Hey this is awesome. Kiefer is sort of endlessly pertinent to a consideration of any (attempted) ahistorical aesthetics and I love seeing him in this context specifically.
It’s really interesting. Kiefer was apparently a Van Gogh fan since his teenage years because of his landscapes (not, he maintains, because of his biography). One of his newer works in the exhibit, from 2019, is a riff on Starry Night. It’s not specifically linked to anything but the Van Gogh original, but it still has that same primal texture of his other paintings. Which makes me wonder what looking at Van Gogh books as a teenager in a bombed-out Germany must have been like.
This is all, I suspect, above my pay grade (after all I am an old, lowly, lonely, jazz musician), but thanks for that piece, which will probably give me the kind of weird, confused dreams I usually get after reading Walter Benjamin. But I have come to accept my limitations, my failed intellectualism; at some point I have to stop trying to figure out things and just compose. But I tend to think all music is absolute and here, if I am understanding correctly what absolute music is, is why: music may have, in its origins. a social theme, a political theme, or any number of sociopolitical means of origin; that's fine, and I have used those kind of externals for stimulus myself. But at the moment of creation, at the moment of creative origin, everything, for the composer, is discarded except for an aesthetic sense of expressive, sonic possibility. That moment is not political, it is not social, no matter how much the title of the work points to concrete themes. That moment is a moment of pure feeling (to quote Peter Handke) in which all externals other than the physical/emotional/aesthetic/technical moment are discarded. I say this as a rather worn out 71 year old who has been performing and composing for many years while not really getting very far professionally in my field. What has sustained me is not the sense that I am accomplishing anything politically but rather a satisfied, internalized aesthetic sense. This has kept me alive particularly through the last 5 years of some regular near-death and near-life experiences, and I believe that is the reality as opposed to the ideal. We should support social justice through our political actions but if we think our aesthetic actions are going to have any real long-term results we are hopelessly deluded. Think about the Germans - a great history of humanist literature, philosophy, and musical composition and what did it get them? A little guy with a little mustache who murdered everyone he could get his hands on. Germany's Got Talent, maybe, but it also had a sick, deadly social underbelly that came to the surface in no time. Same with America, whose fascist tendencies have now bubbled up from under a surface that never really went away.
"Will probably give me the kind of weird, confused dreams I usually get after reading Walter Benjamin" may be the single greatest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.
I think it can be both, y’know? I think there is perhaps an “absolute” aesthetic or artistic impulse (that pure feeling Handke — a brilliant writer but a terrible human being — talks about). By necessity it’s influenced by external factors as well, because we all exist in the larger world to some degree unless we’re one of those sects who moved to the backwoods of Siberia generations ago and didn’t realize World War II happened until 30 years after the fact. But there is a moment where art and aesthetics take the wheel.
We can also tell our audiences what we were thinking about when we wrote what they’re about to read/see/hear, but we can’t control what they do with that information (I love the idea of death of the author but I also think it’s too absolutist for how we actually take in art). As you point out, I’m not sure how much we can expect one form of art to push a political or social agenda while still remaining art and not propaganda (Leni Riefenstahl comes to mind), but I think we’re deluding ourselves just as much if we insist that it can exist fully divorced from those same political and social contexts.
I meant that about Benjamin, and thanks for responding. I take my cue from Richard Gilman, who believed that great artists were not writing history but an alternative to that history- but Richard also praised Brecht for showing the active conflicts between the public and the private mind, which was essentially the conflict between the aesthetic and the political mind, so, yes, it gets confusing and more and more complicated. I also think of Phil Ochs, who showed that political song could be art song. But my model, when I used to write plays, was Brecht as filtered through Beckett, which may have been the only original thing I ever came up with. I don't know if you are familiar with Brecht's first play Baal, which is really like a predictor of Beckett, which is quite amazing. But I have composed with political themes and it is really like a stew of operational ideas, filtered through musicians like Charles Mingus, who regularly wrote music whose titles were brilliant and precise commentary on American life and politics. So...the moral of the story is that there is no moral; don't make rules unless you intend, moving forward, to ignore them.
This is an absolutely beautiful piece. For what it's worth, in my forty-five (eek) years of playing, conducting, and (above all) teaching, I have hewed closely to the notion that there is no such thing as "absolute" music. My most important teachers always spoke in metaphors, and I do the same with my students. I also have hewed to the notion that there are exceptions to (almost) everything and absolute statements like the one I just made should always be questioned. For me, however, the bottom line is that most (but not all!) music that could possibly be termed "absolute" is absolutely not very interesting to me.
Anyway, thank you so much for your wonderful writing!
Love this. All of my best teachers spoke in metaphors as well, many of which I still go back to often.
This also reminds me of a Geoff Dyer essay (set, aptly, in Amsterdam, including the Van Gogh Museum). A character Dyer and his girlfriend encounter says: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
In reading the first part of your piece this morning, I found myself wondering if anyone's ever done a thought experiment, trying to imagine, let's say, a perfectly naive listener, one existing without explicit or implicit understanding of historical and cultural contexts. Would this theoretical person be the one for whom absolute music would exist in the way I think most of use are taught to understand the term.
I don't mean to presume what conclusions other people may have come to, but I certainly learned somehow to equate absolute music as a closed system of purely musical relationships early in my education, and had to heavily revise that concept later on.
I’m trying to remember when I was 3 or 4 and listened to operas with my mom and her parents. The problem is that I came to music via opera, and the first operas I got to know were through Who’s Afraid of Opera, which explained the plots and characters. So I’m working with a skewed slate from the get-go.
But then, isn’t most classical music for children geared towards that explanation? Britten’s Young Person’s Guide, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf… When I worked at Time Out and interviewed artists I often asked what their first musical memories were and for most of them it was lullabies or nursery songs, Happy Birthday, or church music — all works where there is a pretty set signification. They ARE the context. Even 4’33” seems tilted towards this idea.
I suppose I should revise my earlier comment. "Early education" should actually be undergraduate studies. Before then, I didn't really think of music in any particular way that I can articulate.
I'm afraid I'm at a point where my earliest formative musical experiences are distant enough that I can recall them at will, but now I'm wondering how they may still shape the way I think about music. The earliest pieces I can remember are ones my mother played on the piano, and they are inextricably tied up with feelings from that time. While they don't have a story in the way your opera examples do, they certainly carry a lot of significance in the way I understand that period of my life.
Even now, if I think about them in "purely musical" they have an emotional content that sets them apart other pieces.
So, if, as I think you are getting at, we can't ourselves ever be absolute, so to speak, in our experience, is there no point in trying to imagine a listener who is?
Right, but by that point wouldn't the student already be coming to the table with some baggage, whether they've thought about it or not?
But I think you've hit the nail on the head in either case, that there probably isn't an absolute listener. I was trying to shore up some examples — like those videos they have on YouTube of nomadic tribesmen from west and central Asia listening to Pavarotti for the first time — but even that is still attached to their own context with music and sounds (and those videos always creep me out a bit for their Buzzfeed-esque framing).
Hey this is awesome. Kiefer is sort of endlessly pertinent to a consideration of any (attempted) ahistorical aesthetics and I love seeing him in this context specifically.
It’s really interesting. Kiefer was apparently a Van Gogh fan since his teenage years because of his landscapes (not, he maintains, because of his biography). One of his newer works in the exhibit, from 2019, is a riff on Starry Night. It’s not specifically linked to anything but the Van Gogh original, but it still has that same primal texture of his other paintings. Which makes me wonder what looking at Van Gogh books as a teenager in a bombed-out Germany must have been like.
This is all, I suspect, above my pay grade (after all I am an old, lowly, lonely, jazz musician), but thanks for that piece, which will probably give me the kind of weird, confused dreams I usually get after reading Walter Benjamin. But I have come to accept my limitations, my failed intellectualism; at some point I have to stop trying to figure out things and just compose. But I tend to think all music is absolute and here, if I am understanding correctly what absolute music is, is why: music may have, in its origins. a social theme, a political theme, or any number of sociopolitical means of origin; that's fine, and I have used those kind of externals for stimulus myself. But at the moment of creation, at the moment of creative origin, everything, for the composer, is discarded except for an aesthetic sense of expressive, sonic possibility. That moment is not political, it is not social, no matter how much the title of the work points to concrete themes. That moment is a moment of pure feeling (to quote Peter Handke) in which all externals other than the physical/emotional/aesthetic/technical moment are discarded. I say this as a rather worn out 71 year old who has been performing and composing for many years while not really getting very far professionally in my field. What has sustained me is not the sense that I am accomplishing anything politically but rather a satisfied, internalized aesthetic sense. This has kept me alive particularly through the last 5 years of some regular near-death and near-life experiences, and I believe that is the reality as opposed to the ideal. We should support social justice through our political actions but if we think our aesthetic actions are going to have any real long-term results we are hopelessly deluded. Think about the Germans - a great history of humanist literature, philosophy, and musical composition and what did it get them? A little guy with a little mustache who murdered everyone he could get his hands on. Germany's Got Talent, maybe, but it also had a sick, deadly social underbelly that came to the surface in no time. Same with America, whose fascist tendencies have now bubbled up from under a surface that never really went away.
"Will probably give me the kind of weird, confused dreams I usually get after reading Walter Benjamin" may be the single greatest thing anyone has ever said about my writing.
I think it can be both, y’know? I think there is perhaps an “absolute” aesthetic or artistic impulse (that pure feeling Handke — a brilliant writer but a terrible human being — talks about). By necessity it’s influenced by external factors as well, because we all exist in the larger world to some degree unless we’re one of those sects who moved to the backwoods of Siberia generations ago and didn’t realize World War II happened until 30 years after the fact. But there is a moment where art and aesthetics take the wheel.
We can also tell our audiences what we were thinking about when we wrote what they’re about to read/see/hear, but we can’t control what they do with that information (I love the idea of death of the author but I also think it’s too absolutist for how we actually take in art). As you point out, I’m not sure how much we can expect one form of art to push a political or social agenda while still remaining art and not propaganda (Leni Riefenstahl comes to mind), but I think we’re deluding ourselves just as much if we insist that it can exist fully divorced from those same political and social contexts.
I meant that about Benjamin, and thanks for responding. I take my cue from Richard Gilman, who believed that great artists were not writing history but an alternative to that history- but Richard also praised Brecht for showing the active conflicts between the public and the private mind, which was essentially the conflict between the aesthetic and the political mind, so, yes, it gets confusing and more and more complicated. I also think of Phil Ochs, who showed that political song could be art song. But my model, when I used to write plays, was Brecht as filtered through Beckett, which may have been the only original thing I ever came up with. I don't know if you are familiar with Brecht's first play Baal, which is really like a predictor of Beckett, which is quite amazing. But I have composed with political themes and it is really like a stew of operational ideas, filtered through musicians like Charles Mingus, who regularly wrote music whose titles were brilliant and precise commentary on American life and politics. So...the moral of the story is that there is no moral; don't make rules unless you intend, moving forward, to ignore them.
This is an absolutely beautiful piece. For what it's worth, in my forty-five (eek) years of playing, conducting, and (above all) teaching, I have hewed closely to the notion that there is no such thing as "absolute" music. My most important teachers always spoke in metaphors, and I do the same with my students. I also have hewed to the notion that there are exceptions to (almost) everything and absolute statements like the one I just made should always be questioned. For me, however, the bottom line is that most (but not all!) music that could possibly be termed "absolute" is absolutely not very interesting to me.
Anyway, thank you so much for your wonderful writing!
(absolutely) sincerely,
Gabriel's dad
Love this. All of my best teachers spoke in metaphors as well, many of which I still go back to often.
This also reminds me of a Geoff Dyer essay (set, aptly, in Amsterdam, including the Van Gogh Museum). A character Dyer and his girlfriend encounter says: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
In reading the first part of your piece this morning, I found myself wondering if anyone's ever done a thought experiment, trying to imagine, let's say, a perfectly naive listener, one existing without explicit or implicit understanding of historical and cultural contexts. Would this theoretical person be the one for whom absolute music would exist in the way I think most of use are taught to understand the term.
I don't mean to presume what conclusions other people may have come to, but I certainly learned somehow to equate absolute music as a closed system of purely musical relationships early in my education, and had to heavily revise that concept later on.
I’m trying to remember when I was 3 or 4 and listened to operas with my mom and her parents. The problem is that I came to music via opera, and the first operas I got to know were through Who’s Afraid of Opera, which explained the plots and characters. So I’m working with a skewed slate from the get-go.
But then, isn’t most classical music for children geared towards that explanation? Britten’s Young Person’s Guide, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf… When I worked at Time Out and interviewed artists I often asked what their first musical memories were and for most of them it was lullabies or nursery songs, Happy Birthday, or church music — all works where there is a pretty set signification. They ARE the context. Even 4’33” seems tilted towards this idea.
I suppose I should revise my earlier comment. "Early education" should actually be undergraduate studies. Before then, I didn't really think of music in any particular way that I can articulate.
I'm afraid I'm at a point where my earliest formative musical experiences are distant enough that I can recall them at will, but now I'm wondering how they may still shape the way I think about music. The earliest pieces I can remember are ones my mother played on the piano, and they are inextricably tied up with feelings from that time. While they don't have a story in the way your opera examples do, they certainly carry a lot of significance in the way I understand that period of my life.
Even now, if I think about them in "purely musical" they have an emotional content that sets them apart other pieces.
So, if, as I think you are getting at, we can't ourselves ever be absolute, so to speak, in our experience, is there no point in trying to imagine a listener who is?
Right, but by that point wouldn't the student already be coming to the table with some baggage, whether they've thought about it or not?
But I think you've hit the nail on the head in either case, that there probably isn't an absolute listener. I was trying to shore up some examples — like those videos they have on YouTube of nomadic tribesmen from west and central Asia listening to Pavarotti for the first time — but even that is still attached to their own context with music and sounds (and those videos always creep me out a bit for their Buzzfeed-esque framing).