Session V: Perspectives on Temporality
Session V: Perspectives on Temporality
Andreas Werckmeister’s Final Tuning: A Theological-Speculative Path to Equal Temperament
Dietrich Bartel, Canadian Mennonite University
Any discussion regarding Baroque keyboard tunings normally includes the assumption that later Baroque musicians employed a variety of unequal temperaments, allowing them to play in all keys but with individual keys exhibiting unique characteristics, the more frequently used diatonic keys featuring purer thirds than the less common chromatic ones. Figuring prominently in this discussion are Andreas Werckmeister’s various suggestions for tempering the tuning, customarily focusing on the so-called Werckmeister III tuning, which he introduces as the third tuning in his Musicalische Temperatur. While this tuning remains popular throughout the era, it is not Werckmeister’s last word on the subject. In fact, the Musicalische Temperatur is an early Werckmeister publication, and the following decade would welcome numerous further of his publications, a number of which speak to the subject of temperaments. Of particular interest in this regard are Hypomnemata Musica, Erweiterte und verbesserte Orgel-Probe, Harmonologia Musica, and his posthumously published Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse. Throughout these publications Werckmeister increasingly champions an equal temperament. Also apparent is Werckmeister’s increasing concern with theological speculation, providing the underpinnings for his views on temperaments. Increasingly, a theological justification seems to take precedence over a musical one in his argument for an equal temperament, the theological one thereby also providing him with a basis for his call for the use of German keyboard tablature as opposed to linear musical notation. It is the concern of this paper to trace Werckmeister’s path to equal temperament by examining his references to it throughout his publications, to identify his supporting arguments for his insistence on equal temperament, and to examine how the system of equal temperament influenced some of his other concerns regarding music theory. Furthermore, the eighteenth-century rejection of his concept of music as a participation in a mathematically articulated divine cosmic harmony (i.e., the “Great Tradition”) in favor of music as a human form of self-expression will be explored (Mattheson in particular).
Bach’s Keyboard Approaches Reinterpreted in Beethoven’s Late Sonatas in the New Age of Progress
Paul Rumrill , Liberty University
Karol Berger’s Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow sees an Augustinian-Christian worldview reflected in J.S. Bach’s formal constructs—having a “structure of linear temporality embedded within the envelope of eternity” (Berger 118). In contrast, Beethoven’s thematic development approaches and tonal organization are generally conceived with temporal, linear conceptions in mind. His musical aims illustrate the values of the modernist ideas of the late 18th century: the (collective) freedom of humanity from divine dictates; the (individual) autonomy of the composer’s will in creating innovative structures and musical devices; and the inclination to dispose musical material in ways that denote a search to attain fulfillment, realization, resolution, and advancement—in a word, progress.
Nonetheless during his later years Beethoven explores Bach’s keyboard works and contrapuntal conceptions as part of a search for material inspiring innovative composition; among these works are the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. Maynard Solomon refers to a “personal and creative crisis” that leads Beethoven to fervent inner searches and studies of “the ancient forms” as part of the formation of his late period works. Fantasy, fugue, recitative, da capo aria, and perhaps even ritornello are reinterpreted and utilized in constructs subordinate to sonata form and progression-mindedness. Instead of the “primacy of invention over disposition” (Berger 99) so prized by Bach in his keyboard works, Beethoven employs the techniques of contrapuntal, linear motion towards temporal ends—invention contributing to the aims of disposition. As Bach did before him, Beethoven also approaches the interplay between cyclical and advancing time. Instead of chiefly using counterpoint as a device to help minimize temporality, however, he employs both homophony and polyphony in framing temporality or its absence. Beethoven will often use fugal techniques to unleash forward motion and vertical concepts to fetter it—the opposite of what Bach will often do, and part of his desire for a multifaceted autonomy that seeks to straddle both the present age and another world.
An examination of Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas (especially Op. 110 and 111) with these issues in mind will explore: how he reinterpreted Bach’s formal constructs to serve sonata form; some of the invention procedures that serve both disposition and the composer’s desire for autonomy; how his interplay of cyclical and linear time synthesize both Augustinian and post-Christian values in his music-making.
Subverting the Values of Modernity: Schnittke´s Second String Quartet and the instant éternel
Luisa Vilar-Payá, Universidad de las Américas Puebla
Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) seems destined to become an obligatory reference for musical postmodernism. Yet this is hardly an enlightening appraisal. To be sure, the cultural and intellectual processes that underlay Modernity have certainly entered a prolonged and serious crisis, but the attempts to conceptualize it have led to a series of inconclusive listings of attitudes and perceptual strategies deemed “postmodern”. From a methodological angle one must avoid straightforward deductive approaches, since the artistic practices of Modernity—particularly those of modernism—have taken recourse to the same schemes including the willingness to challenge structural unity, the use of parody, irony and quotation, and the reworking of traditions.
Almost every strategy just mentioned appears in Schnittke’s Second String Quartet, including several quotations of the religious tradition known as Znamenny Rospev, as it has been recently demonstrated by Emilia Ismael-Simental. The Second Quartet is the first work that Schnittke wrote after moving to Germany and choosing to be baptized Christian. It is also dedicated to the memory of talented film director and friend Larissa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto accident the year before. The autobiographical element helps us to understand the existence of a profoundly reflective work permeated by a crushing sense of hopelessness.
Drawing on Karol Berger’s view of the theological significance of musical time, as well as on French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s conceptualization of a late-twentieth-century recasting of tragedy, I will first argue that the classical forms which are used as a background appear to be shadows of a musical past, against which Schnittke superimposes a way of thinking that undermines the functions and values traditionally associated with Modernity. I will also argue that circularity dominates precisely in those places where a classical work would ask for directionality: again and again the flow of the music brings us to the same point of departure. At the same time, points of arrival are subverted by extensions of the musical flow, or by freezing the moment in a vivid portrayal of a Maffesolian instant éternel.
Paradise After the Fall: Musical Portrayals of the Beyond in the “Post-Christian” Nineteenth Century
Charles S. Freeman, University of Kansas
After Berger's analysis of "interruptions" in Beethoven's music pointing to contemplation or remembrance of the "divine world beyond" (p. 330), this study examines works by later nineteenth-century composers seeking to confront directly what Beethoven portrayed in moments of seeming distraction. In two nominally orchestral works, Liszt's Dante Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, and two oratorios, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and Horatio Parker’s Hora Novissima, a glimpse of this world beyond, be it Heaven, Paradiso, or simply a place beyond death, is attempted. Liszt and Strauss in particular are of interest for their (theoretically) purely musical portraits of Heaven, while the Elgar and Parker works raise the question of finding a relevant style to accompany portrayals of Paradise in text.
These four musical responses to the beyond parallel portrayals in literature dating to the Middle Ages. Liszt’s symphony, after direct evocations of Dante’s journeys through Inferno and Purgatorio, avoids Paradiso, substituting a choral Magnificat. Strauss's tone poem, in evoking the transfiguring journey of its subject, suggests “beyond” as a place of resolution or completion, as in an arrival after a journey. Elgar, in setting Cardinal Newman's poem, portrays an array of heavenly beings and guides encouraging the supplicant Gerontius before the oratorio's surprise twist, choosing a particularly evocative means of portraying Gerontius's encounter with God. Parker, in setting the medieval meditations of Bernard of Cluny, appropriates many of the techniques of Bach, including fugue, to evoke the timeless glories of the heavenly city.
Beyond parallels or appropriations of literature, each work also points to the difficulties of portraying Paradise in Berger’s “post-Christian” world. In particular, Liszt’s evasion of Paradiso and Parker’s reversion to Baroque techniques point to strategies for dealing with the difficulties of portraying the timeless eternal in the narrative-oriented, time-bound Romantic era.