Peace and Mind: Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity
Using Models . . . for Making Original Music
Alexander Goehr
[Figures]
Sometime in the early sixties, when faith in formalism was at its height, serialism was the basis for musical composition, and study of the postbaroque literature was determined by belief that nothing need be known of it but what was written in the text, I and two friends, Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, saw, at a comprehensive Picasso exhibition at the Tate in London, the series of paintings and drawings that Picasso had done (from the mid-1950s until 1961) that were "based" on the works of earlier artists: Velázquez, Titian, Manet, and Delacroix. In our various ways, the three of us were struck by the informal, fantastic, seemingly violent manner of these transformations. It was entirely obvious that these did not represent some kind of "return to the past" or neoclassicism; nor indeed were they in any profound sense like musical variations on a theme, like those of Brahms on a Handelian air, for example.
Remember that in the sixties, along with a frankly ethical belief that a composer exists to create a new musical language (or at least to follow those who do so), any form of stylistic or technical backsliding or regression was scorned from the dizzy heights of the Darmstadt Summer Schools. Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono (whom we most admired) not only insisted on a quasi-historical diagnosis of their "musical situation" (to use a favorite term of that time). They sneered at neoclassicism (in Schoenberg's "baroque" forms after 1925 and more obviously in Stravinsky up to and including The Rake's Progress) as mere epigonism; they [End Page 108] criticized composers whom they thought to have been left behind (Hindemith, Dallapiccola, Krenek) because of their continued concern with archaic devices such as canon, passacaglia, and any traces of sonata. While yet others (there are too many to mention) were simply dismissed as "commercial" or "compromisers," not because their pieces were found to be technically flawed or artistically impoverished, but because they did not measure up to a prescriptive diagnosis of history. They did not wear the correct badges or have the correct uniforms. In fact, such a prescriptive diagnosis of history is little more than an arbitrary synthesis of fashions, preferences, and prejudices--and there is nothing wrong with that, if understood as such. But whereas the new consciousness of those years paid lip service to the ecstatic, erotic, and revolutionary culture of the pre-First World War period, in reality it soon transformed itself into an orthodoxy and analytically inspired revisionism. No wonder its success as official new music, a subject for academic study!
At the time it was widely believed that all the arts were moving the same way. One talked of expressionism, abstraction, serialism--and of Schoenberg, Joyce, Kandinsky--as if the various -isms and key names could, for all their differences, be subsumed under a single banner. Looked at with hindsight, this conflation was obviously oversimplified, if not downright incorrect; but it served roughly to delineate the area of fertile territory. It was the probably necessary post-1945 aspiration to make everything from new again--from its physical bases. Klee's "dot out for a walk," the often referred to "situation of the single note" (as the atomic ne plus ultra of "scientific" composition), and the belief of Milton Babbitt and Boulez in capital-S Serialism/small-m music (to reverse Schoenberg's familiar hierarchy) determined the agenda and the references. In Europe (though not necessarily in New York), Webern was preferred to Schoenberg (but the predodecaphonic pieces only), Stravinsky (up to the Rite of Spring and Les Noces) and some Bartok and Berg were approved, as were Varèse and late Debussy as well as Messiaen (despite the embarrassment of his Catholic and mystical iconography). These choices correspond to those places in the music of immediate (at least pre-1925) predecessors that could be understood without reference to traditional musical rhetoric or to any familial likeness to previous musical experience. And with these choices went a strong belief in censorship (both self-imposed and group). Even while referring to a "chart" (such as the dodecaphonic, serial tables of pitch, timbre, and durational ordering), composers frequently threw up a group of notes approximating to a musical motif or chord that resembled something from past music--and when this occurred, those notes were excluded or at least disguised so as not to arouse "false expectations" in the listener. Extreme and counterproductive as this kind of censorship might now seem, it was an entirely sincere attempt to rebuild a music on a firm basis, eschewing the anecdotal and almost automatic dragging out of clichés to obtain [End Page 109] a predetermined and calculated effect. Insofar as the censorship accomplished this aim, it was and is a good thing. But the aim flew in the face of real musical experience. It never seemed to have occurred to anyone, then, that if traditional gestures and traces retained their recognizable expressive potency, even in the altered circumstances of a total serial universe, there must be more to them than met the critical intelligence of that time.
It was against this background that Picasso's transformations (not then matched by anything equally potent in music) surprised and shocked us.
Picasso's series of variations on Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe both reproduces the structure of figures and proportions of the model (as one might say Brahms reproduced the sequence of phrases and harmonies of Handel) and "mythologizes" what in the Manet picture is a naturalistic scene of painters and their models on an excursion into the country. In doing so, Picasso not only reverses the manner in which Manet demythologizes Titian, but is--as Douglas Cooper, quoted by Richard Wollheim, describes it--"pushing on beyond the point at which some other man stopped." Wollheim continues: "In other words, Picasso would do precisely what the 'other man' didn't do, but in the course of doing it, he securely establishes the other man within himself" (figs. 1-9). 1
The intense impression that this procedure of Picasso's made upon Peter Maxwell Davies reinforced the compositional concern with early English music (Dunstable, Taverner, Byrd) that lay behind a great deal of Davies' prior work. The particular effect may well have been a move (forward or backward, according to taste) from a slightly coy application of technical procedures--for study perhaps, but hardly for hearing--to a direct and audible involvement with the iconography and gestural language of the earlier composers. Harrison Birtwistle's The World Is Discovered (based on Die Welt fundt by Heinrich Isaac) stands out in his early oeuvre as a piece clearly implying a past composition; but it is harder to trace the kind of ideas under discussion here in Birtwistle's work than in Davies's. Birtwistle would probably like it to be believed that he is not significantly influenced by the music of the past, though he may from time to time have deliberately "arranged" or "recomposed" it. (Ockeghem and Bach are two who have been favored by him.)
A conventional view connects the making of really new work with rebelliousness--with aggression or even enmity against the past. Indeed there have been "rebellious" composers: in the twentieth century, the names of Edgard Varèse , Stefan Wolpe, and John Cage come to mind. But by and large, it is more [End Page 110] appropriate to see the great innovators, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók, as possessed of a new vision of what music might be and say, while, at the same time, grappling with a set of traditional preoccupations embodied in specific compositions by admired predecessors. T. S. Eliot dealt with the topic, famously, in his 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." "The progress of an artist," he writes, "is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable." (For my purposes, I have inverted the order of Eliot's sentences.) Tradition here is not mere Schlamperei (Mahler's word)--the tired and unthinking repetition of dubious truths and pedagogical conventions--but rather the "existing monuments" that "form an ideal order among themselves, [End Page 111] [Begin Page 113] which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. . . ." And Eliot continues: "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past." 2 Note the choice of verbs: the artist is "directed" by the past but, by what he does, "alters" that past.
I dislike Eliot's hyperdramatic "self-sacrifice" and prefer Stravinsky's "submission" ("submission to an established order") as a more suitable term. 3 As the [End Page 113] young (and not-so-young) artist submits himself to a painting by copying it, so the aspiring composer learns his craft by imitating models (cf. Schoenberg's Models for Beginners in Composition, Schirmer, 1942). Prior to even this discipline, he learns counterpoint (J. J. Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725)--he learns how to invent a melodic line against a given cantus firmus, in a predetermined style governed by a set of quasi-historic rules. The important thing, however, is neither the agreed style nor the apparently arbitrary rule convention but the fact that the teacher criticizes the work, pointing out transgressions. Still more importantly, the teacher points to weak and inexpressive invention, which the student then corrects and improves as succinctly as possible, even if this procedure leads ultimately to a recasting of the whole exercise. How the recasting is done and how it leads to "new musical styles" can be clearly seen in the "Attwood volume" (the last of the Barenreiter Mozart edition). Thomas Attwood, an Irish pupil of Mozart's, wrote conventional exercises; Mozart's corrections are printed (along with his rude castigations), and it is possible to see in them how Mozart's improvements relate to the radical innovations of his own style.
The graphic representation of pedagogical practice appears in real compositions throughout the history of music--from Bach's stile antico to the neobaroque figurations of Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Liszt, to Bruckner's "Palestrina" (in the Masses), to Webern's and Stravinsky's mock-Renaissance canons (the last movement of Webern's Second Cantata or the trombone canons of Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas). But though such music clearly refers to models and "pushes on beyond the point at which some 'other man stopped,'" neither technically nor gesturally does it really raise the issue of musical composition actually modeled on specific older works in the way the Picasso is modeled on the Manet. Various words are used to describe the relationships of artists to prior artists or to works chronologically preceding them. Such descriptives may be organized according to whether they imply a conscious act of selection or whether they represent, at least in substantial part, an involuntary relationship to the past. In the first category stands our modeling proper, along with plagiarism and parody. Parody describes the way in which early Renaissance writers employ movements from Masses by their predecessors to "compose against," but also describes the way in which Mahler is understood to approach music of the past with irony--an approach normally associated also with neoclassicism, illustrated anew in the Romantic period and continuing in Tchaikovsky's Mozartiana, the HolbergSuite by Grieg, and various works by Respighi, but above all in Stravinsky after Pulcinella. Quotation, the use of existing music by other composers within a newly invented structure, may also be placed in this first category. In addition, Wollheim uses the terms borrowing and textuality, the one referring to borrowed gestures and expressions, the other to the use of literary or religious texts to be illustrated. [End Page 114]
Against all such deliberate attempts to bridge or remove the distance from past to present, and even to alter the estimation of the past by our experience of the present, stand ideas of influence (anxious or not), inspiration, and tradition. All these imply an involuntary relationship to the past operating through memory, resonance, and education. The greater part of the history of music is written in such terms, implied in popular notions like the "stream of music": the idea of music as a kind of relay race in which one protagonist takes up the baton laid down by his predecessor. The advantage of linking music selectively to its own traditions is that it becomes sufficient to focus on particular characteristics of a composition, allowing what is new and innovational to stand side by side with those aspects of the work that show "influences." But in attempting to demonstrate intentional modeling, as for example in the way Schubert is reputed to have modeled on Beethoven, or Brahms on Chopin, the critic--to be convincing--must compare passage for passage, and often to do this only after removing, as it were, the disguises or trappings that inevitably obscure so specific a relationship between two pieces. Effectively, only critics of the musicality and experience of a Tovey or a Charles Rosen will be able to accomplish this feat. (The most useful study of modeling is contained in Rosen's "Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration.") 4 It is far more difficult to perceive the existence of a model "behind" a piece of music than it is to see it in a painting. The difficulty is compounded when, as Rosen says, "the transformation is an almost total one" and "evidence for the identity is erased in a work which now appears almost completely original." Even where a composer deliberately models his piece on an existing structure, it will be unlikely that more than some aspects of the original will recur in the new work, and these will be conjoined with other characteristics that have nothing directly to do with the original.
My example (fig. 10) demonstrates the way that I have modeled a piece for windband with doublebass on a piano piece by Schumann (fig. 11). I reproduce the typical piano toccata figuration of the original, the relationship of melodic fragments to it, and (though this cannot be demonstrated in a brief example) the structure of answering phrases and sections to each other. The durations and number of measures of the two compositions are almost identical. But the terms in which these structures work are light-years from each other: the tonal Schumann, in C minor, is not reproduced in the modal serial structure of my piece. What is functional in the one is at best a gestural reference in the other. The new piece "substitutes" its own structure, imagery, and associations for those of the original; and, necessarily, the force and tensions of the later piece resolve into a continuation and conclusion of its own that veers away from the original, so that [End Page 115] perhaps little else remains of the original than what Wollheim calls "identification." What strikes Wollheim about the way Picasso borrows is "how little there is to the borrowings over and above the identification."
If the composer does not, by the use of title or program note, allude to the identity of a model, can there be any but a musico-technical interest in such a procedure? Detective work, spotting borrowings of one sort or another, has little to do with aesthetic experience, though it may be of some interest to a historian [End Page 116] or theoretician. At best, an awareness of a model might deepen understanding and pleasure but should not be regarded as an essential of appreciation. It would surely not be right to question the integrity of a listener who, while recognizing no quotations, identifying no references, making no associations, simply obtains pleasure from following the travels of a tune, the intensity of contrast, and the appositeness of resolution in a musical piece. Be this so, the very discussion of the status of a model within a piece might seem to be little more than pedantry or cleverness. It is no accident, I suspect, that there are few if any mentions of this aspect of composing in writings about music.
The situation alters completely where the artist indicates enough of his original model to suggest that the presence of it in his own work is an integral part of the intended expression. Wollheim in his discussion of Manet's borrowings deals in detail with the psychology of this situation, within the framework he proposes of a tension, if not a rivalry, between present and past. 5 Be that as it may, if an artist is motivated by one feeling or another to reproduce some aspect of a previous work, he will, technically, be forced to concern himself with an idea of transparence, such that one sees or hears some part of the earlier work through the whole or separately from it. A technical preoccupation with transparency would of itself differentiate the texture of the new creation from the old, as for general purposes one would assume that no such aspiration was present in the original. [End Page 117]
Though a frequently arising factor in the appreciation of visual art and literature, it may be questioned whether there has ever in the past been a clear-cut example of such intended transparence in music. One possible example, which lies close to me, might be found in the compositions of Monteverdi, the inventor of the so-called seconda prattica. In his time Monteverdi was criticized by a contemporary, Artusi, for having deliberately broken the rules of prima prattica composition (as embodied in the works of Palestrina and Lassus). Artusi, writing within the older manner, implies that Monteverdi included progressions--possibly because he improvised them at the keyboard--that "broke the rules" and were therefore, in relation to the spirit of his times, lapses of taste. Monteverdi, through the agency of his brother, answered the criticisms, defending the alleged transgressions as virtues in the cause of a more real representation of human emotion. 6 It is usual to understand Monteverdi's more strident harmonies and vocal intervals as expressions of such virtues, and from them to generalize seconda prattica as in direct opposition to what preceded it. On the other hand, it is possible to understand the madrigals and operatic scenes where the most striking innovations occur as written according to the old rules and in the old manner, with certain moments transformed by the exigencies of heightened expression--or vice versa: as new prima prattica compositions through which the seconda prattica manner is manifest from time to time, or as seconda prattica compositions in which the antique protrudes occasionally through the surface phenomena of the new.
It was such thinking that led me to compose again (in 1997) the libretto of Monteverdi's lost opera, Arianna. If Monteverdi in his time could, for his own purposes, transform an older practice, and that older practice more or less corresponded to the principles of strict counterpoint as it is still done, could I not too set Rinuncinni's surviving Italian text as voice part and figured bass, more or less as it would have come down to us, had it survived (figs. 12-13)?
Even in a fragment of a piano reduction of the full score, it is possible to see how the reharmonization of Monteverdi's melody, leading in the last bar of the example (fig. 13) to its "taking off" into an expressive range unavailable in Monteverdi's day, presents at the same time a "new music" through which the Monteverdi original may be at least partially perceived.
In the second stage of composing, I took my own, quasi-seventeenth- century framework and transformed it, by reharmonizing, inventing obligato parts, isolating chance occurrences--intervallic, textural, timbric--and emphasizing these against their contextual background (as Klee used to expand and thicken certain lines in a "naturalistic" landscape turned upside down to create a new polyphonic abstraction of it). Crudely speaking, the originals sounded [End Page 118] more or less like the Monteverdi (or reminded of him), the transformations obviously less so. Had I transformed everything to the same degree of polyphonic abstraction, the result would have been a through-composed chromatic composition with scant remainders of the seventeenth century. By holding back and restricting the scope of the transformations to timbre and instrumental mixtures, I retained passages of quasi-Monteverdi "showing through," in the way that Bach's six-voices Ricercar from the Musical Offering "shows through" Webern's pointillist timbric recomposition (until, toward the end, when Webern seems to have lost his nerve, the Bach takes over and sounds like a nineteenth-century orchestration of itself). Simultaneity of two manners (the earlier baroque and the later twentieth-century) is of course a far more slippery concept than simple juxtaposition, which can produce the effect of transparency of the kind discussed but runs the risk of threatening consistency and continuity in the unfolding of the music.
To model a new composition upon an old one does not necessarily imply a similarity of language or technical equipment between the two. (If I distinguish here, rather arbitrarily, between language and technical equipment, it is to say that language implies a rhetoric; and technical equipment, a way of actually putting notes together. The history of recent music gives many examples not only of new technical means creating a new rhetoric but also of new technical means being adapted to the inclusion of at least elements of a traditional rhetoric.) Modeling requires of a composer that he be able to relate nonhistorically and nonanalytically in the first instance to the fabric of the original as if it meant something particular to him, so that he could, as if wearing a mask, speak through it. Indeed, the same is true when a composer sets an ancient poem or dramatic text. All distances between then and now must be made to shrink away, if pro forma cultural hommage is to be avoided.
In the late fifties, side by side with the belief that dodecaphonic serialism (or some derivation and extension of it) contributed to the generation of harmonic fields and analogous developments of rhythmic and timbric organization stood the belief of Schoenberg and some following him that serialism was also the means of reinventing the complexity and richness of the music of the past, and especially of the classical Viennese past. I had the feeling when I took up with dodecaphony that I had almost overnight progressed to more spontaneous and wide-ranging ways of doing things than seemed to have been possible with an eclectic and limited traditional apparatus as acquired in the schools. Again following late Schoenberg, I thought that the methods now called classical dodecaphony (from the Suite op. 25 to the Variations op. 31) could be evolved, modified, and conjoined with quite other methods, so that all existing (and, one hopes, not yet existing) genres of music--from the least demanding to the most elaborate--would once again be achievable, if in an altered form. [End Page 119]
Serially generated compositions tended to be brief; in Webern's case, almost defying spontaneous perception. Only with strain and the stiffness that can result from unfelt constructive manipulation did it seem possible to sustain metric continuity and fill the sound-space postulated by traditional instruments (such as the piano or a string instrument evolved in relation to tonal practice, with their system of recurring octaves) and the orchestra. Either one accepted this loss as immutable reality, as did Webern--regarding the external form of a composition as identical to the sum of its structural moves, omitting all decorative, rhetorical extensions--or one tried to find ways of modifying and extending structure to include or at least substitute for the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and textural redundancy that, in the past, had contributed to the communicability of musical ideas. A choice between these strategies is rarely based merely on intellectual deliberation but is as well dictated by personal temperament and such concerns as for where and to whom the music might be addressed. It was in this spirit that, using the technical means available to me, I first attempted to model movements on existing pieces from the baroque, classical, and romantic literature.
To compose a movement upon a model involves at the outset a procedure not unlike that employed by copyists of pictures when they square up their canvases in order to be able to reproduce the proportions of their original: in music this translates into an analysis of the measure-phrase structure of the model piece, observing its symmetries and irregularities, and mapping what amounts to a time [End Page 120] [Begin Page 122] frame for the new piece. The process is, if not quite mechanical, a fairly straightforward activity. But a significant implication of it is that the new composition is in the first instance conceived as a whole durational space and the procedure of continuing is by dividing up the space following the divisions observed in the model. The total framework comes first, and only then is it apportioned into sections and phrase structures. There is no evidence that the composers of the classical era, given as they were to principles of bilateral symmetry, used any such procedure, but there are indisputable grounds for believing that Bach was familiar with and at least on occasion employed this manner of thought. 7
But the raison d'être of compositional modeling consists not of such mechanical-analytic mapping, which is only a means of concentrating the mind on identities, characters, and tone in the music itself; for modeling leads to the apparently arbitrary act of re-creating such afresh. The new inventions running, as it were, in tandem with the old are continued by the reproduction in the new of the repetitions, sequences, contrasts, and caesuras of the old and, at the same time, diverge from these as the technical and expressive implications of the new material progressively take over. In this way, a tension, possibly only apparent to the maker of the piece, comes to exist between old and new, and such tension, for its resolution, requires flair, taste, and the ability to create coherent continuation to exactly the same extent as is demanded by freely invented material in a piece not based upon a model.
Till now I have steered clear of the psychological motivations of the activities I have described, avoiding any but incidental reference to (Bloom's) "anxiety of influence" and, arising from such anxiety, to the sense of envy and even competitiveness that Wollheim seems to suggest is a potent engine of creative activity and, even more, a determinant of artistic subject matter. Instead of influence, I would prefer, again a term from Stravinsky, appetite. Influence, passive; appetite, active. (Stravinsky: "This appetite that is aroused in me at the mere thought of putting in order musical elements that have attracted my attention is not at all a fortuitous thing like inspiration, but as habitual and periodic, if not as constant, as a natural need.") 8 And envy, as I understand it--envy of the great masterpieces of the past--supposedly results directly from the effect they have upon oneself as a listener. The envy is not of them but of the potency and overwhelming immediacy of the impression they make; and the anxiety results from doubt as to whether one might oneself, not emulate such works (that would be too pretentious), but even in a modest way participate in a tradition of which these masterpieces form the peaks. Anyone coming as I do from a family of practicing [End Page 122] musicians will have experienced the painful crises of confidence of a young person growing up amid the realities of musical life and fearing an insufficiency of that mysterious "gift" that is waved about but is so strangely elusive.
Such early experience makes it hard to believe in any of the neutral
definitions of music as "organized sound" or "sounding air." For
me, music was and is an activity embracing composition, performance,
listening, and study, an activity embodying a set of definable
preoccupations. Like any sport or game, the intention is fixed
in advance and is hardly open to negotiation. As with Kafka's dancer,
there is no question about the steps of the dance; only the dancer's
own anxiety about being able to make them correctly.
9
The suggestion being made here is that the activity of modeling upon a
specific composition of the past, while historically undocumented
and probably exceptional, is in itself a model of normal compositional
activity. It does in deliberate terms what forms a normal part of the
more general, less self-conscious character of creative practice. If
true, the original and the new in music would seem to arise in an
involuntary manner out of the failures of composers when, in their own
ways and in their own times, and with necessarily diverging personal
experiences, they attempt to emulate and resolve what has already been
resolved by their predecessors.
Alexander Goehr holds the professorial chair in music at Cambridge University and is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His recent works include Sing Ariel, a 1990 collaboration with Sir Frank Kermode; The Death of Moses, a large-scale choral work, set to poems by John Hollander and televised by the BBC in 1992; and his third opera, Arianna, a recreation of the lost opera by Monteverdi, produced by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1995. His current projects include Schlussgesang, a viola concerto.
Notes
1. Figs. 1-5 are reproduced from Juliet Wilson-Bareau, The Hidden Face of Manet: An Investigation of the Artist's Working Processes (London: The Burlington Magazine, 1986), 40-41. Exhibition presented by the Burlington Magazine at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, April 23 to June 15, 1986. Figs. 6-9 are reproduced from Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987; reprint, 1990), 248.
2. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 5.
3. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage, 1942; reprint, 1947), 77.
4. Charles Rosen, "Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration," Nineteenth Century Music 4.2 (fall 1980): 87-100.
5. See no. 1 above.
6. The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi, ed. Denis Stevens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 41; 214 et seq.
7. Cf. Ulrich Siegele, "Bach's Theological Concept of Form and the F major Duet," Music Analysis 11.2-3 (July-October 1992): 1002.
8. Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 52.
9. "Das Gesetz der Quadrille ist klar, alle Tänzer kennen es, es gilt fur alle Zeiten": Franz Kafka, Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa, vol. 7 of Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1953), 100.
