Selbstlose Musik. Texte, Briefe, Gespräche by Karel Goeyvaerts (review)

I hope it would not be too unfair to observe that the volumes hitherto published within the Edition MusikTexte series, of which the present volume now forms a part, are, without exception, wonderfully improbable. It is relatively difficult, at any rate, to see how, in an (increasingly) commercialized market for scholarly production, the English-speaking (and English-writing) scholarly world would have found place for a 500-plus-page bilingual edition of Alvin Lucier’s writings, interviews, and text scores, nor an equally long volume devoted to Christian Wolff, nor two volumes stretching to almost a thousand pages, again in English and German, presenting what feels almost like every word Feldman must have uttered during three summers in Middelburg from 1985 to 1987. This is no criticism: to date each MusikTexte volume has been a pleasure to discover, not least because the figures featured seem too often to find themselves footnotes to histories of some presumed musical mainstream. The present volume is no exception.

Arguably, indeed, Karel Goeyvaerts is the archetypal musical footnote to history. The footnote in question here relates, of course, to his performance with Karlheinz Stockhausen of his Sonata for Two Pianos at the 1951 Darmstadt New Music Courses, a performance which left Theodor W. Adorno—himself rather surprisingly present in the role of composition tutor—almost lost for words. When he did find words to discuss this, one of the first prototypes of multiple serialism, European style, they were far from complimentary. Yet it should be remembered that, when Adorno ultimately dubbed Stockhausen and Goeyvaerts “Adrian Leverkühn und sein Famulus,” it was Goeyvaerts whom he saw as Faustus, with Stockhausen—who laudably endeavored to explain this alien music to the leading philosopher of the new music—relegated to the position of the great composer’s exegete.

The volume’s editor, Mark Delaere, has been thoroughly committed to Goeyvaerts over many years. Indeed, it is largely thanks to the 1994 issue of the Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, which he edited under the title “The Artistic Legacy of Karel Goeyvaerts,” and the earlier work of Herman Sabbe on the early history of post-war European serialism, that Goeyvaerts has retained a status beyond anecdote value. Though Delaere evidently feels that both Goeyvaerts and his music deserve more (or different) attention, he confesses at the very beginning of his introduction that Goeyvaerts “owes his reputation to the fact that he was there at the birth of serial and electronic music at the beginning of the 1950s” (p. 8; translations throughout this review are mine). Indeed, Goeyvaerts was hardly a bystander, his Opus 2 für dreizehn Instrumente (1951) has a reasonable claim to be thought of as Europe’s first piece of “true” multiple serialism; and his Compositie Nr 4 met dode Tonen (1953), had he been able to realize the score, would have been one of the earliest pieces of elektronische Musik and, as I note below, one of the first pieces of recognizable minimalism. Yet, Goeyvaerts’s purpose was quite different from that of, say, Boulez or Stockhausen: the sorts of problems that caused Boulez (and hardly only Boulez) to decry number fetishism and “All-Objectivity” are precisely the sorts of issues that energized Goeyvaerts’s approach. His interest was in a sort of transcendentalism, a perfection that could be expressed through numerical strategies and that led to an essentially static music. The “selfless music” of the volume’s title is, really, a “self-less” music: in his correspondence with Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts discusses his aim to create music without the Ego’s involvement. As Delaere describes it, this is “both a rejection and an amplification of the aesthetics of Romanticism: a rejection because the expressive desires of Romanticism and Expressionism are critiqued, and an amplification because at the time Goeyvaerts conceived of himself—like the Romantic composers—as a mouthpiece for a higher, divine order” (p. 12). In this sense, it was arguably...