Rubato, Vibrato, and Primordiality

Some hefty thoughts on a light-hearted topic: violin music and writing

© 2015 Edward Moore

I recently had the rare privilege of spending an afternoon discussing the art of the personal essay with several accomplished writers practicing in various genres, ranging from the novel, to the short story, poetry, and spiritual memoir. My main reason for proposing and conducting that little symposium was to prove to myself that the personal essay -- an august genre that seem to me to be fading or, rather, dispersing into the realm of tweetable textese effusions -- is still among us, even if it is mostly residing in desk drawers or on unaccessed sections of hard drives. One of my hobbies (it seem that term is rarely used anymore) is to seek out intelligent editorials, regardless of the positions being espoused, since I am a great lover of language and take delight in verbal virtuosity. Many years ago, when I was working on my doctorate, I used to take frequent breaks to check out commentary on Slate, for example -- Christopher Hitchens being my favorite contributor -- or Eric Alterman's Altercation weblog. The writing was always energetic and often gave the impression of having been executed in great haste, with devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, I would imagine Hitchens or Alterman walking away from their computer, after posting an especially incendiary piece, in dismay over a word or sentence or an entire paragraph that they wished they could "unsend" (if only such a button existed!). How many times have I -- all of us! -- felt the regret and even the knotted stomach after writing something for the masses that was out of line with our public image! Consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds," in Emerson's ever-apt phrase, is what makes, if not a poor thinker, certainly a poor essayist. The daring excursion into new territory, the dangerous flirtation with the hydra of devil's advocacy -- heart-pounding challenges to the intellectual structure that protects us from the open fields of insanity or absurdity -- is what makes writing exciting, and more than just a production to be downloaded, scrolled through, and forgotten. It is what raises mere typing to the status of art. This notion of mine was discussed in the aforementioned symposium, and the analogy with music was brought up, by Yours Truly.

Many, many years ago -- before the dissertation, that milestone which brought on post-Ph.D.-partum depression (with which I still struggle) -- I was a budding young violinist, spending several hours a day carefully sawing my way through a second movement of a Mozart concerto, and later, planting the seeds of carpal tunnel syndrome with Paganini's 24 Caprices or the diabolically seductive D minor concerto of Sibelius. When I began to play publicly, the relatively easy pieces from the Baroque and early Classical periods satisfied me, to an extent; but with the backup of a good pianist or, later, with members of the string quartet for which I served as second violinist, a safety net (to use an old cliché) was in place, of sorts. Granted, one could screw up, but unless the error was glaring, the pianist or the other members with whom one was performing could play over the glitch rather easily, so that only an expert or a really well-attuned layperson would notice. The "fun" really began when I played solo -- i.e., unaccompanied -- pieces, like a Paganini caprice, or the "Last Rose of Summer" variations by Ernst, or one of the Ysaÿe sonatas, et cetera; for it was then that I became aware of the hobgoblin of consistency. Was I going to do my best to play each note exactly as it appeared on the page (following the fingering and bowing suggestions of Ševčik or Galamian)? Or was I going to engage in that wonderfully liberating practice known as rubato? This works quite well, as I discovered, with a rather tedious piece such as the second Caprice of Paganini, or, for a more recondite example, Ernst's D major Concertino, which easily lulls one into passivity if those seemingly interminable scales of thirds and sixths aren't rubato-ized. Even in the grandest piece of the violin repertoire, the sacred Solo Sonatas and Partitas of J. S. Bach, some embellishment injects an authentic periodicity and contemporary excitement to these immortal works, as Isabelle Faust has demonstrated so well in her recent recordings.

In the liner notes to her 2013 recording of pieces by one of Paganini's finest successors, Pablo de Saraste, Julia Fischer (pictured right) explains why the distinction between artistically serious works and virtuoso showpieces is often a spurious one. The effect of music is not either / or -- that is, there should be no effort to separate "highbrow" intellectual music from "lowbrow" emotional music; the profound Reformation Symphony by Mahler versus Wieniawski's Légende, for example. And in an earlier interview [http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/201010/11702/] discussing her recording of Paganini's 24 Caprices, Fischer states that she "approached them as I would a Mozart concerto." Taken by themselves, the pieces are indeed inviting of flashy playing, and a performer who prides himself on his ability to do a fine job dazzling an audience with, say, number 9, must -- if he is to take in, and communicate, the full scope of Paganini's accomplishment -- view the Caprices as a single work, or "cycle," as Julia Fischer puts it. "When you play [the 24 Caprices] in a cycle you have to pay much more attention to the musical differences of the caprices -- the audience shouldn't be bored after a few caprices and think it's all the same. If you just play, for example, 13 today and, let's say, 19 next week, it doesn't matter if the atmosphere is very similar. In the cycle, you have to find the differences." Indeed, differences. Not similarities or consistency. An effective essayist (to return to the topic that introduced the musical sidebar) will not compose pieces that are predictable. In a rather ironic statement, given the overall predictability of his opinions, the philosopher Nietzsche wrote that "The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind" (Daybreak § 573). ["Nietzsche needed persons, not masks, for his philosophy," wrote Thomas Ligotti, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2007), p. 31. This is a most telling remark, and one needs to read Ligotti's book carefully to unpack it.] Music is, of course, a nondiscursive artform -- i.e., it is not concerned with language and the expression of communicable or iterable (to use a postmodern term) meaning. Rather, music strikes something in us -- I was about to say a chord -- that is primal, and which precedes such intelligible noetic constructs as the concept, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, et cetera -- though music does function in a sort of logical manner, following rules that are more honored in the breach than the observance. When Julia Fischer speaks of the "differences" that make the 24 Caprices a "cycle" rather than just a collection of showpieces, she is referring, I think, to the artist's ability to don as many masks as possible, in order to gain a desired effect. Nietzsche also wrote that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity" (Twilight of the Idols I.26), and while donning masks may seem like a lack of integrity, I think that, given the unthinking blandness of so much commercial music -- and entertainment in all genres that attempt to pass as art -- the ability to don a mask while remaining artistically vibrant is to keep the life-force flowing in those areas of human expression where the person -- a unique, unrepeatable entity (ancient Greek, hupostasis) -- is still sufficiently protean to be interesting. T. S. Eliot remarked, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) that "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Indeed, as I write this I am listening to various performances by Julia Fischer on YouTube -- each one a new prosôpon placed upon her inimitable hupostasis; at the moment, Tschaikovsky's violin concerto. How different she is here, in the rather lugubrious transition to the ebullient final movement, from her light-hearted prancing in Paganini's La Campanella!

Poetry, it seems, is the closest linguistic artform to music, for obvious reasons. The rules are there, and a poet who is able, at the right moment, to bend or break the rules for the sake of personal expression, gains notoriety. Ezra Pound, I think, is a poet who came as close to being a musician of the word as it is possible to be. The reason for this, I believe, was his devotion to the art of translation: taking an existing work and from that raw material, that hulê (to again use an ancient Greek philosophical term), producing an entirely new work, albeit one which rests upon an hupokeimenon (another Greco-Roman, or more accurately patristic, philosophical term) or substratum from which one can only depart so far before the work degenerates into self-serving grandiosity. Pound's Canto I, a very loose translation of a Renaissance translation of part of Homer's Odyssey (the descent to Hades), displays the manner in which Pound's mastery of the rhythm -- if not all the grammatical niceties -- of Anglo-Saxon poetry enabled him to make free-flowing (rubato-ized) music out of this ancient substrate.

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Translating in order to produce an effect -- an effect that the translator has already felt, through his or her experience of the work -- is what every fine poet or musician does. A performance of a composed piece of music is a translation; and success is measured by the performer / translator's ability to produce both admiration and a sort of misgiving in the listener or reader. I have often that felt the most successful performances -- whether they be essays, poems, novels, or interpretations of a musical piece -- are the ones that unsettle me in some ineffable way. To be taken beyond language, conception, cogency, into the realm of the primal, is to experience beauty emerging from the roiling darkness as the inspiration of the artist clarifies the prima materia. Now perhaps I am getting too philosophical about something that is supposed to liberate consciousness from the trammels of structure and stricture. But one would have to be sufficiently philisitinized, I believe, not to sense that something is seriously wrong with the artistic world of twenty-first century America. Agendas rule the day, and pure art -- Was there ever such a thing? I think so (topic for another effusion) -- has become utilized for socio-political purposes. Ezra Pound was perhaps writing "nonsense" (as his biographer Humphrey Carpenter stated) when he made the following statement about music (in his introduction to his 1911 translations of Cavalcanti):

Rhythm is perhaps the most primal thing known to us ... music is ... pure rhythm, rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation of rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these various rhythms.

But I think, on the primal level, we respond to rhythms in speech in a most powerful way -- which is why poetry was the first form of written communication. Easily memorizable, onomatopoeic, and susceptible to virtually infinite variations. Quite like music. And like vibrato on a violin ... when our pitch is a tad off, that wonderful shaking of the wrist permits the minor correction that only a bona fide expert would recognize as a pitch adjustment.