The main nineteenth-century examples of transcription were (and have remained in the twentieth century) the reductions of large concerted works to the smaller resources of one instrument, most often the piano. This practice argues the steady presence of amateur musicians who could not readily obtain or decipher full scores but whose desire to play the music could be satisfied by reading and playing it in piano versions for either two or four hands. Before records and radio this in fact was the main introduction to concert music for uncounted numbers of people for whom—even after mechanical reproduction became a standard feature of modern life—the pleasure of getting control of a full score, and enacting a concert event in the home, was perhaps greater and certainly more frequent than attending concerts. The transcription for public concert purposes of operas, of music for other instruments (especially the organ) and for voice, as well as of full-scale orchestral works, is a qualitatively different thing, however. Liszt was the most famous exemplar of this practice, which at last enters the public sphere in the 1840s and makes a new kind of statement about the act of performance itself.
At the simplest level, Liszt’s transcriptions are an art of sustained and extended quotation, and later of quotation prolonged elaborately into what Liszt was to call a concert paraphrase or fantasia. The variations, paraphrases, fantasias he wrote on Bach’s “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” and on Verdi’s Rigoletto are well-known examples that still turn up on contemporary recital programs. But on a second level, concert quotations that became full-fledged pieces on their own, autonomous works that leave behind the original or blot it out entirely, are assertions of the transcriber’s skill and, much more important, of the performer’s virtuosity. For not only does the listener marvel (as people marveled at Liszt’s fastidious transcription of the Beethoven Sixth Symphony) at how only a magician could reduce and render a full score so idiomatically for the piano, but the work’s formidable digital difficulty is a display of the concert musician’s prerogative to help her/himself to pieces from the repertory of orchestra, organ, or opera and establish them in a new, highly specialized environment.
With his considerably advanced and almost metacritical sense of what the performer’s work was really about, Glenn Gould illustrated the main features of this new environment as it had developed by the mid-twentieth century. Consider as a start that he was the first major performer to announce his retirement from the concert stage at age thirty-one; he then proceeded to spend the rest of his life publicly saying that he had done so, all the while performing around, but never again in, the concert hall. He made dozens of recordings, wrote numerous articles, lectured, did radio and television work, and acted as producer for many of his own performances. Second, no sooner had he deserted concert life than Gould’s repertory suddenly departed from the mainly Baroque and contemporary works in which he excelled and for which he had become famous. He began a new career as “concert-dropout” playing not just Bach and Schoenberg but Liszt’s piano transcriptions of the Beethoven Fifth and Sixth symphonies; in a later recording he delivered himself of his own transcriptions of Wagner, including “Dawn and Rhine Journey” from Götterdämmerung as well as the Prelude to Die Meistersinger. So complicated and intimidatingly difficult were these scores that Gould’s point seemed to be that he wanted to reassert the pianist’s prerogative to dominate over all other fields of music, and to do so completely as a function of unapproachably superior, uniquely “different” capacities for instrumental display.
There is even a dramatic point being underscored in the actual reduction of score from its full orchestral version, which is what Beethoven wrote, to its brilliant pianistic miniaturization by Liszt. To see the difference in size between the two versions is to note that the piano reduction is the metaphoric equivalent of forcing an army to walk single-file through a single turnstile, with the pianist as gatekeeper (Example 1 and Example 2).
Only a professional pianist can render such a work as this—here we must note how pianists play the preeminent role in the developments I am describing—just as the act of executing such a work is no longer an act of affection (amateur is a word to be taken first in its literal sense) but an act of almost institutional mastery and therefore a public occasion. Similarly the sheer length and the scope of the solo performance in the nineteenth-century transcriptions were designed for the technical virtuosity—the complex chordal and passage work, leaps, etc., that had emerged as the hall-mark of piano playing after Beethoven—of the performer’s actual playing. What today we experience in the concert hall is the completed relocation of the site of a score’s musical realization from the amateur’s home to the concert hall, from an ordinary, mainly domestic and private passage of time, to an occasional, heightened public experience of the solo or concert repertory by a professional performer.
After the middle of the nineteenth century virtuosos seem to have regarded their concerts not just as samplings of a few works (that practice continues today) but as marathon surveys of the entire musical literature. And indeed, in the legendary programs put on by Busoni in Berlin and by Anton Rubinstein in St. Petersburg, audiences got immense multi-hour traversals of the whole keyboard repertory. Attenuated versions of these recitals continue today in the all-Beethoven cycles executed by Artur Schnabel, Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, and Richard Goode, among others. The great master professionals become in fact the living embodiment of their instrument’s history, their programs the narrative of that history presented didactically and integrally. The celebrated orchestral conductors attempt a similar combination of performance and history (Bernstein and the Mahler symphonies, Karajan and the Bruckner symphonies, Solti and Wagner, Toscanini and Beethoven).
Until the early twentieth century most concert performers who were not composers routinely scheduled the work of contemporary composers on their program. Artur Rubinstein was probably the last pianist a significant portion of whose repertory until he died a few years ago was made up of works (the Stravinsky Petrushka, Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, many pieces by Szymanowski, Albeniz, de Falla) he played as their composers’ by contemporary and friend. But this practice has fallen off dramatically. Ursula Oppens, a fine New York pianist, is one of the few first-rate professionals still doing that. Otherwise the concert professional’s programs are if not antiquarian, then curatorial, with occasional nods at the musician’s obligation also to be instructive and acceptably contemporary.
EXAMPLE 1. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, opening of first movement
EXAMPLE 2. Listz’s piano transcription of Example 1
Performances of Western classical music are therefore highly concentrated, rarified, and extreme occasions. They have a commercial rationale that is connected not just to selling tickets and booking tours but also to selling records for the benefit of large corporations. Above all, the concert occasion itself is the result of a complex historical and social process—some aspects of which I have tried to present here—that can be interpreted as a cultural occasion staked upon specialized eccentric skills, upon the performer’s interpretive and histrionic personality fenced in by his or her obligatory muteness, upon the audience’s receptivity, subordination, and paying patience. What competes with these occasions is not the amateur’s experience but other public displays of specialized skill (sports, circus, dance contests) that, at its worst and most vulgar, the concert may attempt to match.
What interests me about the concert occasion is that there is an enduring perhaps even atavistic quality to certain aspects of the performance, interpretation, and production of Western classical music that can be studied and examined precisely because the integrity and specialization involved nevertheless converge upon other cultural and theoretical issues that are not musical, or that do not belong completely to the sphere of music. Clearly, for example, musical performance, with its narcissistic, self-referential, and, as Poirier says, self-consultive qualities, is the central and most socially stressed musical experience in moder
n Western society, but it is both a private musical experience for performer and listener, and a public experience too. The two experiences are interdependent and overlap with each other. But how can one understand the connection between the two and, more interestingly, how does one interpret it? Are there particularly useful ways of doing so in order that the enabling conditions of performance and their connection with the sociocultural sphere can be seen as a coherent part of the whole experience?
Now the connection between modern or new music and contemporary Western society has been the subject of Theodor Adorno’s extremely influential theoretical reflections and analysis. There are three things, however, about Adorno’s work that in a sense start me off here, and from which, for reasons I shall explain briefly, I necessarily depart. The first is Adorno’s theory that after Beethoven (who died in 1827) music veered off from the social realm into the aesthetic almost completely. According to Adorno, Beethoven’s late style gains for music a new autonomy from the world of ordinary historical reality.6 Adorno believed that it was Arnold Schoenberg’s extraordinary achievement in his theory and career a hundred years after Beethoven’s death to have first comprehended and subsumed the real meaning of music’s trajectory in the preceding century, and then having thoroughly incorporated it, to have derived his new rationale from a deepened, tragic intensification of the separation between music and society.7
The technicalization of the dodecaphonic system, its totally rationalized form and preprogrammed expressiveness, its forcefully articulated laws, are an elimination of transcendence and an affirmation and alienation as well; everything about music that had characterized it hitherto, its concepts of improvisation, creativity, composition, variation, and sociability, now come, Adorno says, to a paralyzed standstill.8 From the time of the Baroque, music had been not only a documentation of the bourgeoisie’s reality but also one of its principal art forms, since the proletariat never formulated or was permitted to constitute itself as a musical subject. By the early twentieth century, radical modern music of the kind composed by Schoenberg and his main disciples Berg and Webern has had its social substance abstracted from it by entirely musical means. New music has become isolated and hermetic not by virtue of “asocial” but rather because of social concerns.
Thus modern music expresses its social “concern through its pure quality, doing so all the more emphatically, the more purely this quality is revealed; it points out the ills of society rather than sublimating those ills into a deceptive humanitarianism which would pretend that humanitarianism had already been achieved in the present.” Adorno continues: “The alienation present in the consistency of artistic technique forms the very substance of the work of art. The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world.”9 I take Adorno to be saying that by its very rigor and distance from the everyday world of listeners and perhaps even of performers, new music casts a devastatingly critical light upon the degraded and therefore meaningless world, precisely the world for which Georg Lukács thirty years before in The Theory of the Novel had designed his interpretation of the form of the novel.
“Modern music,” Adorno concludes,
sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty. No one wished to become involved with art—individuals as little as collectives. It dies away unheard, without even an echo. . . . Music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. Modern music spontaneously aims towards this last experience, evidenced hourly in mechanical [by which Adorno means music that is reproduced mechanically, unthinkingly, like Muzak or background music] means. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.10
The commanding figure of Schoenberg dominates and gloomily irradiates this description but, I believe, most of what Adorno theorizes about turns out to have little prophetic validity, aside from its rather willful avoidance of such “new” composers as Debussy, Busoni, and Janacek. (To his credit he wrote an essay years later entitled “Modem Music Is Growing Old” conceding the point.)11 Not only did serialism become an academic, thoroughly (too) respectable technique but many of the early masterpieces of the Viennese twelve-tone method are now items of considerable prestige and frequency in the performing repertory.
Some of the alienating distance of the ascetic compositional techniques described so powerfully by Adorno nevertheless survives in the rituals of virtuoso performance that, despite the relative scarcity of virtuosity, nevertheless continue into the present. Classical music is not only not unheard but is heard in new configurations of aesthetic and social experience. Thus what furnished us with an excellent starting point—the observation that Adorno’s characterization of new music is true for the period during which he wrote—is inadequate once we are past the period of the Second Viennese school’s apogee in the 1920s; analysis must be extended into a present to which the application of Adorno’s prescriptive admonishments appears (dare one say it?) sentimental. The fact is that music remains situated within the social context as a special variety of aesthetic and cultural experience that contributes to what, following Gramsci, we might call the elaboration or production of civil society. In Gramsci’s usage elaboration equals maintenance, that is, the work done by members of a society that keeps things going; certainly musical performance fits the description, as do cultural activities like lectures, conferences, graduation ceremonies, awards banquets, etc. The problematics of great musical performance, social as well as technical, therefore provide us with a post-Adornian occasion for analysis and for reflecting on the role of classical music in contemporary Western society.
My second point about Adorno, to whose work I am profoundly indebted in all sorts of ways, is illuminated by an anecdote recounted by Pierre Boulez on the occasion of Michel Foucault’s death. Although he and Foucault never spoke about their intellectual specialties to each other—Foucault about philosophy, Boulez about composition—it transpired that Foucault once noted to Boulez the remarkable ignorance of contemporary intellectuals about music, whether classical or popular.12 Perhaps the two men had in mind the contrast with a previous generation of European intellectuals for whom reflection on music was a central part of their work. Certainly Adorno and Ernst Bloch, for example, demonstrate in their careers the striking relevance of, say, philosophy and religion to music, or the intrinsically necessary presence of musical analysis to Adorno’s negative dialectics or Bloch’s theses on hope and utopian thought.
As we look back to the modernist movement for which music was culturally central—Proust, Mann, Eliot, Joyce come additionally to mind—we have good reason to remark that just as Adorno was able to rationalize and ironically connect Schoenberg’s work in and for modern society, we are able to demonstrate how in the general division of intellectual labor after modernism musical experience was fragmented. Historical musicology, theory, ethnomusicology, composition today furnish most academic music departments with four distinct enterprises. For its part, music criticism is now effectively the report of attendance at concerts that are really evanescent happenings, unrepeatable, usually unrecordable, nonrecuperable. And yet in the interesting recharting of intellectual undertakings, attempted by what has been called cultural studies, certain aspects of the musical experience can be understood inclusively as taking place within the cultural setting of the contemporary West.13 The performance occasion, as I have been calling it, is one such aspect, which is why I shall be looking at it from this broad cultural perspective.
Lastly, Adorno’s main argument about modern music is that its exclusivism and hermetic austerity do not constitute something new but testify rather to a quasi-neurotic insistence on music’s separate, almost mute, and formally nondiscursive character as an art. Anyone who has written or thought about music has of cour
se confronted the problem of meaning and interpretation, but must always return to a serious appraisal of how music manages in spite of everything to preserve its reticence, mystery, or allusive silence, which in turn symbolizes its autonomy as an art. The Adornian model for music history as compellingly analyzed by Rose Subotnik suggests that music eludes philosophical statement only after Beethoven, and that the “alienation present in the consistency of [Schoenberg’s] musical technique” is a fulfillment of the privatization of the art begun during the early days of romanticism.14 I do not disagree with this view, nor it would seem does Carl Dahlhaus, whose monumental study Nineteenth-Century Music (referred to earlier) fleshes out the same model with considerable subtlety and detail. But it is, I think, accurate to say that we can regard the public nature of musical performance today—professionalized, ritualized, specialized though it may be—as a way of bridging the gap between the social and cultural spheres on the one hand, and music’s reclusiveness on the other. Performance is thus an inflected and highly determined point of convergence where the specific and the general come together, music as the most specialized of aesthetics with a discipline entirely specific to it, performance as the general, socially available form of its cultural presentation.
Yet—and here I return now to my main argument about performance as an occasion—it is appropriate to stress the social abnormality of the concert ritual itself. What attracts audiences to concerts is that what performers attempt on the concert or opera stage is exactly what most members of the audience cannot emulate or aspire to. But this unattainable actuality, so strikingly dramatic when we see it before us on a stage, depends on the existence of unseen faculties and powers that make it possible: the performers’ training and gifts; cultural agencies like concert associations, managers, ticketsellers; the conjunction of various social and cultural processes (including the revolutions in capitalism and telecommunication, electronic media, jet travel) with an audience’s wish or appetite for a particular musical event. The result is what can be called an extreme occasion, something beyond the everyday, something irreducibly and temporally not repeatable, something whose core is precisely what can be experienced only under relatively severe and unyielding conditions.