The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul

Essays on Music and Poetry

Marshall Brown

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780295990057
• eBook ISBN: 9780295800806
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Literature

The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul brings together Marshall Brown's new and previously published writings on literature and music. These essays engage questions that are central to the development of literature, music, and the arts in the period from Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, a period in which the modern evolution of the arts is coupled with a rise in the significance of music as artistic form. With a special focus on lyric poetry and canonical composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert, Brown ties the growing prominence of music in this period to the modernist principle of abstraction. Music, as Brown provocatively notes, conveys meaning without explicitly saying anything. This principle of abstraction could be taken as the overriding formula for modernist art in general; and it explains why in this period music becomes the model to which all the other arts, in particular painting and literature, aspire. Brown's title, taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, reminds us that abstraction -- musical and artistic – is anything but toothless; indeed, it "nibbles at the soul" in subtle and enduring ways. Throughout his wide-ranging and erudite analysis, Brown's goal is to pinpoint the nature of music's bite and to illuminate the shared elements of literature and music. While there are many previous comparisons of music and poetry, few are systematic or based on a solid knowledge of both literary criticism and musicology. Brown's essays can be enjoyed by a general, well-read public not trained in either music or eighteenth-century literature, as well as by an audience steeped in sophisticated (if not technical) musical analysis.

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Introduction

MUSIC AND ABSTRACTION

Es ist nur Narrheit, daß man Symphonien in nichts als Noten schreiben will, man kann sie auch in Worte bringen, wenn man sich die Mühe giebt. Sind unsre meisten Bücher etwas anders? Sind viele unsrer Symphonien etwas mehr als ein einziger armer Satz, der immer in Gedanken wieder kömmt, und sich nicht von andern Gedanken will verdrängen lassen?

—Ludwig Tieck, Die verkehrte Welt

WHAT does music mean? Three questions are rolled up into this one: What does music say? What does it intend? What does it signify? Or, in other terms: What are the contents of a piece of music, the effects, the consequences? I pose these questions generically, though the essays in this book concern only a slice of European concert music, and I cannot say how well they might universalize or even generalize beyond the examples offered.

The term I focus on in this introduction to characterize musical expression is abstraction. In Noise, Jacques Attali sharply distinguishes three historical phases of musical expression, termed sacrifice, representation, and repetition. “Representation” is his idiosyncratic term for the era of European concert music whose function he describes thus: “representation entails the idea of a model, an abstraction, one element representing all the others.”¹ In line with Attali’s historical account, musical abstraction may be said to have withered into the elitist democracy of the dodecaphonic system (all tones equal, but only for initiates in Schoenberg’s “Society for the Private Performance of Music”), leaving concert music angry, anxious, or merely nostalgic, while mechanical reproduction gave the mass experience of music the physicality and violence inscribed in the terms “rock” and “hit” (“Schlager” in German). Abstraction did not disappear, but it did perhaps pass into other modes of expression. At least for a while, though, its core was music.

My introduction feeds a number of threads into a loose weave around its core topic. It touches on philosophy, modernist painting, poetry, and music. It is meant to work more as texture than as text, more as evocation than as argument. In conformity with my title, here I will be nibbling at the problem, leaving the upcoming essays to take larger bites (in the more practical close readings) and gulps (in the more general and theoretical chapters).

1. GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL. I will start by getting Hegel out of the way. Hegel is in the way as the grandmaster of abstraction, as a spirit who presides over some of the ensuing chapters, and as a philosopher who was, on my reading, clueless about music. And indeed not just on my reading, for Hegel’s posthumously published lectures on aesthetics repeatedly apologize for the limitations of his knowledge and understanding. Music appears to have puzzled him. Yet the spirit of dialectic has the resources to turn a puzzle into an opportunity. Hegel puts music down on account of its obscurity, yet the negativity of music should be inviting for a dialectician.

Whatever his feelings about music, Hegel did love musicians and musical events. He and his wife were well-known patrons of the opera; he was teacher and friend to Felix Mendelssohn; Goethe’s favorite composer, Zelter, was a regular whist partner. But abstract music without words left Hegel cold. Evidently, he warmed to the social occasions, not to the intimate expressiveness. Indeed, decades earlier the Phenomenology of Spirit sums up music under the rubric of “unhappy consciousness,” at the moment when Hegel discusses “devotion,” which he calls “the shapeless whoosh [das gestaltlose Sausen] of bells, or a mist of warm incense, or a musical thought that does not amount to concepts, which would themselves be the sole, immanent, objective mode of thought.”² The book’s only other independent reference to music comes shortly thereafter and is perhaps even less promising.³ For, at the nadir of the unhappy consciousness, music becomes entangled with the devil. “However, the enemy is found therein in its ownmost shape. In the battle of hearts, the individual consciousness exists merely as a musical, abstract moment” (Phänomenologie, p. 168; Phenomonology, par. 223). Poor music! Only one conclusion seems possible. Not too privileged in his youth, Hegel’s early musical knowledge was formed by the church and by his unhappy time as a theology student. In that context, music is not spirit but at worst anti-spirit and at best only an occasion for spirit to manifest itself—and preferably not in the company of incense and bells.

Yet to conclude thus would be to falsify the Hegelian dynamic. For proper Hegelian doctrine privileges the end of a process. If Hegel came to enjoy musical events, that should be because the enjoyment was, in essence, latent within him from the start. And Hegelian doctrine likewise privileges the negative. If music is the counter-spirit, then it is indeed the sounding board for spirit’s revelations. Indeed, the continuation of the second passage leaves no doubt: “In work and enjoyment, as the realization of this essenceless being . . . this suppression is in truth a return of consciousness back into itself, and, to be precise, into itself in its own eyes as the genuine actuality” (p. 168; par. 223). Certainly, the struggling Gemüt of the prior quotation (the collective noun translated as “hearts” above) is not Geist. Yet it is linked to Geist in its lack of particularity. Mere reasoning power is too concrete, even hidebound. Music, as this paragraph says, cancels out its limitations; indeed, devil that it evokes, music smites down selfhood, strikes particularity to earth in the mutuality of “thankful acknowledgment” (such as one might imagine in a communal, Lutheran hymn). Hegel here uses, both as verb and as noun, the word niederschlagen. Perhaps the strongest term of negation in the entire Phenomenology, niederschlagen emphatically evokes a characteristic result of dialectic—not, to be sure, the well-known logic of preservation through sublimation, but rather the equally fundamental, indeed more foundational, logic of Zugrundegehen (sometimes spelled, to bring out the pun, zu Grunde gehen), of foundering and founding, of tearing down to the ground and tearing down so as to ground. As thought (Denken) becomes devotion (Andacht), so music, sounding from the heart, tears down the edifice of particular thought so as to re-found it as spirit. Abstraction removes the outside world and elevates the soul.

Andacht returns once more, much later in the book, in evidently conscious evocation of its earlier appearance: after the “unhappy, so-called beautiful soul . . . vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air,” a “quiet confluence of marrowless essentialities” constituting conscience leads to the religion of art, which is a “spiritual stream” of “pure inwardness,” manifesting itself in devotion “whose inwardness . . . has existence in the hymn.” The transfiguration that takes place at this moment in the book is now called “pure thought” (pp. 463, 496; pars. 658–59, 710). Hegel’s suspicions of music here evaporate into communion (evaporating is Hegel’s term for the dialectical process at its least palpable), revealing abstraction in its purity.⁴

Thus, musical abstraction may be seen as a critical adversary to musical ideology. Indeed, two sides repeatedly confront one another in discourses about music. Beethoven and Rossini—absolute and popular music. Brahms and Wagner—rational process and mythic vitality. Bruckner and Mahler—piety and sarcasm. Schoenberg and Stravinsky—intellect and impetus. Symphony and opera—universal and national expression. At the time of their articulation, such oppositions have often seemed absolute. To later ears, however, they are replayed within many of the works, as an inner Kampf des Gemüts: the dialectic of universality and ethnicity looms in Brahms as in Wagner; the popular impulse is as genuine in Beethoven’s programmatic and popular works as it is in Rossini’s. Hence the abstraction endemic to music does not free it from its dynamism but replays the dialectical currents as internal differences. Music produces a challenge to thought, not a denial. Indeed, if Bacchic revelry is the theme linking Hegel with Nietzsche, then the perpetual motion of music must be equally compatible with the thought of both.⁵

No documentation links Tieck’s 1798 musical farce (from which my epigraph comes) with the paragraphs on “the inverted world” that are the craziest pages of the Phenomenology (pp. 96–100; pars. 157–69).⁶ Yet, if Hegel heard the music Beethoven was composing in the period of the Phenomenology, he would have encountered the “absolute restlessness of pure self-movement” (p. 101; par. 163) that he, like Tieck, links with the topsy-turvy world. “This simple infinity, that is, the absolute concept, is to be called the simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal bloodstream. . . . It is therefore pulsating within itself without setting itself in motion; it is trembling within itself without itself being agitated. . . . The unity . . . is the abstraction of simplicity, which stands in contrast to distinction. However, since it is an abstraction . . . it is given that it is division. . . . Infinity, that is, this absolute restlessness of pure self-movement . . . is, to be sure, already the soul of all that came before . . . but infinity first freely emerges as explanation” (pp. 100–101; pars. 162–63). Absoluteness, abstraction, pulsation, movement, division touch the soul; through them the understanding “has for its objects positive and negative electricity . . . and a thousand other things, objects which constitute the content of the moments of the movement” (p. 101; par. 163). Music is the subtext, even if not the text, and it takes only a little poetic license to translate Hegel’s trembling into nibbling. Music unsettles and animates—gives soul, gives life, animates and nourishes, both sides at once. From both sides of all the great divides splitting our musical traditions, music ran current in the blood of nineteenth-century Europe.

2. MODERNIST PAINTING. To pursue the question of abstraction, I will take a detour into the field most commonly associated with abstraction, modern art. The fondness of the cubist painters for instruments and scores suggests their ambition to displace music.⁷ In a mechanized world, the round contours of musical instruments increasingly stand in for those of flowerpots, bottles, and fruit (Braque, Man with a Violin, Fig. 1), and their quasi-natural forms, human craftsmanship, and modern manufacture all have a hand in the increasingly disrupted, jagged, dimensionally challenged surface of the twentieth-century table (Braque, Musical Instruments, Fig. 2). For many of the painters’ iconographic choices there are unquestionably “formal” motivations, as when the shape of a mandolin “rhymes” or “chimes” or “harmonizes” with that of a woman—at least when the woman’s shape is reconfigured to resemble the instrument’s (Picasso, Woman with a Mandolin, Fig. 3). And before long, the remaining traces of natural shapes become indistinguishably those of musician and instrument, either one of which might be said to provide the curves and diagonals that minimally lyricize the hard edges and grainy browns of the compositions (Picasso, Woman with a Mandolin, Fig. 4). Still, purely “abstract” or “formal” reasons do not fully account for the particular obsession with musical instruments, not all of which modernize “natural” shapes (Braque, Harmonica and Flageolet, 1910–11). Music envy or music desire must surely play some part. After all, not just instrumental form but musical expression starts to appear in the canvases—a score here (Braque, Violin and Musical Score), a generic name, “VALSE,” there (Braque, Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece).

In a few works, the names of composers stand out with a clarity otherwise spurned in the era of high cubism; in one case, the great musical abstractionist Bach, in another, the great musical genius Mozart (Braque, Homage to J. S. Bach; Violin: Mozart/Kubelick; Bal). It becomes evident that cubist abstraction aspires specifically to the condition of music. Not that this is any new discovery. It has long been recognized:

FIGURE 1
Georges Braque, Man with a Violin
Oil on canvas
Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection, Zürich

FIGURE 2
Georges Braque, Musical Instruments, 1908
Oil on canvas
Courtesy The Bridgeman Art Library

FIGURE 3
Pablo Picasso, Woman with a Mandolin, 1908
Oil on can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Music and Abstraction
• 2 Music and Fantasy
• 3 German Romanticism and Music
• 4 Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice
• 5 Rethinking the Scale of Literary History
• 6 Mozart, Bach, and Musical Abjection
• 7 Moods at Mid-Century: Handel and English Literature, 1740–1760
• 8 Passion and Love: Anacreontic Song and the Roots of Romantic Lyric
• 9 Haydn’s Whimsy: Poetry, Sexuality, Repetition
• 10 Non Giovanni: Mozart with Hegel
• Notes
• Index