Sean on rhapsody, the Rite and Bax

[Sean]

With 19th century Wagnerian explorations of tonality the limits of its resources came into view and only a few potential new ways to move forward emerged- the neoclassical re-exploring of older forms, the calculated forms of serialism, and the remaining tonal development including open forms of rhapsody. The review of older tonal forms was a necessarily limited if important process while serialism as intellectual contrivance independent of natural acoustics lacked convergence of the theoretical with psychological in the listener to make it opposed to art and aesthetic experience. But the development of material under its inherent and tonal impulses allied with motivic working in open form was more promising.

Both serialism and rhapsody bring the disintegration of traditional architectonics and linear thought via lateral complexity. However serialism's displacement of key reference for equality of notes, processes of foregrounding to reduce textural contrast, and maximum of contrapuntal interrelations only presuppose new pre-composed structures to work to, while rhapsody juxtaposes structurally irreconcilable material under purely artistic values. Serialism replaces linearity with a homogeneous formal abstraction drenched in anxiety and fear but rhapsody retains it within a wider material-based holistic perspective. Forward movement is inescapable yet unpredictable in a union of relative and absolute, the canvass sustained with no conceptually defined structural pillars and justifying itself via creation ex nihilo informed only by the moment's dynamics.

Late tonal writing indeed ends in minimalism with its potential for great compulsion through the attention's paradoxical location only in the moment, the real dynamics for striving onward movement being intrinsic to the present material and not derived from without. The mind refers to the Self or its still core consciousness in order to perceive and proceed, stopping surface movement to descend into itself similar to a swimmer on water stopping in order to sink. Stillness and stasis unexpectedly lie at the core of any music of passion as the Self comprises dynamic silence of seething potential energy.

Aesthetic experience and critical distance involve the attention returning back on itself in order to look deeper and understand more, not being drawn confusedly into outward and relatively defined relations. Righteousness and elation in minimalism through repetition and subtly changing and carefully juxtaposed motifs and sections issue from holistic form in Wagner during tonality's peaking and shattering. Ideas emerge, are processed and submerge again into the ecstatic whole in parallel with material within consciousness and its blissful nature.

Messiaen also examples intuitive 20th century rhapsody over external form, providing a spiritual suspension of time in an eternal rather than humanist critique and with Wagner's explicit music of love that transcends its social framing among his key influences. Harmony is seen more in vertical, for-itself and colouristic than constructional terms, comparing with 14th century ars nova style and its major exponent Vitry with his attack and fascination in the individual moment. Sectional working compares with Debussy and mysticism is traced to Scriabin's tonal explorations while birdsong from nature is accordingly incalculable yet inspiring.

Messiaen as with Glass the minimalist often requires playing at loud volume as a vertical descent into the moment to access inwardly located aesthetic content and the absolute within the relative; both also studied Hindu classical folk music rhythms. Shostakovich's Fourth symphony of 1936 moreover is further great landmark in both rhapsodic writing and the decline of art music with powerful and vigorous intuitive impulses dissolving a latent sonata form; his style developed up to this point before subsequently being obliged to compromise, foreshadowing the bankruptcy of music's wider resources.

Prior great rhapsodic music includes the 35 hour set of 570 Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas exploring the inherent possibilities of material in their narrow expressive idiom. Their basic nature again is manic ecstasy and sheer ascent in parallel with the mind's natural state of bliss and are all in one movement binary form resolving duality into unity, written in mature years without need for or distraction from other forms.

Compositional devices and techniques are detached from structural significance and juxtaposed without discrimination only as contrasting textures yet with tremendous intensity and zeal. They appear irrational, unstable, grotesque and taunting to undermine architectonic progression and dialectical thesis, antithesis and synthesis yet provide deeply musical and highly involving art; as with examples in minimalism and other music working in the moment the compulsion in listening is such that it's impossible to do much else at the same time.

The 13 hour set of Schumann solo piano music is likewise material for its own sake rather than any classical development or secondary reasons, forming static mosaics in rich textures where the whole gains unity from within rather than without, its inner logic also taking more time to absorb. There is often no stated theme and just motivic variations on a background idea, in parallel with truth hidden and unforegroundable, providing euphoria and paroxysm that is unexpectedly poised. The sophistication is at a similar height in the Piano concerto, disappearing yet surging, subtle yet inexorable.

Reality as unity and truth is Brahman or consciousness and gives rise to both mental and material relativity and the absolute inhering as its basis, along with the Dionysiac interface between the two. Here pre-rational aesthetic dynamics emerge combining absolute with relative or autonomous stillness with heteronomous worldly meaning and movement, and which the intellect needs to find alignment with. And the definition within the arts of reality's basis in truth via the Dionysiac, rather than via Apollonian relative and conceited frameworks of critical distance and reconciliation lying above, is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring of 1913 in the midst of tonality's crisis.

This is the central post-Wagner work in music, comprising juxtaposed and sectional material related only by dynamic tendency with the attention located in the moment and not confused by architectonic bridges to elsewhere, or by prediction or intellectual determinacy. This brings colossal onward flow and visceral and instinctual power and savagery; there is ruthless sexualized destruction of stupid Apollonian rationale and norms, an unrelenting rhythmic drive and dissonance crushing the entire Western tradition of fake rational balance and decorum.

Music's fundamentals of diatonic and chromatic harmony and duple and triple metres are combined together in intense asymmetry then iterated in a blood on the wall orgy of lust and violence. There is wholeness and intoxication, excess and superabundance, extreme ecstatic statements and horrific fascination, yet with nothing out of proportion because of inner control and alignment with the real dynamics present, and accordingly with life's basic immediacy rather than any distanced calculation.

Dissonance destroys tonality and music in a positive end that leads only onto real life, rather than post-tonality's empty abstraction and false promises for dissonance in continuing social alienation that appeared at the same time. The Rite is music's final major statement in an idiom that could only be used once by Stravinsky or anyone else, having one thing to say in parallel with the singular Dionysiac and Self.

Key moments include the preparation before the stamping chords' first entry where tension and instability of aesthetic surge just under the surface is built such that serious consternation rises for any concern for the role of wider shaping and moderating structures to deal with it, and it then materializes free of such phoney repressive veneers of external control. The clinching moment is then the torrent of concluding statements deliberately obliterating the last traces of Apollonian control in parallel with orgasm and underlying reality, the abyss justifying itself by itself for itself.

The Rite's peroration expresses critical relations' reference inward not outward to arbitrary structures- the mind's relation with reality is subject to subject with both the world and knowledge structured in the single substrate of consciousness. Kissing and sex free the mind from the delusion of prior constructed subject-object ideas and surface deliberation while arriving in Kinshasa is a similar experience after travelling elsewhere in Africa with chaos taken to its logical extreme, again providing an Oh response as foolishness is dispelled. What seems to be chaos may not be a mistaken feature of order but the basis of all effective order in terms of properly grounded dynamics and their lack of subjection to intellectual account.

The first audience with poor levels of criticality rioted because the music insulted their normative world and identity. They tried to take the Dionysiac's ascendance in a ballet of pre-modern paganism over Christianity as indignity heaped on indignity, yet the unflinching eye of the Rite's hurricane is the stillness of consciousness or the Self at the heart of sex, seduction and all effective life, providing insight heaped on insight. And the audience's behaviour of course was highly contradictory in being instilled exactly with the music's spirit they claimed to oppose and not be fundamentally defined by- they provided their own fiasco.

Again folk music has influence with its lack of architectonics and closure and instead improvised general exploration of an expressive idiom as continuous with rather than abstracted from or reflective of life. The Rite's final gesture is then slightly unconvincing despite its preparation in an earlier section due to the Dionysiac lying at the basis of existence and subject to no objectification, separation or conclusion. The Russian folk music references reflect a pre-modern and more authentic society better aligned with human nature than modernity with its material artifice over community relations plus compensatory art; Wagner was further concerned with folklore and mythology and the union of art and life.

The Rite moreover lies at the historical Dionysian interface between the absolute in great romantic art and the long term 20th century decline into relativism and oblivion. Several great recordings survive particularly the Igor Markevitch with the Polish Radio Symphony of 1962 as sui generis and in the most transcendent and phenomenal class of musical performance, plus the composer's of 1960.

Arnold Bax is also among the greatest of composers, providing matchless rhapsodic music again through access to and guidance from aesthetic dynamics inherent in quality material. His motifs and themes have self-containment rather than developmental or transformative potential under architectonic argumentation, interest being in their content per se and juxtaposition under immanent relations. They are self-justifying yet also connote the whole through their accurate selection at each point from the array of material.

Further Wagner influences include consistency and evenness of inspiration for elimination of formal landmarks, sophisticated introduction of ideas and long-term building of climaxes in luxurious contrapuntal and chromatic texture, rich and thickened orchestration with deep colour, a wide and penetrating range of emotion, and themes of myth and sexual love. Moreover both were great lovers and died of a heart condition at age 69, and Bax was born in the year Wagner died.

Again form as well as content evolves under hidden forces unconstrained by pre-compositional design and rational account to give particularly limitless rewards beyond the initial internalization process of repeated listening. Any formal frames to be traced are entirely given over to intuitive processes, again bringing thorough unselfconsciousness yet strength of personality. Interpretations accordingly must understand that the only considerations are inherent flow, self-exultant passion, intoxication and the intellectual mind's drowning, the Bryden Thomson recordings being of the highest achievement. Of the seven profound symphonies the Fourth is possibly the most successful and the Sixth the least but some conductors have seen these in opposite terms due to their respectively faintest and clearest remaining outlines of Apollonian framing.

The symphonies have three movements as disrupting the usual symmetrical four but comparing with the Shostakovich Fourth dating from between the last two symphonies, and with the three act scheme of most of Wagner's mature operas; Bax lived in Russia in 1910. The symphonies like the operas are individually characterized yet form a uniquely unified and uncompromising cycle, variety in unity across as well as within works. Again Scriabin's lavish harmonic and theosophist searching is a further reference.

Bax returned to Glencolumbkille in Ireland for several months annually for nearly three decades, then to Morar in Scotland for a decade, repeating evocative experiences there to look deeper rather than wider, and equating with sets of iterated works by Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn and many others as well as the minimalist technique, and painters Van Gogh, Cezanne and Rothko. His music is imbued with Irish and Celtic myth and visionary spirituality where contrapuntal intrigue, linear complication and heady and haunting opacity undermine analytic articulation. An overall inspiration is Irish poet Yeats with his subtle illumination of psychological states along with concern again for Hindu theosophy including its expression by Bengali spiritual writer Rabindranath Tagore.

Phrases are often started as if half way through, similar to Scarlatti and Shostakovich Fourth to focus on their intrinsic interest and augment the asymmetry, impulsiveness and non-structural energy and power. Perspicuous relational working out is bypassed as though the eyes are shut in order for the mind instead to see the situation clearly, such as in touch-typing with not looking at the keyboard or even the screen so as to think and find accurately, or in cue sports with taking the eyes off the object ball just before the shot for its perfectly clear visualization.

[Mirror Image]

  I hope a moderator deletes, or moves, this thread. It doesn't belong here.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

I hope a moderator deletes, or moves, this thread. It doesn't belong here.

Oh, I don't know...I liked learning there was a town in Ireland called Glencolumbki...Glenclumbk...Glencmulb......just how DO you pronounce that bloody name???

[kishnevi]

Oh, I don't know...I liked learning there was a town in Ireland called Glencolumbki...Glenclumbk...Glencmulb......just how DO you pronounce that bloody name???

Glad you made it that far.  I am still trying to figure out what he thinks he is saying in the first paragraph.

[Ken B]

Foregrounding the intertextual linearities of the harmonic breakdown hermeneutically entails the complete oblation of aperiodic righteousness, Sean. You should know better.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Glad you made it that far.  I am still trying to figure out what he thinks he is saying in the first paragraph.

I put his post through Google Translate...made much more sense after that...

[Elgarian]

Foregrounding the intertextual linearities of the harmonic breakdown hermeneutically entails the complete oblation of aperiodic righteousness, Sean. You should know better.

I think that's where you went wrong, Ken. They aren't linear, they're logarithmic. Also, it's not the complete oblation that gets entailed. The answer lies elsewhere - or at least, a short distance northwest of there.

Only small points I know, but they're important signifiers of the aperiodicity.

[The new erato]

...............a short distance northwest of there.

Ah; in Elsewhere, AKA The Shire.

[Karl Henning]

Foregrounding the intertextual linearities of the harmonic breakdown hermeneutically entails the complete oblation of aperiodic righteousness, Sean.

Okay, am I the only one who thought Ken wrote hermeneutical entrails?

[Sean]

Thanks guys, your grovellings may cease.

[Mandryka]

I really think something fundamental is missing from this: a definition of rhapsodic. I just don't know whether it's a feature of the music or a feature of the music in performance. Can I have a rhapsodic performance of Ludus Tonalis? Art of Fugue? Christian Wolff's etudes? Haydn symphony 91? (All carefully chosen examples  )

I have some other things I could say about your ideas about Schumann and Scarlatti, and maybe Brahms too. But I want to mull them over in the light of your clarification of rhapsodic.

[Ken B]

Okay, am I the only one who thought Ken wrote hermeneutical entrails?

Only on my grocery list.

[Sean]

Hi Mandryka, well I think I clarified rhapsodic several times in the essay but I wasn't expecting anyone to read it particularly closely I guess.

Rhapsody is music that moves under the inherent impulses of its material, the dynamic tendencies in it, and not under any wider imposed formal framing or pre-compositional, distorting conceptions about how to proceed.

I really think something fundamental is missing from this: a definition of rhapsodic. I just don't know whether it's a feature of the music or a feature of the music in performance. Can I have a rhapsodic performance of Ludus Tonalis? Art of Fugue? Christian Wolff's etudes? Haydn symphony 91? (All carefully chosen examples  )

I have some other things I could say about your ideas about Schumann and Scarlatti, and maybe Brahms too. But I want to mull them over in the light of your clarification of rhapsodic.

[jochanaan]

Mandryka, for a definition of rhapsodic, look no further than Sean's writing.

But there is a serious criticism to be made to Sean's discussion of "the dionysian principle."  There are two "gods" of music, equally important: Dionysus and Apollo.  Do they not dance together?  Do not even Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, Lakshmi and Kali, dance around each other in cycles until Time's end?  Without Apollo, Dionysus is unorganized chaos; without Dionysus, Apollo is dead formality.

Stravinsky himself recognized the Dionysian nature of The Rite, saying, "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed."  But in his subsequent works such as The Soldier's Tale, Symphony of Psalms, and Symphony in Three Movements among others, he followed the way of Apollo, striving for the greatest possible perfection in each work.  These works are not less emotional and effective than The Rite; their emotional effect is all the stronger for being supported by rigorous construction and attention to detail.

This is also the difference between Wagner and Brahms.  Wagner is more Dionysian, more rhapsodic; Brahms is as Apollonian as a nineteenth-century composer can be; yet both wrote brilliant, deeply moving music, in which Dionysus and Apollo dance hand in hand--as they do in all great music, including that of Philip Glass, Arnold Schoenberg, Edgard Varese and more contemporary composers.

[Sean]

jochanaan

But there is a serious criticism to be made to Sean's discussion of "the dionysian principle."  There are two "gods" of music, equally important: Dionysus and Apollo.

No, they're not equally important, and Apollo has only fake status as a god. Even Nietzsche chucked the idea of a balance between them after his first book- there is only the Dionysiac, organized by its own immanent and emergent logic.

Do they not dance together?  Do not even Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, Lakshmi and Kali, dance around each other in cycles until Time's end?  Without Apollo, Dionysus is unorganized chaos; without Dionysus, Apollo is dead formality.

The gods dance under their own aesthetic flow, yes, but not under delusory Apollonian prior conceptualization.

Stravinsky himself recognized the Dionysian nature of The Rite, saying, "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed."  But in his subsequent works such as The Soldier's Tale, Symphony of Psalms, and Symphony in Three Movements among others, he followed the way of Apollo, striving for the greatest possible perfection in each work.  These works are not less emotional and effective than The Rite; their emotional effect is all the stronger for being supported by rigorous construction and attention to detail.

Music leads up to and away from the Rite. As is often appreciated, such as in the Grove 6 article, its language could only be used once, all as the Dionysiac is singular and undifferentiated.

Wagner and Glass at his best are more Dionysian as you say, while Brahms and Schoenberg are more Apollonian, but all had great success of course in transcending intellectual framing to find real aesthetic content.

[kishnevi]

But it is the Greeks who named Apollo the god of music and poetry.

[Sean]

I studied this stuff once at university but I'm no expert; Greek intellectual transparency of thought was their downfall, losing touch with the flute of Dionysus.

[Ken B]

I studied this stuff once at university but I'm no expert; Greek intellectual transparency of thought was their downfall, losing touch with the flute of Dionysus.

Right. As opposed to the endless Apollonian internecine wars, and the Apollonian Roman legions.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

I thought Dionysus' instrument was the Aulos, which is not a flute but a reed instrument. (Pan's instrument was the flute.) And What about Orpheus? Eh?

[Mandryka]

Hi Mandryka, well I think I clarified rhapsodic several times in the essay but I wasn't expecting anyone to read it particularly closely I guess.

Rhapsody is music that moves under the inherent impulses of its material, the dynamic tendencies in it, and not under any wider imposed formal framing or pre-compositional, distorting conceptions about how to proceed.

So it's a formal thing, free form music is rhapsodic, right?

Can I just check something? You talk a lot about certain types of mental states like "bliss." These states are possible epiphenomina of performances of non rhapsodic music, as you yourself note with the examples of Scarlatti and maybe Brahms. So rhapsodic form is not a necessary condition for the mental states in question. This is false

If some music has the potential in performance to produce mental states XYZ then it's free form (rhapsodic.)

Where XYZ are these states like bliss. Is that right?

If so, what is the connection between bliss etc and rhapsody? Is the idea that it's a sufficient condition? Ie

If some music is free form (rhapsodic) then it has the potential in performance to produce states XYZ

Is that what you're arguing for? If so it doesn't seem a very strong or interesting claim at first glance, especially if there are ways of interpreting the score which don't produce the state.