Saturday, February 06, 2010
Jankélévitch makes, while essaying music's ambiguous "depth," in a section that could be placed under the heading of enchanted chronology, the seemingly prosaic statement that musical works exist exclusively in the time of their playing (p. 70). Before critiquing let's read the full paragraph for context:
Music is an essentially temporal art, not a secondarily temporal one like poetry or dramatic literature or the novel. Of course, time is necessary to perform a play: but theatrical works can be read one right after the other, or in fragments, and in any order you please. A musical work does not exist except in the time of its playing. Now, this playing occupies a certain durational interval interval (by virtue of tempo), and one can work out its timing; the elapsed time is measurable but not compressible and would not submit either to being abridged or extended. Thus the sonata is properly speaking a succession of expressive contents that unfolds itself in time: it is an enchanted chronology, a melodious form of becoming, time itself. Sonata is sonorous time: the temporal realization of the virtualities contained in two musical themes. And it takes time for the listener to discover these virtualities and for the spirit to delve into the core of this immanence: there is a time for sinking in, and this time, perpendicular to the time of the performance (if one dares to use such language), is the time that the listener spends in delving into the thickness of this meaning devoid of meaning.
(Op. cit.)
Now let's take the position that a musical work exists only in the moment of its performance, knowing that we might afford some depth to such a moment, knowing that there is a time of listening. What does one then rehearse? Of course a musical rehearsal may be thought of as a kind of performance. However in a crucial sense the rehearsal, insofar as it a performance, has an as if quality. Its being as performance, if we may permit ourselves such a phrasing, is conditional. Is it conditional on there being some—some other—awaited performance, a performance that must have the quality of not being realized, not yet, or in the case of the perpetual student of music, not ever, but in any case not realized? Is the performance pseudoreal? Eoreal? Rehearsal reveals the eoreal aspect of the performative—an aspect beyond the telic and the atelic— which minimally teaches that the temporality of the musical is indeed well characterized as having depth, if not depth of being, which may perhaps not pertain to things eoreal, then appreciably depth of phenomenality.
What does rehearsal mean for enchantment? Again, one comes up against a problem of repetition. "In music," Jankélévitch asks (p. 71), "is repetition not often innovation?" I ask, is repetition in general an essay of the work of temporality itself, an essay which potentially reveals the eoreal aspect of time?
Labels: depth, eoreality, Jankélévitch, music, repetition, temporality
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Jankélévitch writes, "In the very measure that one tends to confer upon music the dimension of depth, music is, perhaps, the most superficial form of appearance" (Music and the Ineffable, p. 11). Taking up Jankélévitch's problematic requires putting any hermeneutics of music into question, a position which invites us to consider the question of whether music is a form of appearance at all. That music is a form of appearance is upon reflection not at all obvious. The very idea of appearance as we have inherited it evokes a hermeneutics. Appearance elicits an understanding of depth that, duly appreciated, demands the persistence of a critical distance between immediacy and experience. Does music absolutely require such an interpretive distance, as some musicologists would claim? On the contrary one could argue that in order to be music—as it urges to be understood—music must break from criticism. We could of course refine our notions of "understanding" and "appearance." We could make allowances for music. But does music want our allowances? Aren't we in the end left with ideas that don't mean in the way we want ideas to mean? We have no idea of music. We have no idea of music, yet we still live it, and we still want to approach it philosophically.
Labels: interpretation, Jankélévitch, music, phenomena
Monday, November 17, 2008
To move in rhythm is to recall the metamorphosis of subjectivity–so we are then victims of repetition?!? No, we are just finding a place to launch a critique. (Incidentally an onompatopoetics of experience has been imagined, a becoming atmospheric. Likewise, we could simply supply an alternative, concrete hearing of sounds. The sojourns of this conversation are many.) Rhythm. Levinas' conceptualization of rhythm (in "Reality and its Shadow") can't be compared with what the poets and the musicians and those who study them teach. When I say "rhythm" I mean a slightly other concept of rhythm, not an automatic response that would make us victims of repetition (which we will momentarily disavow for the sake of meeting), but a meeting. The meaning of the interval, the space between durations, the pause, is borrowed from the meeting. In rhythm we meet, ourselves perhaps, perhaps with a flavor of the youtastic–the groove, the word groove too, jump starts the youtastic (and not merely systatic) capacitization of rhythm. Anamnesis of the youtastic, or of the borrowed meaning. Are we not in charge of our recollections? Is there a cause for anxiety? That something vital will be left out of a recollection? That a personal adventure won't be narratable, or that, conversely, we won't be able to escape a romance of totalization ("[t]he interval is no longer separable from one's personal adventure" (Levinas, "Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge," in Proper Names (trans. Michael Smith, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 24)))?
Every meeting is a unique event that cannot be told, that cannot be joined together with other presents to make up a story. It is a pure spark, like Bergson's instant of intuition (BM, 69), like the "almost nothing" of his disciple Jankélévitch, in which the relation of consciousness no longer has a content, but is left like the point of a needle penetrating being. The relation is a fulguration of instants without continuity, which refuses to be a continuous, owned existence (IT, 109; BM, 65, 108).
(Ibid., p.29)
I am challenged by any liaison between the continuous and the rhythmic. Should I now apologize for metastic spasmorealizations of the groove? You are invited to pick up the conversation from here.
Labels: Bergson, Buber, Jankélévitch, Levinas, Passages, repetition, rhythm, you
Monday, February 25, 2008
This is a variation of the 123-5 meme which involves tagging five other bloggers. I've been tagged by Dylan. Here's the deal:
- Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five bloggers.
I picked up Music and the Ineffable by Vladimir Jankélévitch (Princeton University Press, trans. Carolyn Abbate, 2003).
And more still: even in this "moment," the musical-ness of music will often be due to an even briefer conjunction, the briefest instant within a brief moment, an opportune minute, one beat of a single measure–like the ravishing chord in Chabrier's Sulamite, like the captivating harmonic sequence in Chaikovsky's Dumka, or the Gregorian cadence at the end of Fauré's fifth piano prelude. The Charm hangs on the impoderable musical-ness of a brief occasion, a lightning strike of an event.
But can one install wisdom on the seat of this delicate imperceptible point in an ephemeral instant?
I reckon old Vladimir was asking the question posed by music which is also a vital question for thought. Generally I'd say it was the question of the present moment, though as Paul might want to point out, my inclination would be to jump to the question of how one experiences the present moment–and so perhaps you can see one reason why the question appeals to me as it arises from thinking about music rather than, say, calculus.
I tag Nick,Matt,Roman,Yusef and Keith.
Whew! I made it without crashing. I'll be on shaky legs until next Monday or so.
Labels: Jankélévitch, meme