Music against Death: Joana Mallwitz conducts Nono and Mahler

Image: Simon Pauly/Bachtrack.

[Extended cut of a review published on Bachtrack.]

Luigi Nono, Como una ola de fuerza y luz; Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 4

Sarah Aristidou (soprano), Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Joana Mallwitz (conductor), Konzerthaus: Großer Saal, Berlin, 14th September 2024

In his hundredth anniversary year, Luigi Nono is perhaps more often spoken about than performed. A fixture of the German new music scene for many years, his equal commitment to Communist politics and the musical avant-garde may now make him less palatable in an age of neo-liberalism and—increasingly—neo-fascism. But this is precisely why we should remember it. It was refreshing, then, to hear, paired with Mahler’s Fourth, a performance of his 1972 Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a Wave of Strength and Light) at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a large-scale work for orchestra, tape and soloists about memory, remembrance and struggle.

In 1971, some way into working on a piece for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado to be premiered at La Scala, Nono learned that his friend Luciano Cruz had died in mysterious, seemingly accidental circumstances, “apparently due to the inhalation of fumes from a heater in his house.” Nono had met Cruz, medical student, activist and co-founder of the Chilean Marxist-Leninist Movement of the Revolutionary Left, on previous tours of South America, both before and after the victory of Salvador Allende. Nono’s work ended as a kind of requiem to Cruz, an act of mourning and protest at his death and a pledge of commitment to the spirit of struggle in which he lived his life. Nono used a poem by Cruz’s comrade, the Argentinian poet and “minstrel of the revolution” Julio Huasi, from which the work takes its title: the poem is sung and declaimed by a solo soprano early on, but the majority of the piece is instrumental and abstract, rather than textual and programmatic. As with much of Nono’s work, the politics lies as much in the practices of listening it encourages as in simple mimesis or the straightforward presentation of dogmatic messages.

 
The collaboration with Nono and Abbado came at the height of their visible commitment. Documentary footage from the work’s premiere at La Scala shows the three engaged in a post-performance discussion with a large and attentive audience, fielding a listener who suggests that people would rather be listening to the music of King Crimson. Following the Gramscian principles by which the PCI, of which Nono was a long-term member, saw ‘high’ culture as one facet in the struggle for establishing hegemony, rather than something fatalistically compromised and bourgeois, this was a time of experimentation and struggle, culminating in the premiere of Nono’s ‘azione scenica’ Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore at La Scala several years later. This struggle, however, did not simply mean producing or reproducing a music which laid Communist messages on top of conventional forms. And if to present a political message without transforming form would be to banalize that message, to experiment with for without attending to its political significance would be to abrogate political responsibility. Political meaning, then, emerges in and through form as site of dialectical contestation.

   

A deep admirer of Pollini’s virtuosity, Nono, he later explained, didn’t want to write a conventional concerto, nor to concern himself simply with musical innovation, but neither did he want to write programme music. The elegy for Luciano Cruz expresses itself, not just in the setting of Huasi’s poem, but in the form itself, but the form cannot be reduced solely to elegy—or at least, an elegy removed from the broader questions of the revolutionary process to which Cruz had dedicated his life. “I wanted my music”, Nono later remarked, “to be like a space that opens and closes, something like a life that extends and closes again, something like a programmatic metaphor, but free.” Onstage, five loudspeakers behind the orchestra echo the games with depth in Baroque basilicas—a spatial experimentation to be explored at length in Nono’s later Prometeo: “an alternation of bursts, violence and silences”, moving to and away from the audience. Nono had earlier written an elegy for Lorca, while Al Gran Solo Carico D’Amore would function as a kind of gigantic tribute to largely female secular martyrs, revolutionaries who’d perished in the struggles of the past century, from the Paris Commune to Bolivia. He was, however, interested in death “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”. This is not the melancholic pathos of ending, but the struggle of continuing: the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”.

 
This is an “extreme work”, conductor Joana Mallwitz emphasized several times in her typically astute pre-concert talk. While, during her exposition of the Mahler symphony, she was able to illustrate her points with melodic excerpts played at the piano, the sonics of Como una ola are harder to render in reduced form, concentrated as they are in questions of timbre and coloration as much as line or melody. The orchestra is large, whether coming together in gnarly, clustered tutti, or divided into echoing instrumental groups; the solo piano part is demanding, making liberal use of clusters and low notes that threaten to blur individual notes and lines; the words sung by the soprano alternate between the clarity of declamation and a fragmenting into pure syllables and vowels. The tape part, meanwhile, is central to the piece. Sometimes, indeed, it can seem as if orchestra and soloists are playing around the tape, rather than vice versa: what Nono called “an acoustic game of rebounds, echoes, beats and pulsations”, of movement between absence and presence, all the more emphasized for the fact that the tape contains the playing and voices of the previous performers of the work, Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova, rather than tonight’s soloists. Extremity here is not just a case of volume, noise and dissonance—though the work has these in abundance. It’s also about those moments when the music falls away, leaving tape or soloist or a sudden silence, forcing us to re-adjust our focus, to concentrate and contemplate: it’s a work where pathos and drama are inseparable from thought and intellection, where we are not always quite sure where we are.

The work begins with a piercing yet quiet cluster of winds and high strings. It sounds once, then again, briefly, the strings this time cutting in like a knife. Echoing voice in the tape part briefly forms a virtual choir, simmering down to near silence, then joined by the live soprano part, at first wordless, then, in the opening words of Huasi’s poem, first singing, then shouting “Luciano!”, an appeal or cry to the dead, the syllables of the name melismatically extended. The live soprano part unfolds solo, save for the accompaniment of the tape, alternating high, sung lines with phrases shouted out in defiant appeal. Lament becomes call to arms, call to arms lament. It’s a demanding part, the singer having to balance intimacy with public exhortation, all while traversing the voices upper reaches. Over-emphasize, and it becomes shrill: let the strain show, and it loses force. Sarah Aristidou pulls it off with verve. The entry of the piano signals a new phrase. Once again, it’s a challenging part, sounding often in the extreme lower end of the piano in clusters and concatenating hammer blows, through which the pianist must retain clarity of line, even when thrown off by blurring effects of lower-register pedalling and echoing tape. Tamara Stefanovich clearly articulated individual notes without sacrificing the part’s fundamental drama, as the piano alternated with interjections from percussion and orchestra. This section, Mallwitz suggested in her talk, is Luciano’s struggle. Tonight it sounds somewhere between dancing and marching, but with both transformed to become ghostly versions of themselves, as much dream vision as clear portrait. Could we hear the clusters in the piano and the orchestral tutti as representing the mass, the solo line as the guiding vanguard, according to Cruz’s (and Nono’s) Marxism-Leninism? That might be too vulgarly schematic for Nono, yet one can at least note here that the interplay of individual and collective pertains, not just to the interaction of soloist and ensemble but within the solo line itself, as single notes merge to form clusters.

For this is a music of constant transformation. Brass, double basses and low wind (including two contrabassoons) swell in the titular waves, die down again. Clarinets, underscored by the sounds of harp amplified with contact mics, and sounding something like distorted strums from a mutant guitar, flutter as if hovering on an edge, rising and falling, a figure amplified and extended by the piano, now taken up by thick brass, passed around orchestral groups over rumbling bass drums: a music constantly seething, yet in check. A piercingly sustained high note whistle on tape brings the hall to a stop, and the orchestra surge back in, shadowed by the Tonband ghosts. The piano returns to its opening territory of clusters, low end “struggle music”, before falling silent as we end with a passage on tape, from these speakers above the stage which have something of the abstracted gravestone or obelisk about them.

 
Nono would later link his more elegiac works to his interest in the Jewish music of lamentation heard and suppressed throughout Europe from the Middle Ages on, and continued in the work of modernist poets like Edmond Jabès. There are no specific echoes of that tradition here, but this remark nonetheless comes to mind as the pianist falls silent and Aristidou sings over the virtual choir on tape. Under Mallwitz the performance lent, perhaps, more into the contemplative aspects, an undeniably effective approach. Carefully beating out the regular tempo by which each bar lasts the same length, she conducts with a cool precision and poise. This unshowy approach enables the music’s own extremities to emerge unforced. For this is not a concerto or soloistic work: soprano and piano spend much of the piece silent, waiting. Neither, for all its volume, is it fundamentally a music of energy: instead, it offers a drama of stillness as well as activity, of intimacy as well as massiveness, the present and the ghostly sounding at once, the live musicians constantly stopping for the tape, expectant, funereal. In this music of contrast, extreme pitches, high or low, silences and near-silences followed by fortissimo orchestral outbursts, intense outward drama juxtaposed with inner stillness and contemplation, so that all these opposites become dialectical counterpoints of each other, transforming into and out of themselves, inextricably woven. Above all, this is a music of listening, a work in which massive orchestral resources are used as much for the heavy silences they carry as for Romanticist drama, in which piercing dissonance can give tender remembrance.

Nono realized the original tape at the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano alongside original performers Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova. Of these, only the 87-year old Taskova is still alive. What we hear in live performance, then, is the sound of live musicians duetting with ghosts. These ghosts are, too, perhaps, ghosts of revolutions that never were, revolutions that were defeated by coups, reaction, internal dissent. “Luciano! Joven como la revolución” (“Luciano! Young, like the revolution”) declaims the soprano. But at this point in time, the revolution is no longer young. In Chile, the year after Como una ola premiered, the CIA helped depose the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, while today, Nono’s Italy is currently ruled by a neo-fascist government for the first time since the days of Mussolini. But Nono’s music refuses defeatism. Near the end of the work, we hear a section which Nono, nodding to Mao, called “the long march”, as the orchestra gradually, painfully moves from low to high notes, in what may be the closest to a passage of ‘programme music’ in the work, the struggle personified. But, typically for Nono, that’s not the end: instead, in a passage Mallwitz drew particular attention to in her pre-concert talk, we hear a kind of cloud of sound heard in the tape, replaying echoes of previous music. There is no final conclusion, for time leaps forward and back, like the revolution itself. And, like the revolution, or so it can seem, it falls silent. All the more urgency, then, when defeatism and pessimism threaten to settle in, to hear this music of another time, this music of commitment. Nono saw death, “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”, and the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”. It’s a reminder that death—the death of a comrade, the apparent death of the revolution, of revolutions plural—is never set in stone, that change can, and may come, through struggle—the struggle to listen, to play, to organize, to continue.

 

***

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, wrote Theodor Adorno, “avoids all monumentality”. In comparison to the massive scale of his previous two symphonies, the Fourth is relatively short. For Adorno, it’s something like a children’s symphony, in which evocations of marching bands, of triangles and sleigh bells, offers a child’s untainted vision of music. Through this faux-naïvety, however, the adult composer can offer glimpses of the violence present in these apparently innocent evocations—war and the military band, the spectre of child death in the child’s concluding image of heaven, the shadowing violence of its Christian religious imagery—and the anti-Semitic usages to which it had been. In some ways contained and concise, the work is also fragmented, awkward, proceeding through episodes of chamber music-like texture, dances and marches, parodistic folklore, distorted echoes of Schubert, Beethoven and Wagner. With its grandiose, Beethovenian choral ending, the Second Symphony had offered an affirmatory image of resurrection undeniably powerful, gloriously moving, yet troubling in its perhaps too-excessive celebration of religious assimilation on the part of the Jewish composer. A vision of heaven without judgment becomes the ultimate judgment, the vision of inclusion that which abolishes the image of the outsider in love, yet which would reveal itself in its full force in the decades to come in the German-speaking world, with the horrific demonisation and exclusion of the outsider turned into a systematic programme of mass murder. In the Fourth Symphony, we hear the Paradisal vision of resurrection and inclusion once more, but this time replayed, as it were in miniature, as a children’s song. Before this conclusion, all sweetness and piety, however, the work is, as Mallwitz commented, of “scurrilous, grotesque figures”: a work of jumps and discontinuities as much as sweetness, nostalgia and consolation. 

 
The second movement is, in part, a Totentanz: in an early draft Mahler suggested that its solo violin part evoked Freund Hein, a folk personification of death, leading us up to heaven in a dance. Tuned higher than normal, so that it is not quite in tune with the orchestra, Mahler suggests that the violin part be played aggressively, with a deliberate roughness, suggesting a folk fiddle. Adorno points to “possibly synagogal or secular Jewish melodies” here, while Norman Lebrecht describes the solo as “a migrant threat to sedate society”. This is the music of outsiders, who, in a closed and racist society figured as death itself. As with the ländler that suffuse Mahler’s work or the sleigh bells that begin the symphony, we here hear the violin intruding the high art space of the orchestra, not as the kind of decorous folk playing that would suffuse the nationalisms to come—with disastrous consequences—but as the eerie, the sound from outside, the sound of the outsider. It’s as if the soloist in a concerto turned up with a battered fiddle and proceeded to play, the orchestra playing along or contrasting. At the Konzerthaus, the unnamed soloist played it with aplomb: not too grotesque or overdone, not too sweet or smoothed over.

 
So to the finale, with its child’s image of Heaven. There’s something artificial to this paradise, its source, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin’s collection of German folk poetry Das Knaben Wunderhorn, having altered its folk sources in order to make them seem more “authentic”. An image of a child’s image, a fin-de-siècle pastiche of an idealized image of the medieval, the song is not, quite, placed in quotation marks—Mahler made it clear that the work was to seem sweetly authentic—but it is troubled by shadows that Mahler makes no attempt to hide, most notably, in the image of “the butcher Herod”, infamous for the Massacre of the Innocents, slaughtering animals for the heavenly feast. Even in Paradise there is no vision of a world without hierarchy and without slaughter.

 
In Nono’s work, suggested Mallwitz, the first half evokes and laments Luciano himself, while the second half becomes a vision of the socialist future for which he died—a vision which converts lament into struggle, yet a struggle which, in that coda, retains the trace of lament. In Mahler’s fourth, meanwhile, the concluding vision of paradise has an element of horror and terror within its serenity. What Mallwitz calls “the borderless imagination of a child” is not immune from the violence of “das irdische Leben” evoked earlier in the work. “These are not only the modest joys of the useful south German vegetable plot, full of toil and labor”, writes Adorno, “Immortalized in them are blood and violence; oxen are slaughtered, deer and hare run to the feast in full view on the roads. The poem culminates in an absurd Christology that serves the Savior as nourishment to famished souls and involuntarily indicts Christianity as a religion of mythical sacrifice”. The piece echoes strains of the prior movements, as when the sleigh bells of the opening come in just before the mention of the “butcher Herod”—just as those movements contained fragmentary motifs from the song itself, in order to make it seem the work’s natural culmination. As such, for Adorno, the work seems “like a long backward look that asks: Is all that then true? To this music shakes its head , and must therefore buy courage with the caricaturing convention of the happy close.” There is, then, a sadness to this apparent fairytale. “If it dies away after the words of promise ‘that all shall awake to joy,’ no one knows whether it does not fall asleep forever. The phantasmagoria of the transcendent landscape is at once posited by it and negated. Joy remains unattainable, and no transcendence is left but that of yearning.” “There is no more music on earth”, repeats the singer quietly as the work ends. Yet earth is where we hear this music. Consolation is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing of all, if it only acts as compensation for present suffering.

 
Aided by Mallwitz’s resolutely unsentimental approach, Aristidou balanced sweetness and irony, the voice’s final fading seemed rendered as anti-climax, symphonic scale falling away to powerless song. Throughout, Mallwitz’s rigour was refreshing in this music today played so often as to risk seeming hackneyed. This does not mean that it lacked emotion: for to treat the symphony solely as ironic critique and passive defeatism would be to do equal violence to the work as to take it at uncritical, pietistic face value. “Mahler’s humanity is a mass of the disinherited”, wrote Adorno. “He promises victory to the loser”. As Adorno notes, Mahler’s achievement lay in defamiliarizing clichés, joining disparate and incongruous materials in a fragmentary whole. In the Fourth, a symphony that picks up songs, folk dances, marching band music, whose protagonists are the fiddler and the child, a high culture symphony in which music ‘from below’ brings it down from within. It’s this Mahler that we might couple to Nono. His irony, lament and sentiment, apparently polar opposites to Nono’s interrogation, commitment and struggle, in fact reveal themselves as part of the same urge to reconfigure, both the ritual of the Concert and Work, and the same urge to transform the society of which they are a part.

Betsy Jolas’ bTunes

Video thanks to the invaluable 5against4 blog, whose contrasting write-up can be found here.

Nicholas Hodges (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra / Karina Canellakis. BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Monday 5 September 2022.

bTunes, the new piano concerto by Franco-American composer Betsy Jolas, premiered at the Proms in early September on the bill with a much more familiar, but equally strange piece. Under conductor Karina Canellakis, the BBC Symphony Orchestra rendered Mahler’s First Symphony with due attention to its luminous strangeness. The symphony doesn’t so much begin as appear, with the spectral hovering of a seven-octave drone in the strings. It goes on to stage several deeply strange set-pieces, including a lengthy funeral march in which Frère Jacques meets a klezmer melody, and an extended finale, with a sudden and unexpected eruption of doom-laden fanfares and closing, blasting, percussive blare of triumph. At times, Canellakis virtually danced off the podium, and the orchestra’s sprightly account emphasized the piece’s sharp and eerie edges, rendered all the stranger for the strangely apposite sounds of a crying baby in the first movement.

For her part, Jolas’ concerto began with a bit of (extra-)musical comedy, the orchestra’s leader desperately ‘conducting’ the ensemble, cymbal rolls and string textures sounding out like an opening cough, in the apparent absence of conductor and pianist, before Callenakis came running in from the wings, ushering pianist Nicholas Hodges on stage in a Laurel and Hardy routine. More jokes abounded at various points: Hodges slamming the cover down on the keyboard to signal performative frustration or a musical transition—it’s not clear which; the violinists inaudibly bowing the back of their instruments. In such moments, Jolas plays with the traditional roles of the classical orchestra, not only sonically, but in terms of the whole drama and ritual of the concert hall. Musically, as Jolas’ programme note explains, the piece is constituted of separate solo piano pieces assembled as a kind of playlist—hence the punning i-tunes nod in the title. Rather than the traditional romantic warhorse, Jolas renders the piano concerto as a collection of brilliantly-coloured sketches, in which despite a virtuosic piano part, the overall feel is that of a seething, collective texture, the ensemble constantly echoing and amplifying Hodges’ twittering, trilling curlicues. As in much of Jolas’ work, the piece wears its structure lightly: open and flowing, yet precise, its structures assemble and disassemble themselves in a fashion that often feels loose and improvisatory, like breaths of free and clear air.

Astonishingly, once the piece was over, the 96 year-old Jolas stood up from the audience to receive applause and, afterwards, to sign autographs. While some in the audience were clearly bemused, it’s heartening to see such recognition, particularly given Jolas’ long-standing—and clearly gendered—neglect. Jolas herself may not, as she’s stated in interviews, be optimistic about the future of new music, but her own work is anything but pessimistic. It has hope that intellection, liveliness, cheerfulness, joy, and the careful cultivation of an ethics of listening, are all values music can still explore and hold to; hope that awareness of musical history and tradition does not mean being closed but being open, not simply repeating but varying, inventing, ceaselessly turning over and examining the matter of sound with the joy of discovery and with a sense that there is no end to the possibilities to be found.

Joan Mitchell, Quatuor II for Betsy Jolas, 1976. Oil on canvas, 110 x 268 inches (279.4 x 680.72 cm). © Estate of Joan Mitchell.

LONG.LIVE.A$AP.

This is music with a pose aware of its own status as pose, but one posed for an audience different to that working-class or lumpen-proletarian audience one which hip-hop might, in the past and even in some cases in the present, at least pretend to speak for and to. This is music for hipsters, the Pitchfork crowd, posing as music for the people, but which everyone knows is music for hipsters; to be listened to by trendy white kids ‘slumming’ it through their headphones, but with the requisite amount of ‘artiness’ to prevent them from feeling that they’re actually accessing a true lumpen-proletarian vision. Thus, the mix of lyrics with pretensions to the hard-edge macho-misogynistic boasting of a gangsta lienage with ‘cloud rap’ quasi-melancholy, the woozily doomy ambience of post DJ-Screw aesthetics. A$AP Rocky doesn’t rap much, compared to, say, MF Doom’s hyper-virtuosity: the words merge into the background, the track standing on its production rather than by its words (a trend perhaps initiated by the Lil B/ Clams Casino collaborations). Indeed, this is what characterizes the increasing blurring of the lines between style and content, where the emptiness of the gangsta boasts is indeed treated as empty, as almost a secondary texture to the production, dextrousness of flow more than content. Lil B is the extreme example of this, perhaps, veering wildly between the most banal of self-help positivity mantras and aggressive rape-threats to the more interesting parodies of the ideas of persona whereby Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” becomes ‘I’m Bill Clinton’, ‘I’m God’, ‘I’m Gay’, etc, all reduced to the same incompetently slurred and slow, seemingly semi-improvised quasi-rapping.

Still, I think the first song ‘Long.Live.A$AP’, which shares the name of the album, is doing something more interesting, structurally, something which both underlines and goes against the suggestions of its title, with its suggestions of royalty, the urgent non-spaced full-stop between the words breaking up the length or eternity it claims to claim, the urgency of the ASAP acronym turned into ‘get money’, as if that eternity could be accomplished by the money that accumulates the exploitations of an obscured history as its never-ending transcendental legacy for getting everything you want right now, forever. What, for example, to make of the poignancy of its high-pitched sung chorus, asserting that, “Of course, I’m living forever I’ll / Forever, I’ll live long”, with its odd rhythmic landing on the first word (‘I’ll’) of the next sentence, here included as the concluding cadence of the previous line; the grammatical weirdness whereby a verb is elided in order to allow that rhythmic extension of the “I’ll”, so that Rocky claims he’ll “forever”, in which ‘forever’ becomes a verb one could perform, even as the future-projection in the claim to be able to live forever is insistently reduced to a present tense “I’m living forever,” ending with an insistent “I’ll LIVE” that nonetheless never connects up with the “I’ll / forever” which precedes it and which it should complete, so that the futurity of living forever can never be said directly. Not only because of this grammatical weirdness, but because of the odd ethereality of the voice itself – which one might even depict as having the vague associations a kind of soul-ascended-from-the-body spectrality, particularly after Rocky, his “soul […] feel[ing] empty” challenges “the reaper [to] come get me” at the end of the first verse – or the fact that Rocky, despite his claims to invincibility and immortality, to being “on the road to riches” and “tot[ing] that 9,” equally depicts himself as running scared, somewhere between Malcolm X (perhaps via Krs-One), holding his gun in readiness at the window, and a middle-class weakling (“Strangers make me nervous, who’s that peekin’ in my window with a pistol to the curtains?”).

This is all, it seems to me, a making-fragile of the usual gangsta boasting (a boast, to live forever through one’s music or one’s poetry, that of course has existed well before hip-hop) as it appears in the verses, whose juxtaposition with this dreamy chorus is highlighted with almost clunky transitional tenacity in the production, highlighting the status of that chorus as both dream interlude before the reality of life sets back in and as that aspired to by the rest of the song, but only ever briefly reached. The notion of eternal life is here abstracted from the very material subject matter of the rapping – money, women and drugs – so that the material ‘keeping it real’ boasts of hip-hop (which have been, to varying degrees, of course a dramatic facade, a wish fulfilment fantasy, in large or in part) are given a kind of metaphysical tinge (which is, one might argue, entirely apposite given the sacralization of money and/or its gains that hip-hop capitalism has fully, though perhaps parodically and from a complex class position, embraced). As such, this is perhaps the opposite of that process Theodor Adorno believed to be traced in the music of Gustav Mahler, in which “the underworld of music is mobilized against the disappearing world of the starry heavens in order for the latter to be moved and to be a corporeal presence among humankind”; here, corporeal presences and ambitions (which might lead, indeed, to becoming a corpse, through drug addiction, gun crime, and the like, as the lyrics acknowledge) re-ascend into a set of starry heavens which are no longer believed, mystified in the here and now. The stars have already been moved down to earth, and have taken up residence, as hip-hop celebrity replacing the class solidarity that the genre had, and still does, at least in part promise, as the vague intimations of metaphysical belief that circle around Christianity and Islam in hip-hop’s mythic universe.

We might compare here Kanye West’s figure of Yeezus; West still with enough belief invested in some vaguely-theorized ‘Most High’ to take precautionary measures to defend himself against accusations of blasphemy, yet elevating material ambitions, getting, enjoying and maintaining the trappings of wealth as an almost divine goal in itself. But whereas Kanye’s Yeezus is relentlessly harsh, even in its self-pity, the ugliness of the Nina Simone sampling on ‘Blood on the Leaves’ only the most egregious example of this, A$AP’s far less skilful and interesting play with persona – as much a factor of the (multi-personed) production as of the actual rap – nonetheless haunts in its manipulative poignancy in a manner that might also indicate where hip-hop might think it’s come in 2013; or where the afore-mentioned Pitchfork-esque white hipster audience that seems to me to increasingly be shaping this kind of work, thinks it’s come. The wistful whimsicality of the ‘live forever’ chorus is not equivalent to that gesture by which, for Adorno, Mahler’s ironic undercutting of the utopian urge is precisely where he is at his most utopian; instead, it denies that very possibility, and would even seem happy with that state of denial, fetishizing that sense of melancholia and loss in order to amp up its boasts, while dressing them all up in a gauze of a simply aestheticized beauty.

Of course, that sentimentality – think UGK’s “One day you’re here, baby, the next day you’re gone,” as turned into epic vocalized sorrow on the elongated, stretched-out DJ Screw remix – is a hip-hop staple that allows the tough-guy to think himself a feeling man at heart (or, at the least, the production, the use of a jazz or a soul sample, might allow that). A$AP’s female / child-like alter-ego (note the child’s voice that comes in in the final reprise of that chorus), his dreaming high voice – whether or not it is his, treated, or a guest appearance – is thus both separated from and fused with his more ‘gangsta’ image, having it both ways, removing the dreams of ‘living forever’ which might be a call for a collective justice and redemption rather than merely the individual desire for invincibility they would more easily, obviously or even accurately seem to be, while also suggesting that they are central to the verses they surround or interrupt.

Or again, the trope of a boast which undermines itself is hardly a new one – and it’s also present on Kanye’s ‘I am a God’, however much this kind of 1950’s movie-psychologising response is anticipated and satirized within the form of the song itself, a relentless refusal of a particular kind of confessionalism, even as much of the album also falls into an ugly and self-regarding self-pity. On ‘God’, the production, rather than suggesting an ethereal other register as it does in ‘Long.Live.A$AP’, only serves to heighten the relentless crudity of the lyrics, the way they constantly put their foot in their mouth and celebrate the fact of doing just that. So that (to repeat myself), the melodrama Kanye makes of the song’s relentless self-inflation (the repeated sampled screams and the stutters in the music, placed just so as to unsettle the flow at the ‘wrong’ moment) is not so much a cutting-down, a staged vulnerability, but part of the whole performative mask which anticipates an imagined defeat or fear or hubris as, maybe, just another boast. (As well as being part of the whole persecution complex that goes with that exaggerated vanity). But to say that there’s, oh, I don’t know, some ‘real despair’ behind it all is exactly the move that the music anticipates and disallows by occasionally staging moments of apparent self-doubt (which are anyway often ‘resolved’: the singing of “ain’t no way I’m giving up. I am a God” after the final four screams).

Yet, by contrast, I can’t help feeling that there is something more to Rocky’s eeriness than either this anticipatory denial of a separate ‘true inner core’ – jarringly enacted by the high-pitched male screams which ‘punctuate’, or, more accurately, interrupt the lyrics – or a kind of evasively sentimental quasi-metaphysical gesture, hinting at the true material core, the potential collective demand behind the relentless individualized drive of its gangsta-materialisation of the spiritual and spiritualisation of the gangsta-material. This, if only for the way it’s insistently been embedded in my head now all day and all night, despite itself, despite its own anticipations or manipulations of this for indie-cred.

But perhaps I am simply wrong.

Stockhausen - GESANGE DER JUNLINGE / WELT-PARLAMENT (from MITTWOCH AUS LICHT) – BBC PROMS, Royal Albert Hall, 19.07.2013

Performed by Ex Cathedra / cond. Jeffrey Skidmore. Sound projection by Kathinka Pasveer. (Also referenced: Helmut Lachenmann, 'Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied' / Gustav Mahler, 'Symphony No.5', performed by the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra / cond. Jonathan Nott / with the Arditti Quartet.  BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, 15.07.2013.)

Perhaps it’s too easy, or too obvious to say this, but the Visions of Karlheinz Stockhausen would seem to emerge from an egomania based on a particularly old-fashioned, though still prevalent notion of genius, albeit not often these days presented in such nakedly pompous terms – the great artist from Sirius in touch with cosmic vibrations, which he translates into music; apparently with far less of a twinkle in his eye or tongue in his cheek than Sun Ra in his claims to be from Saturn, far less of a play with the traditions of 50s sci-fi, big-band jazz, the history of African-American music as a signifying resistance to oppression; more the vaguely cultural imperialist mystical windbagged ramblings of a rich old white man. The combinations of this egomania with a kind of hippie ‘world-music’ mish-mash of various forms of mysticism and religion passing off for the concern with collectivity with which the music of composers such as Luigi Nono or even the more open-ended scores of post-Cageian associates of the Wandelweiser group much more actively and specifically engages, mean that any encounter with his later music in particular increasingly have to be taken with a pinch of salt. The same could be said, I suppose, of the religious framing of the near-entirety of Messiaen’s output, equally grandiose in its marshalling of large orchestral resources or long spans of time; but I can’t help finding that there is something to do with Messiaen’s continued engagement with the presentation of time’s progression, or non-progression, the structural blockiness of his music, the pleasure of its textural surface in musical terms that don’t need to be related to any of its various scenarios, borrowed from fairly traditional scriptural sources, that makes it easier to listen to on its own terms than Stockhausen’s. ‘Welt-Parlament’, the a-capella choral work which took up the majority of tonight’s programme, is the second scene from ‘Mittwoch aus Licht’, the ‘Wednesday’ section of the enormous operatic cycle which occupied him for nigh on thirty years, and which is by turns self-consciously excessive, wacky and grandiose. In almost all the reviews of the piece (staged as part of the complete ‘Mittwoch’ in Birmingham last year), some minor discomfort or uncertainty is expressed about how to place the tone of this congress (the Welt-Parlament are holding a session in which they debate the meaning of Love); after concluding that the scenario and the dialogue that takes place within it is a hippie continuation of pieces such as ‘Stimmung’ or ‘Hymnen’, it is praised for its scope, for the staging, &c., &c, as if we were thankful for its very existence, rather than attempting to get under the skin of some actual problems that might exist for and with it.

I mean, for sure, it can be hard to know how to take the piece: it seems impossible, for example, that lines like “Love is cosmic glue” or injunctions to “find love” in your inner voice, which is the voice of God, or some-such, could have been written with a straight face. “Love is forgiveness” sings one of the parliamentary soloists; “Not always” replies the President, to which the choir respond with elongated “Ach-So”s. The historical and moral stakes of Love itself, in political or theological terms, are nowhere present in such utterances; nor, it would seem, are they intended to be. Regardless of the rather baffling tone of the libretto, though – which seems somehow to sit too comfortably for satire, and, if satirical, remain uncertain of its target -- the fact that much of the music is sung in invented future languages at least removes some of the dramatic absurdity: taken on its own terms, the choral writing is often beautiful, in a post-Ligeti, post-Stimmung way, with ripples of sound travelling down the rows of singers. For Stockhausen’s sense of spatial dynamics, largely due to his pioneering work with electronic music, is always in play, as it was in the initial diffusion of ‘Gesange der Junlinge’ from speakers around the Royal Albert Hall, its watery electronic bloops and bass booms and phased or pitch-shifted shards of the solo choirboy recording which is its source emerging unpredictably from different points of origin. If that piece could be criticised by the use of that rather amorphous, but frequently-deployed pejorative term ‘dated’ – impressive for its logistical achievement at the time, though many of the sounds could be easily recreated using simpler electronic means, now – one might also add that its structure doesn’t seem as sharp or as tense or as thought-through as it might; there is none of the wrenchingly tense silences present in the music of Helmut Lachenmann, none of the drama of Nono’s late-60s tape pieces, but rather, a kind of meandering quality, excited with the possibilities for creation that the technology and basic concept have created, but not always quite sure how to progress through and with them.

Returning to the notion of space, we might also witness also the entrance and exit of the choir at the beginning and end of ‘Welt-Parlament’, mumbled mass voices gradually fading in and out to the discrete accompaniment of the electronic metronomes each singer carries; some strange versioning of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’, perhaps, though without engaging that work’s teasingly questioning relation to patronage and the labour of its performers. (Stockhausen’s relation to the massive riches heaped upon his music would seem to have been that these were perfectly in line with the cosmic excesses his vision demanded, the most extreme of which is perhaps the entirely tedious ‘Helikopter String-Quartet’ which also forms a part of ‘Mittwoch’).

In terms of the ‘Welt-Parlament’ scenario – this debate on love by a variety of international representatives, taking place, I believe, somewhere literally above the clouds – there’s scope, one would have thought, for a music of debate, even of dialectical confrontation – though as the theme of ‘Mittwoch’ is reconciliation, or, as Stuart Manconie puts it in his book on Stockhausen, a kind of middling, or middle-ground, following the wars of ‘Dienstag’, that’s less the focus here. What happens in the end is that the so-called ‘debate’ on love leads to the airing of certain platitudes over a general hum of assent, sometimes with theatricalised gestures of indignation or disagreement on the part of the performers – which, however never really present themselves in the music; this hum sometimes focuses around droned centres, syllables stretched and thrown around the choir, invented languages or magic names intoned somewhat in the manner of ‘Stimmung’ (‘licht’ gets repeated a lot, seemingly associated with a particular hand gesture that looks a bit like a poorly-done gang symbol; Stockhausen goes bloods-and-crips), and sometimes allows space for coloratura exercises, little solo interventions. Perhaps this is intentional: speeches / arias as demonstrations of a flaunted technical skill that masks the lack of any significant message or contribution, epitomized by the temporary election of a female president (as the manifestation of the cycle’s Eve) when the male president runs off to prevent his car from being towed away; this election celebrated with a self-congratulatory delight in the mere mechanism of election itself, the appearance of correct process without any real consequence outside the self-enclosed ritual of the government chamber. Given this, and given Manconie’s potentially useful notion of a kind of banal middling, we might posit that Stockhausen is, however gently, humorously sceptical of his own quasi-internationalist visions, which it’s also easy (and probably correct) to see as extended hippie hang-overs; the vision of the galaxy-president as a camel-version of the cycle’s Lucifer, shitting out planets, in a later scene, or the announcement-‘interruption’ that the world-president’s car is being towed away in ‘Welt-Parlament’ would seem to mix in a kind of child-like poking of fun at authority figures – even as Stockhausen himself, it might be argued, remains, to a certain extent, the most absurd authority-figure of all, a child playing with his toys in the supposed interests of humanity as a whole, to whom, he, as the supreme artist Lucifer, has come to bring Licht. [*]

Yet there is never really any sense that Stockhausen is aware of what is at stake in the questions of government, community, internationalism or even universalism that his scenario breezily touches on. The alternation between soloist and choir might, of instance, have a long history in relation to, say, Greek dramatic art or to Bach’s Passions, for instance – or to its instrumental manifestation in the concerto form – but that’s never really exploited or dealt with apart from in the potential satire of the solo-as-display I’ve suggested above might be present. Similarly, the gender segregation of the choir (apart from two male singers (counter-tenors?) among the women’s side) would suggest a rather un-reconstructed notion of Love, or, indeed of parliamentary governance. Debate as un-dialectical self-congratulation; the appearance of an attempt at collective governance as precluding any actual necessary engagement with its practical implications. This might be seen as a send up of the impotent fake internationalism of the U.N., but I don’t think Stockhausen’s ‘politics’ traveled that far. Certainly, there’s no sense of that critique being made with the notion of the struggle for an actual internationalism behind it: Stockhausen was no communist. If ‘Hymnen’, for instance, wanted to be the twentieth-century version of the ‘Ode to Joy’, its internationalism was equally fake, and, as Adorno puts it of Beethoven’s work, partial, non-universal: see here Konrad Boehmer’s critique of the political-leanings of the anthems selected by Stockhausen, and his utopian vision of an “irrational petty-bourgeois supra-nationality." By contrast, Helmut Lachenmann's 'Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied' - performed at Monday's prom in a choice pairing with Mahler's Fifth Symphony - provides an engagement with the history of German national identity in music, through the transformation of Haydn’s Emperor Quartet into an anthem associated with bombastic chauvinism, an ethical fragmentation and consideration of the appropriation and complicity of a ‘pure’ music with repellent nationalist ideologies, which might provide us with a better vision of how one might address such issues.

It would be possible to argue, of course, that the climaxes of Lachenmann’s piece occasionally reached a fairly traditional kind of modernist angst-bombast. A few years ago, indeed, the composer-improviser Radu Malfatti expressed discomfort with this aspect of Lachenmann’s music in an interview for Dan Warburton’s now-defunct Paris Transatlantic magazine: “for me, his pieces are still hopelessly old-fashioned, the structures and the forms tumble around in 19^th century-idiomatics: with all his beautiful sounds [by ‘beautiful’ Malfatti here means Lachenmann’s use of extended techniques in order to further the range of instrumental material available, rather than in what he would call a ‘regressive’ sense], I still hear rondos, climaxes, anti-climaxes, and so on.” Yet, against Malfatti, I would argue that, like Mahler’s, Lachenmann’s climaxes highlight their own status as moments of ‘power’ or force or angst as the weak and ineffective moment that, as clichés, they are. The issues surrounding connections between nation, music and mass murder that ‘Tanzsuite’ attempts to address, through its scrupulous re-working and stripping away to a last ghost gesture of German song material, might be said to express itself in two forms: first, an almost-nothing, in which, say, the entire texture is reduced to the whisper or scrape of a violin bow being drawn across the body of the instrument, barely audible in the extended space of the concert auditorium. This almost-nothing, however, always implies climax, a layering of additional instrumental over smaller groups or soli (as implied by the concerto grosso form) – thus, rather than any ‘still, small voice’, it is invariably fraught with the tension of an anticipated return, of an extension that never settles comfort, always liable to interruption or discontinuation but too extended to remain an easily-assimilated interlude. Second, a full-blown climax, which, however, implies its own dissolution back to fracture, to that ‘almost-nothing’, and thus seems to contain something hollow within it. The fairly large orchestra on-stage, then, always seems reduced, impotent, those climaxes sounding out an attempt at bombast that comes across as over-compensation, and through such a move – the inhabitation of fullness and large-scale exaggeration by extreme forms of reduction, and vice-versa – Lachenmman’s piece becomes a dialectical engagement with the orchestra as a particular ensemble category. One could, if one were being crude, apply some crude fascism metaphor to the orchestra , its members swaying to the charismatic will of conductor and composer, everyone with their particular role and their right place; more specifically, though, ‘Tanzsuite’ is an engagement with the presentation of a ‘national music’ that becomes associated with particular orchestral sounds (see, for instance, Adorno on the use of brass within the ‘New German manner’ of the Wagner / Bruckner school), as forms of false collectivity which, in its splintered re-fashioning of how such an ensemble might sound out, is fully engaged with questions of musical form choked with layers of corrupted historical sedimentation.

If, initially, then, Lachenmann’s use of climax and of the resources of the orchestra might at times seem to slip into what Malfatti calls a ‘regression’, it is precisely those moments which ensure a critical and dialectical relation to musical history and to regression itself. The fact, meanwhile, that Stockhausen avoids climaxes of that kind – the feeling of ‘Welt-Parlament’ is somehow oddly serene – suggests, not a ‘progressiveness’ or an escape from the tired clichés of 19^th-century German Romantic music, but that less is at stake. For Lachemann, exaggeration is always musical, accomplished through gestures and textures of amplification or reduction, and their mutual exacerbation of each other, while for Stockhausen, exaggeration occurs mainly through pin-pointed theatrical gestures – the amplified blowing of kisses, the cartoonish car-towing interruption, the setting off of multiple electronic metronomes, the stammered announcement of the next scene by the fat singer left on stage after everyone else has accomplished their beautiful exit. Too often, these moments (primarily comic) feel like spectacular gimmicks, little moments of frisson designed to play against the expectations of a stuffy and stagnated opera house; yet this is all they remain, little moments, talking points for reviews, rather than immanent engagements with musical tradition and its attendant social rituals. It’s not too dissimilar from Werner Herzog’s descent into an essentially empty collection of self-consciously ‘wacky’ gestures in ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’: moments designed for crazy Nick Cage / crazy Werner you-tube clips in a manner little different from the compilations of the most absurd moments from the crappy Cage-starring remake of ‘The Wicker Man.’ Stockhausen can at least be presented as a charming curiosity, a mad scientist, a crazy inventor, a quasi-celebrity who makes extreme statements about 9/11 and writes music to be performed in helicopters; fun to think of as existing, even if one would never listen to it in any depth. Lachenmann’s sustained engagement with musical history and with form, even if it might not seem to challenge the bourgeois formal boundaries and parameters of its concert hall setting, is a more sustained and serious questioning of that setting and with that which is heard in the setting, and one that is primarily concerned with listening, rather than with egomaniacal ornamentation, with the frisson of bourgeois frippery. While the outraged reactions of cultural conservatives whenever a piece of contemporary music is somehow slipped into the Proms programme are hardly a reliable gauge, and while Stockhausen, as a far more famous public figure and a frequent target of bile, is also frequently attacked, the twitter outrage over Lachenmann’s piece suggests something of the way in which, outside any consideration of its structuring principles – merely, that is, on a ‘surface level’ – it remains fundamentally more challenging and troubling in its affect.

Up on cloud nine or on Sirius B, with stars in his eyes, I suppose Stockhausen was never going to be connected enough to music’s historical stakes to attempt anything like this. Still, to return to 'Welt-Parlament', I kept wanting, even as the spectacle and the music itself were impressive enough (though the choral language felt, oddly, rather too comfortably conventional in its beauty, too safe in its affect), a music that could take the potential for debate within that form and really delve into formally; some version of the extended debating scene from Ken Loach’s ‘Land and Freedom’, or the debates in Peter Weiss’ ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’; or Plato’s Symposium; or some sense of what Love might mean in theological or political terms, as in J.H. Prynne’s extended, word-by-word close-reading of George Herbert’s ‘Love III’. What love might mean in terms of hunger and consumption and individual and community, negotiation and gift, the economics of personal relation, and so on. But mainly what I got, in the end – and though I’m certainly glad there have been two Proms performances of contemporary music in one week, before the onslaught of Britten and the queasy-banal propaganda celebration of Royal-Baby-coinciding ‘Britishness’ – was feet heavy with cosmic glue.

[*] [A further note on Stockhausen and humour]

For Adorno’s Mahler, moments of parody and the grotesque are often entwined with those which should be – and on the surface might superficially appear to be – tinged with grandeur or power or force, the undercut bombast of brass climax as revealing the pain at “unappeased suffering” rather than a distanced laughter at the naturalized, never-changing perpetual motion of that taken to be the world’s unchangeable course: the omnipotence and omnipresence of capital and the exploitation of labour. Stockhausen’s humour has no such moral basis - that essential component, also, of real, engaged and effective satire. Rather, his is the playing around of precisely that bourgeois subject who imagines a distance and a freedom from "the world's course" that alienated labourers are not allowed to have. Charming as it might be, it is of the same impulse as his egomaniacal view of himself as conduit for humanity’s advancement and best interest: Marx’s bourgeoisie, in ‘The German Ideology’, mistaking the interests of a particular economic and social group, a particular class, for the interests of the whole.