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...

Tyske tilstander

Jeg har akkurat kommet hjem etter et tre dagers opphold i Frankfurt am Main. Målene for reisen var å høre Hans Zender dirigere et av verdens beste samtidsmusikkensembler, Frankfurt-baserte Ensemble Modern, og å intervjue Zender i løpet av hans workshop med ensemblets "aspirantorkester". Det var en sterk og oppløftende opplevelse å møte denne usedvanlige mannen som dirigent, komponist, lærer og samtalepartner i løpet av to dager. Jeg fikk også et kultursjokk i møtet med "tyske tilstander" på konserten i Alte Oper. For selv om Zender klager over samtidsmusikkens vilkår i Tyskland, er det sjelden man opplever en fullsatt sal - nærmere 500 mennesker - på en konsert med modernistisk musikk i Norge! Den velfortjente trampeklappen ville ingen enda ta for Ensemble Modern, sopransolist Angelika Luz, Zenders komponistelev Frank Gerhardt og dirigent Zender selv, som også bidro som komponist med sitt nyeste verk, det besnærende "Adonde/Wohin?" fra 2008.



Som et eksempel på "tyske tilstander" fremstår også workshop'en med Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie . Disse fremragende musikerne har fått ett års stipend for å få tett oppfølging i fremførelse av moderne musikk av sine instrumentkolleger i Ensemble Modern, og for å få workshop-undervisning av sentrale dirigenter, komponister og musikere innenfor samtidsmusikkfeltet. Jeg fikk være til stede mens Zender ga ekstremt lyttende, nyansert og kompetent tilbakemelding på "aspirantorkesterets" tolkning av Stockhausens høymodernistiske klassisker "Kontra-Punkte" fra 1953. Jeg ble imponert og forbauset over hvordan Zender - som er kjent for sine radikale nytolkninger av Schubert og Schumann - også klarer å gjøre den eksperimentelle arven fra -50, -60 og -70-tallet levende og aktuell, både gjennom sine kommentarer til stipendiatenes tolkning av Stockhausens stykke, og gjennom sine tolkninger av Bernd Alois Zimmermanns "Omnia Tempus Habent" (1957) og Earle Browns "Centering" (1973) på konserten i Alte Oper. Det var utrolig spennende å snakke med ham i to fulle timer i pausen under workshopen, og den fruktbare spenningen mellom tradisjon og nåtid var et overordnet tema. (Intervjuet vil senere bli offentliggjort på norsk). Kanskje har vi i Norge mye å lære av de "tyske tilstandene", i alle fall slik de kommer til uttrykk gjennom nytenkende ildsjeler som Hans Zender - og gjennom fullsatte samtidsmusikkonserter og modernistiske lærlingplasser!

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.

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.