5.
The Power of Music
Throughout this series of Reith lectures I have been focused on the content of
music and its relationship to life. Here, today in this final lecture, I would
like to explore the power that music has over us, the power of the association
that music evokes - that is to say I would like to distinguish between the
substance of music, and our perceptions of it, and ultimately to consider the
difference between power and strength in music, and in life.
It is essential to understand that music is conceived of, and eventually
delivered, from the point of view of one individual. As a result subjectivity is
an integral and necessary part of music. And therefore the permanent
relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is an essential aspect of
music making, as it is of life. Even the freedom of speed in music, what is
called tempo rubato, which is nothing else but Italian for stolen time. Tempo
rubato can not be willfully conceived, but must inevitably have at the very
least a contact with the objective sense of time, i.e. not stolen. And here
again we are confronted with what I like to see as the moral responsibility of
the ear. After all, it is the ear that determines audibility and transparency in
music. It is the ear that must guide us in tempo rubato to have the moral
strength to give back what was inadvertently stolen. In other words, when taking
time in parts of a phrase, we must find the right place to give it back. This is
not unlike the moral responsibility to give back what has been stolen. ...
It is crucial to distinguish between the nature of music on the one hand, and
the associations that it evokes on the other. Consider how Beethoven was misused
and abused in German politics, by Bismarck, by Hitler, and by the East German
Republic. The irony of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony being played in the Nazi era -
'Alle Menschen werden Bruder' - 'All men will be become brothers' - all that is
except a few. In other words the concept of fraternity is being defined in
advance in the sense that you can keep some people out of it. We are talking
here about a critical distinction. We are back at my earlier question about the
knife - a question that I raised in one of the earlier lectures. Is the knife an
instrument with which we can commit murder, therefore a violent instrument, or
is it one with which we can feed the other? The knife in itself is not moral, it
is the human being who has the capacity to make it moral or immoral, and it is
the human being who has the responsibility of creating the associations. And
therefore the problem with playing Beethoven's music in Nazi times, or even with
playing Wagner's music here in Israel, is not the music in itself, but the
association that it evokes in people. This I am afraid is linked to political
correctness, and is tied to ideological thinking. When you play a piece of music
you must find the content, and you can only do that from the point of view of
one individual. And no matter how wide and objective that individual tries to
be, there is inevitably an element of such activity in it. The use and abuse of
Wagner's ideas and music was an integral part of the last years of the Third
Reich - in fact of the whole Third Reich - and it is not only understandable,
but self-evident, that somebody who suffers from this kind of association is not
only unwilling but unable to hear this music. And there is no reason in the
world to force him or her to do so.
It is not my intention - it never was, and it never will be - to force this
music or any music on anybody, and I certainly do not question the horrible
associations that holocaust survivors have with specific pieces of Wagner. I can
only hope that time will eventually help to liberate these human beings from
previous negative associations, ultimately to hear the music for what it truly
is. It is not my place to tell those who suffered from terrible associations
what to do about Wagner, but I believe it is my place to tell those who can and
want to listen to Wagner, that the music itself is not the agent of the
suffering. In the meantime however, I do believe that it is equally important
not to force negative associations on those who fortunately do not suffer from
them. Therefore, in the democratic society, the decision whether it is
permissible to hear Wagner or not must be individual and not imposed by law or
even worse, the result of a taboo. True democracy can only exist without taboos.
Obviously it is imperative to differentiate between substance and perception.
The problem with association is that one is the victim of the perception, and
not of the substance. It is critical that we are not just slaves to the
associations created by listening to a piece of music, but that we understand
its substance, in the same way that a leader has to understand the substance of
what his people are telling him. I went into great detail, and I'm afraid I
cannot do it again today, er into the fact that one can only articulate the
content of music with sound and not with words, but the fact that one cannot
articulate it with words of course does not mean that it doesn't have a content.
And although music means many things to many different people, and very often
means many different things to the same person at different times - poetical,
mathematical, sensual, philosophical - it is only expressed through sound and
therefore it can be said without a question of a doubt that it has something to
do with the human being, that it has something to do with the human condition.
And this is the humanity of music.
I had the great privilege of attending several lectures given here in Jerusalem
by Martin Buber, many years ago. It was Buber who made me realise the necessity
of always looking beyond one's first impression, of digging deeper and finding
connections. As he wrote in I and Thou, and I quote, 'There is nothing that I
must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget.
Rather is everything, picture and movement, space and instance, law and number
included, and inseparably fused.' As human beings we often tend to want to
manipulate the element of time. When we are in a pleasurable situation we would
like it to go on forever, and when we are in a painful situation we wish we
could shorten it, in both cases because we either want change from a painful
situation, or we want to keep change from interfering with pleasure. But music
shows us the inevitable flaw of life, which depends on change, the fluidity of
life. ...
Transition, let us not forget, is the basis of human existence. In music it is
not enough simply to play a statement of a phrase, it is absolutely essential to
see how we arrived there, and to prepare it. One plays a statement one way at
the beginning of a piece, but when the same statement returns later, in what we
call in musical terminology the recapitulation, it is in a completely different
psychological state of mind. And therefore the bridge, the transition,
determines not only itself but what comes after it. It is important to recognise
that the present does not exist without the past, and that the present would be
different with another past. At the same time, what we do in the present is
inevitably the prelude to what the future will be. And the future is determined
not by something that we passively wait for, but it is the inevitable outcome
that we prepare from the present moment. ...
It is essential in this regard to understand the difference between strength and
power. Power itself has only one kind of strength, which is that of control. But
even the great power of sound, in Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner, does not have to
create the association of power that works exclusively through control, but
instead through actual real strength, the accumulative strength that comes from
the build-up of tension. Even the most powerful chord has to allow the inner
voices to be heard, otherwise it has no tension, only brutal aggressive power.
You must hear the opposition, the notes that oppose the main idea. In other
words, the concept of transparency is essential in music, because if it is not
orally transparent you cannot actually get the totality of the music, you only
get one line of it. In Mozart for example, very often in the operas you have
perfectly harmonised ensemble, and yet every single voice is saying something
completely different, and all this at the same time. But you still have a
definite sense of organisation, you have main voices and you have subsidiary
voices - music would be totally uninteresting without this. Even at the moment
when all the elements are unified, when everything comes together in a single
chord, you still hear all the different voices.
Let us consider for a moment the example of playing in an orchestra. When very
powerful instruments, the so-called musical heavyweights - trumpet and trombone
- play in a chord where the whole orchestra is playing they have to play in such
a way that they give a full sense of power, but that they allow the other
instruments, who are less powerful, to be heard at the same time. Otherwise they
cover them up, and then the sound has no strength, only power. See the
difference? Therefore when you play in an orchestra everybody is constantly
aware of everybody else.
In my view this is a model for society. Leadership throughout history, and it is
probably inherent in the human nature, has been based on the effect it can
produce because of the weakness of the people, not because of their strength.
How wonderful the world would be if it were ruled by people who understood this
lesson from music, and understood the importance of combining transparency,
power and strength. But if music is so human, if music is so all inclusive and
so positive, we have to ask ourselves how is it possible that monsters such as
Adolf Hitler and others had such love for music? How do we explain that? How to
explain the fact that Hitler was able to send millions of people to the gas
chamber and would be moved to tears listening to music? How? How was Wagner able
to write music of such nobility and also write his monstrous anti-Semitic
pamphlet? I believe people don't think about music, they just let it wash over
them, and operate on them in an almost animal way. Music to me is sound with
thought, and as Spinoza believed that rationality was the saving grace of the
human being, then we must learn to look at music like this too.
This is why music in the end is so powerful, because it speaks to all parts of
the human being, all sides - the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and
the spiritual. How often in life we think that personal, social and political
issues are independent, without influencing each other. From music we see that
this cannot occur, it is an objective impossibility, because in music there are
no independent elements. Logical thought and intuitive emotions are permanently
united. Music teaches us that everything is connected.
Throughout these lectures I have been attempting to draw parallels between
the inexpressible content of music and the inexpressible content of life. We
have talked about the phenomenon of sound, about the distinction between
hearing and listening, about the need for having a point of view, both in
music and in life, and we have spoken about how music can bring people
together, how music itself can be a great connector. As I conclude these
lectures here in Jerusalem today, we have come full circle. This too, ladies
and gentlemen, I learned from music, because when you perform a piece of
music you have to be able to hear the last note before you play the first.
Thank you very much.
On the Nature and Power of
Music: Start Page
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