Unpopular Opinions

[Jo498]

Go read some ETA Hoffmann and come back and tell us about it.

I think the famous passages in Hoffmann illustrate the tension very well. Hoffmann is usually seen as speaking for "absolute" and against programmatic music. But he certainly does not mean that music is a meaningless play of sounds, rather it expresses something much "higher" than mere programmes, namely, "infinite longing", spiritual ecstasy etc.

There are probably several false dichotomies at work because it seems also obvious that music is not like representative language in many ways. If it was like that, there was no need for music. One could simply say what one wanted to express in ordinary language.
And many of the proponents of "absolute" music were only speaking against some strain of programmatic music they found cartoonish or against sophomoric interpretations associating e.g. Beethoven symphonies and quartets with famous plays by Shakespeare or Goethe.
Similarly it seems really odd that a composer who said "I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc....Expression has never been an inherent property of music." is most famous for ballett scores, a genre traditionally not seen as "absolute music". So either almost everybody is listening or watching The Firebird and the Rite of Spring in the wrong mindset, deeply misunderstanding (whatever that means here, if there is nothing to express, is there anything to *understand* in music?) the composer. Or the composer's statement is not taken to be quite as general and "absolutist" as it may sound.

[Florestan]

[E.T.A. Hoffmann] does not mean that music is a meaningless play of sounds

Of course he doesn't. Jessop, it's actually you who should read him, I know only too well what he wrote.

Similarly it seems really odd that a composer who said "I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc....Expression has never been an inherent property of music." is most famous for ballett scores, a genre traditionally not seen as "absolute music". So either almost everybody is listening or watching The Firebird and the Rite of Spring in the wrong mindset, deeply misunderstanding (whatever that means here, if there is nothing to express, is there anything to *understand* in music?) the composer.

+ 1.

[Madiel]

Ftfy. 

Mate, I'll choose my own words thanks. You're genuinely beginning to irritate me now.

The fact is you decided to make some kind of quip that fell utterly flat. Stop trying to rescue it.

[Florestan]

Mate, I'll choose my own words thanks. You're genuinely beginning to irritate me now.

The fact is you decided to make some kind of quip that fell utterly flat. Stop trying to rescue it.

Whatever. Anyway, cool off a bit. It's just words. Gosh, you do take any trifle as your whole life depended on it. Not good for health.

[Monsieur Croche]

Go read some ETA Hoffmann and come back and tell us about it.

Anyone who mouths off enough -- over a long enough period of time - will either actually have said something contradicting what they said earlier, or say something others will point to as contradicting what was 'dicted' earlier.

Like the late Boulez' declaration of a need to "burn down all the opera houses," or Stravinsky's statement that music can not express anything, it is good to remember the time, the context, and thence, the motivation for such statements; so many of this sort of statement stemming from a reaction to the actualities and mode du jour sensibility of the moment.

Similarly, it is more than important to keep in mind E.T.A. Hoffman was a force majeure proponent of Romanticism, to a degree where he flat out misappropriated Beethoven as a romantic -- towards Hoffman's own ends.  If there is more than a little conflict with his slapping the romantic tag on a classical composer and what else Hoffman put forth, that should not be at all surprising.

As interesting as even the best writing about music and its aesthetics might be (I am a big fan of Debussy's collected essays and those conversations with my screen-name namesake, Monsieur Croche, as well as recalling Stravinsky's Poetics of Music lectures as also quite enjoyable), even the best of it is to me so less worthwhile when it is compared with what composers have actually composed ;-)

[Monsieur Croche]

I think the famous passages in Hoffmann illustrate the tension very well. Hoffmann is usually seen as speaking for "absolute" and against programmatic music. But he certainly does not mean that music is a meaningless play of sounds, rather it expresses something much "higher" than mere programmes, namely, "infinite longing", spiritual ecstasy etc.

Isn't it just amazing how in sync those qualities are with the aesthetic of Romanticism?

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Still, Hoffmann's idea of music which evokes whatever 'infinite realm' of emotion he is imagining is pretty much just how he describes what was later called 'absolute music.'

[Jo498]

Exactly. This is the interesting thing. He speaks clearly against programmatic music, roughly because what music expresses is far more subtle and moving than simple depiction. (He enlists not only Beethoven but also Mozart and even Haydn as "romantic" composers.)
But later on in the conflict between Hanslick and the "Neudeutschen", Hanslick often comes across as a dry "classicist" whereas the other side generally dismissed "absolute music" in favor of programmatic tone poems and Wagnerian musical drama. But this seems a false dichotomy when looking at Hoffmann who seems to mean that music despite being non-programmatic should express far more than mere "sound forms/patterns" (Hanslick's "tönend bewegte Form" - this seems to be closer to Stravinskian notions of what music is/should be) would.
There is also quite a bit of music that does not seem to fit into the strict dichotomy. Take many piano pieces by Schumann. They have poetic titles and some might even be thought of as depicting or illustrating something but generally they are not programmatic in the sense Vltava or Till Eulenspiegel are.

[Florestan]

Actually, Hoffmann contradicts himself big time.

First he writes this:

Did you poor composers of instrumental music who have labored to express certain feelings, nay, even occurrences, have even the faintest idea of its peculiar nature?--How could you even think of trying to treat this art that is the very opposite of plastic depiction, in a plastic manner? Your sunrises, your thunderstorms, your battles of three emperors and so on were certainly ridiculous errors and are deservedly punished by being entirely forgotten.

Two things are to be noted here:

1. The implication that it is not in the nature of instrumental music to express feelings or events --- a proto-Stravinskyan stance.

2. Too bad he didn't review Beethoven's Sixth, or Wellington's Victory: he'd have been forced to notice that his hero succumbed to the ridiculous error of depicting sunrises, thunderstorms and battles.

Then he goes on waxing poetic about Haydn thus:

The expression of a child-like, serene mind, governs Haydn's compositions.  His symphonies lead us  to endlessly green pastures, to a merry, colorful throng of happy people.  Dancing youths and maidens are floating by; laughing children, hiding behind trees and rose bushes, throw flowers at each other.  A life full of love, of bliss, like before original sin, in eternal youth; no suffering, no pain, only a sweet, melancholy longing for a figure that floats by in the distance, at dusk, and does not come nearer, does not vanish, and, as long as it is present, it does not turn into night, since it is the evening glow, itself, in which mountains and fields are steeped.

I submit for you consideration that:

1. The above paragraph --- which is as plastic a depiction as it gets --- implies that music can actually express far more than mere feelings and events; it is the aural equivalent of a Poussin painting. Notice especially the contradiction between "poor composers of instrumental music who have labored to express certain feelings" and "The expression of a child-like, serene mind, governs Haydn's compositions".

2. All that (a) is to be found more in Hoffmann's imagination than in any work of Haydn one can think of (too bad he didn't specify which one he had in mind when writing --- I suspect, though, that he had none), and (b) is far more ridiculous than depicting thunderstorms and battles in instrumental music, which has been done since middle Baroque onwards on a constant basis and quite successfully in some cases.

It is obvious, though, that Hoffmann was far from regarding instrumental music as mere "tönend bewegte Form" or as being without a "concept, object and purpose".

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Hoffmann writing about Beethoven reminds me of Justin Bieber fans

[Karl Henning]

Well, but Hoffman was a man of culture.  Perspective!  0:)

[Mahlerian]

Speaking of gushing fans, here's one.

I must not speak as a musician to a musician if I am to give any idea of the incredible impression your symphony made on me: I can speak only as one human being to another. For I saw your very soul, naked, stark naked. It was revealed to me as a stretch of wild and secret country, with eerie chasms and abysses neighboured by sunlit, smiling meadows, haunts of idyllic repose. I felt it as an event of nature, which after scourging us with its terrors puts a rainbow in the sky. What does it matter that what I was told afterwards of your "programme" did not seem to correspond altogether with what I had felt? Whether I am a good or a bad indicator of feelings an experiences arouses in me is not the point. Must I have a correct understanding of what I have lived and felt? And I believe I felt your symphony. I shared in the battling for illusion; I suffered the pangs of disillusionment; I saw the forces of evil and good wrestling with each other; I saw a man in torment struggling towards inward harmony; I divined a personality, a drama, and truthfulness, the most uncompromising truthfulness.

I had to let myself go. Forgive me. I cannot feel by halves. With me it is one thing or the other!

5 points to the person who guesses the writer without looking it up!  (5 more if they can guess the recipient)

[Florestan]

Speaking of gushing fans, here's one.

5 points to the person who guesses the writer without looking it up!  (5 more if they can guess the recipient)

I guess Mahler is either the writer or the recipient. 

[Mahlerian]

I guess Mahler is either the writer or the recipient. 

Yes.

[Karl Henning]

So, as yet, no points awarded? 

[Florestan]

Yes.

Okay, I'll take my chance: Hugo Wolf writer, Mahler recipient, the latter's 1st symphony subject.

[Mahlerian]

Okay, I'll take my chance: Hugo Wolf writer, Mahler recipient, the latter's 1st symphony subject.

No, yes, no.  5 points!

[Karl Henning]

Was Schoenberg the writer?

[Florestan]

No, yes, no.  5 points!

Thanks. The Mahler part was easy, though. Now you made me curious. Looking up.... Hah! Had I thought about it a little more I would have guessed the writer as well. 

[Mahlerian]

Was Schoenberg the writer?

Yes.  5 points!

The subject was the Third Symphony, incidentally.