Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is one digression after another, one parenthetical thought modifying another parenthetical thought inside a giant digression--and by "giant" digression I am thinking of one that went on for some two hundred pages. A single sentence can contain digressions so vast that you have to search back to find the verb, or even the subject noun! But while extreme, this kind of parenthetical approach to the novel is not unique: I can think of one other case. That would be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, published in 1767. That too is characterized by digressions within digressions so extreme that while the book begins discussing the birth of Tristram Shandy (who is also the narrator), the digressions are so extreme that we don't actually reach said birth until volume three. Proust's approach is very different, but the time structure is so complex because of the regressions and digressions that you never quite know where you are: "In Search of Lost Time" indeed, as the original title in French literally translates.
The composer whose music this reminds me of, sort of, is Allan Pettersson whose great shaggy dog symphonies similarly seem to keep winding around themselves. Of course a digression in language is a semantic phenomenon, something not possible in instrumental music, but still, there is something of a similar feel possible in music. The most magical moments in Proust are when the original topic suddenly reappears and you realize that you are just coming out of a digression. A similar effect occurs in Pettersson when one of his monolithic boulders of a theme reappears after a long stretch of other material. Here, have a listen to his Symphony No. 7. This is a 2017 recording with Daniel Harding conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
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You raise an interesting point as to what kind of music could be said to equal prose. For my part I think the only genre that is consistent musical prose is atonal music. I don't think irregularity of phrase by itself really qualifies as a factor since much poetry is irregular. The leading tone harmonies of late Romanticism are a bit prosy as they parallel the plot device and the cliffhanger although the impulse is still basically lyrical and thus poetic. Some 20th C opera became a bit prosy as it came close to portraying stage speech as in some of Richard Strauss' late operas.
You locate prosiness in harmony, while I was thinking more in rhythmic terms. What is the basic difference between prose and poetry? It seems to me that part of it lies in what me might call the segment length. Now of course there is immense variation in poetry between the repetitive rhythms of iambic pentameter and the enjambment of a lot of modern poetry. But still, most poetry seems to be very condensed compared to prose. In prose, especially the kind that Proust writes, the rhythm of the sentence and phrase comes in long waves. A sentence can occupy a whole page or more. Yes, of course we have long poems, but long poems are typically made up of short segments. So perhaps, in comparing writing to music, we can look at phrase length as an element where we can easily see the correspondences. With harmony it is harder as the only resemblances are metaphorical.
Wouldn't you agree?
I was thinking more in terms of phrase structure which you touched upon at the end. That was my point about the Richard Strauss late operas such as Intermezzo, Die Schweigsame Frau and Capriccio where speech is approximated by the singing. As a practical matter the atonalists were often arhythmic too or so irregular as to have inconsistent rhythm without beats. But their phrase structure is quite complex like dense prose. For the late Romanticism point I made it was in response to your comment that Romantic music was prosy I agreed with prosy but not actual musical prose.
What would your thought be on the Renaissance polyphonists? To me there is not much rhythm to it but there is often clear phrase structure.
poetry tends to have some kind of mensuration or meter we can use to characterize the regular or irregular metrical patterns for meter or verse. I have finally gotten through the first five books of Augustine's De Musica and literally all he talked about was the rhythmic distinctions between rhythm as a basic concept; meter in all possible forms; and the distinctions made between meter and verse, such as how a larger metrical pattern can have assymetries within them that define heroic verse. And those first five books of De Musica are like a prelude to the sixth book which is a closing fugue ruminating on post-Pythagorean numbers and levels of cognition in the mind as a way to understand how we perceive and understand music. Since the English translation I'm reading from was published in 1947 it might be public domain enough that in a year or so I might have to blog through sections of it. TL:DR version is I'm afraid that now that I've read De Musica for myself I think Ted Gioia got Augustine galactically wrong. Augustine never even finished De Musica so we'll never know where he was planning to go in his treatises on melody and harmonics/harmony, but it's clear now that I'm almost done with it that Augustine's (by his own admission!) mind-numbing technical discourse was establishing that rhythm is a foundation for metrical phrases and the ratios involved in harmonies.
But mainly, as Paul Hindemith complained matter-of-factly, it's a tedious slog in the metrics of poetry. Thing is, I've read just enough philosophy and Augustine's theological writings and have been just enough a volunteer church musician I get why Augustine took his torturously indirect path for what he conceded was a prelude in book six.
Which is to say, I think I get Maury saying Romantic harmony can seem like prosody combined with some melodic patterns, but in terms of distinctions between prose and meter/verse Bryan's got the more persuasive position.
Prosaic vs prosody, for instance? I feel that Romantic music tends to be rhythmically prosaic despite the expanded harmonic pallette compared to Haydn, for instance, he's got more rhythmic vitality within his harmonically "simpler" style.
My impression is that the linguistic text-setting/expressive approach in Renaissance polyphonic is more liquid and ambiguous but the imitative and linear procedures (from which what we'd call harmony is generally a convergent side-effect rather than an explicit goal) compensate for the seemingly ametrical phrases compared to tonal and even post-tonal musical styles.
A convergence of interlocking chants, so to speak, is not going to seem to bustle with as much discernible "Groove" as any instrumental form derived from dances. Byrd's Mass for 5 voices is definitely more fluid and has phrases that sound like they could be in 7/4 compared to anything in his pavans for keyboard.
When I was a very young classical musician I did a summer course in lute and one of the things we did was read 16th century two-part counterpoints in an edition that did not put in modern barlines. Quite an interesting exposure to the idea that pulse and meter are quite different things. In my music software I very often write music that looks like it is in C major 4/4 when of course it is neither.
Kudos to you, Wentatchee, for slogging through St. Augustine on music. How many pages is that in English translation?
Maury, I think we were thinking of different atonal musics. Schoenberg's neo-classical suite for piano is more poetic than prosy, but of course all the post-WWII atonalists were very prosy indeed.
I think for me what is the crucial element is not rhythm, nor pulse, but meter. The metric structure of poetry is very different from the metric structure of prose, which tends to be very "long wave" and fluid.
220 pages
That's not too bad. But a harder read than Proust?
Yes I like meter more than rhythm in this context but I think phrase structure is perhaps a secondary factor as it provides some explanation of Renaissance polyphony. As The Hatchet noted the slow polyphony can sound somewhat meterless other than its 'heartbeat' pace except for the countervailing phrase structure.
As for the atonalists we had this discussion some months ago where I noted the rather diffident approach to atonalism by the Second Viennese School. Even Webern's vocal music inclines to Viennese musical traditions although his instrumental works are more rigorous. So I think of them as merely semi-atonalists.
I'm not much of a fiction reader these days, although after half a decade of Adorno binge reading I want to read Hammett's detective novels to spite Adorno's elitist streak. :)
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