Robin Holloway on Music

[Larry Kart]

Robin Holloway (b. 1943) is an interesting, quirky British composer, best known for his Second and Third Concertos for Orchestra (both on NMC), and an interesting, quirky critic, best known for his “Debussy and Wagner” (Eulenberg Books). I just got my hands on his collection of critical pieces “Robin Holloway on Music: Essays and Diversions, 1963-2003” (Continuum), and was pretty much stunned by a passage from the essay “Haydn: The Musician’s Musician.” [The part that stunned me comes at the very end, but I’ll have to quote at length to give that coda some context.]

Haydn, Holloway writes, “is the most self-conscious... the purest of all composers; his art has the fewest external referents, is more completely about itself than any other…. Haydn alone gives no handle, there is nothing to latch on to, biographically or in subject matter…. This music is pure because it cannot be translated. Despite one’s ready recognition of a ragbag of tropes…it owes less than any other to metaphor, simile, association… He is music’s supreme intellectual. Yet every lover of Haydn recognizes within the cerebral power many characteristics difficult to name without absurdity, so wholly are they musicalised. Highs spirits, all the way from physical brio…to jokes, puns, games of surprising intellectual and even expressive weight .. touching on rarified places which no other means could reach…. There is serenity and hymn-like calm; Enlightenment openness, sage and humane; radiance without shadowlike tempera, pure colors on a white base. Their opposite -- twisted strangeness, contortion, mannerist extremity--is almost as frequent, and this too is shadowless in that is never morbid…. Then there is deep still contemplation, simultaneously remote and glowing” etc. etc.….

"How are we to take music that seems to evoke such ambiguities and contrarieties as these, but that certainly supersedes their merely verbal expression—that offers, in its own intrinsic terms, a play of mood, as of material, simultaneously so straightforward and so ungraspable….

"This is the area at the heart of all the arts where structure and process fuse inseparably into expression; the total result is an emanation, however direct or oblique, from the unique individual who is doing the making and summoning into being.

"Music is about notes, whether the upshot is Tristan’s delirium, Tchaikovsky’s floods of passion, cardiac convulsions in Mahler and Berg, or any sonata, trio, quartet, or symphony by Haydn. If it’s not good composing, then neither is it good expression of an emotion, or depiction of a character, or evocation of sunlight playing on the waves or all the rest. If ‘words, not ideas, make a poem,' how much more true for the relatively unconnotational art of music….

"Yet music does render all of those extraneous things. If it were indeed just ‘pure music,’ something—the main thing—would be missing…. So...how can unmitigated concentration upon the process of composition be at the same time a quest for what Debussy called ‘the naked flesh of emotion’? It must be that the materials of music themselves not only convey passion, pictures and so forth, but that they actually ARE passionate and pictorial—intrinsically, of their nature.”

I don't know about you, but I'd been standing when I first read that last sentence, I would have had to sit down.

[AllenLowe]

thanks Larry - I don't know if you've ever read Richard Gilman, a theater critic (and a former prof of mine, who is now, sadly, dying) - but he makes much the same point, I think - arguing against critics who are always trying to put art in a convenient social context (think also Sontag, "against interpretation ") - this is important stuff - as Gilman says, art really offers an alternative history, ""a counter-history, the generation of a psychological and aesthetic alternative to the prevailing artistic and social order". There is also what Beckett has said in describing an artist, "he has nothing to say, only a way of saying it." Beckett's book on Proust is quite brilliant in this regard, and many of the same points are made by the French novelist Robbe Grillet in "Toward a New Novel." Coming to grips with this kind of thind changed my life, my whole approach to composition and performance -

Gilman used to have a little saying when someone questioned the so-called "reality" of a character in a play (like, for example, Didi and Gogo) - someone would say, who are these people? They don't really exist anywhere, they are unrealistic. Gilman would say, "they exist on the stage." You can really make a parallel between this and people who attack new music as being outside of accepted creative/artistic contexts; this is how they went after Ornette in the early days, and Ayler, and a thousand others (and still do so - see Marsalis/Crouch, two heads on one critical body) -

Edited May 23, 2006 by AllenLowe

[Rooster_Ties]

"It must be that the materials of music themselves not only convey passion, pictures and so forth, but that they actually ARE passionate and pictorial—intrinsically, of their nature."

I agree strongly with this statement, and immediately notice some parallels in the visual art world -- specifically with arguments over the value of visual art being intrinsically tied to the idea that it has to be representational of something tangible -- something recognizable -- something "reality-based".

There's that old canard* that the only kind of good (visual) art is that somehow represents the physical world, a.k.a. "reality". But clearly, art -- including beautiful and entirely "successful" art (whatever that means) -- can present visuals with no basis in reality, or even complete and total abstraction (though I'd argue that one can find examples in reality that mirror aspects of almost any non-representational visual art, including totally abstract art).

So too with musical/auditory "art". Many (including me) have argued that music does NOT have to strongly "represent" (or resemble) existing forms and/or sounds, in order to be interesting, "valid", or good. But the degree to which it ("sound" and "time") is organized/filled with interesting sound events -- particularly where there are discernable patterns or pure expression through the sound(s) it/them-selves -- should determine the value of the music in question. Not the degree to which it "represents" sound in a manner that is comfortable and "recognizable".

I'd better quit while I'm ahead (or before I get in any deeper than I can tread!!). One last thing, though... with this discussion, I'm immediately reminded of one of my favorite musical quotes...

"Beauty in music is too often confused with something

that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair."

-- Charles Ives

*had to look it up myself, before I was sure I'd used it right.

Edited May 23, 2006 by Rooster_Ties

[JSngry]

Everything vibrates. Everything. The senses are nothing but receptors and processors of vibrations.

[AllenLowe]

Gilman always used to talk about how old art (talking everything from theater to literature) was tied to old gestures - and that art's purpose was not give people the same old answers but to ask new questions -

[Simon Weil]

Wow!

S'wonderful criticism. Thankyou, Larry.

Simon Weil

(I mean there's a million things you could say, but I couldn't just now= Gobsmacked.)

Edited May 24, 2006 by Simon Weil