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.“