A Concert of
Paintings:
“Musical Ekphrasis” in the Twentieth
Century
Siglind Bruhn
Abstract: Not only poets may respond to a
work of visual art
with a creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and
structure, the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal.
Composers, more and more frequently in our century, are also
exploring this interartistic mode of transfer. Although the musical
medium is reputedly abstract, composers, just like poets, can respond
in many different ways to a visual representation. They may transpose
aspects of both structure and content; they may supplement,
interpret, respond with associations, problematize, or play with some
of the suggestive elements of the original image. This article begins
with some methodological considerations regarding the musical
equivalent of what literary scholars know as ekphrasis (see Spitzer
1955, Hagstrum 1958, Krieger 1967, 1992, Lund 1992 [1982],
Clüver 1989, 1997, Scott 1991, 1995, Mitchell 1992, 1994,
Heffernan 1993, Yacobi 1995, 1998). Central questions concern the
definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to "program music," and
music's ability to narrate or portray extra-musical realities, i.e.,
to relate to them by way of mimesis or reference. In a second
section, I attempt to position musical ekphrasis within the grid of
interartistic interactions laid out by Hans Lund, and address some
central issues of terminology in research on musical ekphrasis. Next
I draw on three groups of symphonic compositions and two hybrid works
(one pairing music with dance, the other with a biblical text), all
composed in response to works of visual art, in order to attempt an
assessment of the possible scope (and limitations) of the undertaking
to reflect images in tones. To concretize the idea of correspondence
between pictorial and musical configurations, I conclude with a
comparative case study. My overall aim in this essay is thus
threefold: to survey the range of artistic expression that can be
made available for such transmedializations, to examine the degree to
which the composers' creative responses draw on a body of shared
cultural conventions, and to develop some first steps towards a
methodology of "musical ekphrasis."
1 Music about Works of Art and
Literature?
Among the possible pairings between two art
forms that express
themselves in different sign systems (verbal, pictorial, sonic,
kinetic, etc.), the relationship between words and images is the one
that is most widely explored. And in fact, the most securely
established terminology is found in a field that has experienced a
significant revival in recent years: ekphrasis. The literary topos
through which a poem (or any other verbal text) addresses itself to
the visual arts has received much attention in recent years and been
subjected to intense scrutiny. As Leo Spitzer reminds us in his
beautiful study of Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, ekphrasis has
been "known to Occidental literature from Homer to Theocritus to the
Parnassians and Rilke, [as] the poetic description of a
pictorial or cultural work of art, which description implies, in the
words of Théophile Gautier, 'une transposition d'art,' the
reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously perceptible
objets d'art" (Spitzer 1962 [1955]: 72). Jean Hagstrum, in a
seminal book that may well have triggered the enthusiastic revival
and the cluster of treatments of the topic in the literary debate of
the past two decades, delineates the term ekphrasis in the context of
what he refers to as "iconic poetry," as relating "to that special
quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art
object" (Hagstrum 1958: 17-29 [18]). Hagstrum builds not only
on Spitzer but also on Julius Schlosser-Magnino (1935: 12) and George
Saintsbury's definition of ekphrasis as "a set description intended
to bring person, place, picture, &c., vividly before the mind's
eye" (Saintsbury 1902, I: 491). From the latter, Hagstrum takes his
crucial emphasis on the concept of enargeia, "pictorial vividness,"
which Clüver has since taken up (Clüver 1998). Another
angle was emphasized by Murray Krieger, who speaks of "the imitation
in literature of a work of plastic art" and of poems that "in
imitating a plastic object in language and time, make that object in
its spatial simultaneity a true emblem of itself" (Krieger 1992
[1967]: 265, 267). Following this direction of thought, Peter
Wagner points out that ekphrasis, both as a poetical and rhetorical
device and as a literary genre, is Janus-faced; "as a form of
mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice
to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the
power of the image by transforming and inscribing it" (Wagner 1996:
11, 13). For his discussion of mimesis in art, particularly
concerning the relation between representation, illusion, and
fiction, he draws on Kendall Walton (1990; Walton's work, while not
explicitly dealing with the notion of ekphrasis, is germane to my
concern here, not least because he has since turned to explorations
of the representational nature of music: see Walton 1988, 1994).
Finally regarding ekphrasis as a literary genre, Grant Scott (1991),
Tom Mitchell (1992), and James Heffernan (1993) define ekphrasis as
"the verbal representation of visual representation," a wording that
Claus Clüver later expands to "the verbal representation of a
real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign system"
(Clüver 1997: 26).
The phenomenon of ekphrasis is typically
traced back to Homer's
description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. As a
rhetorical device, Peter Wagner (1996: 12) traces the term to
writings attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in whose wake it
was established as a school exercise in rhetoric. In the sense of the
interart genre that interests us here, Murray Krieger dates the birth
of a reflection on ekphrasis to the third century. As he reminds us
(Krieger 1992: 7-8), Imagines of Philostratus the Elder was a
series of descriptions of pictorial works of art which Philostratus
the Younger, in his own derivative series of similar descriptions,
called "ekphrasis."
In contrast to ekphrasis proper, with its
history of more than two
thousand years, the musical equivalent of ekphrasis is a very recent
phenomenon. Moreover, the first examples of the budding new genre,
written in the last years of the nineteenth century, were mostly not
distinguished from the broader category of "program music." (See
Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande on Maurice Maeterlinck's
Symbolist puppet play, to my mind the first true example of a musical
mimesis of drama, and the comments by Susanne Langer 1957: 225-226,
referred to below.) Musical compositions with explicit reference-
whether verbal, in titles and accompanying notes, or
onomatopoeic-have existed for much of the history of Western music
(from the many keyboard works about balmy or inclement weather or
battle scenes, collected in Victorian drawing-room anthologies,
through Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony to Richard Strauss's
Symphonia domestica1)
; yet,
I claim, musical ekphrasis is a distinct and as such much more recent
phenomenon. An important task in approaching the subject matter of
this study, then, is that of formulating the criteria by which we can
differentiate between musical ekphrasis and what is generally known
as "program music." The two genres belong to the same species: both
involve purely instrumental music that has its raison d'être in
its response to a definite literary or pictorial source; both have
variously been described as "illustrative" or "representative" music
(Newman 1905: particularly 103-188; 125-126). While it is possible to
employ "program music" as an umbrella term for both kinds, I will
argue that it is not only meaningful but essential for a full
understanding of music of the "ekphrastic" kind to distinguish it
from the more generic expression.
In literature, the equivalent distinction is
that between, on the
one hand, ekphrasis as defined by Spitzer 1955, Hagstrum 1958,
Krieger 1967, 1992, Lund 1992 [1982], Clüver 1989, 1997,
Scott 1991, 1995, Mitchell 1992, 1994, Heffernan 1993, Yacobi 1995,
1998, and, on the other hand, "Beschreibungsliteratur"---a
descriptive epic in which characters are reduced to objects (Buch
1972, also discussed in Lund 1992 [1982]:
13-15)2---or "iconic projection"
(Lund 1992 [1982]: 63-201). One way of locating the
difference is to ask whose idea of reality is being represented.
"Program music" narrates or paints, suggests or represents scenes or
stories (and, by extension, events or characters) that enter the
music from the composer's mind. Musical ekphrasis, by contrast,
narrates or paints stories or scenes created by an artist
other than the composer of the music, and in another
artistic
medium. Furthermore, musical ekphrasis typically relates not only to
the content of the poetically or pictorially conveyed source text,
but usually also to one of the aspects distinguishing the mode of
primary representation-its style, its form, its mood, a conspicuous
arrangement of details, etc. The distinction may emerge fully when it
is rephrased in analogy to one made in literary theory: that between
Tamar Yacobi's modes of "re-presentation" and "representation."
Yacobi (1995: 611-612) cites two examples from Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina, where Anna's portrait functions as a
(narrative)
ekphrasis whereas the description of Kitty, "travelling to her
estate, framed by the window of her carriage," is merely
"picturelike." Program music represents, while musical ekphrasis
re-presents.
For the purpose of this essay, the primary
medium transmedialized
by a composer will always be that of the visual arts. Yet as I have
demonstrated in detail elsewhere (Bruhn 2000a), music can also create
sonic representations of verbal representations. I recognize this
variant of ekphrasis particularly in compositions of non-vocal music
that recreate a literary text-as opposed to setting it (as in art
song or Literaturoper) and thus including the primary medium
in the re-presentation.
Yet even among compositions whose titles
seem to point to a prior
representation in the visual or verbal medium, there are a number
that dwell on the borderline between the general category of program
music and that of musical ekphrasis. Three well-known examples may
bring out this hybrid state: Liszt's Hamlet (1858),
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), and Liszt's
Hunnenschlacht (1857).
At first inspection, Liszt's Hamlet
appears to be a musical
impression of the character that was verbally depicted by
Shakespeare. However, Hamlet and the legend around him have existed
prior to the poet who made him famous, and Liszt's music, which does
not attempt to relate to the play's plot or structure, linguistic or
stylistic features, speech patterns or philosophical content, cannot,
in my opinion, be said to function as a transformation of the play.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition presents a slightly
more complex case. Originally a piano suite that became known as a
piece in the repertoire of symphonic poems thanks to Ravel's
ingenious orchestration, it was allegedly created in response to a
memorial exhibition of architectural drawings, stage designs, and
watercolors in honor of the composer's recently deceased friend,
Victor Hartman. In the absence of full details about the individual
exhibits- "only six of the designs and illustrations that directly
relate to Pictures may be identified with certainty" (Russ
1992: 16)-I find it difficult to appraise to what extent the
composition constitutes a series of transmedializations into music of
Hartmann's pictorially created world. It is far more likely that they
represent general impressions, distilled from the composer's
experiences of the exhibition and the fond memories of his friend's
character. Still, even assuming that some of the individual
"pictures" re-presented in music have indeed not had pictorial
counterparts in the Hartman exhibition and therefore do no satisfy an
understanding of ekphrasis that privileges one-to-one equivalences,
Mussorgsky's composite work, with its series of (musical) tableaux
linked by the "promenade" of the narrator within the musical fiction,
may be read as an example of what Tamar Yacobi defines as an
"ekphrastic model [...] as distinct from a unique art-work"
(1998: 23), a "pictorial model, a common denominator, a generalized
visual image" (1995: 601). Mussorgsky's composition may thus
re-present not so much items from the historical and unique Hartman
exhibition that served as a stimulus, but the art theme of the
"picture gallery," complete with viewer(s).
The third borderline case I wish to address
is Liszt's
Hunnenschlacht, composed in response to Kaulbach's
fresco by
the same title. Judged by the fairly narrow definition of ekphrasis
by Kibédi Varga (1989: 44), who requires "an exact description
meant, to a certain degree, to evoke and substitute for the painting
itself," Liszt's work would fall outside the genre. The musical
rendering transcends the historic specificity as well as the
particular pictorial source, painting a musical picture of a battle,
with no equivalence to structural or stylistic features in Kaulbach's
fresco. On the composer's account (quoted in Moore 1966: 142-143),
even more influential than the mural itself were the thoughts his
friend Kaulbach shared with him while conceiving the pictorial
representation. It is as if the visual artist chose to depict one
half of these thoughts, while the composer portrayed the other. The
painter ultimately concentrated on the continuation of the combat
among the souls of the slain seen in the mist that floated upon the
surface of the lake during sunset. By contrast, the composer,
according to his own testimony, chose to focus on the battle between
a ferocious barbarian and "the personification of Celestial succor."
Where the painter, fascinated by the mingling of bodies, portrayed
violent rage without end, the pious composer depicted the ultimate
victory of "divine truth, universal charity, the progress of
humanity, and the hope of the world," which "sheds over all things a
radiant, transfiguring, and eternal light." Yet, as Tamar Yacobi
(1995: 604-605) has shown in discussing Lessing's injunctions
regarding the statue of Laocoön and Virgil's poetic mimesis, a
"medium-sensitive" attitude "sets free the re-presentational device
[...]: ekphrasis may develop (rather than at best parallel,
at worst attenuate) the original image." Within such a broader
definition of ekphrasis, Liszt's Hunnenschlacht may constitute
an example of ekphrasis that is intriguingly different from the
majority of those I have thus far explored; it would also push the
beginning of the genre back by about forty years, from around 1895 to
1857.
These borderline cases notwithstanding, the
general distinction
between musical ekphrasis and program music seems nonetheless
crucial. A conflation of the two is detrimental to composers as well
as listeners and scholars. Composers, particularly at the beginning
of the twentieth century, when program music was gaining a bad
reputation, often concealed their full intent in the hope of being
taken seriously, having their compositions featured in well-respected
concert venues and favorably reviewed by the influential art critics
of the day-a privilege largely reserved to authors of "absolute"
music. Such concealment occurred not only with regard to programs of
the more general kind-one is reminded of Mahler's withdrawing his
poetic outlines for his symphonies (Müller 1988: 216)-but also
and particularly in the case of music based on extant works of art.
Thus Schoenberg originally denied that his Pelleas und Melisande
was more than vaguely inspired by the topic of
Maeterlinck's
Symbolist drama, acknowledging only decades later how exact a
"transformation" he had actually tried to achieve here (Schoenberg
1950, Bailey 1984). The fact that listeners and scholars were
discouraged from making a distinction between the two adjacent
categories of music resulted in a considerable delay between the
first occurrence of musical ekphrasis and its proper recognition.
The backdrop for this uneasiness with the
concept of musical
representation (and re-presentation) is to be found in the debate
about "absolute" music made notorious by Eduard Hanslick. Drawing on
a term that Richard Wagner first used with a pejorative slant in 1846
(Wagner 1871-1883, ix: 123) and on an assessment of "autonomous
music" already formulated half a century earlier by Adam Smith (1980
[1795]), Hanslick propagates the idea that only music that is
entirely independent of extra-musical influences, that, as Smith
(205) had phrased it, "may be said to be complete in itself, and to
require no interpreters to explain it" is "pure" music: that the
value of music lies in its formal relations and not in its
expressiveness. In opposition to a musical aesthetics of affect,
imitation, and emotion (Wirkungs-, Nachahmungs-,
Empfindungsästhetik), Hanslick declared the classical work of
instrumental music, particularly that of Mozart, to be the truest
realization of the potential of music since it pretends to be nothing
but itself (Hanslick 1991 [1854]). With his famous definition
that the theme of a musical composition is its proper content
(95-104) and that the best of music constitutes, in its essence,
"tönend bewegte Formen" (32), he took a stand against both the
most successful portion of contemporary composition, particularly
works of Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, and Verdi, and against the very
influential poetic descriptions and "readings" of instrumental music
by such literary interpreters of music as E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Wackenroder, Tieck, and Jean Paul. According to his notion of
"absolute" music, Hanslick called all music that referred to
extra-musical programs "relative," derivative, and hence of lesser
artistic value.
Almost a century after Hanslick, the
influential American
philosopher, Susanne Langer, developed her theory of musical meaning
by extension of and in contradistinction to Hanslick (Langer 1957
[1942]). While conceding that all modes of human
understanding are forms of "symbolic transformation" (xiv, 26-52),
and that music serves as a paradigm of a symbolic system, Langer
confirmed Hanslick's position in defining such symbols as
presentational rather than discursive (79-102), as having meaning but
not asserting anything in particular. On her account, works of music
can be "credited [...] with significance, although (by
reason of the moral censorship which distorts the appearance of basic
desires) we can never say what they signify" (207; emphasis in the
original). Although Langer seems to endorse Hanslick and his school
when she asserts that music "is preëminently non-representative"
(209), she grants that insofar as music has "significance" (by which
she seems to mean what contemporary scholars term "signification"),
it is semantic (218), and that its aim is "not self-expression but
formulation and representation of emotions,
moods,
mental tensions and resolutions-a 'logical picture' of sentient,
responsive life, a source of insight, not a plea for sympathy"(222).
While she has only scorn for program music, described as "the
recognition of natural sounds in musical effects," a music that
"deliberately imitates the clatter and cries of the market place,
hoofbeats, clanging hammers, running brooks, nightingales and bells
and the inevitable cuckoo" (220), she does allow for
content-expressing music provided the correct "psychical distance" is
maintained. Her defense of music's exhibiting formal characteristics
that are analogous to whatever it purports to symbolize-"if it
represented anything, e.g., an event, a passion, a dramatic action,
it would have to exhibit a logical form which that object
could also take [...] the musical figure which we recognize
as such must be a figuration under which we could apprehend the thing
referred to" (225-226)-could even be taken to endorse the complex
responses of ekphrastic music to its stimuli.
I will have to leave for a separate study
the question why musical
ekphrasis seems to have found its form only in the late nineteenth
century. It may have emerged in reaction against Hanslick's
condemnation of all music that is not "absolute" as subjective and
emotional, hence of lesser value; a detailed, serious, and
imaginative musical interpretation or mimesis of a work of plastic
art could hope to hold its ground against this judgment. Another
conceivable reason may be its affinity to contemporary developments
of Modernism, as Mack Smith's study of ekphrasis in literary prose
suggests in effect: "The Symbolists [...], in eschewing
realist externality, strove to portray internal states that concrete
detail and referential language are ineffective in describing. The
language of symbolism is evocatively ambiguous so as to suggest
almost ineffable internal states. Music is the closest parallel to
the symbolists' aims, so music became the emblem of their
aspirations" (Smith 1995: 246-247).
More recently, the idea of instrumental
music exhibiting a
semantic content has been taken up by scholars of musical semiotics,
musical hermeneutics, and musical narratology. Yet while in the
literary discussion, Claus Clüver had early on developed a
theoretical approach to ekphrasis which draws on Roman Jacobson's
semiotic theories, exploring ekphrasis as a mode of "intersemiotic
transposition" or even "intersemiotic translation" (Clüver 1989:
58-62), semioticians of music like Vladimir Karbusicky (1986, 1987,
1990), Kofi Agawu (1991), Raymond Monelle (1992, 1995), and Robert
Hatten (1994, 1995) have resisted the advance from a recognition of
music's semantic potential to a tracing of actual intersemiotic
correspondences. This remains true even when a brilliantly perceptive
philosopher of music like Naomi Cumming, entrenched in semiotic
thinking, touches on the known relation between Peter Sculthorpe's
orchestral composition Mangrove and Ian Fairweather's painting
by the same title: while the fact of a visual stimulus is observed
and beautifully documented by her, no attempt is made to develop
thoughts that might lead to a theory of correspondence, mimesis, or
transformation (Cumming 1998). My own reading of musical compositions
in the light of the extra-musical stimulus that brought them into
being has benefitted specifically from Carl Dahlhaus's reflections on
musical hermeneutics (1978) as well as from the music-hermeneutic
works of Constantin Floros (1977-1985, 1980, 1981, 1989), Hermann
Danuser (1975), and Anthony Newcomb (1984, 1998). None of these
investigations, however, touches on music's ability to re-present
subject matter that pre-exists as a representation in another
artistic medium.
The present study aims at a first answer to
the question what it
may mean when composers claim to respond to a poem or painting, a
drama or sculpture, by transforming that artwork's features and
message into their own medium: musical language. In pursuing this
question, I start from the assumption that the creative process that
applies in the step from a painting to its poetic rendering can
usefully be compared to that which leads from a painting to its
musical rendering; in fact I maintain that they correspond to a
degree that justifies adapting the terminology of ekphrasis developed
in the adjacent literary field. In view of this wider application, I
propose to extend Claus Clüver's (1997: 26) definition of
ekphrasis so that it might extend to nonverbal modes of
re-presentation.. Ekphrasis in this wider sense would then be defined
as "a representation in one medium of a real or fictitious text
composed in another medium."
As I understand it, what must be present in
every case of
(literary) ekphrasis is a three-tiered structure of reality and its
artistic transformation:
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a real or fictitious "text" functioning as a source
for artistic representation;
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(2)
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a primary representation of that "text" in visual form
(as a painting, drawing, photograph, carving, sculpture, etc.) or, for
that matter, in film or dance (see Raftis 1989), i.e., in any mode that
reaches us primarily through our visual perception; and
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(3)
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a re-presentation in poetic language of that first
representation.
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The poetic rendering can do, and usually
does, more than merely
enumerate the details of the visual image and their spatial position
within the work of art. Characteristically, it evokes interpretations
or additional layers of meaning, changes the viewers' focus, or
guides our eyes towards details and contexts we might otherwise
overlook.
Correspondingly, what must be present in
every case of what I will
refer to as "musical ekphrasis" is
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(1)
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a real or fictitious "text" functioning as a source
for artistic representation;
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(2)
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a primary representation of that "text" in visual or
verbal form; and
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(3)
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a re-presentation in musical language of that first
(visual or verbal) representation.
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That music represents reality does not go
without saying. In
recent years, the application to music of the term "representation"
has become more accepted and consierable extended in its range to
music that would previously have been classified as "absolute"; see
particularly Walton 1988, 1994, and Scruton 1980, 1997: 118-139.
Earlier in the twentieth century, however, philosophers, music
theorists, and general art critics were divided on this issue. Some
went back as far as Schopenhauer, who had firmly objected to the
notion of musical imitations of "phenomena of the world of
perception" (Schopenhauer 1969, I: 264). Tovey most prominently, but
with him many musicologists of the time, maintains that programmatic
elements in "serious" music are irrelevant to its value as music.
Arguing that musical programs are incidentals that the listener can
safely ignore while concentrating on the "musical" significance of
the sounds, he claims specifically that "not a bar of the 'Pastoral'
Symphony would be otherwise if its 'program' had never been thought
of" (Tovey 1956: 168). Schopenhauer believes that music has a very
limited mimetic potential, while Tovey declares any musical
representation undesirable. This was not always the dominant view.
Under the heading "imitation" in his Dictionnaire de
musique (1975 [1768]: 198-199), Jean-Jacques Rousseau
included two entries, apparently conflating "mimesis" and "imitatio."
The second entry deals with the expected, technical device of "the
same aire, or one similar, in many parts," while the more prominent
first entry explores the field of music imitating things
extra-musical, clearly arguing that this art is no less capable of
mimesis than its sister arts. Rousseau regarded music, and within it
specifically melody, as the last vestige of a form of utterance
suffused with emotional warmth, a warmth that verbal language once
also knew but has since lost and that, he claimed (1760: xiv),
corresponds to a natural expression of the emotional to such a degree
that one wants a special dictionary to understand it.
Conventions established between the parties
engaging in
communication through representation need not, and in fact do not,
end with verbal language. While Susanne Langer (1967 [1953]:
31) is, of course, correct when she states that "the elements of
music are not words," I disagree with her further conclusion that
words alone function as "independent associative symbols with a
reference fixed by convention." Musical language has developed a
highly sophisticated catalogue of signifiers that are understood,
within the conventions of our cultural tradition, as referring to
non-musical objects. Among the best known are
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the figures of musical rhetoric developed in the
fifteenth and sixteenth (Tinctoris 1475, Luther 1538, Figulus 1575,
etc.) and encoded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(Burmeister 1601, Muffat 1698, Mattheson 1739, etc.); the illustrative
devices developed in the madrigalism of the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries; the affective connotations linked with keys and
tonalities; the "affective types," developed by the eighteenth-century
music theorist Johannes Kirnberger (1773) as an extension of the
rhetoric-of-music tradition; and the influential system of categorizing
the connotations of intervals; 3
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the retracing of a visual object (like the Cross) in
the pitch outline; thus the French composer Olivier Messiaen, in a
piano piece about the Cross looking upon the infant Jesus (in Vingt
regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus), invents a
theme whose initial notes, A-Ab-Bb-G, trace the characteristic shape of
a cross with an extended vertical beam, tilted at roughly the angle at
which one imagines Jesus carrying it during his walk to Calvary (see
Bruhn 1997b: 47-50);
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the acrostic (letter-name) representation of, or
allusion to, persons---from Bach's famous pitch signature ("BACH,"
which sounds B-flat/A/C/B-natural after the German fashion of naming
notes), the related one of Schoenberg (who, with the four letters
A/E-flat/C/B-natural for A[rnold] SCH[oenberg], clearly attempted to
establish a proximity to Bach), and those of Shostakovich, Schumann,
Berg, Webern, etc., to the acrostic bows of reverence to a patron
(Schumann's A/B-flat/E/G/G, used as a theme in a famous set of piano
variations to honor one Mr. Abegg) or to a lover (Berg's HF, used
throughout his Lyrical Suite to wink behind his wife's back to
Hanna Fuchs), and other cryptographic messages, Does the range of
stances adopted by composers to works of literature or visual art
parallel those observed in ekphrastic poets?
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the suggestive power of rhythmic and metric signifiers
(lilting triple time for lullabies and romance songs, double-dotted
notes to suggest military prowess, etc.), and
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the semantic interpretation of brief musical units or
timbrally distinct utterances as "gestures" on the basis of their
kinesthetic shape (Lidov 1987). 4
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These basic signifiers constitute
intrinsically different ways of
music's "referring to" (as opposed to "depicting") non-musical
objects; correspondingly different is the degree to which each
presupposes specialized knowledge. Rhetorical figures, modeled after
(verbal) oratory, are readily understood by those familiar with them
since they function almost like a linguistic vocabulary. Gestures
need Einfühlung on the part of the individual listener,
who perceptively links a certain structure with a kinesthetic image
to arrive at an affective connotation. Suggestive pitch contours are
(usually clumsy) translations of visual silhouettes and represent an
object only insofar as the listener attaches the (metaphoric)5
concepts of "high" and "low" to what is heard as faster
or
slower vibration; and letter-name allusions are decodable only after
translation of the musically received message into its notational
equivalent and its basically arbitrary, though conventionally
prescribed alphabetic signifiers.
Yet even the latter two cases, which
initially communicate only
through a mental concept arbitrarily connected with them in our
culture, will turn into convention by force of repeated association.
The listeners' experience of a correlation between certain musical
figures and implied meanings develops from unexpected
recognition---or the recognition of unexpectedness---via repeated
exposure to anticipation, thus establishing a set of conventions that
may gradually come to bypass the original mental link, even develop
into forms where the link is actually inaccessible. Similarly, the
Germanic naming of pitches (with B and H as well as the
suffix-inflected Fis for F# and Es--pronounced like, and used for,
"S"--for Eb) is self-evident neither for the Romance-language terms
for pitches, which are based on do-re-mi and modified by
idiosyncratic words for "sharp" and "flat," nor for the Anglo-Saxon
scale lettered A-B-C-D-E-F-G. As a consequence, it is a matter of
learned convention, and thus of the joy of literacy, as it were, if
lovers of Western music across language barriers recognize that D-Eb
stands for Dmitri Shostakovich, on the basis of the Germanic spelling
of the letters DS, used in the absence of a note-name equivalent to
the Cyrillic letter for "Š."
Composers using musical figures to represent
non-musical objects
and concepts employ a great variety of mimetic, descriptive,
suggestive, allusive, and symbolic means. Single components (motifs
or musical formulas) along with their syntactic organization,
vertical texture, horizontal structure, tonal organization, and
timbral coloring, are invested with communicative value. Quotations
of pre-existing musical material may add allusive reference and allow
for modifications of context, medium, or tonal environment that
successfully express defamiliarization or irony. Finally, countable
units---from notes to beats, measures, or sections---invite play with
numerical symbols both traditional and innovative. These latter cases
venture ever further into the realm of what I have called "the joy of
literacy": not only do such significations elude the uninitiated, we
no longer expect them to be accessible even to experienced listeners,
but only to skilled readers of the score.
Furthermore, music, as I hope to
demonstrate, is capable of a kind
of descriptive effect that Wendy Steiner (1982: 43-46), writing about
the poetry of e.e. cummings and others, refers to as the "embodying
of the still-movement paradox." Even more than language, music can
achieve this without compromising its intrinsic logic. The reason for
this greater flexibility is that music, while resembling verbal texts
in that it develops in time, simultaneously "paints." Like the media
of visual art, it conveys to its audience the experience of colors
and textures, rather than referring to them as language does.
Both its range of register and its compositional textures (polyphony
above all) create a spatiality to which literary modes can only
allude. Lessing, in the "Kollektaneen zur Litteratur" published
within his "Nachlaß," quotes Bach as praising Telemann as a
"great painter" who, in a certain aria, had "so inimitably expressed
the marvel and horror at the appearance of a ghost that one could,
without the words, which are highly miserable, immediately hear what
the music wanted" [so, daß man auch ohne die Worte, welche
höchst elend sind, gleich hören könne, was die Musik
wolle]. But, Lessing (quoting Bach) adds, Telemann often
"exaggerates his painting to the degree of absurdity when he paints
things that music should not paint."(Lessing 1955, 6: 223;
translation mine). Regrettably, Bach seems not to have provided an
example---or if he did, Lessing does not cite it.
But can non-vocal music also narrate? In his
work on Mahler,
Anthony Newcomb (1998) maintains that it can and does. Following a
work of music entails, he believes, the same basic activity as
following a story: the interpretation of a succession of events as a
meaningful configuration. Musical plot characters (or "agents") are
defined by the composer and identified by the listener through
attributes that "may be located in various musical elements---for
example, in instrumentation, tempo, texture, interval vocabulary,
metric design, rhythmic motive or style, or harmonic support," and
"these actors may then be understood as actors in the unfolding of a
plausible series of actions and events" (Newcomb 1998: 61-62). The
difference between such musical agents and agents in representational
painting, literature, or film is that these genres are forced to
attach attributes to specific human figures and to flesh out these
figures with many ancillary details. Music has no need to do so; just
as it can present thematic generality (in what Newcomb calls
"archetypal plots") without having to attach it to any specific
situations or settings, so it can present shifting constellations of
attributes to construct plausible agencies---among them human---left
undefined. "The actions and events can [...] remain purely
musical ones and still imply referential narrative patterns, stories,
or plots" (ibid: 63).
Also, Carolyn Abbate (1991: xi-xii) reminds
us of the
nineteenth-century claim that certain linear elements of music can be
regarded in analogy to the events in a dramatic plot: music is
perceived as generating expectations on the basis of culturally
established paradigms; it moves through tension and release towards
closure. She argues that music should be "seen not merely as 'acting
out' or 'representing' events as if it were a sort of unscrolling and
noisy tapestry that mimes actions not visually but sonically, but
also as occasionally respeaking an object in a morally distancing act
of narration." Such distance, she believes, is achieved through
"moments of diegesis," in which musical voices speak across the
sensual matter we are hearing. However, she cautions, such "moments
of diegesis" are far from normal or universal in non-texted
instrumental music. Since both Newcomb and Abbate are here referring
to music that does not, by its title or genre, claim to be a
representation of an extra-musical reality, the allowance for
"narrative acts of music" is exceedingly encouraging. Non-texted,
non-allusive music may not be able to convey the fine details of a
plotline because it cannot establish the extra-musical specifications
of the characters and props in the fictional world. But as the
aesthetician Kendall Walton in his work on the representational
qualities of music (1994) confirms, mere titles often suffice to
provide this essential factual skeleton and make music patently
representational---and even narrative.
Thus far I have argued that music, like
visual art and literature,
is capable of depicting and referring to objects in a world outside
its own sonic realm (like a person called Abegg or a cross carried by
a man called Jesus), and that what is represented in a pictorial,
literary, or musical medium may be an image or a story, a design or a
narrative. I now turn to the more specific question of how music may
represent something that does not belong to the primary reality "out
there in the world" (say, memories of a day in the country-side or a
vacation in Italy) or "in here in the soul" (say, a love story or a
learning experience), but has previously been represented in a work
of visual art or literature.
2 Musical Ekphrasis as a Case of Interart
Transfer
The preceding argument leads me to another
perspective of what
musical ekphrasis is and is not. The distinction is usefully captured
when one asks whether what is given in a particular case can be
described as "poems or paintings and music?," "poems or
paintings in music?," or "poems or paintings into
music?" In this section of my essay, then, I wish to inquire how a
poetic or pictorial source text relates to---and possibly makes its
way into---a musical composition. In order to develop pertinent
categories that may help, generally, to deal with the musical
material in a systematic way and, specifically, to know what to
exclude and why, I turn to the already established methodologies in
(literary) ekphrasis.
In this context, the approach of the
Scandinavian interart
researcher Hans Lund (1992 [1982]) proves helpful. In his
chapter on "The Picture in the Poem: A Theoretical Discussion," Lund
provides a scheme intended to define what stance the author of the
secondary representation (here, a poet; in our case, a composer)
adopts towards the work of art (a painting or, in our case, a
painting or poem or drama) that constitutes the primary
representation of the scene or story. Lund establishes three main
categories for the relation of text to picture: combination,
integration, and transformation. (In my discussion of the equivalents
in music's relationship to the sister arts, I will further
differentiate two of them.) Here are Lund's definitions one by one,
and my own adaptations for the field of music.
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By combination I mean a
coexistence, at best a cooperation between words and pictures. It is,
then, a question of a bi-medial communication, where the media are
intended to add to and comment on each other. The old emblematic
writing belongs to this category. Here, too, are found certain works by
authors traditionally called "Doppelbegabungen" by German critics, i.e.
authors who combine and to a certain degree master the literary as well
as the pictorial medium. Examples are William Blake, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and Günter Grass. Works which are the results of a
creative cooperation between a writer and a pictorial artist [...] are
also found here. Illustrations made afterwards to match literary texts
are not primarily a concern for literary scholars but for art
historians. (Lund 1992 [1982]: 8)
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What Lund sketches here corresponds, it
seems to me, to two
somewhat different genres in the case of musical composition: setting
and collaboration. Both answer the questions put at the outset of
this section with "Poems or paintings and music." Among
collaborations involving music as one of the key components are works
like Parade (by Cocteau + Satie + Massine + Picasso) and
L'Histoire du soldat (Stravinsky + Ramuz), to name only
two
outstanding examples. Such collaborations differ essentially from
transformations of a painting or poem into music, whereby a
structured entity with all its constituent parts and many layers of
message is recreated on another plane. Neither type of collaboration
is ekphrastic, for two reasons. First, it is usually unclear which
sign system among those involved should be considered primary and
which constitutes the re-presentation. Second, one may assume that
the myriad aspects of communication, which would otherwise be
expressed within a single artistic text, are shared among the
collaborating arts here. We are, then, not dealing with the
transformation of form and content from one artistic representation
into another, but instead with a sort of "synthetic effect." In such
a joint venture, individual components complement one another but
could often not stand on their own.
Music knows few cases that correspond
directly to the phenomena of
"emblematic writing" or the dual art work of "Doppelbegabungen." A
composer like Arnold Schoenberg, who was also a gifted visual artist,
nevertheless did not, to my knowledge, create any work in which his
dual talent engendered a single overarching artistic message. The
closest analogue in recent music is probably Erik Satie. Many of his
piano scores (see, e.g., Sports et Divertissements, published
in facsimile) tread a fine line between musical score and visual
artwork. The brief pieces are prefaced with drawings by Charles
Martin and may have been intended, or so Satie scholars believe
(Whiting 1999: 400-404), to be looked at as much as performed. From
the time when emblematic writing itself flourished, at least one
composition seems to function as a musical analogue. In the early
seventeenth century, Michael Maier (1568-1622) created a work
entitled Atalanta fugiens which consists of fifty musical
settings in a fugued style, i.e. with voices imitating one another,
accompanied by emblems and epigrams. Also known as "Michael Maier's
alchemical emblem book," Atalanta fugiens is specifically
intended to be appreciated "per oculis et intellectui."
Yet the field of music encompasses
compositions that manifest a
much rarer combination of talents than a dual aptitude for poetry and
painting (like that of William Blake), music and painting (like that
of Arnold Schoenberg), or music and poetry (like, more recently, that
of Kurt Schwitters). This unique combination is synaesthesia. In
correspondence with some painters who claim to be putting on canvas
the hues communicated to them in musical sounds, composers endowed
with the gift of seeing colors when hearing pitches or chords may
purport to be creating a work consisting of sound and color. In the
case of a composer who, like Olivier Messiaen, expects his audience
to "see" with their inner eye the hues expressed in his chords
(Messiaen 1944, Griffiths 1978), the visual component is, for most of
us, beyond our perceptive abilities and thus beyond verification;
these works thus do not literally involve two media. The composer's
assertion refers to a very private reality, which is not easily
shared with an audience and the details of which have to be taken on
trust. By contrast, in compositions like Alexander Scriabin's
Prometheus, notated for clavier à
lumières in addition to the instruments of musical
performance, the audience does enjoy a bi-medial performance.
Moreover, analysis reveals that the correlations of sounds and colors
are part of a complex system of spiritual symbolism (Mirka 1998).
The second musical equivalent to Lund's
"combination" are settings
of one text in another medium. While often intriguing in themselves,
these also constitute a hybrid form in comparison to the more
particular phenomenon of musical ekphrasis. Whenever a poetic text is
set as vocal music, or a dramatic text as opera (or, for that matter,
a musical composition as ballet), the original medium is
inflected rather than transformed. Granted, in
vocal
music, intonation---one of the many features of vocal language---is
modified; secondary features dependent upon or related to intonation,
like speech tempo, word spacing, etc., may be more or less affected,
and structure may occasionally be expanded by repetitions. All other
aspects of the original text, however---vocabulary and syntax,
metaphors and allusions, the mode of expression and the objects
spoken of---will characteristically remain completely untouched. The
instrumental accompaniment may be anything from servant to partner
(and, in recent times, even competitor) to the vocal part, but it is
not typically entrusted with creating a self-contained musical
transformation of as many aspects of the poetic model as possible.
Rather, we often speak of it as "supporting" the vocal line or
"painting a backdrop" for it. Such accompaniment acts as a musical
illustration of and to the poetic text.
This is not to argue that vocal music can
never include ekphrastic
means. However, the genres---opera, oratorium, and the lied
mainly---are more characteristically perceived as instances in which
a message conveyed in a verbal text is supported and perhaps enhanced
in the musical parameters chosen to realize and accompany the verbal
utterance. Works in which the music is made to convey a subtext that
considerably transcends or slants that communicated in the words it
sets is as rare as it is fascinating; for examples, see my studies of
Alban Berg's Altenberg-Lieder (Bruhn 1998b) and of Paul
Hindemith's two divergent interpretations of one of Rilke's poetry
cycles (Bruhn 2000b). Yet these exceptions notwithstanding, I agree
with Roger Scruton that it is "necessary to distinguish music which
purports to carry its narrative meaning within itself from music
which is attached to a narrative arising independently, whether
through the words of a song or through the action of a dramatic work"
(Scruton 1980: 285).
The case is somewhat more complex when a
choreographer chooses a
piece of music to which to compose a ballet. The possibilities range
from cases in which the music is used primarily as an aesthetically
satisfying vehicle for the choreography, to cases in which it
actually inspires a conceptual interpretation. In order to
distinguish with confidence between the two, one would ideally need
to create an artificial situation in which one could focus on
choreographies in a silent performance---as, for instance, on video
recordings with the sound turned off. The question would then be
whether such a purely kinetic work could be experienced as a
transformation of (essential aspects of) the musical compositions in
any of the myriad ways in which ekphrastic poems, often read without
the model being present, relate to the works of visual art to which
they owe their being.
This brings me back to Lund and his second
type of relation.
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The second sector of my field of research
I call integration. Here a pictorial element is a part of the
visual shape of a literary work. Whereas pictorial elements in a
combination have relatively independent functions, a pictorial element
in an integration cannot be removed without destroying the verbal
structure. Integration means that verbal and visual elements constitute
an overall unity which is not reducible to the sum of the constituting
elements. In this sector we find stanzas in the shape of a goblet or
hourglass and the like in the pattern poems of baroque poetry, as well
as Apollinaire's Calligrammes and the concrete poetry of
Modernism. (Lund 1992: 8-9)
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The integration of verbal and visual
expressions into musical
compositions includes many examples that need little reflection:
neither verbal performance instructions nor the visual element of the
musical notation itself would normally prompt us to think that we are
dealing with a relationship between two art forms, although both
instances meet the condition: both will not be encountered
independently of the musical content. Musical notation would not be
in existence without the content it aims to perpetuate, and
compositions would not have survived---or at least not in a condition
as close to their original design---without the help of some means of
record-keeping. Similarly, performance indications detached from the
music to be performed make no sense, while music conceived with
expressive nuances that cannot be specified unequivocally outside the
verbal medium loses a valuable dimension when deprived of these
directions.
While these examples of integration hardly
concern us here, there
are several other cases that would require answering our initial
question about the relationship of music to its stimulus with "the
visual or the verbal in music." Music knows the equivalent to
"stanzas in the shape of a goblet," integrating a strong visual
element. The most obvious examples can be found in compositions
written in graphic notation. This system, in which a composer
specifies (or, more often, merely suggests) aspects of an intended
performance, developed from the verbal directions found in earlier
scores. These are now expanded and, in part or in toto, replaced by
imaginative symbols that aim to activate the performer's creative
participation. Known at least since the middle of this century (see
Morton Feldman's Projections of 1950-51), this notational
practice has moved more and more into the area of a non-specific
analogy of sign and intended content, inviting the performer's
creative response rather than a translation of signs regulated by
conventions. However, I doubt that we are generally dealing here with
a "piece of visual art" even at the simplest level of the term.
Notation, in all cases, is graphic in nature. And while an explicitly
graphic notation of music that claims to do without any kind of
"alphabet" or transliteration of clearly delineated phenomena often
takes the idea into interesting territory, I would hesitate to count
such scores among the "integrations of music and picture."
Conversely, Kurt Schwitters's famous Ursonate and many works
of Hugo Ball have shown us that "poems in the form of musical sound
patterns" are equally possible.
Then there are cases in which visual
elements that originate
outside music appear integrated into a piece of music. One example
occurs in scores that are visually arranged in such a way as to
suggest depicted objects. (In this sense, the scores of Sylvano
Bussotti could be compared with concrete poetry, in that the visual
aspect of the written form conveys a message of its own.) In other
cases, a constituent part of the musical language is based on a
linguistic component which would not necessarily appear independently
in a poem or drama; themes shaped on the basis of letter-name
allusions (B-A-C-H etc., see above) fall into this category. Finally,
as if in combination of the implicit graphic aspect and the implicit
letter names, a musical score may contain elements that are
graphically both musical and verbal text. The most striking example
that comes to mind is the title page of a composition for male chorus
written in the ghetto Terezín by one of its inmates, the
composer Pavel Haas. Besides the title itself, Al S'fod, and
the usual information regarding composer, poet---Jakov Simoni---and
scoring, Haas decorates the title page with musical notes that, while
they are carefully placed on their staves, are actually adapted to
look like Hebrew letters. The camp authorities would hardly have
recognized this, but the ones for whom the message was intended did:
it reads "Mazkeret lejom hashana harishon vehu acharon begalut
Terezín"---In remembrance of the first and also last
anniversary of the Terezín exile (see Karas 1985: 80-81).
Furthermore, musical scores may be
accompanied by verbal and
visual texts in the form of epigrams and illustrations. Since
epigrams are frequently quotations from extant literary works, they
could, of course, stand alone and in that case would not concern us
here. Illustrations in musical manuscripts, however, form a category
of their own. Prior to Satie's sketches in the early twentieth
century, they were known primarily from manuscripts of late medieval
and Renaissance music. An example is the famous Chansonnier
Cordiforme, the "heart-shaped chansonnier." More fanciful than useful
for music making, the manuscript shows a kind of troubadour song
written into a preciously illuminated heart. Similarly, the visual,
verbal, and musical components appear almost inseparably integrated,
and the artistic ingeniously blended with the practical, in the
manuscript pages of fifteenth-century canons. Thus in a four-part
untexted canon by Bartolomé Ramos de Pareja (c1440-1491), the
single staff containing the musical sequence is bent into a circular
shape and set, in golden ink, against a background colored the deep
blue of the sky. Wind spirits blowing from the four sides of the page
into the notes indicate the entry of the four voices, while the
calligraphy fitted into the circle reveals the composer as a music
theorist, who informs singers about the modes they will detect in the
four-part harmony resulting from the proper execution of this
canon.
Opera as a genre typically relies on
integrating a verbal text
into the composition in such a way that both elements, lyrics and
music, when represented separately, seem to be lacking an essential
complement. When composers (like Hindemith in the case of
Mathis der Maler and The Harmony of the World)
prepare symphonic excerpts of their operas, they conspicuously rely
almost exclusively on segments that were purely instrumental music in
the first place: overtures and orchestral interludes (Bruhn 1998a:
336-340). Conversely, original libretti, i.e. dramatic texts written
explicitly as textbooks for operatic setting, notoriously lack the
subtleties a theatrical audience would expect, and the few attempts
to perform an operatic libretto on the stage of a lyrical theater
have yielded rather disappointing results (Gier 1998). Yet the
constituent parts of opera---the libretto on the one hand and the
"pure" music on the other---are also capable of functioning
independently to a greater degree than is the case in the pattern
poems Lund mentions. While the visual element in an hour-glass poem
is nothing but an empty outline (and usually a fuzzy one, for that
matter) once the words are taken out, the same cannot be said for
librettos. Many of them may be of a crude if not unpoetic kind when
taken as dramatic works; but, as the now established term
"Literaturoper" indicates, there are a number of literary works that
originated as dramas and continue to exist as such, before and after
their transformation into an opera. Yet these are exceptional cases
and certainly not the rule, and the "music alone" or "drama alone"
typically differs from the corresponding component that forms a
constituent part of the opera. This brings me to Lund's third
type.
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In the third category---which I call
transformation---no pictorial element is combined with or
integrated into the verbal text. The text refers to an element or a
combination of elements in pictures not present before the reader's
eyes. The information to the reader about the picture is given
exclusively by the verbal language. (Lund 1992: 9)
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This, then, is the case of a poem or
painting being transformed
into music-the focus of this study. Where
transformations appear in poetry or prose about
painting, they
are referred to as ekphrasis. In music, such ekphrasis can take as
its object a work of literature (as in Ravel's piano composition,
Gaspard de la nuit, whose three pieces are musical
transformations of three poems by Aloysius Bertrand; see Bruhn 1997a:
181-228) or a work of visual art, on which I focus here. Among
compositions re-presenting literary texts there are symphonic works
on Symbolist drama (Charles Martin Loeffler's and Bohuslav Martinu's
compositions on Maurice Maeterlinck's marionette play, La mort de
Tintagiles, and Schoenberg's work on Maeterlinck's drama,
Pelleas und Melisande) as well as musical works about
poems
short and long (Schoenberg's sextet Verklärte Nacht on a
poem by Richard Dehmel and Elliott Carter's transmedialization, in
Concerto for Orchestra, of Saint-John Perse's epic poem
Vents). Musical re-presentations of paintings include musical
"triptychs" that twentieth-century composers base on works of
quattrocento artists (see, e.g., Ottorino Respighi's Trittico
botticelliano and Bohuslav Martinu's Les Fresques de Piero
della Francesca), transmedializations of Romantic paintings
(e.g., Serge Rachmaninov and Max Reger on Böcklin's Isle of
the Dead), three musical ekphrases on an early modern work by
Paul Klee (see Peter Maxwell Davies's, Gunther Schuller's, and
Giselher Klebe's compositions, all bearing the title, "The Twittering
Machine"), or the responses, by two contemporary Danish composers, to
drawings by M.C. Escher (Per Nørgård's "Ant Fugue" from
Prelude and Ant Fugue [with Crab Canon]: Hommage a M.C.
Escher, and Hans Abraham's Three Worlds).
Compositions that function as musical
ekphrasis may be identified
by their titles, which occasionally include explicit reference to the
artist on whose work the composition is based (Trittico
botticelliano), perhaps even together with a generic allusion to
the transmedialized artwork (Les Fresques de Piero della
Francesca, The Chagall Windows) or specifically identified
(The Twelve Jerusalem Chagall Windows). In other cases,
composers may consider the artwork's titling so unique as to serve as
an unambiguous marker (Isle of the Dead, Twittering
Machine, La mort de Tintagile, Pelleas und
Melisande). Occasionally there may be what seems like an
overabundance of verbal markers, for example when Hindemith entitles
an instrumental composition "Hérodiade (de Stéphane
Mallarmé)" and, in addition, places half-sentences from
the poetic text above the staves at every significant structural
juncture of the music, making it clear that the music follows the
poem chronologically (a procedure which is by no means common;
contrast, for example, Ravel's re-presentations of Bertrand's poems).
At the other end of the spectrum there are cases in which the title
of the musical work is not sufficient to convey the source. Among the
many reasons why this may be so, three stand out, along with what
they disclose about the very different attitudes adopted by composers
toward the re-presented artwork.
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*
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First, the source text may be little known. Non-French
audiences will often not be familiar with Bertrand's poetic cycle Gaspard
de la nuit; so Ravel convinced his publisher to reprint the three
poems in full, each facing the beginning of the musical re-presentation
in the score, thus guaranteeing access to the source works for anybody
who cares to know.
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*
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Second, a title may provide insufficient guidance when
it is based on a pun or a sophisticated quotation from a third-party.
This is the case with Nørgård's Prelude and Ant Fugue:
Hommage à M. C. Escher, which plays ingeniously not only
with one of the lesser-known among Escher's works, a 1953 print
entitled Ant Fugue, but also with two chapter headings in
Douglas R. Hofstadter's famous book, Gödel, Escher, Bach
(1999 [1979]). In Hofstadter's book, technical chapters (with
correspondingly technical titles) alternate with poetic ones, which
bear musical titles. Among the latter, there are two that appear as if
linked by suggestive elisions. The first musical chapter in Part II is
entitled "Prelude . . ."; it is followed, after a chapter elaborating
on "Levels of Description, and Computer Systems," by ". . . Ant Fugue."
In this latter chapter, Hofstadter reproduces the Escher print that
also graces Nørgård's score. The "Prelude . . ." chapter
is illustrated with Escher's 1963 woodcut, Möbius Strip II,
in which ants crawl over the unending surface of the famous twisted
loop. Nørgård's own prelude, thus linked in more than one
way to the following fugue, is a play on the first prelude from the
high point of all compositions of "preludes and fugues," Bach's Well-Tempered
Clavier, which is associatively interpreted here in something like
an endless loop.
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*
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Third, the name given to a composition may even by
deliberately misleading. Such seems to be the case with Carter's
titling, Symphony for Three Orchestras, which challenges
audiences to imagine (or listen for and try to identify) the alleged
three instrumental bodies pitted against one another, concerto-style.
With listeners (and students of the score) thus distracted by alleged
intra-musical questions, the composition would be unrecognizable as a
work of musical ekphrasis were it not for the extensive preface, in
which the composer names and introduces the poet, identifies the work
on which he drew, Vents, and reprints several significant
excerpts from the poetic text.
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Finally with regard to allusive markers, a
particularly intriguing
case is that in which the composer transmedializing a visual artwork
points at the specific source text by way of one or several musical
signifiers. An educated audience listening to a performance of
Respighi's Trittico botticelliano, either in the concert hall
without access to a program that would give the movements' headings,
or on the radio without the benefit of some introductory remarks,
will smile with recognition at the opening sounds of the initial
movement. The first sixteen measures constitute a (modified but
immediately identifiable) quotation from one of the most memorable
phrases in the first of Vivaldi's Four Seasons violin
concertos, "Spring." Considered in the context of Meir Sternberg's
comprehensive theory of "quotation" as mimesis of discourse, where
the represented object "is itself a subject or manifestation of
subjective experience: speech, thought, and otherwise expressive
behavior" (Sternberg 1982: 107), Respighi thus presents us with a
multiple ekphrasis. By means of something like the musical equivalent
to indirect speech, the composer draws our attention to the season of
blossoming flowers (and love) as the suggested object of
representation. Moreover, the extraordinary amount in this movement
of what musicians refer to as "timbral coloring," achieved above all
with the aid of tuned percussion instruments like glockenspiel,
celesta, xylophone, etc., recommends the movement as one in which
music "paints." Finally, the movement comprises two additional
musical "quotations" (as Sternberg employs the term): an
allusion---through characteristic rhythmic and melodic figures---to
the (musical) genre of a "Renaissance dance," and a troubadour hymn
to spring, the latter a signifier linking the time of blossoming even
more unambiguously with idealized love. For the (admittedly rare)
listener capable of identifying even these more esoteric mimetic
inserts, the imagined listening experience, unencumbered by verbal
information, might yield sufficient hints to identify the source
text. As a painting in Renaissance style about spring and idealized
love, Botticelli's --- may well be the first that comes to mind.
Attuned to the "universals of quotation" (Sternberg), this compound
of second-order mimeses thus serves as an intralinguistic (i.e.,
musical within the language of music) marker alerting the audience to
the (extra-musical) object of re-presentation, a specific work of
visual art.
When transformation of an artwork is brought
onto the theatrical
stage and blended with the miming aspect of that genre, the result is
a case of enactment. I know of at least three compositions
based on serial paintings that can be shown to contain distinct
elements of enactment: Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Paul
Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, and Arthur Honegger's La
danse des morts. Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler
integrates and musically interprets several panels from the
Isenheim Altarpiece, the masterpiece of the operatic
protagonist's historical model, Mathis [or Matthias]
Grünewald (see Bruhn 1998a: 340-350). Stravinsky's opera The
Rake's Progress, the stimulus of which is a series of eight
engravings etched in 1735 by William Hogarth, is written after a
libretto in which W. H. Auden, with the help of Chester Kallman,
dramatized the story told in the etchings. The fact that the
Auden/Kallman libretto is a literary ekphrasis in itself, which
Stravinsky then casts into musical form, sets this case of musical
enactment of a pictorial source apart from the third example. For his
oratorio La danse des mort, based on Hans Holbein's Totentanz,
Honegger uses texts that, while "authored" by Paul Claudel, are
actually compiled from the Bible and assorted folk-songs. As such
they constitute something akin to a verbal embodiment of the common
source that inspired both the artist and the composer, rather than
Claudel's ekphrastic reaction to Holbein's artistic rendering. The
situation is very similar in the case of Leoš Janácek's
composition The Lord's Prayer in response to Josef
Kresz-Mecina's panels, a work the composer based on five tableaux
vivants he had devised himself (Fink 1988: 122-124). Here, too, the
text predates both the visual artwork and its musical
transmedialization.
Compositions rendering ekphrastic
poetry---i.e., poems that are
themselves transformations of pictorial texts---usually constitute
not cases of musical ekphrasis but rather mere settings (see my
distinction above). Francis Poulenc's songs on Guillaume
Apollinaire's Le bestiaire, whose poems are in turn based on
woodcuts by Raoul Dufy, fall into this category. So do Poulenc's
settings of Paul Éluard's poems Travail du peintre,
which verbally represent the style and characteristics of various
contemporary painters, and Reynaldo Hahn's similarly inspired
Portraits de peintres after poems by Marcel Proust.
Poulenc
also set Apollinaire's Calligrammes, which are not "poems on
pictures" but rather "poems in the form of pictures" (so-called
"picture poems")---a form that is necessarily lost once the text, now
used as lyrics for songs, is fitted between the staves of musical
notation. At the other end of the spectrum, verbal ekphrasis may
indeed stimulate musical ekphrasis in a musical work that then
presents, as it were, a third-level transmedialization. Thus
Debussy's piano piece Clair de lune in Suite Bergamasque is
based on Paul Verlaine's ekphrastic poem (by the same title) after
Antoine Watteau's painting, Fêtes galantes.
Finally, the composer's musically
transmedializing a work of
verbal or pictorial art may inspire a creative artist working in a
third medium to extend the ekphrastic process even further, adding
yet another level of re-presentation. The cases of two-phase
transmedialization in which I have been most interested are those
involving three different media each: from the pictorial to the
verbal and on to the musical (as in Honegger's oratorio, La danse
des morts, written---with the mediation of a text that Claudel
compiled from the Bible and other sources---on Hans Holbein's
Totentanz series), from the pictorial to the kinetic on to the
musical (as in Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione---on Giotto
frescoes of Saint Francis of Assisi, in the Bardi Chapel of Santa
Croce in Florence, via Léonide Massine's choreography), or
from the poetic model to the musical transformation to the visual or
kinetic interpretation (as in the two ballets written on Claude
Debussy's and Hindemith's Mallarmé-based symphonic
compositions: Vaslav Nijinsky's Après-midi d'un faune
and Martha Graham's Hérodiade; see Bruhn
2000a).
The central questions I have been asking
regard the scope and
nature of this interart, intersemiotic transmedialization and can be
summed up as follows:
|
*
|
What choices do individual composers make in their
quest musically to transmedialize a pictorial or literary
representation?
|
|
*
|
Do these choices, situated within a certain historical
and cultural context, allow us to ascertain and describe a new
"convention" of intersemiotic transformation?
|
|
*
|
Does the range of ekphrastic stances adopted by
composers toward works of verbal or visual art (mimesis,
supplementation, association, interpretation or recontextualization,
playful response, etc.) parallel those observed in ekphrastic poets?
|
3 Means of Musical Transmedialization
In the following examination of the possible
scope (and
limitations) of the undertaking to reflect images in tones, I will
draw on three groups of symphonic compositions based on visual
representations: a musical "triptych" in three paintings by Sandro
Botticelli, two cyclical compositions on Marc Chagall's Jerusalem
Windows, and three short works by unrelated composers on Paul Klee's
The Twittering Machine (see Table). In passing I will
also
mention two hybrids: Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione, a ballet
music on Giotto's Saint Francis frescoes in the Bardi chapel at Santa
Croce in Florence, and Honegger's La danse des morts, an
oratorio for which Claudel compiled a text mainly from biblical
verses. In these two cases, the choreographer and the poet
respectively share the response to the work of art with the
composer.
Table 1: Examples of musical ekphrasis
|
ARTIST
|
WORK
|
EKPHRASTIC WORK
|
COMPOSER
|
|
Sandro Botticelli
|
Primavera
L'adorazione dei Magi
La nascita di Venere
|
}Trittico botticelliano
|
Ottorino Respighi (1897-1936)
|
|
Marc Chagall
|
stained-glass windows,
synagogue, Jerusalem, Hadassah-Hebrew Medical Center
|
(1) The Twelve Jerusalem Chagall Windows
(2) The Chagall Windows
|
Jacob Gilboa (1920-)
John McCabe (1939-)
|
|
Paul Klee
|
Die Zwitschermaschine
|
(1) "The Twittering Machine" from
7 Studies on Themes of Paul Klee
(2) Die Zwitschermaschine
(3) "The Twittering Machine" from
Five Klee Pictures
|
Gunther Schuller (1925-)
Giselher Klebe (1925-)
Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-)
|
|
Hans Holbein
|
Simulachres et Historiées Faces de la Mort,
wood cuts
|
La danse des morts, oratorio
|
Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)
with poet Paul Claudel
|
|
Giotto
|
7 frescoes on St. Francis of Assisi, Bardi Chapel,
Santa Croce, Florence
|
Nobilissima Visione, ballet
with choreographer Léonide Massine
|
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
|
One way of exploring the ability of music to
transmedialize works
of visual art is to arrange the devices that a composer chooses in a
single work of ekphrasis on an imagined scale between, at the one
end, the iconic or "natural" and, at the other end, the allusive or
"arbitrary." Ottorino Respighi's instrumental interpretation of
Botticelli's three paintings is a case in point. The Italian composer
exploits the entire spectrum of depictive means available to the
musical language. There are even moments in his work that come very
close to onomatopoeia. Respighi uses an (extant or convincingly
imitated) Renaissance dance ("dance" here refers to a musical genre,
not a choreography) to make us hear the music to which the three
Graces in Botticelli's Primavera --- sway. In another
musical section, he quotes one of the most famous troubadour
songs---which happens to be a hymn to spring and is thus doubly
suitable for a transmedialization of the painting
Primavera---to signify the concept of idealized love
that,
according to the Neoplatonic views informing Botticelli's allegorical
paintings, was epitomized by Venus. When the composer colors the
refrain of the troubadour song with harmonics (high,
ethereal-sounding overtones) in the violins, he relies on our
visual-conceptual comprehension of this musical device as a
representation of loftiness; we are invited to understand that he is
pointing to the "elevated" nature of the love to which the Florentine
artist dedicated his painting about Venus.
While music is no doubt "a language," we all
know that it cannot
label or describe directly; it cannot simply say or show "red" or
"green", "behind" or "in front," "apple" or "chair." In order for a
music listener to understand how music responds to a work of art, it
is even more necessary than in the case of an ekphrastic poem that
the beholder be acquainted with the stimulus. The significance of the
listener's familiarity with the primary work of art increases in
proportion to the degree to which a composer establishes original
links between musical means and the extra-musical content of that
primary work. Musical gestures of military prowess as suggested in
trumpet fanfares and drum rolls, or the depiction of narrowness in a
melody with a strangely restricted pitch range carried by a leading
voice, convey distinct pictures of triumphant, potentially
threatening force and (physical or emotional) constraint
respectively, whether or not an audience is capable of associating
the agents in the suggested scenarios with fictional characters in
the primary artwork. By contrast, a harmonic is just an overtone. A
harmonics-inflected tune from the troubadour repertoire may be
assumed to signify elevated love whether or not a listener identifies
the genre and retraces the connection to idealized adoration.
However, it requires familiarity with the painting being referred to,
as well as knowledge of the general humanistic ideas informing
depictions of mythological content in the era of Neoplatonism, if an
audience is to follow Respighi as he represents, through this
symbolic attribute, Venus the goddess of divine love as painted by
Botticelli.
Intersecting with such an imagined scale
from the iconic to the
allusive is another, one defined by the nature of what is being
transmedialized. Composers may set themselves the task to represent
in their music not only a content imagined as a scene or story, but
beyond that the artistic language in which this content was first
expressed, its form, and even stylistic or otherwise idiosyncratic
details of the primary representation.
Music can take as its point of departure the
medium employed in
the original representation. A composer may aim to capture the
multiple fragments in identical or similar hues by which
stained-glass windows are distinguished from other visual
representations, stringing together "shards" of music by way of
multiple repetition, including even an emulation of the variations in
color owing to thinning intensity close to the edges; all this and
more can be found in Gilboa's The Twelve Jerusalem Chagall
Windows. Or, in cases where a medium becomes part of the content,
a composer may draw his or her inspiration from the element suggested
within the primary representation. Thus McCabe, in responding to the
visual representation of water that Chagall incorporated in his
portrayal of some of the tribes of Israel, uses the shimmering effect
of an aleatory texture with multiple layers to create musical images
of water in the corresponding sections of his composition. Music can
also translate an implied component of the image, as Davies did when
he organized some of the basic musical entities in his "Twittering
Machine" in a precisely overlapping fashion that imitates
the---invisible but no doubt necessary---cogwheels in Klee's
contraption. All three cases constitute "iconic" manners of musical
depiction.
A musical transformation can tangibly point
to the time in which a
scene or story is placed. The time may be that of Saint Francis of
Assisi's twelfth century (conveyed through the use of a
trouvère song from the era, as in Hindemith's Nobilissima
Visione based on Giotto frescoes) or that of twentieth-century
technology, which informs "twittering machines" and other
contraptions (suggested through the use of serialized pitch
organization in Schuller's composition or of motoric rhythm in
Klebe's piece).
A composer can invite the listener to draw
for his understanding
of the ekphrastic pointer on a shared pool of musical signifiers,
through the citation of existing musical material. Respighi's
composition begins with a rather obvious paraphrase of the first
concerto in Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Since that concerto is, of
course, entitled Primavera, he thus creates by quotation an
allusion to the "spring" of Botticelli. Later in the same work,
Respighi suggests the orchestral palette which his Russian teacher,
Rimsky-Korsakov, had employed in his composition
Shéhérazade, and by doing so places his
musical
representation of the "Adoration of the Magi" as an event occurring
in the Orient.
Last but not least, as the fortuitous cases
of several composers
responding to the same work of art demonstrate, the range of possible
approaches is open not only with regard to the question how
something will be re-presented or re-told, but just as much by the
choice of what aspect of the primary artwork, or what angle of
its interpretation, is chosen to be foregrounded in the musical
transmedialization. While Davies and Schuller focus on the joint fate
of the four pathetic bird heads attached to Klee's crank, albeit
allowing for very different degrees of rebellion versus helpless
compliance, Klebe sees in the same painting four individuals taking
very different stands under shared duress. And while Gilboa feels
inspired by a combination of the words heard in Jacob's blessing and
the radiant, translucent play of light through glass seen in
Chagall's windows, McCabe concerns himself with the dynamics
prevailing among the twelve brothers and tribal ancestors as both the
biblical patriarch and the artist presented them.
As my close reading of these case studies
has convinced me, there
is no parameter of the musical language that cannot be used in the
service of depicting or referring to an extra-musical reality in
general and, more specifically, an extra-musical work of art with its
form and content. At best, preferences can be observed in the means
chosen by individual composers. Almost all facets of rhythmic
structuring have at one time or another been employed to convey
affect. Double-dotted attacks characteristically stand for allusions
to "fate," while the play with syncopations and other rhythmic
irregularities often serves to capture ambivalence. Rhythmic
flexibility is often employed to epitomize the concept of freedom,
especially the freedom from the constraints of conventions. By
extension, rhythmic flexibility may stand for a cliché
characterization of a cultural other---be it the King from the Orient
at the beginning of Respighi's "Adoration of the Magi" or the faun in
a composition by Debussy: both are musically represented in
rhythmically very elastic woodwind melodies. By contrast, rhythmic
monotony evokes different associations, depending on the context in
which it is heard. In connection with extensive note repetition and
percussive sounds, a listener will hear monotony as combative energy
(as in the "Judah" of McCabe's Chagall Windows). In a largely
homophonic setting, rhythmic monotony reminds one of
machine-generated noises; this plays a role in the first movement of
Klebe's Twittering Machine.
Pitches, the smallest units of diastematic
material, are used as
signifiers both individually and collectively. (To give an example
from a musical ekphrasis of a verbal text: Debussy in his
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune,
based
on Mallarmé's poem, employs two pitches as tonal centers
throughout the composition to represent the two competing aspects in
the faun's perception of what happened to him---the thwarted sexual
adventure and the invention of the flute made from reed, or the
sensual versus the aesthetic.) The connection of two or more pitches
into intervals or chains thereof plays a significant role in musical
representation in general. Drawing on the signification of certain
intervals established in the context of the rhetoric-of-music
tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mentioned
above, composers may employ tritones and semitones as a contrast to
perfect fourths and fifths to distinguish emotional insecurity from
self-assurance. Schoenberg thus employs the semitone, the smallest
interval in the traditional scale of Western music, and the allegedly
unsingable tritone, that artificial interval created through the
bisection of the octave which was long dubbed diabolus in
musica, in the material characterizing the women in his musical
re-presentation of Dehmel's poem, Verklärte Nacht
(Transfigured Night), and of Maeterlinck's drama, Pelléas
et Mélisande. Semitone and tritone stand for human
smallness and the not-quite-accepted, respectively, while the
"perfect" intervals, as emblems of consonance, express conformity
with conventional views and are reserved, in Schoenberg's
composition, for the depiction of Dehmel's self-assured "man" and for
the somewhat formal and rigid Golaud in Maeterlinck's play.
Pitches joined to form recurring motifs may
assume signifying
power either through the associations composers and audiences share
about the message implicit in certain contours, or through
context-specific relationships. McCabe's composition The Chagall
Windows, in which recurring pitch contours are used as leitmotifs
for qualities such as strength of character, recklessness, etc.,
provides particularly convincing examples of the former. In other
cases, a motif that has been firmly established in its original
contour may later recur with changes arrived at through processes
that in themselves imply distinct meanings with regard to the
extra-musical agent signified. Here, the details of the resulting
shapes may communicate inflections with regard to the emotional or
spiritual state of the entity referred to. This is superbly achieved
in Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione, where the composer invites
his listeners to follow Saint Francis's psychological and spiritual
experiences in the musical form of the unexpected transformations,
interruptions, distortions, and reaffirmations to which he subjects
the trouvère song.
Next to rhythms and pitches, the timbres of
the various
instruments lend themselves particularly well to characterizations of
suggested dramatis personae. The link between a certain sound color
and a human agent to be imagined may be based on conventional
attributes or introduced in a composition to suggest traits not
necessarily anticipated by the audience. In the first category we
find the faun's flute, the horn of the huntsman, and the drum of the
soldier. These instrumental emblems, identifying generic rather than
unique agents, function as "ekphrastic models" in the sense proposed
by Yacobi (1995, 1998); they are sonic signifiers that present, as a
kind of synecdoche, the attribute associated with their bearers in
countless works of literature and visual art. In a related sense,
bells of various kinds, including the glockenspiel, are employed the
way they have long been, as sounds indicating a quality of the
religious ritual. The organ as the prototypical instrument of church
ceremony is linked to the Christian Mass. In La danse des
morts, Honegger uses the instrument sparingly, reserving it for
moments when he intends to make tangible the loving Father
communicating with His children. The other aspect of God, the
terrible Yahweh who appears to frightened humans in fire or thunder,
the judge of human failure and weakness, is timbrally represented by
the trombone, an instrument with a long history of suggesting divine
judgment and punishment. In religious music, the instrument was often
employed as a latter-day emblem of the angelic instruments announcing
the Last Judgment, which Luther, in his translation of the Bible, had
rendered as trombones (see the trombone statements with religious
connotations in Mozart's edition of Handel's Messiah as well
as in his own Requiem, in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, Berlioz's Grande messe des morts, etc.) In addition
to its characteristic use in church music, the trombone was also
featured as a timbral signifier of divine pronouncements in opera:
see the oracle scene of Gluck's Alceste, the "sacrifice" scene
of Mozart's Idomeneo, the judgment-at-supper scene in Mozart's
Don Giovanni, and many others.
Other instrumental colors, while not
necessarily conventionally
pre-defined, nevertheless serve as intuitively comprehensible timbral
signifiers. This applies to the sounds of the trumpet for the dashing
young fellow and of the whip for brutal disposition. The bassoon,
whose often mocking and always nasal sound quality associates it with
charming humor and bucolic playfulness, offers itself as a very
appropriate signifier, especially for pastoral scenes.
Finally, regarding the means available for
the musical
representation of extra-musical content in general and the
transmedialization of works of visual art in particular, all musical
parameters (pitch, intervals, harmony, rhythm, meter, tempo, timbre,
texture, structure) can be used in quotations of existing
musical material or allusions to known musical genres, to
music-related circumstances, or to other meaning-carrying content in
music. In terms of the relation of the musical composition to the
primary work of art, a musical entity then functions not as a symbol
but as a signal, in the sense defined by Susanne Langer (1967
[1953]: 26): "a signal is comprehended if it serves to make
us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood
when we conceive the idea it presents."
Allusions used to signal an "ekphrastic
model" are often marked by
timbres with conventionally fixed associations, as in the examples
listed above (the hunting call employed to typify a characters, etc.)
We find another interesting instance in the orientalizing features of
the "Adoration of the Magi" in Respighi's Trittico
botticelliano: the music thereby suggests not a trait
pertaining to a person, but a geographic locale---actually one quite
different from the solidly Italian ambience painted by Botticelli.
This example can be understood as a case of one "model" (an
orientalizing melisma as a generic attribute of the peoples from the
Eastern shore of the Mediterranean) referring to another (the
"adoration of the Magi" as a pictorial model, of which Botticelli's
painting is one specific realization). The same movement also
contains another fine example of a musically represented ekphrastic
model. The composer suggests the topos of dirge or elegy through the
combination of the lilting siciliano rhythm with the mournful color
of a slow and legato-playing bassoon, and recreates in his melopoeia
the impression given by the chants of the oriental liturgy.
When Respighi organizes some of his material
in the way familiar
from the music accompanying Renaissance dances, he reduces the full
orchestral palette to three soloistic wind instruments. These,
embodying with their slim and sober sound the aesthetics of the
neoplatonically inclined society of fifteenth-century Italy, intone
the typical irregular meters of the dance music known to have been
played at the Florentine court during Botticelli's time. This is most
certainly an eloquent allusion. It may even be a specific quotation
(as opposed to the generic ones mentioned above), but if so, the
composer must have been using a source not generally available to
today's researchers. Another passage that similarly comes close to
such quotation is the chorale used by Arthur Honegger as a recurring
theme in La danse des morts. It sounds so tantalizingly like a
hymn that "must exist" that this researcher, for one, spent weeks
trying to discover a source that, alas, remained elusive.
Such pointing quotations---insertions of
verifiable pre-existing
musical material into a new musical frame-work---may be anything from
subtle to conspicuous. In what follows, I will give examples
representing various points on an imagined scale from the obvious to
the concealed. Most typical among the materials lifted from another
musical context are syntactic entities like themes and motifs or even
entire song stanzas. They may be inserted into their new frames---in
our case, the transmedializing composition within which they are made
to serve as a musical signifier to a non-musical artwork (or an
aspect thereof)---with or without the specific textures and timbres
that originally pertained to them. With few exceptions, such
quotations are taken from one of three sources: another composer's
composition, the folk repertoire of either the composer or the
country in which the story is placed, and sacred music with its hymns
and chants.
Easiest to identify among the musical
quotations found in the
works I investigated are Respighi's two borrowings, in the first and
third movements of Trittico botticelliano, of
conspicuous figures from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Strictly
speaking, these are paraphrases, but the combination of an identical
key and octave range together with the imitation of the original
timbre and ornamentation captures the atmosphere so well that the
effect is one of having heard a bit of Vivaldi. Equally accessible is
the quotation, in Honegger's oratorio, of the "Dies irae" melody,
which is superimposed over the remaining strands of the texture in
very slow notes and thus gives listeners ample time for
identification. Respighi's rather straightforward way of quotating
from Vivaldi's "Spring" to point at Botticelli's painting have
already been commented upon; Honegger's device for evoking "that day
of wrath" in a composition that interprets Holbein's Totentanz
woodcuts in light of God's judgment of the people of Israel is
equally accessible and persuasive. But while no ardent music lover
will miss the well-known plain-chant or the snippets from the
much-beloved violin concerto, and hardly anyone will fail to make the
connection implied in the words or the title respectively, the same
cannot be taken for granted in the case of Respighi's quotation, in
the second movement of his Botticelli Triptych, of the
late-Gregorian hymn melody, "Veni veni Emmanuel." It is a specific
quotation, and yet, since the melodic contour is not that with which
we are familiar from the Christmas carol sung to the English
translation of the words, "O come, come Emmanuel," only the
initiated---scholars and lovers of Gregorian hymns---will recognize
the inset and thus benefit from the hint by hearing a further musical
signal pointing to Botticelli's Adorazione dei Magi.
Hindemith (in Nobilissima Visione
after Giotto's frescoes
on Saint Francis of Assisi) and Respighi (in the "Spring" movement of
Trittico botticelliano) each quote a troubadour
melody.
Both melodies are famous examples within their genre, but not
necessarily familiar to a general concert audience. And yet,
notwithstanding the discrepancy between the composer's intention and
his listeners' lacuna in "literacy," which in this case hinders the
identification of both the musical contours and the words assigned to
them, quotations such as these can ideally be recognized by
thoughtful music appreciators and thus signal interpretative aspects
within the transmedialized primary text. Saint Francis, then, appears
primarily not as the founder of an order of mendicant little
brothers, or as one who cares for the sick and loves even lepers, or
as one who receives the stigmata, but, in line with one of his
self-characterizations, as "God's minstrel" (Jørgensen 1955:
127), the poet-composer of the Canticle of Brother Sun.
Interestingly though, while Respighi's and Hindemith's troubadour
songs both express, by virtue of this genre, the trope of idealized
love for an inaccessible lady, they differ in the way these
quotations are used. In both cases, the material is quoted
instrumentally; but even the melody alone, constituting one component
of an original word-music entity, invites the question who is
pictured as singing. In Trittico botticelliano, no specific
singer is suggested. The quotation thus serves exclusively to point
to the main character in Botticelli's painting, Venus, and the
assumed gist of the message intended in the painting as a whole: the
representation of a personification of ideal love. By contrast, in
Hindemith's Giotto-inspired ballet music, the troubadour song serves
as the signature tune of Saint Francis and thus characterizes not the
presumed addressee of the song (the Virgin Mary) but the protagonist
of the story, Saint Francis himself.
A musical quotation may thus embody anything
from a timbrally,
rhythmically, or otherwise characterized "model" to an (ideally)
identifiable larger syntactic entity. The object of the montage may
function as a musical marker that helps define the object of the
transmedialization ("the music must be referring to a representation
of spring, since Respighi gives us a snippet of Vivaldi's
Spring") or as a window on an unexpected aspect of the
primary
artwork (showing Saint Francis as, above all, a singer---the one
thing he is not in Giotto's frescoes in the Bardi chapel). In either
case, such insets, speaking autonomously within the superimposed
frame, add a unique means by which an ekphrastic composition
communicates the viewpoint adopted in the re-presentation.
4 Variations of Ekphrastic Stance
In the 417-page "theory" prefacing his
three-volume annotated
anthology of ekphrastic poetry, Gisbert Kranz (1981-87) organizes the
attitudes a poet may assume towards a work of visual art into a
number of categories. His complex grid of cross-classification groups
ekphrastic poems in terms of (1) what they achieve with regard to the
visual depiction (transposition, supplementation, association,
interpretation, provocation, play, or concretization); (2) what their
intention is with regard to the work and its artist (to describe,
praise, critique, moralize about; to use as a didactic, political, or
sociocritical tool; to express delight, etc.); (3) what speech
attitude the poet adopts (allocutive, monological, dialogical,
apostrophizing, or epic; genetic, meditative, or cyclical); (4) what
order of reality pertains to the picture represented in the poem
(real, fictitious, or cumulative); (5) what occasioned the poem
(including the situation of the author, of the pictorial work, and of
the artist). For my present purpose. I will focus specifically on
five of the categories within the first group, i.e., ekphrastic
transposition, supplementation, association, interpretation, and
playfulness, with a view to showing that the distinction made in the
sister domain is equally relevant in the field of musical ekphrasis.
(Kranz's understanding of ekphrastic "transposition" as one of many
ekphrastic procedures seems confusing in light of the work of
scholars, from Tardieu 1944 through Spitzer 1955 to Clüver 1989,
who use it as a general designator, as in "transposition d'art" or
"intersemiotic transposition").
In ekphrastic "transposition" thus defined,
a poet recreates not
only the content of the primary work of art but also, and
significantly, pertinent aspects of its form or its arrangement of
details. A beautiful musical equivalent to this kind of poetic
transposition exists in Walter Steffens's 1966 flute-and-piano
composition, La Femme-Fleur, after Pablo Picasso's 1947
oil painting by that title. As Monika Fink (1988: 105) has shown in
her analysis of the piece, the composer achieves a stunning
translation of the pictorial structures. Picasso's painting traces a
process of abstraction that takes as its point of departure a
naturalistically rendered female nude and converts it, in a series of
consecutive retouchings, into a sunflower with a woman's face. In
correspondence with this pictorial transmutation, Steffens uses
serial technique to transmute an original melodic idea into a
pointillist abstraction of itself. Just as the contours in the
portrait are distorted and then restored to form new shapes, so is
the serially developed melodic line broken up and regrouped into new
musical entities. Fink argues convincingly that the conclusion of
Steffens's piece, in which the flute returns to the elegant melodic
phrase of the beginning, is a musical interpretation of the fact that
the gaze of the appreciator, having taken in Picasso's transmutation
of woman into flower, ends by returning to the woman when it discerns
her face among the petals.
In ekphrastic supplementation, a poet adds
to the visual
representation any of the innumerable nonspatial dimensions that a
painter or sculptor may imply but cannot realize directly: sensory
experiences, for instance, as when words describe sound, smell,
taste, and touch. Supplementation may also allow a poet to read
postures as arrested gestures and infer a possible "before" and
"after" that would enclose the captured moment. Finally, words can
attribute complex chains of thoughts and nuances of feelings to the
depicted characters, where the painter's brush has to limit itself to
more general suggestions. Among the musical works I have examined,
one relates to its model in ways corresponding to these poems:
Hindemith's Nobilissima Visione on Giotto's frescoes at Santa
Croce in Florence.
In Hindemith's composition, one is struck by
the degree to which
the composer uses means and aspects not available to the visual
artist to create a work that Giotto would have recognized as true to
his spirit. The fact that he can, without in the least straining our
image of Saint Francis, add the sonic component as a means of
expression is particularly fortuitous. The composer's representation
of the little brother of Assisi relies primarily on the saint's
devotion to joyous singing, expressed in his much-documented love for
the songs of the French troubadours and trouvères and his most
beautiful artistic creation, the Canticle of Brother Sun.
Giotto's frescoes of Saint Francis touch their beholder deeply as
they capture his modest yet blissfully radiant personality. Yet the
devout artist has no means of giving us the songs through which
Francis expresses his deep inner joy, the heavenly music he hears and
to which he dances with his improvised violin, and his praise of
Creation, which he leaves as his poetic testament. On all this, the
music dwells; here it excels.
Ekphrasis by association does not render
exactly what the eyes see
(in a visual image or on the printed page of a literary work) but,
inspired by the primary work of art, spins off new thoughts or
familiar mental or emotional connections. Two musical works that
associate without replicating details of content or form: are
Resphighi's Botticelli Triptych and Honegger's La danse des
morts.
When Respighi renders in music an imaginary
triptych of Botticelli
paintings, he transmedializes not so much the scene or story visible
in the three depictions but the associations that he himself has and
that he hopes in turn to induce in his audience. Thus, under the
title of the first of the chosen canvases, ---, the mythological
scene with Venus in the center evokes thoughts of Ficino's theories
about allegory (Ferruolo 1955). In 1478, a few years before the
painting was created, Marsilio Ficino had attributed a dual meaning
to Venus: she represents Humanity; her soul and mind are Love and
Charity. Respighi musically epitomizes these thoughts in a hymn to
spring and idealized love. The backdrop of the depicted scene and the
playful characters of Zephyr and Cloris to the right may imply a
bucolic context, which the composer renders in the form of a bassoon
theme of distinctly pastoral tone and humor. The movement of the
three Graces, seen in a circular arrangement with fingers interlaced,
evokes in him the association of Renaissance dances. In Botticelli's
Birth of Venus, the canvas that is re-presented
in the
third movement of the composition---the other "wing" of the triptych,
as it were---Respighi notes the recurrence of two of the characters,
Venus and Zephyr, and responds by recalling conspicuous features of
the Renaissance music he introduced in his "Primavera" movement. In
response to Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi, as already
mentioned, he calls to mind a late-Gregorian hymn that hails the
coming of the Savior, as well as suggesting a popular Italian
Christmas song. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the very
arrangement of the three independent paintings into a Trittico
botticelliano carries its own associations, which create an
overarching message that neither the painter, nor his contemporaries,
nor possibly any of today's art experts would have perceived were it
not for this composer's musically couched interpretation.
The borderline between this kind of
association and ekphrastic
interpretation is permeable. In the latter, the transmedializing
artist uses not associations of a personal nature, but rather
implications known to and shared by all three parties: the creator of
the original work, the responding artist, and the community of
appreciators. These familiar implications include knowledge regarding
the historical, legendary, or literary background of the scene or
story, which would typically form part of a cultural framework within
which all participating parties are embedded. Of the symphonic
compositions I chose for my study, three can be said to rely on
interpretation: McCabe's and Gilboa's musical transformations of
Chagall's Jerusalem Windows and Honegger and Claudel's joint
transmedialization of Holbein's woodcut series about the "dance of
the dead"-itself a particular instance of an "ekphrastic model" in
the sense introduced by Yacobi (1995, 1998). In all three
compositions, the familiar associations upon which both the visual
and musical representations build and on which the communication with
beholders rely are taken from the Hebrew Bible (or the Christian Old
Testament, respectively). In the case of Chagall's representations of
the twelve tribes of Israel, the Bible provides an obvious source of
association and reservoir for interpretive angles; in Holbein's work,
the connection with specific biblical passages is not self-evident
and therefore all the more intriguing.
Paul Claudel, asked to provide a verbal text
that would enable
Honegger to transmedialize Holbein's artwork into an oratorium,
associates specific sections of the Bible, especially from the books
of Ezekiel and Job, with the message he finds expressed in the
"religious" images of the woodcut series. Just like tableaux nos. 1-5
and 40-41 in the visual representation, these passages function as a
verbal frame based on biblical imagery from the Creation to the Last
Judgment that encloses an array of encounters between death and his
clients. Holbein's 1526 Simulachres et Historiées Faces de
la Mort, usually referred to in modern German as "Totentanz"
(thus a "dance of the dead" rather than a "dance of death"), might
also be read as a specific instances of an age-old folk tradition,
one that was no doubt largely innocent of the visions and spiritual
struggles of the prophets Claudel evoked. Having made the primary
association between this particular rendering of the Totentanz
with biblical prophecies and injunctions, the two authors of the
twentieth-century ekphrasis then take the artist's depictions as a
point of departure for their idiosyncratic reading. In the text and
the music of the oratorio, Holbein's less-than-pious sequence of
encounters with the beckoning skeleton is rendered, in a single
movement, as a dance of the reassembled bones provocatively singing
French folk melodies and revolutionary songs, their melodies piled
one on top of the other with open disrespect for any shared meter or
tonality. This riotous and unsynchronized cacophany seems to collapse
the sequential imagery of the thirty-four central "client-of-death"
woodcuts into a simultaneous, many-voiced musical representation of
defiance.
Yet these dancers will soon be truly dead;
Honegger's music states
this as unambiguously as do Holbein's vignettes. The artist conveys
this by way of the hourglass, another "ekphrastic model" found
throughout the art-historical canon. Hidden in different corners of
twenty-four of the woodcuts, the memento mori reminds
beholders that no matter how various the forms of the "dance"
depicted here, all of them ultimately lead to the grave. Claudel
creates a verbal re-presentation of the artistic model in his
collage, strung together from various biblical verses (Gen 3:19, and
the Song of Songs 8:6, Matth 6:25), which reads "Souviens-toi, homme,
que tu es esprit et la chair est plus que le vêtement et
l'esprit est plus que la chair et l'œil est plus que le visage
et l'amour est plus que la mort" (Remember, man, that you are spirit
and the flesh is more than the garment and the spirit is more than
the flesh and the eye is more than the face and love is more than
death.) Honegger sets this phrase by means of three musical devices
that add up to a striking transmedialization. In casting the phrase
with multiple repetitions, as a bass below a texture of ever-changing
upper voices, the composer shapes a passacaglia. This musical form,
which dates back to the seventeenth century, has been deployed by
recent composers (e.g., Benjamin Britten's Peter
Grimes, Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Paul Hindemith's
Marienleben) with a view to its figurative connotations,
suggesting a "persistent foundation" or "basic idea." In stringing
the phrase into a seamless twelve-fold reiteration and thus securing
its continuous presence beneath roughly two thirds of the boisterous
singing in this movement, Honegger takes up Holbein's
two-times-twelve-fold inset of the hourglass that apprears in more
than two thirds of the "client-of-death" representations. In
presenting the phrase recto tono (i.e., in a
rhythmicized but monotone style of recitation on a pitch repeated
throughout the entire phrase), he achieves an effect that lessens the
listeners' attention to the individual words, so much so that they
are likely to miss, the first few times at least, that this is not at
all the oft-heard admonition regarding man being dust and returning
to dust. The thought that these revelers should be spirit
appears at first quite contrary to what is expressed in Holbein's
genre etchings, at least when one focuses on the entertaining images
that make up the large central section. It is only the biblical
"frame," established in tableaux 1-5 and 40-41, that invites
beholders to interpret the popular humor shown in the
"client-of-death" vignettes as a mere veneer covering the profound
question of what humans are, perishable flesh or immortal spirit.
Expanding on this angle of reading Holbein,
Honegger (and Claudel)
reserve the remaining movements, and thus by far the larger portion
of the composition, for various kinds of reflections about death and,
most prominently, for Man's direct conversation with God. This
encounter, not emphasized in the images but owed to Claudel and
Honegger's interpretation, prompts the composer to base his work on
musical signifiers such as timbres---the thunder of God's presence,
the angels' trombones, the solo voice accompanied by a violin
obbligato in the style of a Bach aria---that shift the focus from a
(spirited, often even facetious) representation of the common fear of
untimely death to that of a deeply spiritual struggle.
Finally, as in ekphrastic poetry, the
playful stance is easiest to
recognize in musical transmedializations. In a mode similar to
Gerhard Rühm's numeric "poem" on Brancusi's Endless
Column and Paul de Vree's syllabic recreation of Jean Tinguely's
honky-tonk contraptions, Peter Maxwell Davies and Gunther Schuller
focus on the humor in Klee's depiction and respond to it with wit and
(musical) humor.
This case, exceptional in that three
composers respond to the same
painting---two in a playful way, one rather seriously---provides an
opportunity to witness in miniature the transmedializing eloquence of
instrumental music. I will therefore now turn to this case study and
explore it in some detail.
5 Three Ways of Listening to Birds on a
Crank:
Musical Interpretations of Paul Klee's Witty Criticism of Modern
Culture
Paul Klee is known to many musicians as the
artist with the
fermatas and the many musically suggestive titles ("The Pianist in
Distress," "The Literary Piano," "The Order of High C," "Old Sound,"
"A Master Must Pass Through a Bad Orchestra," "Fugue in Red,"
"Drawing in Two Voices," "The Canon of Color Totality," and scores of
wordings reminiscent of music-theoretical books). And he may well be
the envy of many a musicologist on account of his "Graphic
Translation of a Three-part Passage from J. S. Bach."
Among the many composers who have been
inspired by Klee's very
"musical" paintings, the three most prominent---the American Gunther
Schuller, the Englishman Peter Maxwell Davies, and the German
Giselher Klebe---have all gained particular popularity with just
these ekphrastic works, and specifically with the rendering of the
Swiss artist's vision of a mechanized bird concert. Klebe's Die
Zwitschermaschine created a stir when it was premiered at the
first postwar Donaueschingen Festival for New Music in 1950; Davies's
Five Klee Pictures (1959-62) alerted the musical
establishment
in England to the then young grammar-school music teacher; and
Schuller's biographers continue, despite his amazingly prolific
output during the forty years since, to speak of his Seven Studies
on Themes of Paul Klee (1959) as his most widely received work.
To judge from the literature, the three contemporaries never crossed
paths; most certainly, their compositions originated independently of
each other.
Klee created Die Zwitschermaschine
in 1922, developing an
idea he had first expressed a year earlier in the ink drawing,
Konzert auf dem Zweig (Concert on the Twig). The
miniature,
deceptively childlike and innocently witty at first glance, can be
interpreted on many levels, as the art-historical literature growing
around it confirms. Even H. W. Janson's brief description in
History of Art (1962: 527) suggests something of the depth
expressed in Klee's sparse design. "With a few simple lines," Janson
writes, "Klee has created a ghostly mechanism that imitates the sound
of birds, simultaneously mocking our faith in the miracles of the
machine age and our sentimental appreciation of bird song. The little
contraption (which is not without its sinister aspect: the heads of
the four sham birds look like fishermen's lures, as if they might
entrap real birds) thus condenses into one striking invention a
complex of ideas about present-day civilization."
The four birds, along with the slightly wavy
twig on which their
thin legs are perched, are almost identical with those Klee drew in
Concert on the Twig. Each consists of a stylized head
with an
open beak and a single eye, a stick-figure body and corresponding
single-line legs. Weird as their appearance may be, one can
distinguish four different poses. Are these different temperaments?
characters? reactions to the mechanism that supposedly drives them?
From their beaks protrude variously shaped caricatures of a tongue,
easily interpreted as symbols for the different nature of their
utterances.
Beginning from the left, the first bird,
whose body is stretched
tall with the head cocked backwards, emits a vertical form that could
be mistaken for the handle of a spoon, were it not for the precursor
drawing in which a round black dot, placed into the corner of the
beak and thinly connected with the "handle," reveals an exclamation
point. With this punctuation mark and the overall body posture,
complete with the open eye and the neatly feathered crest, the bird
seems self-possessed and assertive. It is also the only one among the
four that has a tail, albeit of wispy hair-lines only, which is seen
floating in the air in a rather relaxed manner. The second bird from
the left comes to little more than half the size of the first. This
is partly due to the fact that its legs are spread wide, as if in a
desperate attempt not to lose its footing (a fear caused, presumably,
by the whirling motion to which the twig is subjected). While the
first bird is assertive, this one is despondent. It hangs its head
straight down, with the crest falling over its open beak. The
utterance emerging from its throat is depicted as a curled shape,
limp and listless, as if wanting to coil itself back into the head.
The third bird, taller again, looks sideways and slightly down, away
from the crank that threatens all of them. The black thread of its
"song" is curved upward, combining the cunning of a fish hook with a
lack of direction. Its crest spirals downward, surrounding the
vertical stick that represents its body as if the bird were hugging
itself to give itself courage. Where the eyes in the other three
birds are small, thin black circles, this creature shows a hugely
oversized eye, white with a dark, anxiety-stricken pupil. The fourth
bird is portrayed with yet another character. As Maurice Shapiro
(1968: 68) describes it so well, it "faces forward, to the right,
advancing. His head is taut and compact; his crest streams out behind
in rays; his eye is bright and directed. From the tightly drawn mouth
there extends a needle-sharp barb, two-ply, machined like a ratch,
which is aimed in the direction of the threatening dark mass that
moves in from the upper right of the picture; faced by this
formidable creature, the clouds open and a space clears on the
extreme right. If this demoniacal woodpecker sings, the notched barb
in his throat will sound more rattle than twitter."
If these are the birds that are to produce
the twittering, what
exactly is the machine and how does it activate them? Klee limits
himself to the merest hints: a crank at the right-hand side, with a
handle large enough to appear commanding, if not threatening,
attached to a thin horizontal thread that intersects at various
points with the curved twig but ends in a wheel fastened to nothing
that the viewer can detect. Below this arrangement, there is a
rectangular shape that, to this beholder, seems to double as a
rudimentary stage for the bird concert and as a safety net should one
of them fall. The strange object seen to the left of the group of
birds will represent a music stand when perceived in connection with
the stage, or else appear as a device pertaining to the machine, both
supporting the thread that operates the wheeling motion and, with its
harpoon-like points, keeping the birds confined from any sideward
escape.
There are, then, at least three rather
different ways of reading
Klee's painting. If one chooses not to regard the stick-figures as
deliberately pitiful, one could see a witty drawing of a machine that
attempts to use birds' voices for a concerted action, driven by a
crank, and thus controlling the speed and perhaps the volume of the
twittering. This reading need not be entirely pessimistic; there
would be nothing that prevents the individual birds from varying
their tunes as they are used to doing; nor would there be any reason
why the birds, once they have recovered from their shock after the
forced motion has stopped, might not resume their singing without any
input of the "machine." In another interpretation, the denatured
birds, reduced to little else than the beaks that are to produce
predictable sounds, can be read as Klee's critique of a technological
age that has sacrificed nature and its original music to the cracking
sounds of soulless machines. This reading might include a
sociopolitical component; most likely it would imagine the birds as
deprived by an anonymous power of their liberty and
self-determination. Finally, one could focus on the four differently
characterized creatures, seeing them as epitomes of four ways of
reacting to the threat of nonsensical automatization. In this
scenario, the crank, or the fact that what Klee draws is really a
manually operated contraption and as such subject to human whim,
failure, overexcitement, tiredness, etc., may not be so central as
the possible attitudes towards any kind of impersonal interference
with basic freedom.
Peter Maxwell Davies conceived his
orchestral composition, Five
Klee Pictures, for the students of Cirencester Grammar School in
Gloucestershire, whose director of music he was from 1959-1962; he
later revised and expanded particularly the third movement, "The
Twittering Machine." With an instrumentation now adjusted to the
possibilities of professional orchestras, the revised work was first
performed in 1976 (see Davies 1978).
Three features are immediately striking in
this piece. In terms of
texture, one distinguishes three levels: a primary ostinato (a figure
that stubbornly repeats itself over and over) which is heard
throughout without pause, a pair of voices adding two secondary
ostinati, present in all but the very last measures, and twenty
further voices. In terms of notation, improvising parts exist on each
of the three levels side by side with parts in fixed notation. In
terms of emotional structure, the sixty-four measures of the
composition are laid out as a protracted increase in volume and speed
during the initial three quarters, followed by a sudden hush when the
original tempo and volume is restored, and concluding ever more
slowly, softly, and thinned out.
The primary ostinato is presented by
trombones and low strings.
Before a background of ascending triads in regular quarter-notes, the
solo cello alternates with the first trombone in presenting a curved
figure of eight eighth-notes. Each figure ascends from its first note
through flattened steps to the diminished fifth and redescends
through two raised pitches, with the result that it covers all seven
semitones within the tritone. Since this is later complemented, in
each of the two partner instruments, by the cluster between the
tritone and the octave, the primary ostinato voices really make use
of all twelve semitones. Such "all-encompassing" circular shapes seem
to paint sonic images of wheels. This impression is reinforced when
it becomes clear that each of these figures, exceeding a single
three-four measure and concluding on the first beat of the next,
overlaps with the beginning of the complementary figure---passing on
the motion as one cog-wheel to another, an ingenious musical image of
the mechanical wheel in the contraption depicted by Klee.
The main ostinato in low strings and
trombones is soon joined by a
secondary ostinato presented in the piano and four horns. However, no
sooner have listeners understood that these are ostinati, i.e.,
unchanging, stubbornly repeated figures, than the piano, soon
followed by the strings and the trombone, begins improvising on its
figure; only the horn remains "obstinate" in its repetition. The same
happens when the ostinato groups are joined, in irregular but
well-spaced succession, by the remaining strings and winds as well as
by five percussion instruments: half of them barely present a basic
form of their utterance before they begin exploring joyously free and
ever different renditions. During the eight measures leading up to
the fff climax in m. 48, twelve voices are engaged in
repeating patterns with variation of either rhythm or pitch or
contour, fifteen reiterate figures without changes, and one (the bass
drum) plays developmental changes specified in the notation.
After this climactic moment, the music
returns to the original
tempo and volume level, while the voices added to the ostinato
figures are limited to new, relaxed three-note gestures or repeated
trills. Soon, however, these "voices" drop out along with those of
the secondary ostinato, leaving only the primary patterns to fade
towards what is nevertheless heard as a sudden cessation of the
mechanical motion.
One cannot speak about the musical
impression of this
organized chaos is, of course, given that every performance, by the
same players but even more so by a different ensemble, will result in
differences on many levels. Yet whatever the details in a specific
interpretation, the general idea of the portrayal remains. The
"twittering" we hear has all the variety and simultaneous fundamental
monotony of the simple birds Klee draws. The repertoire of the voices
that are added to the basic mechanism of the ostinato patterns
consists of just a few pitches, repeated innumerable times with
little room for variation. Heard in relation to Klee's picture, the
basic ostinato patterns seem to epitomize the mechanical contraption
that, in this image of modern denaturation, launches the bird calls.
Once the cog-wheels are turning, they start gathering one bird call
after another, gain ever more momentum and intensity, and gradually
draw all voices around them into a whirling motion.
No doubt it is the machine that, with the
precision of its
movements holding a rein on all it initiates, keeps all bird calls
metrically aligned. One wonders whether Davies was only being
practical (not wanting to tax the powers of the intended first
performers---and listeners---beyond their limits) when he decided to
keep the composition in very traditional three-four time throughout,
without any of the polymetric juxtapositions his contemporary,
Olivier Messiaen, was using in the same decade for his many bird
pieces. But there may well be a statement here, one not far from what
Klee may have intended: that man-made machines deprive nature of its
glorious freedom of expression, confining it into the narrow boxes of
that which the human mind can grasp without exerting itself.
Gunther Schuller wrote his musical response
to pictures by Klee in
1959, at the same time as his British colleague (Schuller 1962). Like
Davies, he places "The Twittering Machine" in the center of a cycle,
which he entitled Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The work was
commissioned by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and premiered on
27 November 1959 under the baton of Anal. Dared.
Like Davies, Schuller makes use of musical
devices that suggest
themselves for transmedializing Klee's vision of a contraption with
wires that make bird heads sing. Ostinato figures again represent the
mechanical apparatus with its ever-recurring circular motion, and the
inflections of tempo---a gradual increase at the beginning, matched
by a slackening and return to a more comfortable tempo for the final
section---epitomize the part played by the human hand operating the
crank.
But here the similarities end. Schuller's
ostinato does not
continue throughout the piece but rather punctuates it. The first
statement spans eight measures, the second eight beats, and the third
eight sixteenth-notes; in the four-four time of the piece this
translates as a twofold diminution to a quarter. The three
participants in the ostinato differ from one another only minutely.
While the speed of their sonic attacks differs, they all play with a
four-note chromatic cluster in such a way that all four pitches are
heard simultaneously at all times.
During the second half of the initial
ostinato passage, the
representation of the mechanical device is colored with the first
"twittering" noises: individual attacks in the highest register of
two piccolos, flute, oboe, clarinet, and solo violins I and II, soon
joined by almost equally high-pitched notes in trumpet, English horn,
and solo violas. Later in the piece, once the ostinato-carrying
instruments have fallen silent, these timbres will be supplemented by
even stranger avian sounds, produced by a bassoon playing in the
highest register and a solo violoncello playing in harmonics. The
rhythm of these twitters is extremely complex, and while the volume
is different for each attack, the general level increases as the
ostinato recedes in diminuendo and thinned-out participation.
This twittering, we must not forget, is
generated by the turn of a
crank and the wires that activate (presumably artificial) avian
heads. As befits music supposedly created with the help of such a
contraption, the pitches are rigidly ordered along the lines of
serial composition.
A "theme with two variations" built from row
transformations is
followed by an eight-bar phrase that is held together by a long
ritardando, a slackening down to one quarter of the main tempo.
During this dramatic deceleration, the entire body of musical voices
descends through more than three octaves. The effect is further
enhanced in terms of timbre: the brightest voices disappear and are
substituted, if only for a few notes, by bass clarinet, contra
bassoon, trombone, and solo bass. This plunge into the low register
uses none of the tonal models introduced so far. Instead, maintaining
a continuation of the complex rhythms characteristic of the bird
calls, many of the individual voices now present not individual
pitches but falling semitones. It is interesting that the drastically
decelerating descent includes, at its slowest, falling quarter-tone
segments and ends with bass notes that, according to the composer's
marking, droop in little glissandi. This fact seems to suggest
that Schuller has in mind a very tangible image: the
twittering-machine mechanism, winding down as the hand that turned
the crank is getting tired or bored, is reaching a degree of slowness
where it no longer guarantees accurate action; the effect is like the
out-of-tune flattening of notes on a record not keeping its turning
speed.
After a brief general pause, the ostinato
figure embarks on its
much shorter second statement. All is contracted here; especially,
the crescendo that launches the cluster figures is compressed into a
single beat. During the equally abbreviated diminuendo that follows,
the "bird" voices, juxtaposed with a powerful crescendo, reverse
their earlier plunge and ascend rapidly, suggesting a powerful
rewinding of the "bird-call" mechanism. The bird calls in their high
register resume where they had left off, in such a way that the piece
works its way backward from varied phrases to the initial unadorned
one. The piece closes---or the machine screeches to a final halt---on
what may be heard as a strongly misshapen C-major chord.
Of the three composers inspired by Klee's
picture, Giselher Klebe
is the only one who focuses on the individuality of the birds and
their reactions as they are subjected to forced motion and
enunciation. He explains his goal in the preface of the autograph
(Klebe 1959): "The musical concept adopted the pictorial layout of
the picture by Paul Klee and thus mounted the four 'twittering
components' onto a 'machine'-like rack." Klebe's composition must
thus be understood first and foremost as a four-part character
sketch. The common thread that runs through the single components is
certainly full of repetitive rhythmic gestures, as is to be expected
in any musical portrayal of machines. However, it is not so much the
contraption itself that is depicted here as the way the four
creatures caught in it perceive their fate. This effect conveys
itself very powerfully to a listening audience. There is a thread
that holds together the "four birds" in their four symphonic
movements, binding sections that differ in vivacity and mood in much
the same way as the shared bondage in the teeth of the "machine"
unites Klee's birds with their different temperament.
The idiosyncratic portrayal of the four
characters in the
composition's four sections reveals Klebe's interpretation of Klee's
depiction. The first section---like the bird to the left with its
erect posture and beak pointed heavenward---is assertive and
self-assured. In fact, misleading as such simplistic correspondences
generally are, everyone listening to the music with Klee's miniature
before their eyes will be tempted to identify the slashing
full-orchestra sf strokes heard throughout the Allegro
as instances of the bird's exclamation-mark enunciation. The
refrain-like material with its irregularly interrupted
sixteenth-notes in the strings evolves a picture of anger. Its
strident sounds are the result of a juxtaposition of incompatible
semitones, a repeated D# in the second violins and an E-based figure
in the first violins and cellos. Alternating with these
straightforward calls of defiance, the motivic material shows no sign
of the paucity of expression expected from beings deprived of their
freedom. The first singer presents eight distinct melodic gestures
and one powerful rhythmic ostinato. The motifs differ in texture from
solo to homorhythmic duet and chordal setting, involve all the
instruments of the orchestra, and are tonally cast in a free form of
dodecaphony which, although it often reaches the full set of twelve
semitones, is not confined by rules of serial sequencing. The
rhythmic ostinato, presented in the percussion, is free in its own
way, observing neither metric preferences nor regular spacing between
recurrences. Much as this bird may be bound into the machinery of
percussive sixteenths that pervade the section, it manages to
maintain a large repertoire of self-expression.
In the Andante section, Klebe
portrays the dejected,
literally crestfallen posture of the second bird in a pattern based
on a dotted rhythm, juxtaposed horizontally and often also vertically
with triplets. Double basses in weary-sounding pizzicato
pulsations underlie solo entries that develop into complicated
details, as if the anxious bird found itself entangled in just too
many wires. The duet of two trumpets with cup-mutes confirms this
character portrayal in the realm of tone color as well.
The third section is deceptive in its verbal
indications. Although
the tempo marking suggests a moderate pace after the preceding slower
one, the actual impression of the music is for long stretches one of
dread-filled stasis. Here the rhythm often seems frozen, and a very
limited number of harmonic soundscapes keeps recurring. When, as a
contrast, the motion picks up, the sudden vivacity seems to suggest
madness and is far from any joy. This is powerfully conveyed by means
of a rather unusual timbral combination: an interplay of brief
staccato utterings in the piano with the xylophone and
the
drum and another very dry percussion instrument. The dramatically
enlarged eye in Klee's third bird and its strangely shredded crest
find an eerie musical equivalent here.
The recapitulation of material from the
first section, implied by
the "tempo I" in the heading of the final section, is compressed
(just as the bird on the far right is much shorter and more compact
than the craning one on the far left). This reprise includes, in its
first half, reminiscences from the two intermittent sections, as if
this bird was briefly trying on the full array of possible reactions
developed by its siblings in response to the manipulative situation.
Having thus gathered strength and, apparently, worked up a righteous
indignation (with a wild stretto of the initial motif and frequently
renewed exclamation-mark strokes in sff), this bird converts
assertiveness into raw aggression. The music concludes in an
unambiguous percussive fury, as if hurling arrows into any man-made
clouds that may dare to darken the skies of avian freedom.
As the brief description of these
compositions by Davies,
Schuller, and Klebe confirm, the three composers differ substantially
in their approach to the painting and are thus ideal representatives
of the various ways in which Klee's miniature may be interpreted.
Davies sees a satire in which the birds never give up their efforts
to outsmart the machine. True, they are bound into a wheeling motion
of ever faster rotation. But, this composer is convinced, nothing,
not even an attempt at mechanization, will ultimately be able to
stifle their expressive freedom. Instead, as the tempo increases, an
ever greater number of birds takes part in the joyous ride,
contributing ever-varied flourishes or syncopated variations of their
respective calls. Klebe does not seem to focus on the idea behind the
painting and the question who comes out victorious, birds or human
machinery. Instead, he translates the structure and concrete
components, the four individualized characters as he finds them
depicted so charmingly by Klee. Finally, Schuller's movement strikes
me as a brilliant piece of musically couched cultural criticism. A
completely mechanized set of avian squeaks is subjected to a series
of transformations that only the human obsession with abstraction
could invent. The musical picture is one of detached heads on wires,
jerked this way and that, with a result that is as mesmerizing as so
many of the high-tech contrivances characteristic of our time can be.
But the birds' voices are no longer their own, as becomes sadly
obvious when they go "out of tune" with the slowing down of the
mechanism.
Notes
1
There has been ample discussion by scholars of program music whether
the presence of a title is sufficient to bring a piece under the
rubric, insofar as this usage seems to confuse the distinction
between "a piece that expresses some emotion suggested by the title
from another that either evokes its subject or (in some more concrete
sense) actually attempts to describe it" (Scruton 1980). Since the
authorities in the field (see, e.g., Newman 1905, Tovey 1937, 1956,
Schering 1941, Lockspeiser 1973, Orrey 1975, and Scruton 1997) differ
on the issue itself as well as on the allocation of individual
compositions, the following list includes examples of both
categories. Stock items in a catalog of programmatic compositions
thus widely understood would include works from all countries of
continental Europe. Musical amateurs have at their disposition
sizeable collections of keyboard pieces from the English sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, anthologized for the drawing room and
graced with fanciful titles; see, e.g., William Byrd's suite, Battel,
whose fifteen pieces present a sequence of tableaux from idealized
war, and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book with titles like "Faire
weather," "Calm whether[sic]," "Lightening," "Thunder," and
"Clear day." In Germany, H. I. F. von Biber (1644[?]-1704)
wrote "Mystery or Rosary Sonatas" for violin, each depicting one of
the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, as well as many tone paintings,
the most well-known being Battalia for violin solo, strings, and
basso continuo, and Johann Kuhnau (1660[?]-1722) composed six
"Bible Sonatas" which, he claims in the preface, depict "the fight
between David and Goliath," "the melancholy of Saul being dissipated
by music," "the marriage of Jacob," etc. In France, François
Couperin (1668-1733) composed a musical portrait of "The Pilgrims"
while Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) undertook to render emotional
snapshots in pieces entitled "Sighs," "Tender Plaints," and "The
Joyous Girl." In Italy, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) composed large
canvases of the seasons in Le quattro stagioni (accompanied by four
sonnets, possibly his own) as well as many other works carrying
programmatic titles, such as the chamber concertos La tempesta di
mare, La caccia, Sonata al Santo Sepolchro, and Per la
Solennità di San Lorenzo. Half a century later, the Austrian
Karl D. v. Dittersdorf (1739-99) wrote twelve programmatic symphonies
on topics like Ovid's Metamorphoses and The War of the Human
Passions. Several famous compositions from the period of Viennese
Classicism first put programmatic works on the map of serious music,
notably Haydn's Creation, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and
Wellingtons Sieg (the "Battle Symphony"), and his Egmont, Leonora,
and Coriolan overtures. However, as Wagner pointed out in an essay on
Liszt's symphonic poems (Wagner 1871-1883, v), while these
compositions aimed at sketching a character or telling a story in
musical texture, their form was still determined almost entirely by
the laws of absolute music. This apparent contradiction of content
and form changed only very gradually. Beethoven's legacy determined
the developments in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth
century. Early on, the programmatic orchestral compositions by Hector
Berlioz (1803-69), Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie, took
off from the impressionistic example of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony;
they led to many further examples of musical "nature canvases,"
particularly in Eastern Europe---Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81) with
Ivanova noch'na lisoy gore (St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain)
and Bedrich Smetana (1824-84) with Vltava (Moldau) come to mind. The
"tone poems" of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) include
autobiographically inspired pieces, notably Aus Italien (From Italy)
and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), along with compositions based on
tales of pranksters and eccentric knights (Till Eulenspiegel, Don
Quixote) as well as a tone poem for which he himself wrote out a
detailed synopsis that he then exactly illustrated in his music: Tod
und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). To comment on just
one: Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly
Character, cast as a sinfonia concertante with viola and violoncello
as solo instruments (roughly for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), is a
masterpiece of musical pictorialism, with hilariously realistic
windmills, sheep, and flying horses, which paved the way for much of
the musical pictorialism in the twentieth century. The twentieth
century continues the tradition with successful compositions from
Claude Debussy's La Mer (The Ocean, 1905) to Murray Schafer's Son of
Heldenleben (1968) and Peter Maxwell Davies's Runes from a Holy
Island (1977).
2
Incidentally, Buch in his study on "Beschreibungsliteratur" does not
address the question of ekphrasis, i.e. of literary texts
re-presenting visual texts. Like the music-lovers who deem the term
program music quite enough for covering all compositions that
represent something, be it the program part of the world out there or
part of another artist's creative work, Buch considers
"Malereigedichte" a category subordinated to the larger genre of
"descriptive literature."
3
Catalogues of such figures of musical rhetoric comprise up to 160
distinct forms (Unger 1969 [1941]). The simplest overview
suggested (Buelow 1980: 795) lists (1) figures of melodic repetition,
(2) figures based on fugal imitation, (3) figures formed by
dissonance structures, (4) interval figures, (5) hypotyposis figures,
(6) sound figures, and (7) figures formed by silence. To give one
example: the group hypotyposis comprises the figures anabasis,
catabasis, circulation, fuga, hyperbole, metabasis, passaggio,
transgressus, and variatio (Buelow 1980: 798). For some of the
treatises containing original definitions, see Johannes Tinctoris,
Complexus effectuum musices (ca. 1475), Martin Luther, Encomion
musices (1538), and W. Figulus, Cantionum sacrum (1575); for just
three of the many compilations undertaken in the subsequent
music-historical period see Joachim Burmeister, Musica
autoschediastiké (1601), Gottlieb Muffat, Florilegium (1698),
Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739). Johann
Philipp Kirnberger's treatise, "Die wahren Grundsätze zum
Gebrauch der Harmonie ... als ein Zusatz zu der Kunst des reinen
Satzes in der Musik was first published in 1773 (Berlin and
Königsberg). An English translation by D.W. Beach and J. Thym,
"The True Principles for the Practice of Harmony," can be found in
Journal of Music Theory 23/2: 163-225. Connotations linked with keys
and tonalities range from the simplistic "major means happy, minor
means sad" to the more complex allusions said to reside in the Greek
modes. To give one example: Boethius (480?-?524) tells in the
prologue of his de musica (see Strunk 1965 [1950]: 82) that
"the Phrygian tone, that is, the third, sung to a musical instrument,
aroused one young man listening, the suitor of a certain girl, and
provoked him to such rashness that he wanted to break into the girl's
room at once, by force. And when the Phrygian tone was changed to
Hypophrygian, that is, the third to the fourth tone, the young man
calmed down, appeased by the gentleness of the tone."
4
David Lidov (1989) and, more recently, Robert Hatten (study in
progress) explore the creation of semantic content in instrumental
music through representations of the body. They believe that gestures
may exploit a listener's identification with motor activity (think of
the difference, when watching and hearing a violinist, of the effect
created by serene bowing that flows from an undulating upper body, as
against, e.g., furiously hacking attacks executed with tense
shoulders and neck). In extension to purely kinetic features, a
specific timbral quality created on an instrument may be
linked---quasi-metaphorically---with a particular vocal grain, as if
answering questions like "what kind of feeling would be expressed if
this timbre were that of a human voice?"
5
For the purpose of my present argument, I am using "metaphor" as
describing both placement and motion in auditory space and nuances of
affective content. For a lucid investigation of the fuzzy boundaries
and extremely varied landscapes within the territory of "musical
metaphor," see Cumming 1994: 3-28.
6
See Leonard Meyer's definition that "Musical meaning arises when our
expectant habit responses are delayed or blocked---when the normal
course of stylistic mental events is disturbed by some form of
deviation" (Meyer 1967: 10).
7
The work is listed alternatively with the explanatory subtitles hoc
est, emblemata nova de secretis naturae chymicae and the longer
Secretioris naturae secretorum scrutinium chymicum per oculis et
intellectui: accurate accommodata, figuris cupro, emblemata,
epigrammata, illustratum, opusculum ingeniis alterioribus. The music
is for three unspecified voices; the emblems are engravings in
copper.
8
This is a unique example of musical notation---albeit one appearing
out of the usual context, i.e. on the title page of a composition and
thus not intended for performance---that simultaneously functions as
verbal text. Unfortunately, as my Israeli friends tell me, not all
parts of the intended Hebrew message are entirely clear; possibly,
like many European-born and bred Jews, the composer may not have
known the language intimately enough. Given the historical situation,
however, the suggested transliteration seems like a safe guess at
Pavel Haas's intention.
----
Earlier versions of the reflections
contained in this essay were
presented at various conferences: sections 1-2 at the International
Symposium on Word & Music Interactions (Bloomington, IN, February
1998), sections 3-4 at the Fifth World Conference on Word & Image
Studies (Claremont, CA, March 1999), and the case study in the final
segment at the Conference "Cultural Functions of Interart Poetics and
Practice" (Lund, Sweden, May 2000). A developed version will appear
in vol 22:3 of Poetics Today (fall 2001). The thoughts
that inform this essay also appear in my monograph, Musical
Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting
(Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000), where especially the case
study is analyzed in much greater detail.
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