The Agony of Modern (German) Music
German composers reject the dictatorship of history in favor of the dictatorship of Theodor W. Adorno. Will they ever get free of “formless expression”?
The division between American art music and that of Europe, especially Germany, has never been wider than now, it seems to me. As I’ve explained elsewhere [see Advice to a Young Composer], I see the United States as having recently undergone a Rococo period, a period of rebellion against the avant garde, largely a German avant garde, that dominated art music in this country from the 1940s through the 1970s. This Rococo gave birth to some of the most superfluous “art” music written in the last two hundred years, but at least it was a struggle of some kind, a rebellion of the protégé against the mentor.
To this day the German musical establishment feels no such desire to move on to the next thing, whatever that might be, having settled into an aesthetic that is atonal, indeed, aharmonic, and utterly lacking line and form. The irony is that they have been doing this for a hundred years and still believe their work to be avant garde (and still believe that being avant garde is an end in itself).
In March of 2004 I attended a couple of concerts of the Tage für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany. One program included works by local, established composers. Like so many times before at concerts of new music in Germany, I was overwhelmed by the feeling, as each piece started and ended, that someone was opening and closing a door on the same, eternal improvisation of effects and gestures. I spoke to one of the performers afterward, a cellist and scholar who specializes in new music, and suggested to him that the Germans have a morbid fear of return, that is, the wholesale repetition or development of a section we heard earlier. Occasionally a small gesture might be repeated intact, immediately, as a little local surprise, but any largescale organization is missing from this music. “Well,” he said, “return of the kind you mention would give rise to a system, and that would mean form, and form is fascistic. A composer is interested in the formless expression of the free, inner soul, he doesn’t want to allow externally imposed hierarchies to dictate his music.” He leaned in and added pointedly, “And there's always the Opus 11.”
I had heard the speech about form-as-fascism from Germans before, and was preparing to tune out a long harangue. But his reference to the Three Little Pieces (1914) for cello and piano, Op. 11 by Anton Webern caught me off guard. The cellist explained further that “Webern showed that you could employ a few fleeting gestures and sounds, never repeat anything, and write a masterpiece.” I flashed back on the Opus 11 and other similar works from Webern — the Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Op. 9, the Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, Op. 6 — and my only thought was that Webern had proven he could do this and write masterpieces, not that anyone else could.
Further, intrinsic to the success of works like the Op. 11 is that they are extraordinarily brief, with individual movements often lasting just a few seconds. In this way Webern was able to push musical syntax to the limit, avoiding the supposed constraints of form, and still create a fascinating musical “event.” German composers today seem to believe that these “events” can be pushed to durations of ten, twenty, sometimes thirty minutes or longer. They're mistaken, to be sure. But where did this mass lapse in judgment come from? We expect student composers, going through the usual rites of passage, to view masterpieces not only as works of art but as formulas for creating more masterpieces. They learn otherwise soon enough. But the suggestion before me now that an entire cultural aesthetic had been defined by such personal accomplishments as Webern’s Op. 11 astonished me. As with most things German, however, it's of course not that simple.
It’s no mystery why Germans want to avoid anything in their art that would suggest fascism, but they seem to have taken extreme, sometimes nonsensical, measures in the case of their music. The fact that Romanticism, for example, was rooted in Humanism and predated Nazism by a hundred years leaves it no less tainted to most Germans by Hitler’s affection for it, and it remains rejected by all but the most daring or careless who create new music in Germany. Those whose music reflects anything resembling a Romantic aesthetic these days possess ethereal careers (unless, perhaps, they’ve moved to Italy and become Communists).
Somewhat more of a mystery is how even the most abstract notion of form ended up being associated with fascistic thought in the first place. “The formless expression of the free, inner soul” that my cellist friend described is the opposite of fascism, but it is also rarely of interest to anyone other than the owner of that soul (and perhaps his therapist). In such an abstract medium as music I believe that a richly hierarchical form is needed to bring that expression to a level that can be meaningful to more than one person. Because hierarchical systems suggest dictatorship to German artists and intellectuals, however, hierarchy is itself poisoned and poisonous, just like Romanticism. That musical hierarchies can also be implicative, open to multiple solutions, indeed employ multiple solutions simultaneously, that they exist in all kinds of different music from cultures that are anything other than fascistic, does not matter to this German view of things: hierarchy is bad, so systems are bad, form is bad.
As it turns out, this aesthetic of rejection was not brought about by a single work, but arguably a single man. Enter Theodor W. Adorno, a German Jew who escaped to America during the war, and who, as Alex Ross puts it, “became the prophet of a modern Germany obsessed with understanding its past.”* Adorno’s writings, particularly the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Negative Dialectics (1966), drove German aesthetics in any and every direction as long as it had nothing to do with fascism, or, for that matter, anything that came before fascism. To Adorno the Nazi period was a chasm into which all of German history had vanished, and so that history was no longer available as a source of aesthetic values. “[Modern music] has taken all the darkness and guilt of the world upon itself,” wrote Adorno, in his Philosophy of Modern Music (1949). “It is happy only when representing misery; it is beautiful only when rejecting beauty's illusion.” And with this, as Ross puts it, Adorno sounded “a call to arms for those who wish to ride off into the sunset of avantgarde obscurity.”
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At one of the Tage für Neue Musik concerts, during a postintermission panel discussion, the cellist I had spoken with earlier that week was interviewing the composer Cord Meijering, whose music was being featured that evening. Meijering’s music had been moving away from the required asceticism toward lush lyricism for some time. In an effort to be provocative, I suppose, the interviewer dug up one of Adorno’s more outrageous one-liners from somewhere — “Every artwork is the mortal enemy of every other” — and asked Meijering for his reaction. The composer, visibly agitated, shot back, “Why always this militarism, this belligerence from Adorno? I've had enough of it!” Much to his credit, Meijering refused to respond further.
It must be welcomed that some German composers are embarrassed by this cult of personality around Adorno. His unrelenting call for the abnegation of all tradition has led to a musical Tower of Babel, where nothing is repeated and so everything sounds the same. The attempt to justify this so-called aesthetic with such infertile ideas as “formless expression” is making some composers uncomfortable. Perhaps this embarrassment and discomfort will inspire some soul searching, but nothing is likely to change soon. For example, I have told my German colleagues of how I spend a good deal of energy devising my own forms, my own systems for organizing musical materials. The results are often not much different from the traditional forms, but the point, I explain to them, is that I devise these forms myself in the process of composing the very music of which they are a part. The Germans smile blandly at this, and would tell me, if only it were worth discussing philosophy with an American, that my thoughts are corrupted, as Adorno puts it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, by having passed “through the filter of the culture industry.” By which he meant, specifically, the American culture industry.
But my German friends are safe: their copies of Adorno on the bookshelf are their talismans, warding off the evils and influences of history. It seems a shame. The power of the traditional forms in Western music, most of which were developed or refined in the German speaking world, is that at their core dwells a compelling abstraction of a basic human story: departure, enlightenment and return. For centuries the Germans had occupied the avant garde in Western music, but half a century ago they departed this role, convinced, thanks to nihilists like Adorno, that German guilt for the Holocaust precludes enlightenment and so makes return pointless. Many of us wish they would reconsider that position.
But on to form. I do not believe that hierarchical structures, whether the traditional ones or those of my own invention, are denying me my freedom, quite the contrary. In any case, it’s impossible for me to view form as something separate from music, or music separate from form. These static, formless, atonal works that populate new music programs in Germany bore me for the same reason that completely tonal, minimalist works do: they awaken no debate within me about what will happen next.
And that brings me to the heart of the matter: a composer’s relationship to his listener, which I’ll discuss in a future essay.
*Ghost Sonata (What happened to German music?), Alex Ross, The New Yorker, March 24, 2003 (the article is also available on Alex Ross' website). An insightful and scathing criticism of Adorno and the Germans who deify him. I was unaware of this article before I started this essay, and was directed to it by a friend.