The sound of writing

I started writing the new chapter today, here's a little excerpt:

In the previous chapter, I showed how the orchestration of the caesuras in the text was a main aesthetic strategy in Zender’s first Hölderlin work. This is not the case in the second work. Not that the chosen text is any more fluent in Hölderlin lesen II than in the first work, on the contrary, it is much more fragmented. Whereas in An die Madonna large fluent parts are abruptly and expressively cut off in mid-sentence, making the arising caesuras negative centres of ineffable meaning, Sonst nämlich, Vater Zeus…could be described as perforated by caesuras which incessantly hinder the formation of a fluent meaning. The nearly constant disjunction of the textual flow does not give the caesuras the acute dramatic effect they have in An die Madonna. Instead, the lack of fluency gives the impression of stuttering. The break in communication is not sudden, but constant, and instead of pointing towards something which cannot be said, it thus leads the attention towards the difficulties of utterance as such. As I will explore later in this chapter, Zender lets his music approach this “poetics of stutter”, which Craig Dworkin has identified as a central strategy in experimental art. The frequent repetition of words and sentences in the poem, something which did not occur at all in the first work, could be understood as an emphasis on the stuttering nature of the text.

The sound of the caesura

In March, I wrote the analysis of the first of Zender's four Hölderlin works.

The way I see it, in Hölderlin lesen I Zender is less interested in illustrating isolated words and images in Hölderlin’s hymn than in constructing music which echoes the way Hölderlin’s text is articulated. The self-reflexive language criticism implied in the text impels Zender into reflecting on the musical medium and its conventional gestures. Like in Hölderlin’s language, there is no unmediated expression in Zender’s music. Zender does not read a certain meaning or mood into Hölderlin’s text, but he constructs a very specific room for a new experience of it through his montage of citations. In Zender’s work, Hölderlin’s fragmented hymn may not be subject to a “musical reading” in the traditional mimetic sense, but nevertheless, Zender is reading Hölderlin more closely than most other composers. By putting Hölderlin’s disrupted and displaced lyrical gestures in complex and continually transforming constellations with Beethovenian and modernistic musical gestures, and by composing the sound of Hölderlin’s caesuras rather than his words, Zender reads the hymn without reducing it to a message. By allowing it to stay an enigma, he opens it for the reading of the listener.

Now I am working with the analysis of the second work, called "The sound of writing", where Zender's strategies are connected to aesthetic ideas of writing and repetition in thinkers like Kierkegaard, Derrida and Deleuze. I hope to finish the third and the fourth analysis before September. So, you are right, people, I am not very social right now...