Music and other four letter words; 3

University of Utah radio presents music and other four letter words. Here is your host associate professor of music at the University of Utah Paul bad. Let us speak up time and temporal. It was Mr. Elliott who the last time was much preoccupied apparently with the point of intersection of time with the times. Which is not just the poet's preoccupation or the saints as he suggests but is apparently very often the musicians we tried to save as in the meager way I think the last time. As one of the kind of prominent features of a high bar Roque art. And by that I didn't necessarily have in mind just the music say of the 17th century culminating as people say that music did in Bach or Handel about the Rochas a sort of. Recurring tendency in the arts. As late as

the poetry say a hard crane. How. For a musician whose particular art is sort of fixed in time. To achieve something like a sense of the time. Lots of composers just bypass that altogether because there there is music and there is music. It's easy to write music to entertain people it's easy to write music which is beautiful. It's difficult apparently to take the art which moves forward in time and to find some technique some method of time suspension. And usually when that happens it info is a special kind of audience which wants something like that experience or is looking for something like experience which is of course an experience which transcends the art and makes music more than music. There are there are techniques and there are composers who have developed them. There are

ostinato techniques for example in the time of the early 18th century which are which is merely the repetition again and again and again. Certain kinds of rhythmic patterns or melodic patterns. Until the ear ceases really to listen anymore. But rides on a certain tide of inevitability detaches itself from any sort of frontal participation in the music. When this happens it's a little like the person I suppose who sits. Focusing on something explicit on the other side of the room and then discovers that he has gone out of focus. There are a glaze that has come over his eyes and that he is there but he is not there. This is probably a simple way of talking about something like. You know much more important context. The point of intersection of time with. The

time has to be there. And not to be there. It's the metaphysicians preoccupation with being and becoming. Without laboring that particular thing we could play a piece of music this one from Beethoven. The last of Beethoven's piano sonatas Opus One hundred and eleven in C minor. Major the two movements in which Beethoven tries to make fairly explicit at first to our ears anyway some of the techniques of time suspension for one thing. In the second movement it will listen to parts of although we don't really have time unfortunately to listen to the whole of it and besides we shouldn't listen to it anyway. We should just let ourselves yield if we can. It's immediately apparent that it's not a very interesting. Tune. That he's chosen. And so a kind of static harmonic movement. There are maybe only three chords. The placement of the hands is at some

distance one from the other. So that there is a great yawning chasm which is sensible to us at the beginning of the music. And although this is the same at the end of the movement the sense of distance because of everything that we have passed through and the quality of ecstasy apparently which it has induced in US is not present anymore. And that's like being there and not being there. It's like time and the time. It's it's like being and becoming. It's like all of those things which co-exist paradoxically. But never in a kind of either or relationship. He's chosen to write the piece of music for piano for alone so that he can have something like the effect of the painter who works in a single color a monochromatic painting. Formally he's chosen one of those very difficult things and what kind of form which is not very interesting to a lot of people

that is the theme and variations so that he begins with what would seem to be a not very interesting thing proceeds to make variations on it as though once again in a kind of metaphysical allusion. It is being said that there is no really new thing under the sun that the pacing of things sometimes is more vibrant sometimes more telling sometimes more illuminating than others. But we come back at the end of the movement to the place where we began. And this sounds like a line from Eliot's Four Quartets. We go by the way in which there is no ecstasy he says and we return to the place where we began and recognize it for the first time. That means that we have we have undergone a special process of illumination. It has very little to do with music. Except that music is the way music has become sort of tolerable. Music is a path. Towards greater

apprehension but then Beethoven seems always to have been saying that when he really applied himself seriously after about 1812 to writing music for its sake and not for people's sake. Well let's listen for a minute to the way in the second movement of the last Opus One hundred and eleven begins. Paraphrase another thing this pioneer is the place.

No color. No sense of movement. Very devotional kind of quality. A lot of things that could be said I suppose about the quality or the nature of the music. We don't really have time. To speak about the variations begin the variations increase in. The sort of dynamic quality. The pacing seems faster and the activity latent dynamism is sort of explored and made explicit. Finally as a result of all this a kind of ABS sore Sion in the total experience which is possible from just this simple sounding and not too interesting appearing beginning we are finally caught up. In a kind of wrap to some kind of ecstasy. Kind of hazy

focus so far as that particular melody or that particular chord of the sequence is concerned. So by the time we've come to the end of the movement there are people who declare and these are usually the Special Advocates of the late music of Beethoven. A special kind of spiritual experience has been accomplished by way of the music that they have experienced no other way. There could very well be true. I wouldn't want to say however that music is the only route to something like that kind of awareness because we are we are all reminded by one person or another that music is just another way to listen for a moment to the way this movement and so that you might I suppose have a better idea of what it is I'm trying to say her. Why.

Having passed through the dynamism all of the energy all of pulsation. Which we are capable of I suppose. We are purged somehow by the music. This is apparently what Beethoven has in mind. We are caught away. We are transported. We have awareness that were not available to us before. They've come through a very strict kind of musical discipline which raises that other problem which the St.. I suppose in his exploration of the route to God knows better than any of us. Something like ultimate freedom being available only by means of ultimate discipline. Look the way out is the way through and certainly the way around.

Well all this sounds very strange of course because it serves. As a way of speaking about some kinds of music which many people loathe. Actually I mean it's lots easier to listen to Beethoven artistically. So it's easier to listen to. Technically. It's a lot easier to do a lot of things. It's a lot easier to listen to some Debussy atmospherically and quite possible and as far as I can tell there's nothing wrong about that except maybe the easy way. And it may also be judging from some things said by those three men. And even if you see that isn't ultimately what they have in mind for their music to do. Or to be. Beethoven says that the end of all this for the listener is something like the beginning was for him that his catalyst was always a state of spiritual exhilaration or enlightenment for which the best word which romantics of the 19th century seemed to have was joy in his ninth symphony. He says

that it's something like the feeling of being. Merged beyond the stars over the top of the stars with the eternal father who sits on his throne over the canopy of the stuff and that it is in fact the business of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven to to create to induce to make possible for us this kind of ecstasy and that that is the business of music and that once it has happened to us once we've had a sort of clear vision of something like the true light that we are in fact purged of other less important mortal awarenesses and we cannot come back and be the same people that we were before. The fact that lots of people probably most people listening to Beethoven do come back the same people that they were before and and with with a tinge of sorrow at the return to human experience must mean that they didn't have the experience in Beethoven's music that he intended for them to have.

That in Opus 100 then 11 the last piano sonata they did not experience the ecstasy they were not in fact transported they were not called away they were not affected in just the way that he had in mind for the music. That may not be the fault of the music however but the fact that we find ourselves incapable very often because of our entrapment in the temporal of the kind of discipline and the kind of attention then the kind of. Rapport which the music requires is easier for us to be turned on I think. By my pleasant happy. Sounding. And fairly free moving we would say in our ordinary nowadays vernacular joyous music like. This for example from a recent free moving Broadway London type show. Yes.

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

Good morning. My. Thing in. The Fall. I've. Long long

long long. Thought. Which is kind of a shame it should have gone on and on and then it could have been truly symbolic. C S Lewis I think is a man who tries to make the distinction privately but important principles between words like happiness and words like joy.

And there are others who try to make distinctions between words like beauty and words like truth. Now this is a nice song. It's a happy song. Whether or not it represents the ultimate achievement enjoy. It. Beethoven would wonder. I suppose Mr Elliott would wonder. I suppose I would wonder I suppose. And yet in its way it's not a bad experience maybe maybe a beginning experience. Maybe something an occasion to which we can rise actually. And maybe it's important that a lot of people can rise to a certain happy occasion maybe more important than that only a few people can rise to a joyous occasion. We're there however Bertha's in this kind of area the pop rock kind of music. A group of people who pretend to be something like the Beethoven's who make it possible for

a given the few to transcend just that kind of happy swingy. Good morning starshine experience to something which they say is much more profound. We've referred to them before I suppose in this series These are the people who talk about their kind of pop music striking through to something like ultimate awarenesses something like ecstasy again something like Time and transcendence once again when a lot of people listen to this kind of music their reaction is much the same as it is to say Beethoven Opus One hundred and eleven that it seems monotonous that it seems dull that it seems like it's going place that most of those things that we like or have come to expect from music and even from art are not present. But it is not pretty. All of those things are certainly true and the reason that they are certainly true is because that they that they don't seem to have any connection with what the experience of the music is supposed to be. Listening to

this music say by blind faith you recognize a lot of the qualities which are. The technique of time suspension and they'd open up a Zondervan 11. The slow moving harmonic context. And the sometimes terribly painfully exposed nature of playing instruments the singleness of color and the variation on a sort of basic beat or theme. All of those things are here Beethoven as incarnated except that incarnated now in a different kind of medium. And probably for a different kind of public but he wouldn't have minded that since he had a great respect for the folk. It begins to sound and because this music will go on this way for a

long time. Like the chanter of medieval songs in his won the ultimately true church begins to sound like the chanter of. The. Indian rain dances. Who has the one ultimately right. Set the. Musical sounds and phrases which will appease or entice the gods. Begins to sound like the player of the Indian ragas who has the one set. Of musical formulas and patterns which coincides. Rightly and for all time. With the quality of the evening or afternoon or morning. Begins to sound like a lot of things. One thing that doesn't sound like is interesting beautiful entertaining. Any of those values that we we like to associate I suppose with.

The music that is us. But it's not meant to and as long as we can get over that hurdle I suppose we can begin to understand some other things about music and possibly about life. You are also asking me questions as Walt Whitman and I hear you. I answer that I cannot answer you must find out for yourself long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams. No I washed the gum from your eyes. You must habit yourself to the devil of the light and of every moment of your life. That sounds like Mr. Elliot it will cost you not less than every thing. He says. Did you see said that. I suppose you use. You may remember that the French symbolists poet said things like that. You have to give up the syntax you have to give up the familiar. You have to let go. You have to give up hostility towards all the unprecedented experience

long enough. Walter goes on have you timidly waited holding a plank by the shore. Now I will you to be a bold swimmer to Jumpoff in the midst of the sea. Rise Again nod to me shout laughingly dash with your hair. And there you are. Jump in somehow let go of the plank. Sink in a moment of cure could Gordian chair or rise again nod to me who am the way show or Beethoven. Eric Clapton Susie and whoever and find what joy is laughingly dash with your hair. What joy is and what mere happiness may have been. This has been music and other four letter words featuring

Paul Bana associate professor of music at the University of Utah. Music and other four letter words as a production of University of Utah radio executive director Rex Cambo. Series director Jean tak. This series is made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.