De Staat; A Tale of Two Synecdoches

depicted: Adalbert Stifter
Intro to Stifter’s *Many Colored Stones*

A Tale of Two Synecdoches

I met Louis Andriessen when I played De Staadt with NY Phil under Gunther Schuller. David Starobin was the other guitarist and Scott Kuney played bass. Andriessen sent me a signed copy of his wonderful guitar solo (“Triplum”), which I gave to a student and never got back. That was the Horizons Festival and my modernist friend Rolv Ytrehus was in the audience to boo.

David Starobin remarked about the lack of rehearsal time, feeling the rehearsal time was less than the duration of the piece. I remember how gnarly the brass section was. One saw the guitars and sneered, “shitar”.

What did Andreiessen mean by the title? He may have explained it somewhere, but not knowing, I now free associate.

Unmindful of my sister’s sage sisterly advice – “you don’t have to issue forth every thought that goes through your Brian” – here we go.

Some of us become allergic to imperial grandiosity and its manifestations. We come to understand and appreciate Bauhaus, Stifter, Dewey, Kaléko, Karl Krauss, Peirce, James, Loos, Mies, etc. We come to feel the same exultation in work that triumphs over the pathological grandiosity that is a key chapter in the authoritarian playbook.

knee deep in kakistocracy

Was Andriessen thinking about this issue? If we can’t know, it’s then free association.

Some of us developed a severe allergy to imperial architecture. Everything pompous in Paris. Everything Kaiserlich und Königlich in Köln and Vienna. Buckingham Palace reeks of distended empire.

If you do not get physically ill in Buckingham Palace or the Goldene Salle, you are not paying attention to certian pathological dynamics. See Hermann Broch.

And this is why we love Ruskin & Burkhardt, and in that regard, an anecdote about David Lang’s Ruskin take-down, his opera, “Modern Painters”, below.

Punchline

I feel some of our brilliant young composers inhale the grandiosity of their grand cities and allow it to feed into the hubris that comes from the accidents of their birth.

Background radiation from the recent imperial and colonial past?

And I check this feeling because when I meet the young composers I usually find them sympatico and humble.

Pomp is never vanquished. Bauhaus, form follows function, cults of the small, these attempted to neutralize the pathologies. A century of sensitive artists responded in useful ways to dangerous pathologies. It’s ongoing.

Those dangers were abstractions to me. until a few years ago.
Hermann Broch’s essays are essential reading.

And this sheds some light on what first struck me as completely bizarre and inexplicable – the American percussionist (now living in Austria) who explained to me that (paraphrasing) Davidovsky & Wuorinen are not cool enough for Klangforum Wien. (I wanted to see the two performed in Austria. I wanted to facilitate that.)

Can we search out the sincere lower nobles (see Stifter bit below) who consider themselves middle class and feel it’s up to them to keep things real, prove themselves by keeping things real, working hard to do so, often in the shadows?

“Never listen to the critics – when they praise you” (paraphrasing) – Leon Fleisher

Let’s add: do not introject grandiosity of any sort.

US imperialism, shock doctrine, neoliberal madness of every stripe is bringing the US to the abyss. The middle class is getting destroyed in the process.

The David Lang Conversation – A Tale of Two Synecdoches

Two synecdoches I propose as a way to coexist across disparate historical perspectives, those perspectives knitted into platforms of a worldviews.

I arranged a wonderful number from David Lang’s opera “Modern Painters”. I made a mandolin part for me and I produced it at Weill Hall. (2010?)

In a conversation, David explained that the work is a tribute to a philosopher with whom he utterly disagrees.

I told him I love Ruskin.

Synechdoches happen……..
….often enough unconciously……..

Owen Barfield and CS Lewis are among the many who point out the confusion around the notion of the “Dark Ages”. Moreover, they claimed the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a very faint boundary. On these points they were in agreement with the spirit of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.

On the Dark Ages, CS Lewis writes, “The partial loss of ancient learning and its recovery at the Renaissance were for him (Gibbons) both unique events. History furnished no rivals to such a death and such a re-birth. But we have lived to see the second death of ancient learning. In our time something which was once the possession of all educated men has shrunk to being the technical accomplishment of a few specialists.”

There is always the question of what’s on most people’s radar. Nuance is always lost, but never completely. CS Lewis: “”Nothing is ever quite finished with; it may always begin over again. And nothing is quite new; it was always somehow anticipated or prepared for.”

Ruskin = looking backwards. Seems perfectly reasonably after some years of consideration. Moreover, Ruskin derserves a take down because of his hilarious antics with Effie.

Ruskin was disappointed to discover that his bride had pubic hair. He expected a Greek statue. The marriage was never consumated. She married Millais.

My synecdoche is Ruskin = authenticity – fresh roots and springtime green sprouts unsullied by the problematics of entrenched values. And my memory of someone’s (possibly Ruskin’s) take on the Gothic gargoyles brings tears to my eyes – the stone carvers’ pagan sensibilities (animistic, proto-Deist!) quietly forming a buttress to a flowering authentic European culture no longer in thrall to the Hellenistic–those faces bursting with creative *genius*.

It’s reasonable to take David to mean, “Why look back to look forward?” Look back at Ruskin asking us to look back at the middle ages. Not everyone’s oreinted that way.

Two synecdoches:

– 1) Ruskin = Looking backward

–2) Ruskin = authenticity; find an open space for creation, unburdened by artistic agendas.

And Michael Gordon points to an open space in his title,

“Thou Shalt Thou, Shalt Not”

As with the Andriessen title, I don’t have any hints about MG’s intentions with that title. He may have left clues, but I take it as something akin to the sensibilities of the Gothic stone carvers. I hope to have the opportunity to ask him.

The Pre-Raph notion of Gothic, translated into hipster = gettting real

If I get upset over a synecdoche that to me is uprooted from the roots that are very real to me, I am in error. There are always ongoing shifts in historical focus. Those shifts explain generational differences and they relate to shifting pronunciations and word usages. I “aseed” (accede) to such realities. [Rachel Maddow says “aseed”.)

And in this case, the difference of perspecitve is century old. CS Lewis has a book of essays called

They Asked For a Paper

This is my route into the discussions of Macherey and Althusser and to Owen Barfield’s philology. I know Macherey and Althusser through Terry Eagleton, who was kind enough to answer a letter I sent to him on these subjects.

As much as David Lang feels weird about looking back to the Middle Ages, it’s amusing to see Alex Ross descrive Lang’s work as having some kind of Medieval vibe.

The Rest Is Noise “Bang Theory”

I agree with the characterization and note that it is at odds with a disomfort with Ruskin. There’s nothing inconsistent about a BOAC composer being knowingly or unwittingly Pre-Raph; it’s reinforced by Reich’s avowed kinship with Perotin, and there’s that stunning medieval number in John Adams’ El Niño. Minimalism wanted to get real. Losing minimalism’s kinship with the Pre-Raphaelites might strike some as mission creep?>

What is mission creep in music? A step in a process? Does it lead to things growing stale or things getting freshened, or both? It relates to the critic who said Brahms reminded him of musty old blankets. Such redolences are real and provoke reactions. What to call this other than an historical process, scent-based, feeling based, rather than ideological? Those stuck after most have moved may be thought of as stranded assets if they are quiet lone wolves. Others will rot there.

For the moment I am happily telling myself that Alex Ross testified to a gradual, unwitting Ruskification of David Lang’s work.

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depicted: Dietrich Boenhoffer

Regarding Stifter – Dietrich Bonhoeffer was famously reading Adalbert Shifter’s *Witiko* while in prison waiting to be executed. The fictional Witiko is a lower noble.

Throughout the novel we learn the difference between the upper and lower nobles. The upper nobles are partying at hunting lodges. Like Cheney shooting his plutocrat pal in the face.

The lower nobles are trying to make the system work, concerned with the wellbeing of their serfs.

In the opening chapter we see the expectations of an innkeeper. Witiko arrives at an inn and the innkeeper assumes he will take Witiko’s horse to the stable. Witiko says, no, I will tend to that.

He takes his horse to the stable, lovingly pats it down to allow it safely to cool, waters, feeds it, etc.

The upper nobles have trained the innkeeper…..

My memories of so many anecdotes from Stifter’s work always moves me to tears. The rise of authoritarian pathologies has made Stifter so much more poignant.

The Biedermeier (Stifter was very Biedermeier) memory of analogous tyrannies goes back to the 30 years war that Grimmelshausen writes about. Stifter also has a story about that sad time. A love story taking place in a remote mountain valley in Bohemia.

I was easy to think Goethe was prescient (predicitng a rising barbarism), but he merely was up on the predicable pathologies of tyrants and their ability to manipulate the populace. He knew all about the 30 years war.

I assumed the US would be forever immune. How sad to get this reality check.

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Intro to Stifter’s *Many Colored Stones*

Karl Kraus “In These Great Times”