Music, metaphor and metaphysics

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Kramer, Lawrence

It might be objected that the sources of the musical metaphors in The pelican and Autumn sonata are not musical, but verbal and theatrical; Chopin and his music have no say in the matter. But both the play and the film are the products of a cultural world in which Chopin's music has a definite place, exerts a certain influence, articulates a familiar sensibility. Chopin is not the only composer Strindberg and Bergman could have chosen, but the choice is anything but random. Besides, music invites metaphorical responses all the time. The sudden silences that interrupt the accompaniment of the A-minor Prelude positively cry out for one.

Or consider a moment from a work of musical theatre written at about the same time as The pelican and imbued with the same fin-de-siècle psychopathology. Richard Strauss's opera Salome (1905) concludes with a long serenade by Salome to the severed head of the prophet Jochanaan. 'Wenn ich dich ansah', she exclaims at one point, 'hörte ich geheimnisvolle Musik': when I beheld thee, I heard mysterious music. Not long ago, working on a book about opera, I came upon a comment on this passage by the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, who was fascinated by what he heard in it -and what he didn't hear. At the word 'geheimnisvolle ', Strauss introduces an instrumental colour that Dallapiccola could not identify, 'two notes in the low register: two very sweet, intense tones [...] [of] an isolated timbre that one could never expect to hear, so unrelated does it seem to the commonly understood possibilities of the orchestra.' Attending a performance in Berlin in 1930, Dallapiccola understood the timbre as a summons to metaphor even before he picked up the verbal cue given by 'geheimnisvolle'; the timbre, he remarked, 'apparently comes to us from a distant, yet-to-be-discovered world'. Even so, he was 'disturbed [...] for hours on end, perplexed and even mortified [...] a little' by his failure to identify 'the secret, mysterious instrument' (an offstage organ) that made the sound." Rather than close off the timbre 's enigmatic quality, the metaphor enhanced and reenacted it. The desire to uncover Strauss's secret instrument folded over into the desire to cover the distance into that unknown world. These desires, too, are part of the metaphoric action. In hearing the timbre as intense and very sweet while Salome croons lovingly to Jochanaan's head, Dallapiccola implicitly traces the mysterious music to its source: the yet-to-be-discovered world of erotic decadence where desire thrives on the will to mortify the flesh.12

The content of this example is exceptional; its performative effect is typical. No doubt about it, music evades metaphor. But the music that evades metaphor only exists as a mode of metaphor.

Fourth, given that what, if anything, a work of music 'means' or 'expresses' on any particular occasion depends on its performance, how can we justify a reliance on semantic interpretations, with all their metaphysical underpinnings? Abbate points this question with particular sharpness, identifying 'real' music with 'immediate aural presence', 'music-as-performed', 'musical sound made in time by the labor of performance ', the force of which 'can ban logos or move our bodies without our conscious will'.1' One might demur that banning logos is not so easy (heaven knows, people have tried), but there is a more basic point to be made here. In what sense is music as performed, the ephemeral product of live labour, more 'real' than music as articulated in a score (or, for that matter, a lead sheet), or music as recorded, or as synthesised on a computer, or recollected in the mind's ear? The term seems to do little more than indicate a passionate preference. And that would be all right were it not that the indication obscures something quite fundamental, especially in the fully-notated world of classical music.