I am picking up this writing by RedScharlach to propose a question.
RedScharlach wrote:Anton Webern's Orchesterstück op. 10 no. 4 has nothing narrative about it: six bars, less than half a minute, a few short sounds scattered here and there. Lachenmann dedicates a couple of pages to a tight analysis of the tiny events of the piece, grouping them by affinity, identifying their consequentiality (exactly!). Then, suddenly, he changes register.
The whole thing is nothing more than a moonlight serenade of fluted sound, with echoes coming from the place where the bright trumpets play and the death-announcing trombone, an instrument of universal judgment, responds, until the military drum plays the retreat, disturbing the idyll and the lover begins to pluck the mandolin under his arm, while his beloved makes a gesture to him with a violin figuration.
[Helmut Lachenmann, Listening is useless without listening. Possibilities and difficulties.]
This Webern, re-listened to through Mahler's ear, reveals some things.
The main one seems to me the possibility of reading a novel in an aphorism: it is a matter of time scales. With Mahler we can sit down with all the calm in the world, a Symphony lasts two hours, we have all the time to enter his sound world, understand what is happening, follow the drama, participate emotionally (like reading a great late-19th-century novel). Webern, by comparison, is incredibly sparse and elliptical: we don't even have time to realize that the piece has started, and it is already finished. And yet Lachenmann demonstrates that by observing the music through a magnifying glass, equipped with great attention and great imagination, the dynamics are the same.
In short, it is not the quality of the sound events that determines narrativity; apparently, it is not even the relationship between events "in itself"; perhaps it is the possibility of describing such relationships through the categories of narration, complete with characters, conflicts, resolutions (but here I am entering the field of hypotheses).
We are talking about an aphoristic work by Webern that I would like to place alongside this poem by Ungaretti:
Soldiers
One stands as
d
of autumn
upon the trees
the leaves
i am picking up this phrase:
"Lachenmann demonstrates that by observing the music through a magnifying glass, equipped with great attention and great imagination, the dynamics are the same."
setting it aside for that of Messiaen (proposed by Frank), here it is:
Frank wrote:I propose this interesting quotation from Messiaen regarding rhythm and the listener:
[...] he [the listener] will not have time, at the concert, to verify the non-transpositions, the non-inversions and, in that moment, these problems will no longer interest him: to be seduced, that will be his only desire. And that is exactly what will happen: he will undergo despite himself the strange fascination of impossibilities: that certain effect of tonal ubiquity of non-transposition, that certain unity of movement in the non-inversion of rhythms (or when beginning and end are confused because they are identical); all things that will progressively lead him to this kind of "theological rainbow" that tries to be the musical language, and from which we seek incitement and theoretical support.
In red is the interesting part that clashes with Lachenmann's idea ... during a concert one does not have a magnifying glass. Aside from the fact that if a lens is needed... narrativity has gone to hell, but the point of this topic is to understand the meaning of aphorism in music.
Here, thinking about Ungaretti:
"The term 'soldiers' is easily replaceable by 'men', and to war the broadest notion of life is applicable, at the moment when Ungarettian reflection universalizes itself, and reasons no longer solely and exclusively on the tragedy of war but on the absurdity of the entire human condition and on its intrinsic finitude, on its being condemned to an end like the last autumn leaves of the trees. And this parallelism between man and leaves is both a very effective image and an intertextual reference (which reconnects Ungaretti's text to those of an illustrious learned tradition) to the classical tradition, such as that of the Iliad."
For intellectual honesty, I am citing the source
http://www.oilprojec...riche-2822.html
What should be triggered in the listener after a few seconds of listening to a Webern series (which is practically the piece) or the work indicated by RedScharlach?
Clearly, I am asking to understand and not so much to nitpick the excellent forum members who are providing very interesting insights on fascinating topics.
Thanks in advance.
