Thank you, everybody who made my disputation day - both the defense and the party - such a wonderful experience. My family, who hosted the party, Peter, who was a terrific toastmaster, all the guests, everybody who came to the defense: thank you so much! Special thanks to Arnfinn Bø-Rygg, Erling Guldbrandsen, my advisor Ståle Wikshåland, and above all, my brilliant and warm opponents, Martin Zenck (Würzburg) and Berthold Hoeckner (Chicago). Below, you can read my presentation.
Music Reading Poetry - Hans Zender's Musical Reading of Hölderlin
My dissertation is concerned with intermediality in art. I have explored a special kind of relation between music and poetry, and this relation is what I refer to as reading. I start by asking whether music can read poetry. Using Walter Benjamin’s distinction, I then ask more specifically whether music can respond to the “way of meaning” in a poem instead of sticking to the traditional task of imitating “what is meant.” This in turn leads me to wonder whether a musical reading of a poem can exhibit features that are normally associated with twentieth-century literary criticism. I explore this question by examining the musical reception of Hölderlin’s poetry and analyzing the contemporary composer Hans Zender’s musical treatment of Hölderlin’s hymn fragments. Before I go on, I want you to hear an excerpt from Zender’s Hölderlin music.
Introduction
The introduction charts some of the theoretical implications of the opening question: can music read poetry? Admittedly, this question has been asked before. The idea that a composer’s musical setting of a pre-existent poem constitutes an interpretation or reading of the text is fundamental to the aesthetics of the art song, especially in connection with the German Romantic lied. But in my opinion, traditional musicological analyses of text and music, often imply that the composer intends to do the “same” as the poet, by imitating and illustrating a poem as “faithfully” as possible. Generally, this understanding emphasizes the semantic aspects of the poem, and tries to explain how the composer expresses the “content” of a poem through musical means.
But this kind of explanation is not what I have aimed for in my dissertation. On the contrary, my project grew out of discontent and impatience with the traditional model. I find that it implies an untenably simplistic understanding of poetry, of music, and of the relation between them. This paradigm was clearly challenged by many 20th Century vocal music composers, for instance Berio and Boulez, who were drawn towards the most experimental poetry of their contemporaries and precursors. This attraction between complex poetry and complex music is in turn a challenge to musicology, and I asked myself: how can one analyze a combination of two artistic expressions which are in themselves so hard to understand?
I have attempted to untangle this complex intermediality by looking at the relationship between poetry and music in light of modern concepts of reading itself, especially Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation, Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of reception aesthetics, and Jacques Derrida’s idea of the play of the signifier. In different ways, these theories describe reading as a process of transformation that is simultaneously productive and potentially critical, both in literary and larger cultural contexts. They also hint at the ways music relates to poetry in a vocal work. Here, I will focus on what I found in Benjamin.
In sharp contrast to commonsensical ideas about translation, Walter Benjamin asserted in his essay “The task of the translator” from 1923 that a translator should not try to convey “what is meant” in a text, but instead focus on its “way of meaning”. I quote: ”… we must draw a distinction, in the concept of ’intention’, between what is meant and the way of meaning it. […] a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning.” For Benjamin, the “way of meaning” of a text is connected to its particular syntactical, phonetic, and rhythmic features; in short, its linguistic construction, its materiality as a text.
Instead of a straightforward duplication, Benjamin holds that this focus produces a wholly new text that will appear foreign to or even incomprehensible in the target language. For Benjamin, however, this failure to communicate the semantic meaning of the original is not a major problem. He refers readers directly to the original for that meaning and suggests for translation a complementary role that touches both the original and the new languages. They constitute what Benjamin calls the “Fortleben”, or “continued life”, of the original work, which could be understood as a vital part of its critical historical reception.
Benjamin’s theory of translation has been important for the modernism of the 20th Century in general, because of its focus on formal construction over content. I believe that this notion of translation also provides a valuable theoretical framework for the analysis of musical interpretations of poetry. Like translations from language to another, musical readings of poetry transform the original text fundamentally by focussing “lovingly, and in detail” on its “way of meaning”. And, being a part of a larger modernistic context, much of the vocal music from the past 50 years or so treats the text in a manner which can be understood through Benjamin’s concepts. So, in my dissertation, I wanted to explore how a contemporary composer creates new music by focussing on – and in Benjamin’s sense, translating – the “way of meaning” in a chosen poem. Furthermore, I consider Benjamin’s idea as concept of translations as the “continued life” of the original work to be very fruitful when discussing the historical aspect of musical readings of poetry. Like translations, musical readings come after the original text, often when the text has become famous or even canonized. And like translations, musical interpretations are not only results of the understanding of the original text but also contributors to it. We can talk about the musical reception of a poet as an active part of a larger reception history.
Chapter 1 – “The musical reception of Hölderlin in context”
Consequently, my first main chapter is called “The musical reception of Hölderlin in context”. With the aim of exploring not only how musical readings transform poetry, but also how they take actively part in the historical reception of a specific poet, I focus on the way modern composers have approached the two-century-old poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).
The choice of Hölderlin is far from random. His poetry is complex and rewarding from the point of view of literary analysis, and his literary reception bridges two centuries of cultural history—from relative oblivion in the nineteenth century to canonization in quite distinct areas of twentieth-century poetry, art theory, philosophy, and politics. However, Hölderlin’s rich and ambiguous reception history would not be relevant to me if it were not accompanied by a correspondingly overwhelming response to his poetry in the field of music.
The literary and philosophical reception of Hölderlin as a whole is naturally too vast a complex of thought and action to summarize in a musicological dissertation like mine. I draw attention to those aspects of it that I find most relevant to its equally fertile musical reception, and focus on what I regard as a decisive division in the images of Hölderlin’s poetry. The image of Hölderlin’s poetry as something close to visionary truths in the early 20th Century readings of writers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Stefan George, and Martin Heidegger is challenged by the image of the poet’s texts as an experimental critique of language in the many readings of since the 1960s. With the help of Theodor Adorno’s essay “Parataxis” and the philologist Dietrich Sattler’s edition of Hölderlin’s texts as works in progress, Hölderlin gained a new actuality in postwar modernist art, including music.
In the second part of the first chapter, I argue that the musical reception of Hölderlin can be divided into two main periods as well, broken by a paradigm shift around 1960s. I find that composers before 1960 generally adopted a traditional mimetic strategy of trying to convey the mood and meaning of these texts as faithfully as possible. Conversely, several composers in the 1960s started exposing the poems to treatments that look more like conscious distortions and displacements. Hölderlin’s poems were no longer regarded as sacrosanct. Instead, they were embraced anew as inspiring points of departure for similarly charged formal experiments with music.
Chapter 2: “Gegenstrebige Fügung—Hans Zender’s musical poetics”
The German Hans Zender (born 1936) is one of the most profiled contributors to the experimental musical reception of Hölderlin. I find his series of four works called Hölderlin lesen, written between 1979 and 2000, to be particularly thought-provoking experiments with the musical possibilities of reading poetry’s “way of meaning”. The two first works of Zender’s series constitute my main analytical material and are examined in chapters 3 and 4.
But before I commence the musical analyses, I examine Zender’s musical thinking in the second chapter, “Gegenstrebige Fügung—Hans Zender’s musical poetics”. I discuss his ideas of producing tension-filled constellations between music from different ages and cultures, and I particularly explore his project of transforming the past by recomposing works of the classical musical tradition. I also argue that Zender vocal music works are also very often composed as confrontations between poetry and music, rather than fusions.
Chapter 3: “Broken Gestures – An Analysis of Hölderlin lesen I”
In my third chapter, “Broken Gestures – An Analysis of Hölderlin lesen I”, I ask what Zender’s first Hölderlin work from 1979 does with Hölderlin’s hymn fragment “An die Madonna”. First of all, he does choose the traditional option of turning it into a song. While the text is recited, the music is played by a string quartet. Zender leaves the text unchanged and unabridged, and requests a recitation “without particular nuances of expression”. Rather than setting Hölderlin’s text to music in the traditional way, Zender juxtaposes it with music. Furthermore, Zender’s music mixes two sharply contrasting musical idioms, “Beethoven style” and serialism. Thus, the work is not only conceived as a confrontation between the languages of text and music, but also as a confrontation of two different musical languages, whose borders are constantly explored and negotiated.
In order to approach this intermedial montage, I have concentrated on the relation between textual and musical gestures in my analysis. I do not regard a gesture as containing a specific semantic meaning. Rather, I regard gesture as an open-ended movement towards meaning, which sometimes even can appear as a movement away from meaning. I found many instances of a subtle affinity to Hölderlin’s textual gestures in Zender’s Hölderlin lesen I. But rather than amounting to traditional musical word-painting, the musical responses are delayed, distorted and ambiguous. Instead of trying to amplify the characteristics of the different kinds of gestures in Hölderlin’s text, I find that Zender is responding to the rapid alternation between these gestures in his complex shifting and combination of musical idioms. And even more, he focuses on Hölderlin’s movement away from meaning, his disruption and displacement of gestures through sudden pauses and detached conjunctions and adverbs, signalling an argumentation which never comes.
In addition to the gestures, I have found that Zender focuses on the sound of Hölderlin’s language. I argue that the immensity of complex text which is recited without repetitions or omissions, and in combination with music which demands the full attention of the listener, leads to a paradoxical blurring of the semantic level of the text. In spite of the fact that the text seems to be put in focus, the sheer amount of text and the density of it redirects the attention of the listener from seeking signified meaning and towards the materiality of the signifiers. Thus, Hölderlin’s words largely become musical elements. Paradoxically, the recitation draws the most attention to its status as a text when it is disrupted. But instead of leaving these ruptures silent, Zender elaborates on the “sound” of the textual rupture musically.
Chapter 4: “Unendliche Deutung voll” An analyzis of Hölderlin lesen II
In Hölderlin lesen II for recitation, viola, and live electronics from 1987, I find that Zender explores the musical possibilities of the text’s “way of meaning” even more thoroughly. Zender’s approach to Hölderlin’s hymn fragment “Sonst nämlich, Vater Zevs…” focuses on its linguistic materiality: the rhythm of the words, the way they mirror each other’s distribution of vowels and consonants. Zender responds to this elaboration of the materiality of the signifier by bringing it into play musically. The musical reading is amplifying the self-reflective “phonetic analysis” of the signifiers, not only by emphasizing and repeating individual language sounds in the recitation, but also by constructing a similar process of reflective repetition in the viola music. Using real-time electronic manipulation of the signals of the speaking voice and the viola in this work, Zender foregrounds the correspondences between the textual and musical “building blocks” with. He composes a vital aspect of the piece through echoes, delayed repetitions and multilayering of single words and tones or longer textual and musical gestures. This way, Zender emphasizes the textural materiality of the signifiers, the play of phonetic and rhythmical similarities and differences, and the constantly disrupted movement towards meaning.
Epilogue
In the epilogue I take a step back from my detailed analyses of the material to highlight some of the methodological choices I have made and the experiences I have had while developing my thesis. I discuss my use of the topics of processual reading, montage, hermeneutics, and gestural analysis and relate them to other research in the field of word and music research and in related fields of musicology.
When analyzing a musical reading of a poem, it is tempting to try to define a system for the intermedial relations. In my exploration of the relation between text and music in Zender’s Hölderlin works, however, I have deliberately refrained from trying to establish a watertight system of correspondences. I have made this choice because I regard the experience of meaning, both in poetry and music, to be metaphorical, processual and unfinished. I have tried instead to chart how Zender’s music engage with the poem’s “way of meaning”, and with what I have called its gestural “movement towards and away from meaning”. I side with Lawrence Kramer in his criticism of semiotic analyses that claim to present a stable system of relations between poetry and music. In Kramer’s words, “the very act of interpretation desystematizes as it goes”. Like Kramer, Peter Bürger proposes a critical hermeneutics as a more fruitful approach than a rigidly systematic one, even to a complex montage work where a unified meaning seems to be out of reach.
Of course, this kind of hermeneutic analysis cannot pretend to be objective and final. In my view, the interpretation of intermedial art works have their greatest worth in redirecting the listener’s attention to the productive and reciprocal process of reading between the art forms. But it does not suffice to delegate the listener to the role of a passive recipient. The meaning processes are only materialized as such when the listener participates productively. As Zender puts it in one of his essays: “Receiving and producing is the same thing.” In my opinion, the hermeneutic analysis of music, and of relations between words and music, has an important task in exemplifying productive and processual approaches to the listening experience, and thus, inviting the listener to take an active part as a critical reader.
The way I see it, this stance warrants a combination of courage and modesty in word and music research. We need the courage to include metaphorical language and subjectivity in our analyses, as the belief in a comprehensive and objective codification of the relation between music and poetry fails to take into account the inherent ambiguity and processual character of both art forms. But simultaneously, I call for the modesty to admit that, just as musical readings can never capture the complex flux of meaning in a poem once and for all, our musicological readings of these readings will always have to be works in progress.
