A Test Case: The Norwegian Academy of Music Prototype Performance: Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19
- by Darla Crispin
Many musicians are accustomed to finding inspiration from the other arts and there are aspects of Schoenberg’s Op. 19 that actively invite this approach. The extreme brevity of the Op. 19 pieces has prompted many commentators to describe them as aphoristic. An aphorism is, of course, a literary form - and one that had strong currency in Vienna at the time of the composition of these piano pieces (1911). In particular, it was a form of expression taken to conspicuous heights by the writer and social commentator, Karl Kraus. This project has explored how far, beyond generalised parallels, a kinship between the aphorisms of Kraus and Schoenberg’s Op. 19 pieces may be pursued in terms of research and its relationship to, and discernible benefits within, performance. This becomes another way to test the idea that ‘the fundamentally ethical claim of Schönberg’s aesthetic, which remain with us today as part of the legitimation of musical modernism, derive much of their force and specific form from the work of Kraus’ (Johnson 2000 179).
While we most often encounter Kraus in his various guises as a writer, in this project we also explore his importance as a performer, whose public recitations - he regularly recited on stage to audiences of over 700 people - became extensions of the ethical life-project with which he was engaged. Past writings on linkages between Kraus and Schoenberg focus upon the ethical aspects of the ‘language problem’ and how these are transmuted by the two men into viable artistic projects. Less attention is paid to the mesmerizing effect that Kraus had upon audiences. We see this as being connected to the intense and intrinsic performativity of his own, written language and believe this connection to be a useful model for exploring Schoenberg’s musical rhetoric. Edward Timms’ appellation ‘histrionic’, in relation to Kraus’ rhetoric, opens a door here, and it leads back to the idea of how languages are composed as acts of performance.
So perhaps we can learn something of how to perform Schoenberg’s music through understanding the performativity of Kraus’ speaking, and translating this into our present-day context.
Die wahren Schauspieler lassen sich vom Autor bloß das Stichwort bringen, nicht die Rede. Ihnen ist das Theaterstück keine Dichtung, sondern ein Spielraum (Kraus 1986, 101).
True actors accept from the author only cues, not specific words. To them a theatre piece is not poetry but a field of play (Kraus, trans. McVity, 2001, 69).
In a multi-modal presentation, we may offer models in which the materials of Schoenberg and those of Kraus are counter-posed, with a view to pointing up the wider relatedness of these two figures’ very individual ways of engaging in language critique through processes of distillation and concentration within their respective languages. The ‘performance’ of this juxtaposition thus becomes its own ‘matter of fact.’ To study such relationships from the outside is a matter for performance studies; to create an event that juxtaposes them is a form of art-making, although informed by research practices and articulating a form of research. But this form of research, while deeply informed by empirical matters and although it may itself be studied empirically, cannot itself be regarded as empirically true or false.
Juxtaposing Schoenberg and Kraus may be artistically, aesthetically and intellectually stimulating (or not), and may therefore embody a range of artistic, aesthetic and/or intellectual insights whose coming together seems to point to some kind of ‘truth’; however, it is always important to remember that we are not dealing here with a literal ‘truth’, but with a set of arguments which, hopefully, build a sufficiently convincing case for it to seem more likely than not that they have a basis in truth. Or, putting it another way, they build a convincing case rather in the manner that a compelling performance of a work can encourage us to believe that in it lies, not necessarily the ‘whole truth’ of the work, but at least a valuable addition to the ‘cluster of truths’ that gather around it.
Such thinking was part of the rationale for the development of the Norwegian Academy of Music’s performances of Op. 19. In these performances, we interspersed performances of the pieces with enacted aphoristic quotations of Karl Kraus - as artistic decisions informed by critical engagement, rather than as verifications of research findings – thus pointing up the ‘grey areas’ where artistic research is concerned. The unified performance event was conceived as a series of ‘actions’ in speech and music, with this ‘collage’ bookended by complete performances of Op. 19, but by different pianists, underlining the deliberate avoidance of singular interpretations. The aphorisms could logically be said to bear some relation to the musical content of the pieces alongside which they were heard, in terms of the matching of musical affect with aphoristic content, although it must be emphasised that the choices were artistic ones, not selections based on direct research findings (i.e. there is no evidence the Schoenberg and Kraus linked their own work together in such a way, although, as has been noted, there is ample documentary evidence of Schoenberg’s high regard for Kraus, and of Kraus’ support of Schoenberg’s artistic life project). What was being tested was the extent to which the ‘sound’ of the recited Kraus aphorisms and the music of Schoenberg’s aphoristic pieces could be perceived as articulating comparable artistic/ethical critiques and, in doing so, having an effect of mutual enrichment. For this reason, it was also valuable to hear Kraus’ own voice in archive recordings within the performance event, as well as hearing performed readings of the aphorisms.
This work was informed by sources on Kraus from both literary theory (Timms 1989, 2005, and Frantzen 2013) and music theory (Goehr 1985, Cook 1989), but the primary aim was to make a musical presentation, and the finished event also owed a debt to the genre of ‘documentary’, or ‘journalistic theatre’, especially as developed and practised by the American actor and playwright, Anna Deavere Smith. We became increasingly interested in the idea of ‘shape’ for this performance, reflecting the Schoenbergian notion that true shape IS the musical idea.
So, a layered formal framework for the presentation of Opus 19 was ‘curated’, using a structure in which complete performances of the work by two pianists would serve as opening and closing events. Between these performances, each of the individual pieces, done in pairs, would be interwoven with aphorisms of Kraus, recited in German and then in English translation. Some of the theoretical, social and historical contexts were interwoven with the performances in short speeches.
The aim was to present a ‘live’ artistic research exposition, conveying a real-time experience of the ‘aphoristic twists’ employed by Schoenberg and Kraus. The intention was not to use this juxtaposition to impose a single, didactic ‘contextualisation’ of the Schoenberg pieces but, rather, to give an audience of very mixed experience and musical backgrounds a series of ways through which they might choose to enter and explore the music, and the ideas. The presentational structure thus framed three different performances of the pieces within Opus 19, each by a pianist, but the element of repetition was highlighted as more of a dramatic than a didactic tool.
As already indicated, another extremely important element of the presentation was that we listened to archive recordings of Kraus himself, reciting some of his own writings, to gain a sense of what Timms calls Kraus’ ‘histrionic’ temperament and satirical style. Musicians certainly have a lot to learn from ‘how’ Kraus spoke the ‘what’ of his writing. The deeper hope underpinning this richly textured and almost saturated presentational strategy was to enable those listening to gradually experience a sense of ‘hermeneutic deepening’, so that the cumulative work of the ‘reflective musicians’ was translated into ‘reflective listening’. Since this event was videotaped in its entirety, it was also possible to study both the performance and the responses to it, gaining some insights into audience reaction through the discussion session that followed immediately after the performance. While this cannot be regarded as empirically significant (both because the information gathering was non-systematic and informal, and because only a single performance was in question, rather than a series, with different audiences), the responses did emphasise the potential value of approaches to musical performance that engage audiences actively and variably.
The discussion that followed, which included audience interventions about heightened awareness of ‘silences’, of ‘stillness’, and even an expressed desire that the form of the event might have been changed so that the repetitions were heard one after the other, rather than at wider intervals, gave some indication that this aim had been, in part, fulfilled. For the performers, the Kraus and other contextualizing materials certainly confirmed the necessity to speak through the music, and the role of shaping to allow this ‘speaking’.
There are variations in terms of how flexible might performers feel, or even how ‘safe’, in this kind of performance. Moreover, the introduction of the ‘curatorial’ voice means that matters of ‘interpretation’ becomes more complicated; whose vision is being communicated in a performance such as this? Is there a ‘fused vision’ at work, whereby it is divested of individual ‘ownership? Better still, might the changed mode offer audiences a more active role within an interpretative field? Could we work toward a situation in which performance actions might be immediately modified on the basis of audience responses to the texts, as well as the performer’s own reactions? Ultimately, my own hope would be to develop an artistic structure strong enough to support the communication of ideas with as little didactic narrative as possible – to detect and develop the best balance between performativity and explanation.
The performance, whose structure is indicated diagrammatically as part of this exposition, including timings of performances in the accompanying video, emphasised that it is within the character of Kraus - his manner of recitation, his process of structuring utterances both through the practice of writing and that of performance - that Schoenberg detected a sonorous language critique that echoed his own in the musical/non-verbal sphere.
What was created here was as much a theatrical performance as a piano recital. There was an additional intention behind the performance to critique the hermetically sealed nature of some modern music events, with their seemingly fruitless pitting of ‘difficulty’ against demands for ‘easy’ cultural consumption. This returns us to the question of ‘where’ interpretation lies. Driven by a sense that the notion of performance as some kind of non-resistant conveyor of intention and meaning would no longer do, the participants in the performance actually attempted to highlight the epistemic complexity of Op. 19. Ironically, in doing so, a series of inter-related paths into the work emerged, giving the audience members some choice in how they might encounter the material. In this kind of model, the audience members have the potential to ‘perform’ their own listening, stepping out of passivity into something more pro-active and explicitly individualised – should they wish. Furthermore, the layers of the presentation can be separated out, either as a spoken and musical performance without scholarly commentary, or as a scholarly text. The fusion of both into a single presentation forms a research exposition, both theory and evidence.
If ‘new knowledge’ may be said to emerge within this practice, then the performance may be argued to have been a kind of ‘action research’ process. But the construction of it, while informed by a great deal of research knowledge, neither sought to replicate any actual past performance (the historically-informed performance model), nor did it aspire to fulfil any explicit aim of the generators of the material (Schoenberg and Kraus). Instead, the curator of the event proposed the generation of a ‘field of possibilities’ within which both performers and audience members might make interpretative connections that would reflected how they had been individually stimulated, without being prescriptive.
References:
Cook, Nicholas. 1989. ‘Schenker’s Theory of Music as Ethics’, in The Journal of Musicology 7.4. Berkeley: University of California Press, 415-439.
Deavere Smith, Anna. 1993. Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identites. New York: Anchor Books.
Deavere Smith, Anna. 1994. Twilight Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor Books.
Frantzen, Jonathan. 2013. The Kraus Project. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Goehr, Alexander. 'Schoenberg and Karl Kraus: The Idea Behind the Music', in Music Analysis 4:1/2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1985, 59-71.
Johnson, Julian. 2000. ‘Karl Kraus and the Schönberg School’, in Arnold Schönbergs Wiener Kreis – Viennese Circle, Report of the Symposium 12- 15 September 1999, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Centre 2/2000. Vienna: Arnold Schoenberg Centre, 179-189.
Kraus, Karl. 2001. Dicta and Contradicta, tr. Jonathan McVity. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Kraus, Karl. 1986. Aphorismen, Sprüche und Widersprüche, Pro domo et mundo, Nachts – Schriften Band 8. Herausgegeben von Christian Wagenknecht. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Timms, Edward. 1989. Karl Kraus-Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Hapsburg Vienna. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Timms, Edward. 2005. Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist – The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
