Our starting point: the taxonomic problem. What kind of thing is Pierrot lunaire? And at many levels. What type of work is it? What type of vocality is it? Is it a man or a woman? What genre are the individual pieces? Who is speaking? This is not saying that the piece is “uncategorizable” in the sense that word is often used: to say that a piece transcends genre or categorization. The way people reacted to this piece doesn’t attribute nearly so much elevation or mastery to it. More like, people just felt confused. And I’m saying that this experience of confusion, of not knowing what Pierrot is or even what type of thing it is, of wondering who is speaking and whether it is speaking or singing, is exactly what makes this piece tick.
The next thing: that taxonomy problems are always at hand in any genuine instance of second-person communication.
Here we ended up talking about the metaphor of messages from outer space, very apropos of the work (lunaire) and of Schoenberg reception during this period (air from distant planets). If aliens communicated with us, how would we know, since their way of communicating would be nothing like ours? What does communication look like on the moon, or on Mars?
And then: Mike’s question was, is there anything interesting about the particular way these ideas are explored in Pierrot lunaire, or the insights it has?
Yes! We talked about, first, the stylistic disparity between the poet and the moon. The way the moon “communicates” doesn’t sound anything like the way humans communicate. (I’m thinking about Solaris, and how the scientists’ desire to animate the ocean results in the ocean animating ghosts buried in their psyche.) This didn’t make as much sense to Mike, so then we talked about this idea that the poet wants the moon to speak to him, and how this results in a sort of animation exchange. The poet asks the moon to become animated, to speak to him. The moon doesn’t speak to the poet, but in Pierrot’s world, it becomes all too animated, annoying and disturbing Pierrot. If you animate the moon, do you kill the person? It raises the issue: second-person communication is more easily described than done. If you want to listen to someone, really listen to someone from a second-person perspective—not ventriloquizing, not appropriating—you just don’t know what you’re going to get. But the work says it’s a good thing to do. The act of listening is redeemed, in the music, by the fact that the moon’s music is really cool, and the way it combines with the poet’s music is really cool as well.
Mike started to describe this piece as a stoical exploration of what can go wrong when you address/listen in the second person.
It would be too much to describe Pierrot lunaire as enacting a dialogue between moon and human. But the two communication modes are cool when combined.
The Trauma Rover 