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
*********************************
PART II
Ives’ Unanswered Question between the rocks of Bernstein/Stravinsky and the monster of Adorno/Schoenberg/Berg
Greetings again,
Last time we surveyed a few reactions to the experience of crisis, using examples that ranged over the entire 20th century. Taken as a whole, Bernstein would say that our examples: Ives, Norris, Williams, Joyce, Ellison, and Webern. Perhaps we should have also mentioned that the monthly journal of the NAACP, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910, continues to be titled The Crisis
All of these according to Bernstein mark a general “crisis in ambiguity,” to use his term, where the structures of the past had collapsed or are collapsing and have not been replaced by any coherent new ideological apparatus. Something had happened that all of these voices, in many ways so very different from each, were reacting to. This can be mentioned alongside Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of how regimes of sovereign power (associated with feudalism), gave way to disciplinary societies (associated with industrialism and the bourgeoisie) and which are now being transformed into societies of control (associated with networks, codes, “the postmodern”, etc.)
You are no doubt familiar with one of the most famous markers of the collapse of feudal Sovereignty and the rise of the disciplinary society of Enlightenment:
[SLIDE or Python clip
Right of Self Determination & the Revolt against Sovereignty -
Monty Python Holy Grail: Autonomous Collective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bqQ-C1PSE ]
Foucault and Deleuze could not have said it better, but here is how Deleuze concisely describes these social transformations:
“Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (‘you are no longer in your family’); then the barracks (‘you are no longer at school’); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa 51 could exclaim, ‘I thought I was seeing convicts.’”
Let’s pause to see this scene:
[SLIDE and Europa 51 clips
Europa 51
]
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.
But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time ... in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.”
- Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” OCTOBER, 59, Winter 1992.
Elsewhere he and others will make the point that it was Kafka who represented the breakdown of the disciplinary society and the coming of new forms of social control in The Trial and The Penal Colony but others are notable in this regard, including Jorges Luis Borges, and William S. Burroughs.
William S. Burroughs (with Phil Proctor)
“The Control Machine” from Nova Express:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTXyV6S5YM
William S. Burroughs
The Limits of Control [Sections VI, VII, VIII, X ]
http://eng7007.pbworks.com/w/page/18931079/BurroughsControl
But despite the declaration of a general social crisis or at least a series of general crises that signal the demolition of bourgeois morality and social structures ….
of Enlightenment notions of progress,
of Reason and its accompanying bourgeois norms….
despite all these upheavals, Bernstein finds something solid and universal to hold on to:
And that is the connection between music and language as uniquely human modes of expression.
A key to Bernstein’s interpretation of Ives and of the very notion of crisis is his view that music – like language – is natural and expressive of something that is universally and uniquely human, despite what might seem like an infinite variety of musical sound.
Bernstein explicitly links language and music as two aspects of the same phenomenon.
And he derives this not only from his own immersion into music, but also from Noam Chomsky’s theory of Generative-Transformational Grammar, especially the concepts of creativity and “Deep Structures” that he pulls from it. Sadly, Chomsky is not well known to many despite his being perhaps the foremost American intellectual of the late 20th century. Chomsky’s early work, Syntactic Structures, fundamentally changed the field of linguistics, bringing about what was actually referred to as “The Chomskian Revolution in linguistics”. Perhaps paradoxically, his lack of coverage in the American media is the result of his being a public intellectual, media and US foreign policy critic and……. anarcho-socialist. I’ve put some links to more information about Chomsky in the description, including the documentary Manufacturing Consent, a production on Chomsky’s life and work underwritten by the Canadian government. It opens with the film-maker juxaposing clips of Chomsky receiving all of the major international scientific awards doing person-on-the-street interviews, asking the question “Do you know who Noam Chomsky is?” No one does.
But Bernstein wants to draw from Chomsky’s linguistic work as evidence for this quality of expressiveness that belongs, he says, only to music and language.
Chomsky’s “Generative Transformational Grammar” refers to the hypothesis that:
A small set of structures (in the human brain itself) produce rules of language that are almost infinitely variable (generating transformations) while remaining within the rules of grammar and syntax).
It is because of this uniquely human capacity for language, Chomsky argues, that a sentence such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is both completely expressive (i. e., “meaningful” or creative) but also nonsense.
So from a simple set of rules that we are hard-wired for, we can generate a near infinite variety of languages. If the capacity for language is universal in humans then, by the way, we can see how for Chomsky language operates politically:
Language itself indicates that ideologies of supremacy, and of nation and race, are nonsense.
Language and Music are the two things that make us human, this is crucial for Bernstein in arguing that music can express the uniquely human crisis of the 20th Century, which many now would say was, if nothing else, a crisis in humanism and in what it means to be human.
Chomsky himself has always argued that language is uniquely human, that other species do not have language, because it is something shaped in the unique brains of our species.
However, let me just say that for the most part, apart from some theoretical positions, we now understand that music and language are not at all unique to humans. It is only that we humans get to define what language and music are and are not.
Chomsky grounds his views in Descartes and rationalism, in the philosophy of Enlightenment and not in its Natural History. Darwin himself argued that music is natural to many animals and that for humans music came before language. We will address that issue in the third part of this lecture, when I turn to a critique of what I have been saying here.
As Bernstein himself says, Ives’ Unanswered Question is not a metaphysical one of: “The Perennial Question of Existence” – but about the centrality of music at a time when music is expressive of the long crisis of the 20th century. Linking language to music, to being a human ….. and to changes in human society gives Bernstein a canvas on which to sketch the ways in which music is expressive of those social transformations. Since all human production in some way discloses to us the existence of that singular 20th Century crisis, does it matter which work we chose to analyze and critique? Ironically, here Bernstein, one of the last great conductor/artists and a true Modernist, moves close to what becomes known as a “postmodern” view:
……………….
That what is truly important in a work is beyond the mere intention of the creator/artist, and that the importance of any single work of art is called into question, isn’t it, when it can be replaced by any other?
In fact, Bernstein dismisses Ives’ own description of the Unanswered Question – remember what he says about the “Silences of the Druids” and what he calls “typical Ives cracker barrel humor” – in favor of his own focus on the composition’s expression of the great social upheavals of the 20th century.
SLIDE: Ives’ forward to The Unanswered Question.
And so I think we can say that at the very least, for Bernstein The Unanswered Question is a question that is simultaneously musical, social, universal, and individual.
But doesn’t this also imply that we can no longer listen to Ives, or Schoenberg, or Stravinsky, without consciously knowing what was to come? That is, we can never just naively listen to or enjoy it. Only seven years after he wrote the Unanswered Question, we would embark on 80 years of almost uninterrupted hot and cold wars. One can no longer simply make “beautiful” music. All music must now be understood – whether it intends to or not – as expressing something about the social world in which it is embedded.
It is impossible to hear Ives’ silences of the Druids after the sounds of the trenches, the camps, and the atomic bomb, and indeed, Bernstein seems to imply that the Druids were silent because there were none left to speak. As Bernstein says in Lecture V:
“The 20th Century has been a badly written drama.”
Indeed, one wonders if Bernstein knew how close he had come to the view that Adorno summed up in the words: “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.”
Bernstein and Adorno agree that music is expressive …. BUT they differ on what precisely is being expressed.
Let’s pause and listen to two pieces, one by Adorno and one by Bernstein, so that we might hear some of the differences between their approaches to music and its meaning.
Already you can hear the mixture of serious and popular in Bernstein’s music.
For Bernstein expression is a natural result of human existence, and this expression of universal feelings discloses to us the presence of the “deep structures” that unite us all as humans.
And
For Bernstein, and for Stravinsky for that matter, “primitivism” expressed this deep relation to Nature: as we can see the title of his final lecture, which stands as his answer to Ives’ Question: “Music of the Earth”
Let’s hear this invocation of the primitive in the first section of the Rite of Spring which is similarly titled: “Adoration of the Earth”
Keeping what you just heard in mind, let me turn to Bernstein’s target, Theodor
Adorno (who was a sociologist and composer but better known as a philosopher and key member of the “The Frankfurt School Of Critical Theory”)
In contrast to Bernstein’s naive naturalism, Adorno argues that music expresses the structures of social relations, which are always relations of power and authority. If music expresses anything, it is that it – along with taste, style, fashion, and popular culture – express the everyday experience of the mechanisms of domination and authority that structure contemporary social relations. Crisis now takes on a different and more subtle meaning.
Adorno proposes that the critical social analysis of music is the place to work out fundamental sociological questions about social theory, domination, consumerism/culture. He says this in his essay “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being”
This essay dates to 1941, but has only recently been published for the first time in a collection titled The Current of Music:
The fact that music is still unexplored territory… means that one finds far fewer rigid views here than in other fields, and that there are far fewer obstacles in the form of cliches to impede the posing of questions…. Music is especially qualified [as ‘an especially good point of entry’] to do this because it shares fundamental characteristics with language and, like language, is clearly dominated by monopolistic centres, while, at the same time, [unlike language] it is not directly connected to the world of objects…. however, the influence of this object-world is palpable in all elements of musical language and its reception. Music truly is, to cite Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, ‘the world once again’, but a model that one can use to study the defining characteristics of reality without having to discuss directly the content of that reality.
[[[ As an aside, Adorno and Walter Benjamin carried on a important and lengthy dialogue on popular culture, revolution, and crisis. I chosed to use the construct of Bernstein vs. Adorno because Benjamin and Adorno often talk past each other due to the importance of music and sound in Adorno’s work, versus the literal absence of such concerns in Benjamin. As he writes to Adorno upon the death of Alban Berg:
272. To Theodor W. Adorno
Dear Mr. Wiesengrund,
Paris
December 27, 1935
....please let me say that I thought of you with profound sympathy when the news of Alban Berg's death reached me yesterday.
You know that when we talked about music, a field that is otherwise quite removed from my sphere of interest, it was only when his work was the subject of conversation that we reached the same intensity as when we discussed subjects in other fields. Specifically, you will no doubt still remember our conversation after the Wozzeck performance.
--
Walter Benjamin. Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. p.518 ]]]
Benjamin from his Messianic marxism to his ownership of Klee’s Anglus Nova,
Now lets give Adorno equal time and hear three short pieces:
1 Three Short Piano Pieces (1934/1945).
2 Three Poems by Theodor Däubler for a Four-Woman a capella Choir. Number 3.
3 Two Orchestral Songs from the Unfinished ‘The Treasure of Indian Joe’ (Song 2)
Despite the nod to the popular, especially in the last piece which was to be part of an opera based on Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, one does not, I think, hear much of a interest in meeting the demands of a popular audience, though it does sneak in through Adorno’s following of the style of his mentor, Alban Berg. One can hear echos of Berg’s Lulu in Adorno’s Orchestral Songs Number 2.
Now again, let’s keep in mind what we just heard while we consider Adono’s views on music as “natural”
Is music at all natural for Adorno? Well yes and no, it depends on how we think about what is natural and how we think about nature. It is certainly true that for Adorno music, especially popular music, is not “Natural” or expressive of “Nature.”
One might say that, at best, it is an ideological expression of our relationship to Nature.
Although it does connect Humans to natural aspects of themselves, it does so only to exploit those natural/biological aspects of ourselves, and/or to provide our minds and bodies with relaxation/recreation/reproduction so as to be ready to return to work the next day.
Music can not be expressive of Nature because that Nature no longer exists. For Adorno, that former Nature has been transformed, appropriated, and dominated by humans.
You may know the phrase: “Like Second Nature” and Adorno takes that seriously.
“Nature” is now really “Second Nature”, indistinguishable and unimaginable apart from its domination by human social production. Any aspects of ourselves that are “Natural” – the very aspects that Bernstein appeals to – are no less dominated than the Nature we still think of as “Out There.”
If Music expresses a relation to Nature, it is in fact expressing our relation to this Second Nature that is characterized by Authority and Domination, and not Freedom and choice.
Perhaps we can hear this negative dialectic drift in and out of view in ….. a piece that Bernstein does not mention, “On the Antipodes” from Charles Ives’ Songs.
Another image of this Second Nature is Marx’s argument that the world presents itself to us as a “vast accumulation of commodities”, and Adorno draws heavily on Marx’s chapter on the Fetish of Commodities to argue that music is no less commodified, and there for no more expressive, than any other consumer item produced by “The Culture Industry”.
This leads Adorno to take a very dismissive attitude towards the kind of popularization that Bernstein promoted through much of his work, and even the popular socially meaningful music, – such as anti-war music – that Bernstein embraced. Take a look at this short excerpt of Adorno speaking about protest music:
[SLIDE]
Adorno on Music and Popular Protest: https://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest
Therefore the idea that music expresses something other than social relations, that some music is “Authentic” and others not, is absurd.
The demand for Authenticity or relevance is a demand for a conformity that is regulated and imposed from within and without.
Even before the protest music of the 1960s emerged, Adorno had written that:
Whoever says culture also says administration.… The polemical and useless...namely the products of the culture industry. You let culture drive around in a kind of gypsy caravan, but this gypsy caravan moves in the midst of a monstrous hall. There are no more hiding places. Culture has long become questionable as it has become nothing more than the coagulated content of the educational privilege, in other words, a managed appendix integrated into the production process.
(see also: Theodor W. Adorno, Kultur und Verwaltung, in: Collected Writings Vol. 8, Sociological Writings I, Frankfurt am Main 1972, pp. 122–146) Broadcast: 26.07.1959, SWF location: Baden-Baden, Kunsthalle location manager: Biallowancz;
One hears echos of this view in John Schaffer’s remarks when WNYC here in New York threatened to cancel his show New Sounds: “Marginalization of the arts, with the big depressing news we’re facing, is the exact opposite of what this culture needs.... When what we listen to is all based on algorithms, you’re fed things that will already fit your taste,” he said.
The domination and intensification of consumer society (what Adorno calls the “Culture Industry”) continues relentlessly until it pervades every aspect of life This means for Adorno that even the radicalism of musical atonality could not escape the process of commodification. It even becomes, as “a degraded form of pure dissonance,” the norm in horror film soundtracks:
“The modern motion picture... requires musical means that do not represent a stylized picture of pain, but rather its tonal record. This particular dimension of the new musical resources was made apparent by Stravinsky in his Sacre du Prentemps. Adorno and Eisler. Composing for the Films, pgs. 24-25.
Bernstein and Adorno converge on the importance of Stravinsky’s nod to popular music, especially Jazz. For Bernstein, though, this was to be applauded, while Adorno saw Stravinsky as embracing the Culture industry, he did not try to resist it as Adorno thinks Schoenberg did – or at least Schoenberg did until late in his life when “Schoenberg wanted to be heard” by the wider publics that Kurt Weil, Hans Eisler, and of course, Stravinsky himself commanded.
They also converge in another important way: they both believe that music is expressive of social life, but here again they diverge immediately.
If Bernstein is right about Ives – that he was asking a question about not only the direction of music, but also of a civilization on the brink of a catastrophic World War – then it holds equally true that Stravinsky’s Sacre expresses the coming crisis, with its industrialization of killing that only civilized people, and certainly not “primitives” can dream of.
Adorno on Stravinsky, especially La Sacre du printemps
“Le Sacre du printemps… makes the subject of the work a human sacrifice, that of the principal dancer – a sacrifice which the music not so much interprets as ritualistically accompanies. (“On Jazz” from Essays on Music, p.289)
Sacre consists of rigid and “convulsive blows and shocks” that reproduce the machines and technocratic domination that we can see in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:
“His percussive effects are no less than assassination attempts, echoes of archaic war drums, blows of the sort that sacrificial victims and slaves have to endure” – Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait 1962-63.
“….the anti-humanistic sacrifice to the collective – sacrifice without tragedy, made not in the name of a renewed image of man, but only in the blind affirmation of a situation recognized by the victim. This insight can find expression either through self-mockery or through self-annihilation…. Speaking of the prehistoric youthful generation of Sacre, Cocteau stated in somewhat condescending but well-intentioned tones of enlightenment: ‘These credulous men imagine that the sacrifice of a young girl, chosen above all others, is absolutely essential to the rebirth of Spring’” (Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music, p.145-146).
So for Adorno
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and its primitivism show, like the paintings of Emil Nolde, that this naive primitivism is not so naive and harmless as might pretend it to be, nor is it a threat to the bourgeois social order. Like Nolde’s paintings, Stravinsky presents Nature in terms of the primitive and the savage.
For Adorno, it does not express the Freedom or the so-called “Back-to-Nature” ideology that it claims. Adorno argues that this is not “nature” but really the expression of a “Second Nature” with the pleasures and desires, brutality and domination, that Sade’s Justine and Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills” announced.
Stravinsky, therefore, has more in common with Emile Nolde than he does with Schoenberg. Not all expressionism is the same. Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party from its first days and remained a committed Nazi until the end. His work was still banned because its’ primitivism and expressionism was, the authorities said, degenerate.
A similarly significant contrast can be drawn between Stravinsky’s Rite and Berg’s Lulu. Stravinsky naturalizes the violence and terror of the present by connecting it to a mythological/ritualistic past, whereas Berg’s Lulu makes it clear that the violence and objectification found in the work of art are those found in the production of everyday life. Lulu describes social life without naturalizing it.
Even if we were to look at the past, the murder of Iphigenia at Aulis is not an annual ritual sacrificed to bring the cycle of seasons, but because Agamemnon, her father, recently killed a deer in Artemis’ sacred grove and she sends the winds to prevent the Greek fleet from embarking for the war at Troy. Unlike the murder in the Rite, when Agamemnon returns to Mycenae from Troy, he is almost immediately killed by Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. There is no eternal return of Spring and ritual cycle sacrifice, libations, and blessings (see also the story of the “King of the Wood” in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.6095/page/n19 ). In fact, the future holds is only ruin for the houses of Atreus. In the midst of their great success at Troy, Mycenaean Greece was obvious to its own impending social and economic collapse. Likewise, the Roman Empire – much like the British Empire at the end of WWI – did not fall in a day.
I will let Adorno have the last word on what he sees as the contrast to be drawn between the two:
To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky’s Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind's Lulu than does Berg’s music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg's work is to Stravinsky’s and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out of just such conflicts….
Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors, and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry. The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg’s Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself. – Adorno. Aesthetic Theory p. 276.
The question is whether the crisis/crises of the 20th/21st centuries will become normalized/naturalized, or resolved through social reform, or the catastrophe of a “revolt of Nature”? Ives’ silences of the Druids could be the silences of extinction documented by Bernie Krause and his comrades.
And we will be back next time to discuss the Critique of the original version of these notes…
Well ……….
that is, of course, as they use to say back in South Carolina:
"If the sun comes up and the creek don’t rise."
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