I’ve come out the other side in a way since leaving this blog aside for awhile. I’ve written so much, received feedback, and then had some months off. Which maybe gives me perspective now.
Reflections on the 2017-11-17 Charlie meeting notes:
Why does the impulse toward lyric utterance survive in the culturally inhospitable environment of musical modernism, and how does it do so? There is nothing obvious about the continued and even increased attraction to lyric in musical modernism. In terms of their stylistic connotations, modernism and lyric would appear to be opposites: modernist angularity vs. lyrical smoothness, modernist intellectualism vs. lyrical emotionality, modernist forbiddingness vs. lyrical accessibility, modernist rarefaction vs. lyrical warmth, modernist masculinity vs. lyrical femininity. The attraction to lyric within pivotal strands of musical modernism, however, is certainly evinced by the fact that so many cornerstone works of the Second Viennese School and the postwar Avant-Garde fall into the lyric category, from Arnold Schoenberg’s op. 15 and op. 21 (Pierrot lunaire) to Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. So a major plot strand in the history of musical modernism is the story of composers torn between two impulses, one toward lyric, one away from lyric. As this conflict reached a crisis point, composers wrote pieces that envisioned a desperate solution: to destroy lyric for the sake of lyric’s renewal.
My opening question, the central one guiding my dissertation, has a Cavellian twin: how did the persistence of the lyric impulse even come to be an issue worth investigating? While the problem of lyric’s survival takes on a mythic, life-or-death intensity in some of musical modernism’s most striking moments, there are many cultural environments across time and place in which lyric’s survival hasn’t even arisen as an issue. It is not remarkable that musical modernism at times embraced lyric, at other times adopted other modes. What is remarkable is how charged lyric became in key modernist pieces. When it took on this charge, lyric was not just one mode among many: on its survival seemed to depend the very cohesion of human society. How and why did lyric become charged in this way? What did lyric seem to provide that other modes didn’t—and why, at this moment in history, did its powers nevertheless appear increasingly, urgently insufficient to society’s needs? And given that lyric had become so charged that it required death and renewal, what vision was there for what a reborn lyric would look like? All of the works I’m studying juxtapose an old lyric that must die with a new lyric that must, but has not yet, come into being. One of my challenges is to articulate what that new lyric might be, since the works give only a negative image.
One might think that the turn away from Romantic lyric was historically overdetermined. First, there’s the simple matter of styles becoming outmoded: Romantic lyric’s heyday had passed and was, by the early twentieth century, out of style (this is leaving aside the curious fact that many of the most beloved icons of Romantic lyricism, like Puccini’s arias or Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder, were composed during the twentieth century). Second, if on an overt level Romantic lyric can be caricatured as a sentimental idealization of the enchanting and soothing Orphic voice, it’s easy to see why lyric might have taken on a negative aspect after the wars. In the aftermath of wartime atrocities enacted under the aegis of purity and beauty, beauty’s supposed relationship to goodness inevitably came under suspicion, and not least in the domain of what we now call classical music. If lyric could enchant, it could also seduce; if it could soothe, it could also drug. Third, from the perspective of postwar critical theory, lyric’s attachment to beauty and wholeness guaranteed its falseness, its inability to speak the truth about experience (since early-twentieth-century experience was neither beautiful nor whole). Adorno’s famous statement that “poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” is just one example of postwar intellectuals rejecting lyric, or adopting it only in broken forms.
But the story of how and when Romantic lyric became a problem is deeper than a story of stylistic shift, and historically reaches much further back than the wars. We can better understand why lyric would accumulate a life-or-death significance in a modernist context if we recognize that lyric, as one of the main inheritances from the Romantic era, held profound cultural meanings—and that these cultural meanings underwent equally profound shifts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If we look back to the turn of the century, we see that art music milieus were already in turmoil about what lyric for a modern age ought to be, not just for the sake of lyric itself, but for the sake of what it was thought to represent. Schoenberg’s op. 15 (1908) premiered at a moment in history when tensions surrounding Romantic models of lyric reception were rapidly precipitating out of solution. Savvy audience members no longer found it obvious how to attend or respond to lyric performances. Debates about concert etiquette and a proliferation of innovative performance models were symptomatic of an ontological confusion: petty spats about the proper use of lighting in song recitals were, on a deeper level, motivated by uncertainty about what defined lyric and what it was for.
Meanwhile, composers like Schoenberg were writing pieces, like op. 15, that aggressively challenged the frameworks through which many audience members were still accustomed to hearing lyric. Such pieces invoked lyric via convention, historical reference, form, or genre while denying what many audience members still expected from lyric: beauty in the Kantian sense, a well-regulated, balanced, integrated aesthetic experience. But these expectations went beyond mere aesthetic appraisal, for audiences didn’t just expect lyric works to sound a certain way; they also expected to get something out of lyric. That something had to do, I’ll argue, with self-improvement and the broader culture’s aspirations to bloom and flourish (aspirations that were often and increasingly nationalistic). Works like op. 15 fundamentally challenged these old assumptions about what lyric reception consisted of.
One way to describe the old model of lyric reception is via the symbol of the circle. In the old model, successful lyric constitutes a circle. The reception around lyric genres at the turn of the century was shot through with a Romantic belief that lyrical beauty simultaneously proves and guarantees the moral, even spiritual ideal of integrated wholeness. The well-regulated, balanced, integrated qualities of the lyric utterance were taken as evidence of the beauty of the lyric speaker’s soul as well as proof of the cohesion of the society of which the speaker was part. Sometimes, the aesthetic qualities of lyric were also taken as tools by which balanced and integrated qualities might be instilled in the audience. By proxy, lyric was charged with the job of facilitating the thriving oneness of society as a whole.
The Trauma Rover 