Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context

5. Intricate Temporalities: The Transfiguration of Proper and “Improper” Sounds from Christian to Jewish Environments

Intricate Temporalities The Transfiguration of Proper and “Improper” Sounds from Christian to Jewish Environments1 Ruth HaCohen Three modes of communication situate the background of this paper. They relate to three realms of experience and to the intersections and conflations of their respective configurations. These modes are music, narrative, and ritual. All three engage us in the real present— they call our attention at a certain moment, they demand from us a blank duration for the projection of their inhering experiences, and they launch us into “unreal” presents whose mental fabrication they stimulate.2 When we hear a story, listen to a piece of music, or attend a ritual, we are often willingly interpreting their messages by assuming their referred stretches of virtual past, present, or future, as our temporary lived present.3 It could be the story of Exodus activated by a certain ritual in which we find ourselves involved; the cosmological history of the planets rendered in a piece of music that wishes to usher us into its heavenly mode of existence; or a story—literary or cinematographic—of futuristic adventures that takes us into its fantastic realms. In such operations we can discern at least three modalities of imaginary present tense: past-present, present-present, and futurepresent . Since the present is doubly presented in each of these modalities , both as the time in which they historically/biographically occur and as the time which characterizes the phenomenal features of its mental objects, these three modalities should be rather called: the past as present in the present, the present as present in the present, and the future as present in the present, or in short: the past-presentpresent , the present-present-present, and the future-present-present. While the experience of such modalities seems to depend on the willing imagination alone, encoded modes of communication—of the kind historical and literary narratives, musical works, or performative rituals deploy—facilitate their activation, rendering them communal. These three modes often interpenetrate each other (in Miller 2 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:42 PM Page 81 opera, moving pictures, religious services and the like), enhancing or being enhanced by an imagined present the other mode conjures up. In the following, I will concentrate primarily on the temporal experience projected by certain musical works/events which call upon and utilize the two other modes of communication: narrative and ritual. These temporal experiences—directly or indirectly reported by real or imagined audiences—are implied in the performative events these works historically launched. Various beliefs and practices nourished such experiences, themselves often enlisted for promoting or reinforcing certain hegemonic or subversive ideologies. The following theoretical discussion regarding the nature of musical temporality will bring me to more specific theological–ideological environments related to certain Christian ritualistic music, and to subsequent philosophical and literary transfiguration of their inhering presents into assumed Jewish contexts. In and Out the Musical Present It was the American philosopher, Susanne Langer (1895–1985), who half a century ago coined the trenchant phrase “Music makes time audible and its form and continuity sensible,” thus summarizing her theory of musical perception and expression.4 Building on the Bergsonian contrast between spatialized, measured time that is objective, and existential–experiential duration (la durée pure) that is subjective, Langer’s maxim implies the notion—following Ernst Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms—regarding the ability of musical configurations to isomorphically mold and qualify the internal dynamics and emotional undulations of “being in time.”5 It is the experience of passage in individual life, along its psychic tensions, building-ups and resolutions, which Langer claims, is the “model for the virtual time created in music.” In the process of creating music as a symbol of subjective time “every kind of [psychic] tension transformed into musical tension, every qualitative content into musical quality, every extraneous factor replaced by musical elements.”6 Isomorphism , in this case, is achieved through a common factor of emotional life and musical unfolding time (like mass which is a common factor of both a sculptured body and an organic body), and a superimposed iconic morphology, musically configured. This effects music as a symbolically condensed modality, a “sonorous 82 Ruth HaCohen Miller 2 :Whats minta 1 9/3/08 4:42 PM Page 82 image of passage, abstracted from actuality to become free and plastic and entirely perceptible.”7 Several interrelated objections to this argument can be raised without refuting...