The sound of poetic images

I got positive comments for my new chapter "The sound of writing" by my supervisor Wikshåland today, and now I am planning Zender-analysis no. 3: "The sound of poetic images". It explores the third Hölderlin lesen-work, which contains nine short "poetic images" from the huge, complex and heavily commented poem "Patmos". I am pondering much over the fascinating first image Zender has cut out of the text:

"... furchtlos gehn / Die Söhne der Alpen über den Abgrund weg / Auf leichtgebaueten Brüken."

"...fearless over / The chasm walk the sons of the Alps / On bridges lightly built."
(Translation: Michael Hamburger)

B. A. Zimmermann - Zender's mentor in pluralism

Hans Zender published his first composition already in 1949, at the age of 13. The style of early works like the Wind Quintet from 1950 is playfully neo-classical, and the young composer predominantly wrote in genres associated with that idiom, like trios, quartets, sinfoniettas, and divertimentos. Zender had a notable youth work in the traditional genres behind him when began studying composition, conducting and piano from 1956 to 1959, in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg. His composition teacher was Wolfgang Fortner (1907-87), an initially traditionally inclined composer who was increasingly interested in serialism and became a driving force at the Darmstadt summer courses. Having finished his studies in 1959, he immediately established a successful conducting career. For Zender the composer, however, the 1960s was a time of doubt and searching. According to his own accounts, Zender was convinced by the necessity of serial composition during his study years, but like many of his contemporaries, he gradually experienced the framework of serialism as an aesthetic limitation.

In this search for new possibilities he was profoundly influenced by the composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-70), with whom he shared a year’s residency at the German Academy at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 1964. At that time, Zimmermann had already established his own pluralist aesthetics integrating musical styles from disparate times and cultures, inspired by the poet Ezra Pound, whose expression “all ages are contemporary” forms an ostinato in Zimmermann’s texts about music. In Zimmermann’s conception, we are surrounded by a multitude of disparate signs of the past, and our experience of the relation between these signs and what we conceive of as our present time is non-linear, flexible and individual:

One cannot get past the observation that we live peacefully with a vast variety of cultural products stemming from the most different times, that we exist simultaneously in many layers of time and experience, most of which neither appear to be derived from each other, nor to be connected with each other [...] And so, a special phenomenon of our existence seems to be that we are able constantly to experience this tremendous diversity, and to experience it with all the changes that occur because it will always be different threads which are linked together for a split second.



Zimmermann’s main point is that our internal experience of time is not successive and linear as the measurable “cosmic” time. The past and the future does not have a distinct psychological reality, it is all mingled in the subjective experience of the present, which leads Zimmermann to the radical conclusion that there really is no present in the strict sense: “[…] there is no present in the strict sense [...]. Time folds itself into a spherical shape.” Zimmermann’s philosophical recognition of the „spherical shape“ of time prompted him to explore the possibilities of pluralistic composition: „From this concept of the spherical shape of time I have developed my so-called pluralistic composition technique, which takes the complexity of our musical reality into account.” In the words of Constantin Floros, Zimmermann’s pluralistic works initiate „[…] a conversation, an imaginary dialogue between the ages“.

Zimmermann’s pluralism could also be interpreted as a kind of through-composed intertextuality. The paradoxical coexistence of different layers of musical “reality” is staged in a single score, with the illumination of experienced links between layers being given particular concern. In these musical montages citations sometimes spring forward, but Zimmermann claims that these are often overemphasized by critics and misunderstood as parodies, while he prefers to compare them to scientific citations, with precise source instructions. But this “intertextual” web of musical connotations is in no way intended as an objective comparison of stylistically distinct available forms. Zimmermann refutes the common assumption that his pluralistic form is a mixing of musical styles. Referring to Cage and Kagel as like minded composers, he discards the concept of style as an anachronism unable to capture the complex musical “reality” which he defines as the spherical shape of time. Furthermore, Zimmermann emphasizes the role of individual inspiration. As he understands it, the complex web of influences inspires inner pictures in the individual, and the composition of pluralistic music is a “calculated projection” of these inner pictures.

Zimmermann’s view of musical “reality” as multi-layered and of the inner experience of musical time as non-linear was a crucial impulse for Zender in his search for a new compositional language from the early 1960s on. The influence from Zimmermann’s multi-layered montage technique is obvious in many of Zender’s works, especially in the first five Cantos (1965-74) and the opera Stephen Climax (1979-84), and as a conductor and writer on music he has continued to emphasize the late friend’s importance.

But, maybe just because of the closeness to Zimmermann, Zender has been careful to distance himself from his profiled theoretical concept of pluralism. Through the years, Zender has suggested different alternatives for the word “pluralism”. In a text from 1976, Zender argues that the philosopher Jean Gebser’s notion of integration captures Zimmermann’s ideas – and the situation of contemporary art in general – better than Zimmermann’s favoured concept of pluralism. Gebser believed that earlier evolutionary levels of consciousness – “magical” and “mythical” – exist unconsciously besides the newer “mental” level in the contemporary mind, and that the challenge of our time was the integration of these earlier levels into the modern rationalized consciousness. Zender understands both Zimmermann’s and his own confrontation of different music historical levels as attempts at an existentially charged integration of this kind, rather than the mere juxtaposition of exchangeable differences that the notion of “pluralism” easily implies.

In a sketch from 1988, Zender applies the art historian Werner Hofmann’s extended, extra-historical use of the term manierism to both Zimmermann’s and his own music. Hofmann sees manierism as phenomenon recurring through art history as a reaction to a hegemonic “classical” art form dominated by rules. In Hofmann’s terms, the distinctive traits of manierism are style mixing, multiplicity of material, and the decomposing of coherent forms and unequivocal expressions. Manierism plays freely with the rules, conventions and clichés of the preceding classicism, citing, exaggerating, and breaking them in a distanced manner. Zender argues that Mahler’s music is better understood in this context of manierism than as a late romanticism. Mahler was a foreboding the montage music of the middle of the 20th century, Zender claims. He views both the second Viennese school and the serialism of the 1950s as “classicist” in that it seeks to form a logically defined and coherent language. The pluralistic montage music of Zimmermann, Bussotti, Berio, Schnebel and himself is then a “mannerist” response to the “classical” tendency of serialism.

Thus, the concepts of “integration” and “manierism” were employed by Zender in the 1970s and 1980s as alternatives to Zimmermann’s notion of “pluralism”. Furthermore, in an interview from 2006, Zender adds heterogeneity to the list of alternatives. He regards it as a more precise description of his compositional diversity than pluralism, drawing attention to the aforementioned principle of productive tension between aesthetic contradictions which he elsewhere refers to as “gegenstrebige Fügung”. Even though the notions of pluralism and heterogeneity may seem very close, Zender’s point is that the latter concept implies an antagonism where the first only depicts difference.

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.“

Hans Zender and postmodernism

It is not easy to label Hans Zender music historically. In works like Music to hear and Cabaret Voltaire he uses a harmonically, rhythmically and technically highly complex musical language which seems to grant him a place among the successors of musical modernism. In other pieces, like Schuberts “Winterreise” and Schumann-Phantasie, Zender’s citation and commenting of canonical works seems to make him the prototype of a musical postmodernist. And the occupation with East Asian culture in works like the Lo-Shu series could all too easily earn him the label “exoticist”, which in turn would strengthen a superficial postmodernist categorization.

And to be sure, during the 1980s, when the discussions over musical postmodernism reached Germany, Zender wrote several texts where he principally recognized the theoretical terms of the present “postmodern condition”. He characterized the aesthetic openness enabled by the virtual coexistence of all musical times and places as a great possibility for the composers, but also as a great danger. In Zender’s opinion, musical postmodernism must be aesthetically “responsible”; the juxtaposition of different styles has to be worked through formally. Zender has no patience for uncommitted eclectism or unreflected recycling of pre-modernistic forms. This cautious and conditional support of musical postmodernism is not unusual in German music in the 1980s and 1990s.

Joakim Tillman has written an insightful review of the German debate over musical postmodernism, which shows how the understanding of the concept as a synonym to regressive anti-modernism was countered by changing concepts of postmodernism as a reflective continuation of modernism. The first concept of postmodernism was influenced by Habermas’ debasing characterization, while the latter, more positive type of concepts were more influenced by the French debate fronted by Lyotard. Among the attempts at a definition that Tillman recounts, Zender’s understanding of postmodernism seems quite close to Thomas Schäfer’s idea of postmodernism as “a radicalized continuation of Modernism, freed from dogmatism.” Some of Hermann Danuser’s criteria are fitting as well: the “fundamental pluralism of musical languages” will be a central theme in this presentation of Zender’s work, as will the strategies of “double-coded” use of historical elements and rehabilitation of the avant-garde. However, Danuser’s characterization of postmodernist music as “bridging the gap between high and low art”, how appropriate it may be in relation to postmodern music in general, is not to the point in the case of Zender. Later, I will return to how entertainment music is kept outside of Zender’s pluralism, and instead acts as a negative definition of the unity of his chosen material.

However, Zender has increasingly sought to define his music beyond the dichotomy of modernism and postmodernism. In a sketch from 2004, where he interrogates himself about the unity of his work, he leaves the common presupposition that modernism is about compositional unity and postmodernism about compositional pluralism. Instead, he redefines modernism as a search for multiplicity:

Noch vor einigen Jahre hätte ich wenigstens negativ eine Einheit zu bennenen versucht: Abwendung von den Klischees der Moderne wie der Postmoderne – von pseudoabstraktem Kunstgewerbe wie von historisch oder exotisch ausgerichteter Beliebigkeit... Heute glaube ich zu erkennen, dass der tiefste Impuls der Moderne eine Hinwendung zur (nicht homogenen, nicht reduzierbaren) Vielheit ist. Vielheit – das heisst ja auch Offenheit für das Unerwartete. [...]

This understanding of modernism as an occupation with complexity and irreducible heterogeneity is not only striking in the context of Zender’s works, it also has immense consequences for the revaluation of the music of supposedly “strict” modernist music.

Intertextual analysis of text and music

I går begynte jeg å skrive igjen, og som alltid føles det som en lettelse. Jeg skriver på en presentasjon av Hans Zenders musikktenkning, men varmet opp med en skisse til innledningen. Her dreier det seg om temaet som var starten på prosjektet: en revurdering av forholdet mellom tekst og musikk i tonesettinger:

In this dissertation I seek to gain an understanding of the relationship between text and music in the four works in the series Hölderlin lesen by the German composer Hans Zender. Traditionally, analyses of text and music have treated the combination of two art forms in a “musical setting” as a meeting between autonomous expressions. In this praxis, the lyric poem has been seen as a self-contained unity that the musical setting should try to mirror and heighten. This mimetic view of musical setting will be discussed and criticized thoroughly in chapter two.

But here, before I focus on Hans Zender’s work, I will only question a limited aspect of this view: the idea that the combining of poetry and music is a simple arithmetic, an addition of two distinct elements summing up to a synthesis that is as self-contained as the two forms that were subsumed in it. Of course the concept of interpretation is crucial in most analyses of musical poetry settings, but I am also suspicious of the thought that the composing of music citing a prewritten poem is a strictly individual reading of a definite object. The literary theories of intertextuality and reception of the late twentieth century have shown that neither an art work nor an artist exists in a vacuum. Both formal structures and experienced meanings are parts of flexible and open-ended intertextual networks that reach far beyond the traditional category of influence.

The definition of art as an ongoing weaving of complex intertextual relations has profound consequences for the analysis of musical poetry settings. It means that neither the poem nor the composer’s musical “language” can be regarded as self-contained unities. Regardless of its author’s intention, a poem is a dialogue, not only with other poems, but with works in other art forms. Furthermore, its meanings can be experienced through correspondences with the most disparate strands of historical and contemporary culture, including philosophical and scientific concepts, religious praxises and historical events. The same holds for musical works and compositional “languages”: they are more or less conscious dialogues with other musical works and styles, through affirmation, negation or variation, and they are not only talking to each other, but also to works and concepts in other art forms. Lastly, the thought that the meaning of music should be defined culturally is widely accepted in contemporary musicology, and in my opinion, a combination of this anthropological understanding with the more flexible notion of intertextuality can tell us much about the complexity of the experience of musical meaning.

Defined in this way, both poems and musical works potentially take part in interdisciplinary dialogues and correspondences even before they meet in a musical poetry setting. The insight that neither the poem nor the musical “language” is one, but rather composite of manifold correspondences and open-ended processes, is central to several composers of vocal music after the war. To these composers, the musical setting of a poem is not an alchemic operation where two elements becomes one, but rather a performative play with complex intertextual potentialities, highlighted by the concrete crossing of the art forms in the framework of experienced time. One of the most reflected practioners of this kind of confrontation of poetry and music is Hans Zender.

For en språkkritisk estetikk

En masterstudent ga meg en meget interessant skriftlig kritikk av en av mine artikler om tekst og musikk. Studenten opplevde mitt perspektiv som en negativ og pessimistisk holdning til fortolkningen og formidlingen av musikk med tekst. I mitt svar la jeg vekt på at en språkkritisk betoning av "det umulige" ved en fullstendig og entydig kommunikasjon av kunstnerisk mening etter min mening derimot er å forstå som et fruktbart premiss for mangefasettert og produktiv fortolkning, både musikalsk og skriftlig. Her gjengir jeg litt av mitt "forsvar":

[...]
Du har kanskje rett i at det er lettere å kommunisere muntlig - finne tonen.
Skriften løper løpsk, den bommer alltid mer eller mindre på det vi ville si.
Dette illustrerer kanskje det jeg prøver å si i min artikkel (men ikke
får til): språket fanger ikke uten videre inn erfaringens rikdom, og slett
ikke musikkerfaringens rikdom.

Det jeg prøver å få fram, er ikke på noen måte at sangerens arbeid for å
formidle en sang er forgjeves. Den hermeneutiske sirkelen av
detaljtolkning og helhetsfølelse i arbeidet med f.eks. en lied kan derimot
gi lyttere intense og skjellsettende opplevelser. Samtidig er jeg glad i
Barthes' tanker om "the grain of the voice" - det mer språkløse, fysiske
nærværet i en menneskelig stemme. Når vi blir betatt av et slikt nærvær
spiller det ikke noen rolle om vi ikke oppfatter teksten, det er "part of
the game", som du sier. Vi oppfatter meningsfylde på tvers av og uavhengig
av
teksttolkningen - men det betyr ikke at teksttolkning er galt eller at det
aldri når frem.

Teksten min forsøker derimot å ta høyde for begrensningene som ligger på
kritikerens fortolkning av forholdet mellom tekst og musikk, og jeg
kritiserer et par musikkvitere som etter min mening lar sin egen
akademiske tekstlesning rave vel høyt over komponistens, musikernes og
lytternes verden. Det er det bombastiske i deres ellers svært kreative
assosiasjoner som er problemet, ikke at de prøver å forstå kunsten og
sette ord på den. Kritikere har en veldig viktig rolle i å prøve å sette
ord på kunsten, bringe den gjennom kroppen til hodet, så å si, få oss til
å undres over den og bli enda mer glade i den. Men etter min mening må de kritiske fortolkningene
være "forsøk" (jf. navnet på min blogg) som har ærefrykt for det
uutsigelige i kunsten.

Jeg føler ikke at jeg har et pessimistisk syn på kunst, det jeg prøver på
er å ha et reflektert forhold til den. Og mine tekster er farget av et
språkkritisk syn er ganske vanlig i moderne kunstkritikk - og som
har røtter i den tidlige tyske romantikken, Novalis og Schlegel. Dette
synet innebærer en prinsipiell tvil på at språklig kommunikasjon er
entydig, men samtidig er det ofte knyttet til en sterk tro på det
kunstneriske og menneskelige potensialet i inspirerte forsøk på å uttrykke
"uutsigelige erfaringer". Som du er inne på, er det flott at ulike lyttere
får ulike opplevelser under en fremføring og tolker disse opplevelsene
forskjellig. Det er nettopp slike poenger jeg er ute etter å få med i
kritikken rundt forholdet mellom tekst og musikk.

Den formidlingen av mening vi snakker om, er bare
umulig på den måten som alle idealer er umulige å realisere
fullstendig og en gang for alle, på en udiskutabel og entydig måte. Men
denne umuligheten av entydig begrepsliggjøring, kombinert med opplevelsen
av meningsfylde som gjør at vi gang på gang prøver å si noe om poesi,
musikk, sang, mennesker - er ikke dette det vakre, grobunnen for det
kreative? Som sanger gjør du et viktig arbeid med å levendegjøre
tekst-musikkverker gjennom fortolkningsforsøk som gir verkene nytt liv i
stadig nye variasjoner, som igjen varieres i de medfortolkende
bevissthetene til lytterne. Hvis det var mulig å overlevere komponistens
intensjon entydig og endegyldig - slik at alle lyttere var fullstendig
enige om hva de hørte og hva det betydde - tror jeg derimot at kunsten
ville ha vært død.
[...]