Bruckner, squared

My rejoinder to Mr. Goldman’s response below:

Aficionados of music who do not know much about music, but know what moves them, are at the mercy of the professionals, who know how to move them. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” at peril to your soul: even beautiful music can be used for evil as well as good. The problem, of course, is just what Sir Thomas Beecham observed: “People don’t like music. They just like the way it sounds.” I am the first to admit that Bruckner’s music sounds glorious. But just how is it put together?
The greatest analyst of tonal music (and the one whose theory quite properly dominates the university curriculum in the US) was Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), a Bruckner student who respected the man but found grave flaws in the music. His evaluation (republished in Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker. Gesammelte Aufsatze, Rezensionen und Kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren 1891-1901, ed. Hellmut Federhofer, Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft, 5 [Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1990], 197-205), finds that the music really doesn’t hold together: his musical phrases lack necessary connections to identify beginnings, middles, and endings. Brahms’ contempt for Bruckner’s music is well known (and this had nothing to do with professional jealousy: Brahms had signed Joachim’s manifesto against the “New German Music” long before Bruckner came on the scene).

– David P. Goldman

In all humility, while I admit to being out of my league from the standpoint of professional musicological debate, I believe, as an architect and philosopher, there is something highly elitist, if not Gnostic, about the view that only professionals have the ability to perceive the beauty or ascertain the truth of things, when it is often the professionals who are responsible for creating the academic dichotomy between head and heart that posits a schizophrenic split between experience and reality: their heads so often in the clouds they cannot see the truth or beauty directly in front of their nose, or in this case ears. Admittedly the public is often at the mercy of the “professional” in a certain sense, but history has not shown this to be unequivocally, let alone predominantly, a good thing. A simple survey of modern art, architecture, and music would likely find an overwhelming majority of its proponents among the academic elite compared with the general public, the “simpletons” who recognize the closed circle of Gnostic intelligentsia for what it itself cannot recognize itself to be. “Adults” know so much about so many things, yet unlike children they fail to see the wonder that is in front of them every second of every day, having fit the world into neat and tidy categories and boxes when being refuses to be so encapsulated, and truth so truncated.

That being said, I do not oppose grand theories categorically, only those that won’t admit of possible exception or incompleteness. Music is not simply about “what moves us”, and I do not think mine nor David Hart’s love of Bruckner is as perjoratively subjective as you condescendingly suggest. What we have discovered is that the motivic and structural nature of Bruckner’s symphonies is not cut and dried, but that his symphonies do exhibit musical motivation and structure and teleology, and at an extended scale. As an amateur musician, I am aware of Schenker’s tonal music theory (or theory of musical artwork), more from a historical/criticism standpoint, but not in a highly specialized way. A quick survey of literature out there, which I took the occasion to read over the past few evenings, also shows several instances in which professional academic musicians and theoreticians attempt to rehabilitate Bruckner’s symphonies as disparaged by Schenker (from what I could find, his 5th, 8th, and 9th), even in some cases using Schenker’s own highly narrow methodology which was supposed to be the reason for which Bruckner was cast into the outer circle of musical hell. Perhaps this reveals a deeper underlying prejudice to Schenker’s anti-Bruckner rhetoric than his theories themselves admit of. And what of those musicians/theorists contemporary with Schenker who espoused his views yet found room to love Bruckner (I speak generically because I’ve forgotten their names off the top of my head)?

Again, as I am not a professional musician, you [Mr. Goldman] would be better at wading through and discerning whether or not such rehabilitation has merit to it or meets with success, but the point stands that even professional musicians and theoreticians disagree on these matters, even from a Schenkerian perspective….all of which points to the need for the general ear test, to put down pen and paper and score and simply listen to whether or not Bruckner’s music “holds together”, to allow for intuitive knowledge and experience that may not fit the system. It is similar to the story of the famous artist who commented that Michelangelo was a horrible painter, though one can hardly agree when looking at the Sistine Chapel. And quite like Michelangelo, who no one knew quite what to do with because he didn’t fit into a certain style or mold– because his figures weren’t “natural”, because his painting technique was deemed deficient, because his architecture seemed awkward by certain standards, yet his work was absolutely beautiful– so Bruckner seems to me, and many others.

As David Hart mentioned, Bruckner’s music stretches the “boundaries of (tonal) music” as such, but perhaps such stretching is not so much a deformation as simply a stretching; perhaps it is precisely this stretching that makes way for what most Bruckner enthusiasts recognize and which you brought up in your previous post – the musical entry of eternity into time, the sacred into the profane.

Looking forward to reading your coming article.  This is obviously an inadequate treatment and discussion of things, but I would suggest that Roger Scruton’s books “Aesthetics of Music” and “Understanding Music” add ample food for thought in these matters, as they are sympathetic to tonal theory but are willing to point out the deficiencies in Schenker’s (and others’) theories.

Bruckner, on the square

I heart Bruckner.

As such, I was happy to find a fellow Bruckner proponent in David B. Hart, a frequent contributer to First Things and On the Square.  His essay regarding Bruckner and his 9th symphony came as a pleasant surprise, both by virtue of scant public knowledge as well as lack of general acclaim for Bruckner’s music.  One could reasonably come to this conclusion by conducting a simple comparitive analysis of references to Bruckner one encounters in life, whether or not such references are positive or negative, the small amount of literature available on his works, and the little attention he gets in the cycles of symphonic performances at concert halls around the world.   In other words, Bruckner lovers seem to constitute a small minority district among the voting class of western classical music.  And yet, I have actually dared to call Bruckner my favorite symphonist, though the polestars of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven perhaps loom larger in the broader context of favorite musicians.  Thus I admit that I read David Hart’s essay with a certain reverential curiosity not only for its content, but perhaps even moreso to see who would chime in the comments and what would be said, testing the validity of my general sentiments that people either know little about Bruckner, simply don’t get him, or at worst dislike him.  Sandro Magister is one such prominent example of which I am sure there are many.

The most obvious case of proof-of-point was the response from Mr. David Goldman, another frequent contributer to First Things, and seemingly far better versed in general music theory and history than myself, as I am no professional musician or theoretician, only an ardent classical music lover with a natural ear for these things. Thus I could hardly argue authoritatively, from a musicology standpoint, against Mr. Goldman’s more well-informed opinions, which I will have to read at greater length in the coming issue.  Yet, the snippets he offered gave me cautionary pause.  I often find such attempts to bracket and rate music by various pigeon-hole theories rather constricting and hardly helpful in the long run.  While agreeing that western classical music is formally Christian, and that there need to be certain objective criterion for discernment and judgment, in general I would find it difficult to accept any theory of western classical music that would posit Brahms (an avowed atheist) as its last truly great master and defender of its inherently Christian form, however much he simply inherited those forms from his predecessors. Every great classical musician stretched the previously held “canon” of forms and created new possibilities.  Obviously there is some stretching which simply amounts to breaking and noise.  However, I do not believe that Bruckner falls into this category, particularly as a cursory glance at his music and his biography reveal a man who inherited far more than just Wagnerian forms, let alone when one simply listens to his music and stops trying to overly-categorize and listening to general hearsay.  Bruckner hardly fails in any of the ways Mr. Goldman seems to imply: from a purely formal standpoint vs. a subjective impression standpoint, from a lack of teleology, nor by adhering to a faulty or “destroyed” plasticity of time in his music.  When one listens to Bruckner, as David Hart alluded to, one gets the distinct impression that we are no longer operating in purely human time (nature), that we are now on God’s time (i.e. grace, elevating and perfecting), and once we have changed our expectations to be properly disposed and receptive, it is analogous to learning how to pray again, for we all too often are guilty of putting God on our terms and on our time rather than the other way around.  Perhaps Bruckner is simply able to create sacred space and sacred time in his music by means that are not “canonical” or which do not adhere to some over-extended crack-pot theory.

Supposing that Bruckner did formally adopt Wagner’s “New German Music” approach in an exclusive way, as perjoratively suggested, perhaps another question is whether or not Bruckner could possibly have baptized (transformed, internally) Wagner’s “New German Music” in much the same way that early Christianity baptized and transformed a great deal of Greek Philosophy and Judaic culture (and lest we forget, Bruckner stated that his starting point was Beethoven’s 9th symphony, however indebted he was to Wagner for some of his musical forms).  Simply put, it seems to me Bruckner’s Catholic humility and piety seem to suffuse and inform the shape and content and time (otherwise known as the sound world) of his symphonies, and yes in a way that is dramatically different than his predecessors but which also shows a far greater inheritance and synthesis of tradition than Goldman gives credit for.  Perhaps it is our theories and concepts which need broadening and stretching,  and any music theory which preferences the ascription to an idea over and against the discerning ear itself risks pitting the head against the heart and further risks ideological suffocation and obfuscation.

Having had the opportunity to listen to the majority of Bruckner’s symphonies live here in New York at both Carnegie and the Philharmonic, while also attending those of Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, et all, I can honestly say that I have never heard a more sublime symphony than his 8th (what I would call his resurrection symphony, for all of his implied lack of teleology), as well as his 9th (arguably greater than his 8th, if only it had been finished…).  If there was any one desert island symphony, or any one symphony that seemed to best represent our nature/grace teleology, it would be Bruckner’s 8th.  One simply cannot listen to it without implicitly hearing the eschatology that “God may be all in all”, to coin a phrase a friend of mine has used to describe the sense.

On a final point of contention, as an architect, I find the argument that the “internal content” can be measured simply from the formal composition on the page without reference to the performed work to be highly specious, as if, analogously, the plans and elevation drawings of an architect were the measure of the 3 dimensional architecture itself.  Any “actual analysis of content” must be “measured” as music, which is heard, not merely notes on a page.  And so what gives me pause are traces of a theory that is unable to account for something that might be better in reality than on paper, and whose conceptual apparatus might be too constrictive to account positively for anything that lies outside its scope.  But, I look forward to reading the suggested article and reflecting further on these matters if I am off base in my remarks.

For those interested in listening to Bruckner’s symphonic works, I would highly recommend the Celibidache, Giulini, and Chailly recordings of the later symphonies (listed from slowest to fastest).  For his masses and Te Deum, Matthew Best and the Corydon singers have a fine set as well.  It should be noted that Bruckner’s masses and symphonies are magnificent sonic and spiritual journeys which require a fairly large block of time to listen to and contemplate.  They are for the musical Mary’s as opposed to the musical Martha’s of this world, and justly reward those with the patience and contemplative receptivity they require.

What is Art? (Part I)

I had hoped to write these musings sooner, but instead allowed my thoughts to simmer after the initial epiphany and its afterglow yielded to a more contemplative ‘dwelling with” in the platonic sense.  Still, a blog hardly affords one the space to develop ideas to an adequate extent, and so what follows, as will inevitably be the case henceforth, is like an intellectual iceberg in a vast sea to which I’ve taken to exploring with an ice-pick.

To the point, I was recently struck by two related thoughts– the first while enjoying a walk on a beautiful fall day in my neighborhood of Park Slope, the second while reading one of Timothy Gallagher’s books titled “Spiritual Consolation: An Ignatian Guide for Greater Discernment.”  The first introduces the question “what is art?”, while the second “what is beauty?”.  As this post will only take stock of the first occasion, I mention the second simply to denote the presence of an ensuing post or two that will make further light of these initial undercooked comments.

While walking around Park Slope, I was overcome with a sense of gratitude infused by the contemplative receptivity towards my beautiful surroundings. Such a growing ardor not only filled my vision with an inner light that spread itself out like a luminous mantle upon all the eyes beheld, bathing the world with wonder, but it seemed to demand a response from me, in much the same way that when one is given a present, particularly when it is a surprise, one should immediately respond with a resounding “thank you!”.  In the spiritual world, this thank you would be directed towards God and would entail the two-fold response of love: prayer and service (circumincessive contemplation and action).  Analogously, this is no less true with art and philosophy.

As is usual with sudden epiphanies, the flash of light experienced leaves one with a concentrated kernal with which to spend at least the next several days (and years, depending on the gravity of the epiphany) unpacking and contemplating.   The more condensed form of this latest realization is that art, in a broad sense, is precisely the creative response manifesting contemplative gratitude for the beauty of being (and hence nature) through visual and aural representation, and which takes on heightened specificity within the various “fine arts”. By extension of similitude, I realized that philosophy is essentially the response arising from gratitude at the truth of being.  In each case, philosophy or art, the necessary precursor is a contemplative wonder and grateful receptivity to the givenness of being.  More simply put, art is the love of beauty, in much the same way that philosophy is the love of wisdom (truth), in which love demands a response, in fact already contains a response within it to an extent– a resounding “thank you” to the gift, with each discipline manifesting their concretized responses in their respective ways.

There are serious and far-reaching ramifications in extending what seems to be a rather simple but somehow generally overlooked intuition, at least as I see it, most of which would require a more serious essay or book to discuss.  Of note would be a less constricted view of “art”, a more robust interpretation of the classical phrase “art imitates nature” and Aristotle’s poetics (even while retaining points of disagreement), serious divergence from some of Gilson’s viewpoints in his “Arts of the Beautiful” (and many other books for that matter), the re-introduction of the ethical question in art that has been too cursorily dismissed, a stern appraisal of most modern art as largely adolescent (exhibiting ingratitude and bad manners, if not outright rebellion), etc etc.  Least of all it would entail the salvaging of the true nature of the philosopher and artist from the wreckage of their current reductionist incarnations as meaning, more or less, “thinker” and “fabricator”, however unwitting the acceptance of their narrowing or loss of multi-dimensionality.

In short, without a genuine gratitude towards Being (and hence the givenness of Being in nature) exhibited in the two-fold dynamism of contemplative receptivity and creatively lived response– if either aspect of the dynamism is seriously impaired or lacking– beautiful art and true philosophy are impossible.

Portfolio Added

Just added a tab for posting a sampling of images and descriptions from my portfolio, with the plan to also use it to add a series of extra-curricular design studies, counterproposals, and sketches as time allows in the future.  It will also serve as a forum to discuss design theory as related to the designs.  Enjoy!

Tolstoy and Dostoevksy (according to David B. Hart)

A friend of mine forwarded this recent publication in First Things: On the Square by David Hart, one of my more recently discovered favorite authors.  However, in this comparative evaluation of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, while I agree with many of Hart’s points, loving both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I yet find myself diverging in several places, most notably at the more basic point of aesthetic theory which he uses to differentiate their artistic ranking.  Here, I have recapitulated my essential response to Hart’s essay from On the Square, but have taken the opportunity to expand a little on the issues I touched upon there.

I would certainly agree that it is possible to “rate/rank” authors/artists to a certain extent, and yet one often has the feeling that, at a certain point, as a friend of mine is want to point out, comparing the relative greatness of, say, Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, begins to get a bit dicey. I do not ascribe to the relativistic stance that simply fulfilling the aesthetic aim which one has set out to achieve creates an equivalency between artists, since it still leaves the more basic question of whether or not the objective beauty which was achieved was greater in one artist than another as well.  Just because Michelangelo and Rothko were attempting to do different things with their art, and both were proportionately successful to their aim, it does not follow that somehow Rothko was as great an artist as Michelangelo, because the final result of Michelangelo’s art is, simply at a glance, infinitely more beautiful than Rothko’s.  Furthermore, as von Hildebrand is want to point out, a flower is more aesthetically beautiful than a worm, though a worm is ontologically superior, and both fulfill their natural and aesthetic roles perfectly, thereby positing the “pleasing to the eye (senses)” as the determining principle, and hence the question of subjective judgment returns as if an uninvited guest through the back door (not that this is ultimately where von Hildebrand ends up, and nor where we would want to, but the dilemma persists at this point).

So, that being said, I suppose if the measure of the greatness of one’s literary art was the degree to which one created utterly believable, and thus utterly comprehensible characters with whom we could easily empathize or relate to, or moreover if it was the extent to which the characters could actually inhabit our world and the degree to which one was able to render beautiful and transparent the ordinary and the natural, then I would agree with Hart’s analysis at this basic theoretical point, historical/religious points of contention which he delineates not withstanding. I have always argued, like Hart, that Dostoevsky’s characters are “theatrical”, meaning they could only exist in the novel, never in real life, and that they are often “types” rather than “real” individuals. But then again, I’ve never felt this to be the founding premise of art, nor the highest criterion for tasteful discernment, and so I don’t think I can quite concur with these premises as the basis of comparative judgment for the relative merit of one’s art.  It’s like the old trick of making the rules of the game such that only you can win: if the purpose of literature, or the measure of mastery, is what Hart says it is, then Tolstoy wins.  But if it’s not, the question remains open.

Hart’s basic contention, that Tolstoy’s purely artistic greatness outshines Dostoevsky’s based on Tolstoy’s ability to create utterly believable characters and representations, reveals a certain underlying aesthetic principle which preferences, for lack of a better analogy, photographic realism to painting, or perhaps a better comparison is neo-scholastic realism to baroque art (a topic I will address in a later post, since the baroque requires a degree of rehabilitation in light of our modern sensibilities).  To me, it is analogous to saying that Canova was a better sculptor than Michelangelo, because if you look closely at Michelangelo’s work, none of his characters are “real” or “believable” in the sense that 19th century realism intends; they could not “inhabit our world” realistically because of their often contorted positions, augmented features, etc, and yet they are dramatically and formally infinitely superior to Canova’s beautiful realism, precisely because their goal is not simply to reflect reality beautifully, but to point beyond it through its depths (not that Tolstoy fails at this, but Dostoevsky, I think, is greater in this regard).

It is these depths that the artist is after, otherwise one’s art is simply pretty, not beautiful, since the work can never transcend itself (not that either author is guilty of this).  Certainly art needs to be “at home in the world”, and certainly the artist must be able to portray reality, and so in one sense, Hart’s focus is correct, and his guest is able to slip in the back-door, as it were, but not without radically changing his outfit.  It is not so much that portraying reality is not part of the aesthetic criterion, but that there are deeper levels of reality which often require “artifice” to reach (as demonstrated by Michelangelo’s sculptures), ones that Dostoevsky is able to penetrate precisely because his method and style, his tensions, dissonances, and resolutions are more suited to plumbing the depths, and his characters, either because or in spite of being theatrical, have greater ontic weight; they reveal an even greater reality than a narrowly conceived realism can account for.  If it is a certain “gracefulness of expression” that one detects in Tolstoy that one misses in Dostoevksy, perhaps comparing Raphael to Michelangelo represents a more suitable analogy, but even here the criterion becomes tendentious.  In the very least, I do not think the criterion for Hart’s judgment would hold sway across all the arts, at least as I understand it to be explicated in his essay.  Further, simply on a side note, I can agree that Dostoevsky’s characters are merely pyschological chimera no more than I can agree that Dostoevksy has so many passages which one simply has to tolerate, as if by implication Tolstoy’s long narratives do not.

Balthasar, in talking about Soloviev’s relation to Dostoevksy, points out with his usual lucidity, and far greater eloquence, the gist of my general contention:

“In ancient culture, ‘poets were at once prophets and priests’, and it is only in the subsequent division of labour that poets elevated an isolated art to the status of an idol: ‘For such priests of pure art, perfection of external form comes to be the main consideration.’  Realism quite rightly reacted against this; but ‘in the ineffectual hunt for the pseudo-real detail, the actual reality of the whole is once more lost.’  Dostoevsky had an eye for inner reality, and he is the pledge of the poetics of the future.”

H.U.v.Balthasar, GL III Lay Styles, p. 343

All of this also brings to mind the question of matter vs. form, style vs. content. Likewise, it would seem that one would have to accept a certain trajectory of Gilson’s “Arts of the Beautiful” as the starting point for one’s objective standard of judgment in order to come to Hart’s conclusions, while distancing oneself from other parts of the trajectory (the relation of truth to beauty in art).  Would one have a greater art if one was technically more procifient but imaginatively and creatively inferior to one who had slightly lesser “talent” but superior imagination and creative and compositional ability? I think I would take the latter. Is art simply in the technical mastery (Gilson), or is it in the wholistic mastery of both technical proficiency as well as imaginative and expressive power? Is the “factual truth of bodies” (Canova) more important or more expressive than the “truth revealed by bodies” (Michelangelo)?… which is the major difference between, respectively, neo-scholastic and realism art of the 19th century compared with the baroque. Interestingly, in drama, one has to “act” in order to appear real and convincing, whereas those who simply act normally appear to be bad actors. But perhaps Hart’s point is more nuanced than I am arguing…these are my first reactions.

Bach’s Havana reincarnation: Tiempo Libre

A friend of mine passed this along…it seems they have discovered Bach’s reincarnation in Havana, Cuba!  The following is a studio interview and music session with the group Tiempo Libre on WNYC Soundcheck.  My brother would be proud, considering his more recent fascination with Cuban music.  Check it out!

Seeing the Form: Introduction

For those unacquainted with the text from which this blog title is drawn (H.U.v. Balthasar’s “Theological Aesthetics, Vol. I: Seeing the Form“), the focus of this blog is an exploration of the “beautiful” in its multitudinal meanings and manifestations, with aesthetic coordinates set on that particular splendor of form found in architecture.  However, so as not to delineate my aims either too narrowly or too myopically, I should leave myself ample wiggle-room by claiming a degree of intellectual independence from both the scope and specifically theological agenda of the amazing volume that comprises the namesake of my blog, and from which I have drawn much inspiration.  My interests are simultaneously artistic, cultural, political, philosophical, and theological, and so the content will purposefully reflect these divergent but overlapping interests.  Of course, all that I write I humbly present to my public audience with the hope that fruitful discussion and commentary will ensue, not only for the sake of my own continued intellectual formation, but for the universal purpose of developing an ever-deepening appreciation and experience of beauty in all of our daily lives; to live with ever-greater wonder before the surfeit of Being.