Musical Meaning and Human Values

Chapter 3

c h a p t e r 3 The Devoted Ear Music as Contemplation Lawrence Kramer Central Europe, the late eighteenth century: the slow movements of cyclical instrumental works embarked on a metamorphosis. Instead of expressing sustained states of feeling drawn mainly from the varieties of serenity and pathos, some slow movements began to explore the possibilities of internalized drama. Others enacted a process of contemplation. One group sought to grasp interiority as something complex and heterogeneous ; the other labored to elevate the spirit through acts of attention. These two aims sometimes overlapped. Each was consistent with the era’s increasing interest in the psyche as a structure, a realm, and a puzzlement . But this interest covered the dramatic strain more fully than it did the contemplative, which was more concerned with spirit than with feeling . The protocol of elevation in the contemplative slow movement corresponded with a certain practice of devotion—‘‘a certain practice’’ because its devotedness had no object. It assumed the form of religious illumination but without specific religious content. It was a meditative exercise in the spirit of Kantian aesthetics: devotedness without devotion.1 Where did the concern with such illumination come from, and how did it find its way into music? What is the genealogy of the contemplative slow movement? I do not mean this question as a stylistic one that might lead, say, to the traditions of hymnody or operatic prayer or the setting of 59 60 The Devoted Ear the Benedictus. It is a question, rather, of cultural formation, the development of a certain type of expressiveness that even today retains much of its power. One likely agent in this development was the inclusion of contemplative thought among the basic routines of cultivated life. Another was the overlapping practice of seeking opportunities for reflection in both the traces of history—sites, monuments, relics, ruins—and scenes of beauty in nature . The spiritual element in these practices coincided with the drift of religion from something the truth of which was assumed to something the truth of which might be questioned or denied, something that those who maintained it might have needed to defend. This drift, and not a simple turn from belief to unbelief, was the primary form of post-Enlightenment secularism. Its outcome was not yet the art-religion of the later nineteenth century but the creation of aesthetic practices meant to tune the spirit and give sensory pleasure at the same time. The contemplative practice of the age was literal in its seeking: the thinker or artist walked out into the world and paused for contemplation when something arrested the walker’s progress. To wander became a source of wonder. Both Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Byron ’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, key texts of the post-Enlightenment moment , and widely read, helped model this fusion of the via contemplativa with the via practica in which the seeds of modern tourism also germinated (think of Fingal’s cave, which Keats invoked in verse and Mendelssohn in music). Thus Byron, recalling the ruins of the Roman capital of Switzerland : By a lone wall a lonelier column rears A gray and grief-worn aspect of old days; ’Tis the last remnant of the wreck of years, And looks as with the wild-bewildered gaze Of one to stone converted by amaze, Yet still with consciousness; and there it stands.2 Byron’s image of consciousness both stilled and heightened by a transformative gaze points to the frequent aim of the contemplative practice that his text exemplifies. The contemplative slow movement represents a concurrent, mutually reinforcing trend that replaces the gaze with an intensive practice of listening and thus allows the mind both to wander without a map and to arrest its own progress without a monument. What follows are some thoughts on how this happens, and to what end. 61 Lawrence Kramer Haydn’s String Quartet in G Minor, op. 74, no. 3, dates from 1793. It is nicknamed ‘‘The Rider’’ for the memorable galloping theme that opens the finale. A decade later, the finale of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2 (1802), nicknamed the ‘‘Tempest,’’ would give the sound of a passing horseman a distant nocturnal quality, the aura of romance , not of adventure. But Haydn evokes a clipped, roughshod energy, a rocking and surging still audible in the mid...