Having just finished D.H. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy, I am completely enraptured. Sometimes I allow myself to forget the importance of art and spirit for the late-nineteenth century cognoscenti: in a world experiencing the death of God, the idea of Art and of the Mind (with a capital A and M, respectively), really meant something. Especially now, looking back at some of the texts I studied in the throes of my fin-de-siecle research, I can't help but compare Lawrence to people like Bahr, Klimt, even the ostensibly disparate Schoenberg and Stravinsky. To all these men, a nostalgia for the past prevailed--although expressed in a wide spectrum of references form the Greeks, to Byzantium, to baroque dance forms, and to ancient rituals--and was indeed, a major force of motion in their intellectual and artistic outputs. They were seeking an answer (or more aptly, the answer) and an antidote for nineteenth century material excess. In any event, if you want a break from theory, spend some time with D.H. Lawrence in Italy...just another piece of the 1890-1914 puzzle. Below are a couple of my favorite passages.
"The twilight deepened, though there was still the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air. A fragment of moon was in the sky. A carriage-load of French tourists passed me. There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys our warm being." (155)
Another favorite:
"It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. So that it seems as though we should be left at last with a great system of roads and railways and industries, and a world of utter chaos seething upon these fabrications: as if we had created a steep framework, and the whole body of society were crumbling and rotting in between." (165)
Showing posts with label bahr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bahr. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
the cmm reading list + a chilling look at things to come
Oh, hello there, CMM blog, didn't see you there. I've read so many things since last we spoke; thus begins the CMM reading list. I recommend: Weimar Culture/Gay; Fin-de-Siecle Vienna/Schorske (a perennial favorite, always useful); History of Sexuality/Foucault (more like a history on the discourse surrounding sexuality); Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud/Lacquer; Discipline and Punish/Foucault; Feminine Endings/McClary (did I already mention this one?); Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft/Corse; Queer Mother for the Nation/Fiol-Matta; Telling Stories/Maynes; How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves/Eakin; Secret Historian/Spring; The Book of Questions/Jabès; "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse"/Katz (read it in its entirety here); The Gutai Manifesto/Yoshihara (available here). And "Death of the Author" again. Why isn't Barthes required reading for musicians?!
With all these things swimming around in my mind, what does the future hold?
1. Cage as Modernist. We like to believe that Cage's iconic 4'33'' is all about the expression of post-modern plurality and his aleatroric oeuvre an ode to absent authors a la Barthes. But what if, by reducing music to its essential elements (as in 4'33"), Cage offers a musical analogue to a Greenbergian (yes, Greenbergian) concept of art? I am referencing that which Greenberg would refer to as "post-painterly abstraction" and that all-too-loaded descriptor "modern."
2. Hindemith as Author: Conflicting Temporalities, Conflicting Epistemologies. There is a passage from "Death..." that surfaces in my mind with alarming frequency:
The Author...is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the annunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. [1]
Most recently, these words appeared (figuratively speaking of course) as I practiced this concerto's introductory soliloquy. So much of Hindemith's musical material aligns him with a modern (ascetic) compositional style: an organicism indebted to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and (papa) Schoenberg, an interest in structural austerity (Adolf Loos, anyone?), and aesthetic aims ostensibly opposed to nineteenth century decadence. In the case of Der Schwan, however, Hindemith's reference to storytelling in a musical space creates a paradox of temporalities: at once the performer acts as Author reconstituting that which has already occurred through his/her performing body while also engaging in a performative act, the "here and now."
3. Ornament, Asceticism and The Modern. As intimated in the preceding text, for the Moderns (that is to say, the fin-de-siecle Vienna intelligentsia), art ought to be imbued with both austerity and spirituality resulting in an asceticism that traces its progenitor to--surprisingly enough--Kantian aesthetics. Through explications on excerpts from Schoenberg's Style and Idea, Hermann Bahr's essay The Modern, and Weininger's Sex and Character I will elucidate the bondage of modernity to a intrinsically masculine spirituality that seeks to humiliate artistic "flesh" as a means to achieve aesthetic purity.
4. Anna Morandi Manzolini's Oeuvre in the "Century of Looking." A wax anatomist devalued by her contemporaries and subsequently the art historical canon, Morandi Manzolini provides, in her life and work, a lens through which to view a culture obsessed with looking. Although numerous feminist scholars have sought to reclaim and subsequently valorize Morandi Manzolini as a scientist and artist, more efficacious is the utilization of her work as a means by which to illuminate the eighteenth century urge to order, observe and control the body.
5. Performing Bodies, Objects in Motion. I read this passage from Feminine Endings and couldn't help but formulate a few thoughts. McClary writes:
For women’s bodies in Western culture have almost always been viewed as objects of display. Women have rarely been permitted agency in art, but instead have been restricted to enacting—upon and through their bodies—the theatrical, musical, cinematic, and dance scenarios concocted by male artists. Centuries of this traditional sexual division of cultural labor bear down upon…any woman performer…when she performs, always threatening to convert her once again into yet another body set in motion for the pleasure of the masculine gaze. It may be possible for men in the music profession to forget these issues, but no woman who has ever been on a stage, or even in front of a classroom, can escape them. [2]
The performing musician confronts the aforesaid crisis daily. Western art music is inextricably bound not only to a culture of insidiously subtle oppression but also within a web of Foucauldian force relations. As performers, listeners and scholars we participate in musical systems of inequity wherein our own bodies and those of our colleagues, students and teachers move perilously (and sadly, often aimlessly) through a minefield of subjugating gazes, historically conditioned responses, and unwittingly discriminatory discourses.
Excited?
1. Roland Barthes, Image, music, text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 145
2. Susan McClary, Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 138
With all these things swimming around in my mind, what does the future hold?
1. Cage as Modernist. We like to believe that Cage's iconic 4'33'' is all about the expression of post-modern plurality and his aleatroric oeuvre an ode to absent authors a la Barthes. But what if, by reducing music to its essential elements (as in 4'33"), Cage offers a musical analogue to a Greenbergian (yes, Greenbergian) concept of art? I am referencing that which Greenberg would refer to as "post-painterly abstraction" and that all-too-loaded descriptor "modern."
2. Hindemith as Author: Conflicting Temporalities, Conflicting Epistemologies. There is a passage from "Death..." that surfaces in my mind with alarming frequency:
The Author...is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the annunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. [1]
Most recently, these words appeared (figuratively speaking of course) as I practiced this concerto's introductory soliloquy. So much of Hindemith's musical material aligns him with a modern (ascetic) compositional style: an organicism indebted to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and (papa) Schoenberg, an interest in structural austerity (Adolf Loos, anyone?), and aesthetic aims ostensibly opposed to nineteenth century decadence. In the case of Der Schwan, however, Hindemith's reference to storytelling in a musical space creates a paradox of temporalities: at once the performer acts as Author reconstituting that which has already occurred through his/her performing body while also engaging in a performative act, the "here and now."
3. Ornament, Asceticism and The Modern. As intimated in the preceding text, for the Moderns (that is to say, the fin-de-siecle Vienna intelligentsia), art ought to be imbued with both austerity and spirituality resulting in an asceticism that traces its progenitor to--surprisingly enough--Kantian aesthetics. Through explications on excerpts from Schoenberg's Style and Idea, Hermann Bahr's essay The Modern, and Weininger's Sex and Character I will elucidate the bondage of modernity to a intrinsically masculine spirituality that seeks to humiliate artistic "flesh" as a means to achieve aesthetic purity.
4. Anna Morandi Manzolini's Oeuvre in the "Century of Looking." A wax anatomist devalued by her contemporaries and subsequently the art historical canon, Morandi Manzolini provides, in her life and work, a lens through which to view a culture obsessed with looking. Although numerous feminist scholars have sought to reclaim and subsequently valorize Morandi Manzolini as a scientist and artist, more efficacious is the utilization of her work as a means by which to illuminate the eighteenth century urge to order, observe and control the body.
5. Performing Bodies, Objects in Motion. I read this passage from Feminine Endings and couldn't help but formulate a few thoughts. McClary writes:
For women’s bodies in Western culture have almost always been viewed as objects of display. Women have rarely been permitted agency in art, but instead have been restricted to enacting—upon and through their bodies—the theatrical, musical, cinematic, and dance scenarios concocted by male artists. Centuries of this traditional sexual division of cultural labor bear down upon…any woman performer…when she performs, always threatening to convert her once again into yet another body set in motion for the pleasure of the masculine gaze. It may be possible for men in the music profession to forget these issues, but no woman who has ever been on a stage, or even in front of a classroom, can escape them. [2]
The performing musician confronts the aforesaid crisis daily. Western art music is inextricably bound not only to a culture of insidiously subtle oppression but also within a web of Foucauldian force relations. As performers, listeners and scholars we participate in musical systems of inequity wherein our own bodies and those of our colleagues, students and teachers move perilously (and sadly, often aimlessly) through a minefield of subjugating gazes, historically conditioned responses, and unwittingly discriminatory discourses.
Excited?
1. Roland Barthes, Image, music, text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 145
2. Susan McClary, Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 138
Friday, October 29, 2010
papa schoenberg's ca-razy cohort
Some time ago--when I was young, stupid, and arrogant--I had the opportunity to take a seminar on fin-de-siecle Vienna. At the time the readings were difficult, the concepts fresh and the names relatively unknown. Although at present, my thoughts are mostly tied up with eighteenth century anatomical wax models (yes, you heard me), I recently had occasion to return to the world of Loos, Schoenberg, Wieninger and Bahr. Below are a few excerpts from my most recent draft. I really encourage you to think about this, this, and this in the context outlined below.
An Overview: Characterized by an excessive anxiety, Vienna at the fin-de-siecle provided a locale ripe for artistic and cultural turmoil. In the political sphere, the immediate government opposed the values of the bourgeois and intelligentsia: Karl Lueger and his anti-Semitic Christian Socialist coterie offered an ideological foil for Vienna’s cosmopolitan citizens. Such political disparity likely contributed to “secessionist” tendencies among artists and intellectuals. Indeed, a desperate advocacy of cultural re-nascence, famously articulated by literary critic and dramatist Hermann Bahr in his 1890 essay The Modern, permeated the Viennese firmament. Bahr’s battle-cry further foregrounds the intensely spiritual, often delusional (even delirious), narratives ascribed to artistic creation at the fin-de-siecle.
Weininger's Sex and Character: Overt in its misogyny, pristine in its logic, Sex and Character gives a particularly eloquent voice to the deeply troubled fin-de-siecle man. When considering the text one must negotiate one’s own disgust: looking beyond the urge to apply myriad derogatory “isms” affords the reader opportunities to experience—through Weininger—the fin-de-siecle masculine psyche in all its anxieties, fears, and indeed, perversions.
Loos, Wagner & Ornament: Adolf Loos’ biography, written oeuvre and architectural output suggest an ideological dissonance. Seeking to resurrect and, if I may be so bold, purify architecture, Loos famously declared that ornamentation was indeed a crime. In his essay, Ornament and Crime, Loos evangelizes for an austere style liberated from filigree, devoted to formal unity. While performing this identity of modernist apostle, Loos simultaneously advocated an almost excessive use of craft and ornament within the home. Such a negotiation of modernist aesthetic propriety illuminates not only Loos’ inextricable links to nineteenth century thought, but also his insidious application of Victorian feminine containment to architecture and interior decorating.
In general, there exists an obsession with ornament in fin-de-siecle art and theory. Furthermore, Loos equation of applied art with degeneracy operates within and validates the gendered confines of genius.
Schoenberg: If one accepts the condition that Schoenberg’s atonal and dodecaphonic music asserts the composer’s masculinity, one can also postulate the existence of what Foucault would call “aims and objectives” intrinsic to Schoenberg’s textual and musical oeuvre. Given what we now know regarding the composer’s cultural context, I would argue that not only does Schoenberg’s modern style express fin-de-siecle aesthetic ideology but also operates within the context of artistic and cultural misogyny.
As an end note, I'd like to briefly evangelize for this book. Go. Read it.
An Overview: Characterized by an excessive anxiety, Vienna at the fin-de-siecle provided a locale ripe for artistic and cultural turmoil. In the political sphere, the immediate government opposed the values of the bourgeois and intelligentsia: Karl Lueger and his anti-Semitic Christian Socialist coterie offered an ideological foil for Vienna’s cosmopolitan citizens. Such political disparity likely contributed to “secessionist” tendencies among artists and intellectuals. Indeed, a desperate advocacy of cultural re-nascence, famously articulated by literary critic and dramatist Hermann Bahr in his 1890 essay The Modern, permeated the Viennese firmament. Bahr’s battle-cry further foregrounds the intensely spiritual, often delusional (even delirious), narratives ascribed to artistic creation at the fin-de-siecle.
Weininger's Sex and Character: Overt in its misogyny, pristine in its logic, Sex and Character gives a particularly eloquent voice to the deeply troubled fin-de-siecle man. When considering the text one must negotiate one’s own disgust: looking beyond the urge to apply myriad derogatory “isms” affords the reader opportunities to experience—through Weininger—the fin-de-siecle masculine psyche in all its anxieties, fears, and indeed, perversions.
Loos, Wagner & Ornament: Adolf Loos’ biography, written oeuvre and architectural output suggest an ideological dissonance. Seeking to resurrect and, if I may be so bold, purify architecture, Loos famously declared that ornamentation was indeed a crime. In his essay, Ornament and Crime, Loos evangelizes for an austere style liberated from filigree, devoted to formal unity. While performing this identity of modernist apostle, Loos simultaneously advocated an almost excessive use of craft and ornament within the home. Such a negotiation of modernist aesthetic propriety illuminates not only Loos’ inextricable links to nineteenth century thought, but also his insidious application of Victorian feminine containment to architecture and interior decorating.
In general, there exists an obsession with ornament in fin-de-siecle art and theory. Furthermore, Loos equation of applied art with degeneracy operates within and validates the gendered confines of genius.
Schoenberg: If one accepts the condition that Schoenberg’s atonal and dodecaphonic music asserts the composer’s masculinity, one can also postulate the existence of what Foucault would call “aims and objectives” intrinsic to Schoenberg’s textual and musical oeuvre. Given what we now know regarding the composer’s cultural context, I would argue that not only does Schoenberg’s modern style express fin-de-siecle aesthetic ideology but also operates within the context of artistic and cultural misogyny.
As an end note, I'd like to briefly evangelize for this book. Go. Read it.
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