This is a tribute to the six parts of Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures at Harvard University from 1973, a mix of his words and my own to provide transition.
ONE
Knowing a thing
in the context of other disciplines,
a quixotic foray —
whither music?
Understanding whence —
what music? whose music?
Copland, Bach, Stravinsky, Ravel
tapping the code of raga,
a musical grammar
underlying human speech,
the varied nature
and structural functions of mind,
abstracting larger principles
of how we are constituted,
our innate grammatical competence
that proclaims its autonomy —
music, a metaphoric phenomenon
expressing affective existence
through mathematically
measurable elements —
phonology, syntax, semantics,
sound plus structure;
begin with the anatomical,
the protosyllable ma,
how it leaps from the breast
of mother into sound —
the processes of speech,
grammar known and unknown,
human kinship, love —
open the breath to vocalize ah…
hablar, falar, fabulare,
the branches of the olive vine,
common origin,
the mists of prehistory
where all mothers grew,
where bad is small,
the gods big thereby good,
the growling great, grow, groot, God;
and once again the baby, ictus and glide,
the mouth mother morpheme
rewritten as a pitch event —
music as heightened speech,
hunger, anticipation, aggression,
the physical manifestations of affect,
gooseflesh and moist feelings,
music among patterns —
the singsong tease "Little Sally Water"
plaintively expanded,
a constellation of two-and-three note
variants the world over —
vibrating bodies emitting waves,
the tonic and its overtones,
fractional segments vibrating separately;
and five notes away, the dominant,
itself a fourth away from the next overtone,
then the third, making the fundamental
and the three pitches — the triad,
one of many cultural expressions,
tempered to tonal harmony,
the blue notes resting
in the spaces between,
the birth of pentatonic longing
and the tonal centers.
TWO
The deep structure
and the surface structure of language;
deletion (of underlying strings) in syntax
produces surface structures
that make the components of a sentence —
the aesthetics of this as poetry,
the prosaic elements not there,
musical prose and its underlying strings,
transposing strings;
the metaphorical leap,
our innate symmetrical instinct intact,
the resolution of yes and no, lingam and yoni,
how one and other become fulfilled —
Mozart, a string of dualities,
the 40th symphony…
two within four within eight
just so, just so
are the things left unsaid —
we learn symmetry
is not necessarily balance;
structures undergo
principles of transformation and deletion,
the aggregations of phrases,
contrapuntal syntax,
the interweaving,
the perception of structure,
repositioning and permutation,
pronominalization —
we reach a dead duck —
yet the music is ongoing,
side-slipping on skis,
conjoining, developing deletions,
inversions, strong weak strong —
another dead duck, another conjoining,
crazy side-slipping, embedding,
enjoining a single sentence of music,
the first period.
THREE
A broad dispassionate view —
the beauty of ambiguity,
a reminiscence of phonology,
syntax, semantics, meaning —
The whole town was populated
by old men and women…
war, or aging,
the deep structures
combined and condensed,
yoked together —
now Stravinsky,
a series of nouns,
the harmonic support
a verbal adjective;
the zeugma of poetry,
decision-making steps,
grammatical justification,
finding a poetic level:
the broken
semantic rules of metaphor,
sidereal organisms…
Juliet is the sun —
abnormal human speech,
transformational principles,
lexical meanings, deletions,
radiant metaphor,
literal discourse,
inner corporeal logic,
beauty born, music —
unburdened
by literal semantic weights,
two metaphors undergo
instantaneous transformation,
not radiance nor brownness
but the rhythm,
harmonic progressions,
semantics, the weak link,
the prolongation
of the ictus of the protosyllable ma —
Jack and Jill, Harry and John and golf
and persuasion, a Chomsky trap
from willy nilly to meaningful,
the tonal structures playing,
semantic thinking,
juggling the game of notes,
puns of twelve letters
working vertically and horizontally,
a continuing play of sonic anagrams;
significational sensory data
release energy and the affective functions;
intrinsic meanings
not to be confused with specific moods,
pictorial impressions, stories —
a stream of metaphors is the thesis…
the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven —
merry peasants, brooks,
and birds sportively juggled,
offering something fluid,
the sounding notes combined
eliciting subjective associations…
Is affect intrinsic or merely a transference
via the notes from the composer
to the performer to the listener?
Moments coy and wheedling
with tears and passion
offer a drama of pleading and refusal —
then firm agreement, conditions settled.
FOUR
Beyond duality,
the growing
accretion of chromaticism,
contained and containing
the diatonic nodes
in a tonic dominant frame —
to be within the container
and to form the frame,
a beauty that depends
on ambiguous surface structures —
Mahler’s Adagietto, the swooning
notes that lean on resolution,
the surface notes of the triad, just so,
these again recall
a youthful teasing chant —
the semantic ambiguities
so well accentuated by Beethoven,
the modified series
of tonic dominant changes
before the return —
artist, priest, prophet,
the divine rights
of greater expression,
new freedoms,
an expanding universe
of the artists’ personal passions —
Romanticism, together
with the New Chromaticism,
volcanic sparks;
the madness of Schumann,
the festival
of rhythic symmetry
in Carnaval, marching
in three quarter time,
or the Symphonic Études
landing odd footing —
and Chopin, somewhere
between tonal and modal,
the implied sound resonating
between the chords —
submediants and subdominants
falling almost in key,
just before the true cadence —
musical semantics,
chromaticism in poetry,
the freedom to pursue sound
for its own sake,
new sonic relationships,
labials and plosives —
the sonorous beauty
of "The Leaden Echo
and the Golden Echo,"
a chromatic plea
to keep beauty
from vanishing away,
farther and farther
from center,
the semantic vacuum filled
by interweaving poetic tones —
the contiguous styles
of Berlioz and Beethoven,
the great dramas told orchestrally.
FIVE
An urbane dance, pleased with itself,
unaware of crisis, similar either/or
moments present in Wagner or Debussy,
the ambiguous chromatic color
of 1908, Rapsodie Espagnole,
contained among familiar counterparts,
safe before war,
before Mahler bid the last farewells to tonality
and the doubts and terrors of the Sibelius Fourth —
Karl Kraus declaring the degeneration of language,
and the stretched Wagnerian tonalities of Schoenberg
of a sudden become
too many notes and too many meanings,
leading to artistic shifts,
upheaval and renunciation:
air from another planet, unconfined,
Ives and his Unanswered Question —
a sustained footing,
pierced by the trumpet’s pleading
amid retorts growing farther and farther from sense,
only the pulsing G major remaining to answer —
so the question of clarity and confusion begins;
joined by the same desire for expressive drive,
to expand metaphorical speech,
other voices enter the music of the times,
convulsive tonalities, logical antinomies
of the cultural crisis,
a break from syntactic structures
based on odd symmetry,
aleatoric riddles of atonality,
Pierrot lunaire for voice and instruments,
Sprechtstimme, the glory of heightened speech;
the ictus present here again,
the ungovernable freedoms difficult to follow,
despite the brilliant inner procedures
of canonic inversion, retrogrades and the rest;
moving counter to innate tonal drive,
the tone rows outlining the occasional triad,
a burly Till Eulenspiegel melody
under a romp that remembers Wagner,
aesthetic order among members
of the new democracy forming the chain
along which new surface structures arise.
SIX
Whether Verdi, an Italian
writing phony Egyptian ballet music,
or the silk-gowned Wagner
following the wanderings
of the penitent fool,
the sincerity of the line remains —
“Fern Hill” flies —
blessings on the poet’s artifices
that give it wings!
On all artifices
that make the emotions
aesthetically pleasant and intelligible;
the Firebird that gave its first glow,
and Satie,
casually delivering musical objects,
a sincere triviality, whimsy, Parade;
the rattle of a typewriter
and the sound of an amplified puddle —
then the toy waltzes and calliopes
in Petrouchka, contemplating a world
of affective detachment recorded
in personal language,
object added to object,
touchingly mechanical, pitiless,
the great artificer
with his bag of tricks,
the duality of the puppet
concealing a passionate human heart
through syntactic rhythmic displacement —
the phonology, syntax, and semantics
of tonal refreshment,
the phonological slides of dissonance,
the expansion of the triadic idea,
mitosis by polytonality,
the tri-toned interval of Debussy’s Faun
and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto,
an unstable relationship between triads;
or those two chords, equally consonant
in themselves, that combined strike
the raw primal blow in Rite —
the revivifying art
of asymmetrical language,
between phrase structure
and motivic structure,
new pulses and jabs,
fashioned out of tiny motivic cells,
like a kaleidoscope fashioned
from jagged pieces of broken glass,
the asymmetry racket in full color —
sets of rhythms buried
one within the other,
a musical folklore
of anthropological metaphors
and atavistic blood constellations.
