outline of this crisis
The Crisis of the 20th Century:
How to Understand the Crisis as Bernstein and Adorno refer to it:
First: it is A LONG CRISIS or series of crises: c. 1880-1938, The Cold War, the War on Crime, the War on Terror
Second: it is a complex, multi-faceted structures of social forces, knowledges, institutions and technologies, and environmental/geographical transformations.
Third: it is also the crisis of the 21st century.
There is an ambiguity that allows for a slippage between the meaning of the title and the music itself. Bernstein is pretty sure any ambiguity can be resolved or overcome through the unity of time and sound. For Bernstein, the music expresses the crisis more emphatically than the title. He almost mocks Ives’ own description of the work. Perhaps this points to a certain anxiety about open-endedness implied by the music and title: That is, that perhaps the Crisis is a permanent one.
Whether or not we agree with Bernstein, we can certainly agree that he interprets the Unanswered Question as expressing – at least in retrospect - a general social movement towards catastrophe.
So what we want to now explore is this notion that the crisis in music as an expression of a general crisis in society.
First,
Crisis does not mean revolution in the sense of the overthrow of regimes, though revolution and crisis go hand in hand. Their relation to any particular catastrophe can only be grasped on later reflection. That is, after it has already happened. This is want Hegel meant by “the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as twilight falls.” (Hegel. Philosophy of Right).
For example, the Industrial Revolution – which your World History courses here have already noted – was preceded by several social transformations and collapses in antiquity, and it was immediately preceded by a crisis in the social relations of feudalism which resulted in the domination of the social relations of capital, and its bureaucratic apparatus for the management of permanent cultural and economic crises.
This notion of “The Long Now” (which can be traced to Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg) is certainly taken up by Raymond Williams in what he called The Long Revolution: a long-term revolution driven by crises in three social domains – political/democratic, scientific/technological, and social/everyday:
It seems to me that we are living through a long revolution, which our best descriptions only in part interpret…. It is a difficult revolution to define, and its uneven action is taking place over a long period that it is almost impossible not to get lost in its exceptionally complicated process….The complex interaction between the democratic and industrial revolutions is at the centre of our most difficult social thinking
Yet there remains a third revolution, perhaps the most difficult of all to interpret. We speak of a cultural revolution, and we must certainly see the aspirations to extend the active process of learning, with the skills of literacy and other advanced communication, to all people rather than to limited groups, as comparable in importance to the growth of democracy and the rise of scientific industry.
Raymond Williams. The Long Revolution, pages 10-11.
Another description of a prolonged and gradual social crisis is found in The Octopus by Frank Norris, where those engulf in the crisis cause by the extension of the railroads into California, the internationalization of markets, and technological change are fairly obvious to the fact that the creation of their ranches had caused a similar crisis and revolution of the societies that they had brutally displaced only a few generations before. The narrator “Presley” – really Norris, who is there seeking inspiration for an epic poem about the settling of “the West” which becomes The Octopus, the first of a projected trilogy comprising the “Epic of the Wheat” – never comments on the fact that he rides around on a bicycle and not a horse, but does note the disruptions caused by the railroad agent’s automobile. The larger ranches have stock tickers connected to the grain futures markets, though the same ranchers are opposed to the more recent changes brought by the railroad’s domination of the movement of grain to market, allowing the railroad to fix the prices for grain shipments.
This is how Norris describes a “nerve center” of this new landscape.
It is a little long, I know, but it illustrates the transformations of Ives’ own time as well as reminding us about our readings on landscape and place:
So here is Norris:
The office was the nerve-centre of the entire ten thousand acres of Los Muertos, but its appearance and furnishings were not in the least suggestive of a farm. It was divided at about its middle by a wire railing, painted green and gold, and behind this railing were the high desks where the books were kept, the safe, the letter-press and letter-files, and Harran's typewriting machine. A great map of Los Muertos with every water-course, depression, and elevation, together with indications of the varying depths of the clays and loams in the soil, accurately plotted, hung against the wall between the windows, while near at hand by the safe was the telephone.
But, no doubt, the most significant object in the office was the ticker. This was an innovation in the San Joaquin, an idea of shrewd, quick-witted young Annixter, which Harran and Magnus Derrick had been quick to adopt, and after them Broderson and Osterman, and many others of the wheat growers of the county. The offices of the ranches were thus connected by wire with San Francisco, and through that city with Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last, and most important of all, with Liverpool. Fluctuations in the price of the world's crop during and after the harvest thrilled straight to the office of Los Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe [lit. Who Knows?], to Osterman's, and to Broderson’s. During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year, which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel. At such moments they no longer felt their individuality. The ranch became merely the part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the whole world round, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant a drought on the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine.
Harran crossed over to the telephone and rang six bells, the call for the division house on Four. It was the most distant, the most isolated point on all the ranch, situated at its far southeastern extremity, where few people ever went, close to the line fence, a dot, a speck, lost in the immensity of the open country. By the road it was eleven miles distant from the office, and by the trail to Hooven's and the Lower Road all of nine.
“Very complete you are here, Governor,” observed the editor in his alert, jerky manner, his black, bead-like eyes twinkling around the room from behind his glasses. “Telephone, safe, ticker, account-books well, that’s progress, isn’t it? Only way to manage a big ranch these days. But the day of the big ranch is over. As the land appreciates in value, the temptation to sell off small holdings will be too strong. And then the small holding can be cultivated to better advantage. I shall have an editorial on that some day.”
A typewriter, a telephone, a geologically accurate map, safe, account ledgers, a ticker. Modernity had already transformed their lives.
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The line:
“At such moments they no longer felt their individuality….a drought on the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine”
Shouldn’t this remind us of Schoenberg’s “I feel the air of another planet.”
And the transformation of the landscape is expressed in the soundscape,
Norris uses sound to alerts us to the earlier passing of an everyday life that had been lived according to the changing of the seasons. This everyday life had been replaced by the regulations of the religious calendar of the colonial era associated with the Mission:
Norris writes:
[[[We should pause to mention that the sound of the mission or as he says “a note of the Old World” reinforces the sense of the passing of regimes of social control, now “unfamiliar and strange at this end of the century”: the 130th Psalm de Profundis, often set to music: opens with the line: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord”]]]
The Mission – now merely an “echo from the hillsides of Medieval Europe” – is contrasted with the bureaucratic, regular, industrial, working day of capital, marked by the sound of the whistles of the trains and the horns marking the shift changes and everyday life of the workers at the railroad shop. Passing the train yard, Presley experiences this new technology that now dominates the landscape and the humans in it:
….a huge freight engine that lacked its cow-catcher sat back upon its monstrous driving-wheels, motionless, solid, drawing long breaths that were punctuated by the subdued sound of its steam-pump clicking at exact intervals….
And a few hours later, as Presley continues home at night he experiences the locomotive in action. Horrified, he flees to escape the sound of the engine hitting a flock of sheep that had been crossing the tracks in the dark at a place where the track had been laid through their usual route and where before the engineers would have stopped their trains until the sheep had passed. But with the monopoly and the global market in place, the timetable and schedule were all that mattered. The trains, in other words, now had to run on time:
The night had shut down again. For a moment the silence was profound, unbroken.
Then, faint and prolonged, across the levels of the ranch, he heard the engine whistling for Bonneville. Again and again, at rapid intervals in its flying course, it whistled for road crossings, for sharp curves, for trestles; ominous notes, hoarse, bellowing, ringing with the accents of menace and defiance; and abruptly Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, Cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.
Frank Norris. 1901. The Octopus: A Story of California.
https://archive.org/details/octopus00norr/page/n6
And for fun, as one in the original graphic novels series:
https://archive.org/details/ClassicsIllustrated159TheOctopus
Raymond Williams and Frank Norris offer long term, institutional examples of social crisis. But obviously, we should mention that there are other, more personal, expressions of crisis as well. This is why it is important to understand the multiple senses in which “crisis” is being used in Bernstein’s discussion of the Unanswered Question. Take, for example, the use of shock in the alternating moments of mundane existential crisis and epiphany in James Joyce’s short stories, such as this passage from “The Dead”:
His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself... was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce. “The Dead” from Dubliners.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.183214/page/n169
Or perhaps this was even better expressed by Ralph Ellison in his short story “A Storm of Blizzard Proportions”:
She left hurriedly. And as he waited he watched the dying glow of the fire and thought of the voyage westward. Tomorrow he would sail for home. Weeks of cold, rough seas. A cold crossing he would have of it. And at home there would be snow. He shivered, hearing the quiet crackling of the coals. A snowstorm of blizzard proportions, the Army newspaper had said, was sweeping the mid-western states. Already snow was covering the hills of Ohio, already powdering his mother’s grave-stone there, and flaking the brooks and frozen rivers, where quail made tracks in the quick-falling dusk. Snow was sweeping the hills and drifting the briers, and drily shaking the blood-red leaves that hung like bandages snagged on the thorns in flight – and endless snowing all over the snow-white world of home. Snow sweeping, snow falling, snow drifting down. Snow in the hills and faraway places. A snow of blizzard proportions. Covering all.
Ralph Ellison. “A Snow of Blizzard Proportions” from Flying Home and Other Stories, page 155.
Musically, the attentive and active listener can hear this use of “shock and silence” in Anton Webern’s later compositions as in, for example, his Symphony Op. 21 from 1928 (1927-28 Berliner Philharmoniker with Pierre Boulez, conducting)
One effect of Shock and silence in Webern is to draw the active listener to all that is outside of the music (like we discussed about John Cage’s 4 minutes 33 seconds) In a similar way, we find in Joyce and Ellison how profound personal experiences can blend seamlessingly with the environment beyond the personal.
Which is worth listening to now:
And this takes us to our last notion of crisis, which rejects the simplistic opposition of the personal and the world,
It is, of course, the global environmental crisis brought about by the human domination of Nature under the social relations of capital. This is how it is described by Max Horkheimer in his “Revolt of Nature”:
The work of Enlightenment is also the work of the domination of nature….The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself. Domination becomes ‘internalized’ for domination’s sake.... Society and its institutions, no less than the individual
himself, bear the mark of this.... Since the subjugation of nature, in and outside of man, goes on without a meaningful motive, nature is not really transcended or reconciled but merely repressed.
Max Horkheimer. 1947. “The Revolt of Nature” from The Eclipse Of Reason.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59625/page/n7
So we can not simply declare with Bernstein that The Unanswered Question expresses the “crisis of the 20th century” because we can not be sure of the actual meaning of that crisis or locate it in any one place, either social or individually, or in terms of a particular direction, and certainly not in terms of progress.
We have mentioned several different conceptions of the crisis that Bernstein unifies into the singular 20th Century Crisis. These range from Raymond Williams perspective of the Long Now, to Frank Norris’ depiction of rapid social changes brought by technology and globalization, to more personal experiences found in Webern, Joyce, and Ralph Ellison.
While the sense of crisis may have been (and quite likely still is) ubiquitous, there remains the problem of how to make sense of the various manifestations of this social fact. Each of these ways of looking at crisis (along with its associated concepts of social change and revolution) is an attempt to give meaning to the past…... to give it a history.
But, of course, there is also the present crisis in which we find ourselves immersed and which now structures our personal everyday as well as our general social/environmental relations. After all, if it were not for the current , there would be no need for this recording. As we learned from our readings about landscape and soundscape, we are all recording the history of our times. I will, as I said at the outset, leave it to you to record your own history of the times.
Each understanding of crisis that we briefly mentioned has its’ limitations, though some have more limitations and contain more errors than others. This is especially true when we consider, as we will in the next part of this lecture, whether and how music expresses an era or event.
Was Pierre Boulez correct when he wrote that:
“An idea does not exist until we realize how it may be used. In musical terms, there is no such thing as an idea in itself, it is a reaction to our whole cultural environment. Before composers consider the relationship between idea and realization of its own terms, they must first understand it in context – although they can never be sure of having grasped its precise significance. Once realized, the idea itself can never truly be uncovered. If we try to retrace the path from idea to realization, we miss the underlying motivation, which will have been consumed by the realization, burned away so that the work can be made, A real work annihilates the urge that produced it, it both transcends and negates the original idea” – Pierre Boulez. “Idea, Realization, Craft.” Music Lessons: Lectures at the College de France.
Next:
We are going to focus on the differences and converges of Bernstein and Theodor Adorno, whose Philosophy of Modern Music Bernstein disparages as “a nasty, turgid book” (Lecture V, at 26:41mins), but it is the work, along with Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, that lays at the heart of his lectures leading up Ives, crisis, and the expressiveness of music.
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