Hope in the past: Zender and Benjamin

I have argued that Heraclitus’ concept of palintonos harmonia, or “Gegenstrebige Fügung”, is a fundamental idea in Zender’s texts on music. For Zender, it describes a poetics of confrontation, a poetics founded on the productive tension that can be explored by combining apparently incompatible construction principles.

I have tried to demonstrate Zender’s use of the concept of “Gegenstrebige Fügung” in three main areas. First, I have discussed Zender’s confrontation of two contradictive ideas about listening: the one focussing on the experience of the acoustic moment and connected to Zen practices and the ideas of John Cage; the other focussing on the temporal unfolding of form and connected to the European musical tradition. Second, I have discussed Zender’s confrontation of canonized works in the European tradition with the productive listening of the contemporary musical consciousness. And third, I have discussed his confrontation of the chromatic pitches of the equal temperament in the European tradition with the whole-numbered pitches of the overtone series, connected to his development of a method of modulation confronting acoustic laws with modernist constructivism.

Schematized like this, the central role of the European tradition in Zender’s poetics of confrontation is clear. His confrontations of contrasts always include this tradition in some way, whether it is the perceptive modes of the East Asian tradition, the modernist sensibility for rupture and fragmentation or the suppressed tradition of “pure” intonation which is picked as its antagonist. Zender’s confrontations can furthermore be viewed in a simpler way: as encounters between an object of the past and a subject in the present. The antagonistic traditions of Zen, modernism or pure intonation are not incidental; they are major points of reference in Zender’s identity as a composer. Unlike the European tradition, which appears to be a deep fundament in his activity, the antagonistic aspects come through as new and radical insights. These radical perspectives threaten to undermine the foundation laid by tradition. In recognition of this crisis, the only way to save the legacy of tradition is to confront it with the antagonistic insights, bring it into a dialogue with them. This way the tradition may live on in a pluralistic context, but it will be a changed tradition. They way I see it, this process of confronting tradition with its antagonists is Zender’s overriding aesthetic project. But far from openly describing the new radical insights as threats to the European tradition, he chooses to view the inevitable confrontation as a crucial productive tension, a “gegenstrebige Fügung” which has the possibility to rejuvenate the past. For, as previously cited, Zender regards the past as unfinished, open for the creative transformation of the contemporary consciousness. And in his view, it is only through this continuous critical actualization that the tradition can survive.

In my opinion, there is a striking parallel between Zender’s confrontations with tradition and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of historical materialism as it is expressed in the theses “On the Concept of History” from 1940. In sharp contrast to the dominant historicism, which believed that bygone ages could be reconstructed objectively, Benjamin articulates a view of the past as unfinished and dependent of the experience of the present: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognisability, and is never seen again.” This process is not unproblematic, Benjamin emphasizes, for the conformism of the ruling classes constantly threatens to wipe out the future possibilities of the tradition. Thesis VI describes how memory as a creative image of the past is endangered:

Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.

To secure the present relevance of the tradition, Benjamin argues that the historian must distance himself from the belief in a continuous tradition. For the Marxist Benjamin, historicism is empathy with the victorious, and therefore “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”. The careful transmission of cultural documents as holy “cultural treasures” from one generation to the next is also “tainted by barbarism” in Benjamin’s opinion. Not only the reverence to tradition, but also the compulsive manner of its transmission must be rebelled against: “The historical materialist […] dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain”.

For Benjamin, the present is the defining polarity in the understanding of history, not a point of origin in the past. Brushing history against the grain means reflecting on tradition in a non-linear manner, as flashes in the present, actualized at a moment where the past becomes “recognizable” or relevant. “Historicism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past”, he claims, while “historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past”. Benjamin encourages to “blast open the continuum of history” and use its bits and pieces in the service of the present. In Benjamin’s view, the present is no mere transition between greater times; it is on the contrary the scene of the experience of historical time, the frame where historical time stands still and can be contemplated: “The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history”. Instead of constructing linear, teleological models of explanation, Benjamin’s philosophy of history implies contemplating on the unique constellations that the “now-time” of the present has constituted with specific parts of the past:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.

Because of its apparent mysticism, messianism, the belief in a coming redemption inscribed in the past, is maybe the most controversial theme in Benjamin’s philosophy, and there is no room for discussing it thoroughly here. I will only comment shortly on this excerpt from the second thesis:

The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices that we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? […] If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical materialist knows this.

The “weak messianic power” we have as subjects of the present can be understood as our ability to give meaning to the endeavours of the past through our interpretation. By establishing a link between our time and an earlier one, we can give it posthumous significance; we can give it a reception history. But in Benjamin’s conception, this power is also binding. There is a “secret agreement” between the generations which gives us a responsibility for the survival of the elements of the past that we cannot afford to lose.

Jürgen Habermas has described Benjamin’s involvement with history as “redemptive critique”, in contrast to the “conscious-raising critique” which he associates with Lukács. Habermas is sceptical towards Benjamin’s form of critique, which he regards as too affirmative of the past and therefore without any real possibility for changing the future. However, Habermas’ term “redemptive critique” has been assimilated by critics like Peter Bürger and Richard Wolin, who disagree with Habermas and argue that Benjamin’s redemption of the past implies a radical critique of it, where shattered pieces of “hope in the past” is used to strengthen the consciousness of the present and the future.

In my opinion, Walter Benjamin’s “redemptive critique” affords a rewarding perspective on Hans Zender’s thinking about music. Like Benjamin, Zender revolts against a linear philosophy of history, and seeks to explore constellations between the contemporary consciousness, the “now-time”, and distinctive elements from the past. Like Benjamin, Zender engages with the tradition from the perspective of the concerns of the present, using the non-linear involvement with historical documents as a stepping stone for reflection and creative transformation. And like Benjamin, Zender finds too much meaning and hope in the past to allow it to be left to deadening conservation of the ruling conformists. Zender’s “gegenstrebige Fügung” of the European musical tradition and its “Others”, especially East Asian thinking, overtone harmonics and modernist experimentation, is in my opinion a powerful demonstration of Benjaminian redemptive critique. In the postmodernism condition of musical pluralism, Zender seeks hope in the past, only to transform it into contemporary music.

Never the same river: Zender and Heraclitus

In an essay about musical listening, Hans Zender cites the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus’ sentence: "We never step into the same river twice". For Zender, the experience of change, instability and flexibility which the sentence expresses is connected to the fundamental experience of temporality. Walking into a river at the same place again, the river is never the same: the water is different.

But Zender points to a second meaning in Heraclitus’ sentence: the streaming of water is constant, even though the water and its constellation are different. The river has to be the same in some way, or else we would not be able to think of it as changed. Zender regards this paradox as the core in Heraclitus’ fragment, and in the act of thinking as such.

In the context of music which Zender uses it, Heraclitus’ sentence obviously means that the experience of a work of music is never the same twice. But at the same time, it means that some aspect has to be the same for us to think of it as changed. The way I understand it, for Zender the notated musical work is the stable aspect, which however cannot be experienced objectively. The inevitability of subjective experience, of the constantly changing act of interpretation by performers and listeners, makes the work an unending process and not a product.

Zender connects the sentence by Heraclitus to his favourite fragment by the same philosopher, the one about “gegenstrebige Fügung” or agonistic harmony. He understands the paradoxical coexistence of identity and non-identity as the very same productive tension as he is attracted to in the concept of “gegenstrebige Fügung”. With this connection clarified, Zender expresses his thoughts on the meaning of the discussed fragments for the understanding of music, in a passage which sheds light on the relation between the ambivalent stances in the texts I have been commenting in this subchapter. Zender reformulates the relation between what he previously referred to as the first stage of spontaneous listening and the second and third stages of reflected and interpretive listening in light of Heraclitus’ paradox. He maintains that the “excited”, dynamic listening on the one hand, which forgets about form in its unique experience of the moment, and the “reflected”, structural listening on the other, which identifies form through abstraction and comparison, are interdependent in an unfathomably complex way.

The paradoxical coexistence of music as a dynamic flow of time and as a structural construction makes the experience of a musical work different every time, but at the same time it enables a flexible continuity between a potential infinity of experiences. That is, it enables the existence of tradition. For Zender, the attraction of tradition is not the idea of a safe haven one can turn to when the present is too confusing. On the contrary, what makes him engage himself so actively with tradition as a composer and a conductor is the way the past never is the same, it is never finished: “Vergangenheit ist nichts Abgeschlossenes; ihre Kräfte können sich neu formieren und auf eine kaum voraussagbare Weise auf unsere Gegenwart einwirken.“