Reviews and Information on Publications - Recenzije i obavijesti o izdanjima

I n^^sM 40 (2009) 2: 353-361 I

Reviews and Information on Publications - Recenzije i obavijesti o izdanjima

Karol BERGER, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Karol Berger's new book deserves sustained and careful reading. His core idea is that as European society changed its way of thinking about time, its music (and, for that matter, its view of all the arts, let alone of the human self and its politics, ethics, and religion) altered in a fundamental manner. The turrng point he places roughly as the mid-eighteenth century. The nature of this revolution of consciousness is implied in his title: Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow. When it came to thinking about time, the world for Bach, according to Berger, was still medieval: we live in a cyclical world, one pervaded by a sense of God's eternity. For Mozart, who lived and worked on the other side of the philosophic divide, time hadfiguratively'straightened itself out.' Now, Berger tells us, it is arrow-like: time has become a dynamic, linear thing. It has also become a reality largely to be comprehended on purely secular terms. Summarizing the structure of his book, its author writes: In thefirstpart.. .1 presented Bach as a musician who aspired to capture the traditional Christian worldview in music that correspondingly subordinated linear temporality to visions of eternity. In the part that follows I will show how Mozart captures aspects of the modem outlook in music that liberates and celebrates linear time. (176) This statement comes half-way through the text, at the end of a rich, subtle, and admirably even-handed forty-six page Interlude titled Jean-Jacques contra Augustinum: A Little Treatise on Moral-Political Theologyin which the author presents Rousseau and the great church father as iconic representatives of these two contrasting visions of time.

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Reviews and Information on Publications - Recenzije i obavijesti o izdanjima

And quite literally, the book hinges on this Interlude: for it is here that Berger attempts to show how the European mind went from one fundamental world-view to another. An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernitythis is the subtitle of the book. These origins, we are told, are not at heart musical; our musical modernity arises rather as a byproduct of the efforts of the culture, as a whole, to deal with the breakdown of the medieval view of human natureand specifically with the moral crisis that arose when the medieval answer to the problem of reconciling God's omnipotence with humanity's free will no longer convinced people. Rousseau, says Berger, was the first to explicitly to show a way out of this dilemma....[Ijt was necessary to supplement the nofion of free will with a new concept of freedom as autonomy. (144) In ways that are simply too complex to convey in a short review, all through this book its author shows how this new view of humanity afected and altered musical form, making its temporal design increasingly linear and dynamic. But as a sample of the rich argument Berger presentsas well as the engaging prose style he employs to do sohere is a passage from the Interlude which gives a compact summary of his core historical thesis: In the intellectual tradition shaped by Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity, the infinite superiority of eternity over time, and being over becoming, was obvious. Modernityscientific as well as moral-politicalis at bottom an attempt to set this picture aside and emancipate time. Ultimately this is the meaning of the death of God. Augustine raised two essential complaints about the temporality of human's earthly existence. First, and obviously, what was wrong with such existence was that it came to an end: mortality. Second, and less obviously, time causes us to relate everything, even ourselves, in a mediated fashion: the present forever slips from our grasp because we can capture experience only in memory or expectation. Modernity gave up on such complaints and simply embraced the contingent and mediated character of human existence finitude in the broadest sense of the term. (171-172) Now, the first job of a reviewer is to convey the inherent size of the material with which an author is wrestling. So it needs to be said right off that, as musicologist. Dr. Berger is dealing with as big and as important an issue as can be imagined. And if how we see time isn't fundamental to how we experience music, what would be? The only other candidate for primacy would be how we think about sound itself. So if a culture changes its foundafional attitude towards timewith the result that the immediate experience of time is altered for those who live in that culturethen it stands to reason that its music would be obliged to take on a radically new quality, and perhaps even radically new forms. That is what Karol Berger contends. Moreover, as he sees it, it is not only music which altered as the modern concepfion of time gripped the Western world; all the arts changed both technically, and in terms of their ethical focus: ...the main job of art before it became fully modem in the late eighteenth century was to give sensuous embodiment to the eternalcosmic or divineorder and truth. Since that time, by contrast, the tendency has been to use art to proclaim human autonomy; for the modems, for us, art is mainly a tool of self-affirmation. (42) So Berger is bold: he is proposing nothing smaller than a comprehensive overview history of Western music, viewing that historyand, specifically, the pivotal eighteenth

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I py^siyi 40 (2009) 2- 353-361 |

centuryas reflective of the evolving drama of Western culture as a whole. In keeping with this wide-angled perspective, his text contains discussions of the poetry of Goethe, the writings of Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, E.TA. Hoffman, Hegel, and Proust; as well as richly engaging observations on the art of Poussin, Tiepolo, Carracci, Bernini, Mantegna, Drer, Dossi, and Giorgioneall of which are accompanied by fairly good (though far from perfect) black and white reproductions. (Nor have I mentioned everything extra-musical which gets into this book.) And Dr. Berger sees this vast and evolving cultural, artistic and philosophic drama as havingmuch like a well-crafted classic work of the theatera decisive moment: a moment of dramatic perepetia at which the very destiny of the main character reverses itself. In this book, that protagonist is music; and the decisive moment is the mid-eighteenth century. Now there is enough truth in Karol Berger's thesis to make it plausible; evenlet me be the first to admitthrillingly plausible. No one with a responsive set of ears, or a questing intellect, can doubt that Mozart does not sound like Bach, let alone like Beethoven or Monteverdi. And Berger makes a valuable point when he declares: In their thinking about both the moral and the natural realms, the modems shifted the balance of their esteem decisively from eternity, rest, and immutabilitywhich had been privileged by the ancients and by medieval Christianstoward time, motion, and change. (16) Balance of esteem is a fine formulation, since it acknowledges that both ways of experiencing time were present on either side of the chronological divide: pre-modern and modem. If only Dr. Berger had remained true to this insight, the book would be a classic. As it is, it is a flawed classicfor, I regret to say, his frequent desire to separate the two modes of musical/temporal experience leads to statements that simply are overdrawn. I say this regretfully since these exaggerated passages tend to mar the over-all impact of a work otherwise packed with marvelously insightful moments, both of cultural history and technical musical analysis. Later, I will mention several of these; but a book's main point is its main point, and honesty requires a questioning of its core methodology since these moments of exaggeration, far from being momentary lapses, occur with sad frequency. What is Berger's key error? To present a bifurcation of fundamental ontological mattersmatters which, in reality, and in the depth of the human mind, never are truly separate. In his more provocative moments, he appears to assert that the timeless (or rest) aspect of the world was the only aspect people felt as fully realas absolutely truein the years before 1750, and then, somehow, in the years which followed, the dynamic aspect (the motion aspect) of the world dethroned it: even banished it from human perception and desire. Nothing like this happened; or even could happen. The human mind is always aware of reality as rest and motion, the linear and the cyclical: even, I daresay, of the eternal and the irreducibly momentary. The medieval world, after all, did give us Chaucer, and the sixteenth century, Breugel. If Augustine bemoaned the transitoriness of this world, these men certainly didn't! They relished the tang, zest, delight of itas, one might note, so did the Troubadours of the twelfth century! Now let's consider the other side of the chronological divide which Berger proposes: certainly a great many modem minds have relished eternal matters. As Berger himself notes, in the writings of E.TA. Hoffmann and Arthur Schopenhauer, music is said be capable...of revealing the noumenal world beyond. Mu-

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Reviews and Information on Publications - Recenzije i obavijesti o izdanjima

sic's subject matter is now no longer human passion but infinite totalitythe metaphysical ground of being. (286) So it seems unwise to divide humanity too steeply as pre-modem and modem. Certainly, there are differences. What historian could disagree? But the sameness is just as importantand that sameness is given short shrift in this book. The truth is, wherever we find humanity, we see it dealing with what the great American philosopher Eli Siegel called the aesthetic nature of the worldthe fact that, as he put it so grandly: In reality opposites are one: art shows this. Had Dr. Berger avoided the many moments at which a bifurcating image of human history was presented, his larger pointthat there was indeed a shift in the balance of esteemwould have been far more convincing. One can surely say there was a new emphasis, a new welcoming of the dynamic aspect of time in the later half of the eighteenth century; and even more so in the nineteenth with the enunciation of the Darwinian theory of evolution. But to imply, as Berger often does, that the evocation of the timeless and the cyclical would have struck a listener of 1790 as philosophically untrue to his life's experience, or that a composer of, say, 1642, would have been incapable of conceiving a strongly linear, goal-directed design through sound(tell this to the Monteverdi of L'incoronazione di Poppea)well, this is simply too much! And please understand, I am not parodying Dr. Berger. I am just conveying what he says iri his less prudent moments. For example, consider this astonishing assertion: the principle...of submission to the authority of linear time...is prerequisite to making self identity possible. (256) I suppose, on this account, no one prior to 1750 recognized himself or herself in a mirror! Or ponder this statement:
In the later eighteenth century European art music began to take seriously the flow of time from past to future. Until then music was simply in time"; it took timeevents had somehow to be arranged successively, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, mattered little to the way the music was experienced and understood. (9) As they say in sober, scholarly circles "Say what?"

Can one really, with a straight face, assert (and this is what the passage just quoted implies) that Bach's Prelude in C minor from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier could have been played in Leipzig in 1730 with its tempestuous coda coming at the start of the piece rather than at the end, and that this transposition in time would matter little to how the music was experienced? Are we truly to think that people then and there were that different from us? Forgive me, if I seem to hammer away at this point, because it is crucial if we want to see(and I hope we do, since human kindness depends upon it)that we are always far more like other people than different from them, no matter how far away in place, time, or culture. This is a bedrock matter; a non-negotiable matter if we want our scholarship to be et/i/cfl/-because the desire to accent one's difference and mute one's kinship to others is a form of human contempt. Contempt, as Eli Siegel once said, is the greatest temptation, or danger, of man. We should avoid it like the plague both in our lives, and in our scholarship. So let's ask, as a further thought experiment (and Berger has some of his own): Had one of Bach's students played this prelude as a postlude to the fugue in a lesson, can

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one sincerely picture Bach saying: Do what you want with the order; the distinction between earlier and later really matters little to me. Is such a picture even remotely possible? Upon reflection, it seems apparent that the two ways of thinking about time have always been around; and upon deeper reflectionand in keeping with the principle of Aesthetic Realism enunciated by Eli Siegel, which I quoted earlierit is equally clear that people have always wanted to coordinate these two ways: these two visions of time. They would have to do so, if they didn't want to deny half of who they were, and half of what they felt. That some people did (and do) make such denials, is sadly clear enough. But art doesn't arise from dishonesty; artof whatever century or culturehas always tried to give the full picture of what the world (and human feeling) is like. And when it comes to the art of music for which time inevitably is crucial, it means that musicians have always tried to find beautiful ways of expressing the relation of the changing and the unchanging, the active and the restful. It is never one or the other: at least, among honest folk. In his less provocative moments. Berger himself gives much evidence for this. As I already noted, his phrase, balance of esteem, implies that both ways of feeling time were always real to peopleonly that, at various times, they wanted to foreground one more than the other. But who ever said only a foreground is real? For example. Dr. Berger notes on p. 106, in opera seria time wins over timelessnesswhich implies, since it comes in the midst of a discussion (very fascinating technically) of how Bach achieves a sense of timelessness in the Si. Matthew Passion, that an early eighteenth century lover of music might go from having his sacred, eternal feeling satisfied in church on Good Friday, to having his earthy, dynamic feeling about time satisfied shortly later (once Holy Week had passed) at an opera house. Again, the point is that both feelings about time were present on either side of the 1750 Rubicon, with neither was more real, in the ontological sense, than the other. And there is complementary evidence from Berger himself that the sense of timelessness didn't leave human consciousness after 1750 either. It can be found in his discussion of Mozart's Don Giovannifor, as he observes, there is something of the eternal, the cyclic in how Mozart brings back the music of the Overture at the opera's conclusion: It is as if the normal, mundane, linear temporality of the opera's plot were being embedded in circular, divine time as if the eternal order whose help was invoked at the end of Act 1 were reestablishing itself and claiming its due. (243) One more thought experimentwhat, on Dr. Berger's methodological premises, is one to make of strophic form? It is found in profusion on both sides of this supposed ontological divide. Now, the music in such compositions is as circular as can be; but the text especially if it is narrative in contentis just as clearly linear. So, again, it appears that people have enjoyed feeling the interplay, even the simultaneity, of both notions of time. Given the antiquity of church sequences, let alone the music of the trouvres and Minnesnger, it is clear that people have desired this simultaneous experience of opposites for at least a millennia. If the viewpoint of Aesthetic Realism is correct, then the aesthetic impulsethe need to make opposites oneis as ancient as humanity itself. That impulse, at once metaphysi357

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cal and artistic, can be observed in Neolithic cave paintings as well as in the most freshlyminted products of the avant-garde in any garret in any trendy part of any city. All beauty is a making one of opposites, Eli Siegel taught, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves. Berger, perhaps without realizing it, is working (I surmise) in the shadow of Martin Heidegger, whowith his concept of Dflsei'nmade it difficult for the scholars of the last eighty years to conceive of ontological issues as other than relative to a particular place and time. We talk now of ontologies rather than ontologywhich would have struck most scholars before Heidegger as simply bad grammar! The traditional view of ontology was that it is the science of what inevitably must be true about existence in any possible time and place. This view is hardly voiced in the postHeideggerian world. Yet, Heidegger was wrong; and to the extent anyone follows him, however consciously or subconsciously, that person has also built his or her scholarship on an uncertain foundation. Yes, the relative is real; but so is the absolute. The enduring truth about reality (and hence about music, insofar as it is a sonic witness to that truth) is that opposites are one, and are meant to be experienced as one. The finest things in Karol Berger's book, in my estimation, illustrate this idea. They are to be found whenusing his extraordinary ear and keen intellecthe discerns in the music he is considering the junction of opposites rather than their bifurcation. I mention now a few of these highpoints. First, Berger is thrilling as he tells about Mozartian concerto-form: how, in these concerto allegros the main focus of interest is the order in which melodic ideas are presented within each of the three tellings of the storyopening ritomello, exposition, and recapitulationmaking each of the tellings progressively more complete and logical. (14) What is being described, in effect, is a spiral through time: a oneness of linearity and circularity. His fouri chapter, Mozart at Play, deals in detail with such spirals forms (my term, not his), including a brilliant analysis of the opening movement of K. 491. Moreover, Dr. Berger shows how part and whole, balance and imbalanceother crucial (and permanent) sets of aesthetic oppositesare made one as he explains how the structure of the movement as a whole is as tremendously and deliberately lopsided as the main subject itself. (196) Second, Karol Berger shows how, in Mozart, it is the element of discontinuity (cadential punctuation) which makes for our sense of dynamic flow through timeor continuity. One opposite, in other words, is the necessary ground of the other. He also, in a complimentary way, shows how Bach's far less punctuated contrapuntal formswhose textures seem to flow and emphasize sonic continuitysimultaneously heighten our focus on their individual moments: their discrete demonstrations of the various possibilities of the core contrapuntal subject. Again, the reality of one opposite makes possible the reality of the other. In his understanding of Bach, Berger gives honor to Laurence Dreyfus and his 1996 text Bach and the Patterns of Invention for having deepened his perception of Bach. I admire thisone scholar unabashedly expressing his gratitude to another. Meanwhile, it is important to note that Berger's own Bach analyses are remarkably original. See, in particular, his brilhant explanation of how Bach, in the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, conflates in a single phrase [the final measures of the piece] what normally is presented in successive onesthe end of the B section and the beginning of the A' section, as well as recapitulations of the flrst vocal phrase and the ritomelloand for good measure also blends the texts of the two protagonists into one. (59) This, on technical terms makes

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simultaneous what normally is successivewhich is yet another way of showing that time as linear can equally be felt as its opposite: as an eternal Now. (59) I do not have the space to comment on Berger's probing analyses of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, of various piano sonatas and quartets by Beethoven, let alone his setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy. Nor can I comment here on his careful studies of Bach's C major Fugue from the First Book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, or of various passages from Mozart's La
nozze di Pigaro, Idomeneo, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflte. There is even, to conclude the

book, a swift (but wonderful) discussion of Schubert's Winterreise. Here, according to Berger, time is neither cyclical nor linear. Instead, it gradually freezes over, like a river, or tears, in winter. (350) To have what flows, what is in motion, gradually become that which is entirely at rest, is yet another way of saying that oppositeswhile utterly differentare interexplanatory; are, indeed, one. That Schubert felt the primal aesthetic fact (what Eli Siegel once called The Aesthetic Center) that reality is always rest and motion, stability and change with a sad emotional tinge, is neither here nor there. This song cycle may well be what Berger calls it: our civilization's greatest poem of existential estrangement and isolation. (351) Bach and Mozart, Monteverdi and Beethoven, let alone Schubert on other occasions, when they presented the unity of opposites, may very well have done so with very different emotional emphases. All this means that while moods may alter, the eternal aesthetic nature of reality doesn't; whatever we feelfrom the deepest tragedy to the most joyous exhilaration and gratitudewhen we are honest, we will be compelled to show, through the sounds we make as musicians, that our moods are occurring within a reality that is eternally aesthetic: the simultaneity of permanent, ontological opposites. Berger is afinehistorian; also an excellent musical analyst. To write a book of over 350 pages, and to have (as far as I can see) only one slight technical error, is achievement enough! (The error is on p.19: the word vita in a passage from Monteverdi's Orfeo does not fall on the 5th degree of the scale, but rather on the 7than F natural in the tonality of G minor.) His cultural history is also deeply insightful. If there is a flaw in the book, it is the one I have indicated: a false philosophic underpinning. But I hasten to add: if I am right about this criticism, it is hardly aimed at Dr. Berger alone. It is rather a symptom of a general weakness of our times: an inability to seeshall we saythe forest for the trees! Every century, every culture, every individual is unique; and Karol Berger has been energetically fair to the difference between the modem and the premodem view of the world, time, art, music, and the human self. But difference is only half the story; the other half is kinshipand I simply contend there is a universal backdrop to these points of difference which Karol Berger does not make enough of. If my belief that the eternal is just as realnot more, but not lessas the temporal makes me pre-modem in my viewpoint, then so be it! Let the discussion go on as to which way of thinking about these issues is the most accurate, the most fruitful, and the most humanly kind. As they say: time will tell. Edward GREEN
New York City

E-mail: edgreenmusic@gmail.com 359

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