Between Reason and Monsters

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

In 1799 Francisco Goya published “A Collection of Prints of Capricious Subjects.” The eighty etchings and aquatints, known as Los Caprichos (caprices, folios), criticized the “multitude of follies and blunders common in every civil society” and particularly in Goya’s native Spain: superstitions, arranged marriages, corrupt rulers, powerful clergy, etc. The forty-third print is among the artist’s most enduring images. Entitled “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (“El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”), it shows an artist (possibly Goya himself) asleep at his drawing table. He is surrounded by bats, owls, and a wide-eyed lynx—ominous creatures in Spanish folklore. A mysterious figure lurks in the center, staring directly at the viewer.

On first impression, the illustration seems to be an endorsement of rational thought: when logic lies dormant, the world becomes demon-haunted (to paraphrase Carl Sagan). But this is only part of the meaning. A caption accompanying the print warns, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.” Pure rationality and pure irrationality are both dangerous. Reason without emotion is too dull and heartless to adequately address basic human and societal needs. Emotion without reason gives rise to all sorts of prejudices and harmful fantasies. When held in harmonious balance, passion and intellect create life-affirming art.

Goya’s rejection of absolute rationalism marked a transition from the Enlightenment to early Romanticism. While not denying the value of science and social reforms, he reclaimed emotions as an authentic and positive force.

Romantics would further the cause, placing knowledge and wonder, history and mythology, order and spontaneity side by side. Their idealization of expression stirred them to especially grand appraisals of music, which E. T. A. Hoffmann called “the most romantic of all the arts—one might say the only purely romantic one.” This belief owes largely to the balance Goya advocated. In most of its incarnations, music is both quantifiable and unquantifiable. Its raw materials and construction are open to theoretical and scientific analysis, but its evocations are almost by definition non-rational. Most important, its expressiveness is born from its structure.

As a visual artist, Goya might have objected to the musical bias of many later Romantics. After all, the counter-requirements of heart and mind are found in every art form to a greater or lesser extent. At its best, art is a reminder of what makes us human: form and feelings, function and purpose, reason and emotion.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Wagner and the Music of the Jews

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon among nineteenth-century composers. Chopin, Liszt, Mussorgsky and others are on record making derogatory comments about Jews and Judaism. Most of these musicians carry no stigma; their works are performed without hesitation. This is not so with Richard Wagner, whose vitriol was exacerbated by his affiliation with left wing revolutionaries. Two things make it difficult to separate Wagner’s work from his views: the Nazis espoused his music, and he wrote a polemical essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music,” 1850, 1869). While he cannot be blamed for the Nazis’ use of his music—he died before Hitler was born—the anti-Jewish sentiment in his infamous essay is hard to dismiss.

Wagner makes two basic points in “Das Judenthum in der Musik.” The first is that “the Jew” is incapable of reaching the musical heights of European composers. He takes specific aim at Felix Mendelssohn, whom he considered more of a technician than an artist, and whom he thought lacked the passion and heart of a Beethoven (or of Wagner himself). He also mentions Giacomo Meyerbeer (Jacob Lieberman Beer), a once-popular opera composer whom Wagner felt was too practical, too calculated, and too concerned with popular tastes to be truly creative. Not incidentally, Wagner was convinced that Meyerbeer, a Frenchman, had deliberately sabotaged his early efforts to enter the Paris establishment. (Contrastingly, in 1841 Wagner wrote a glowing review of La Juive—The Jewess—a grand opera by another French Jewish composer, Fromenthal Halévy.)

If we remove the anti-Semitism and generalizations that fueled these observations, then Wagner’s views are not far off: Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer are in some ways inferior composers of the Western canon. But there is good reason for this. Jews did not enter the world of European music until the nineteenth century, and even then had limited opportunities to develop their craft. They were late to the party and had a lot of catching up to do. Moreover, Mendelssohn, a “classicist,” adhered to conservative and essentially canon-affirming tastes. Wagner died in 1883, so he missed out on the twentieth century and its slew of innovative Jewish composers: Copland, Schoenberg, Bernstein, Philip Glass, the pioneers of Hollywood film music, etc. In addition to being a venom-infused stereotype, Wagner’s image of Jews as musically uncreative is simply outdated.

His second point is that “The Jew flings together the various forms and styles of all composers and eras.” Wagner meant this as an insult: Jews have no musical language of their own, but instead appropriate their neighbors’ music and perform it as foreigners. If we take out the negative implication of “Jew as imitator,” then Wagner’s opinion was actually correct—and perhaps even ahead of its time.

Wagner lived when Jewish music was gradually becoming a topic of interest among Wissenschaft scholars, who amplified the cultural uniqueness of Jews and Judaism. As part of that agenda, Jewish scholars perpetuated a myth of musical continuity, wherein some elusive element of “authentic” Jewish music could be traced back to Jerusalem’s Second Temple. This element was never discovered, and was never really looked for in any serious way. Still, it was a powerful sentiment that basically went unchallenged until the mid-twentieth century, when scholars came to terms with the fact that Jewish music is always tied to its surrounding, as Wagner pointed out. Contemporary critics view the ability to adapt music of the surroundings as a strength, rather than a weakness, of Jewish culture.

Not surprisingly, Wagner’s admirers tend to downplay his anti-Semitism, while his detractors emphasize it. As noted, he wasn’t entirely incorrect in his comments on the music of the Jews in his time and place; but the hatred that saturates his words cannot be ignored.

It is sometimes remarked that Wagner was envious of the Jews, but this assertion is rarely elaborated upon. I’d like to add my own theory. Wagner’s greatest claim to fame as a composer is the leitmotif: a recurrent theme throughout a musical composition that is associated with a specific person, idea or situation. Given Wagner’s obsession with the Jew in music, he was almost certainly aware that leitmotifs were a staple of synagogue music in his native Germany, and had been since the Middle Ages. The High Holidays, for instance, were full of them (the so-called “Mi-Sinai tunes”). One might even argue that Wagner stole the concept from the Jews, or was appalled to hear Jews using a musical device he thought he had invented. This could explain at least some of his vehemence. It also suggests that maybe—just maybe—Jews weren’t so uncreative after all.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Musical Motivation

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

Motivation to compose music is often portrayed in spiritual terms. A flash of inspiration consumes an abnormally gifted individual. A supernaturally selected musician channels a mysterious surge of energy. A person becomes possessed by cosmic sounds, which find their way onto the manuscript page. Melodramatic depictions like these were promulgated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and continue to influence how we think of the music writing process. Composition is viewed as an inaccessible and unlearnable art. It is the endeavor of a chosen few, who have been blessed by fate and deemed worthy by the heavens above.

In case these characterizations seem exaggerated, let us look at a couple of actual examples. Music critic and theoretician Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) wrote this of a compositional moment: “The lightning flash of a thought suddenly crashed down, at once illuminating and creating the entire work in the most dazzling light. Such works were conceived and received in one stroke.” Arnold Schoenberg perpetuated this sensational image, stating that musical inspiration can well up as “a subconsciously received gift from the Supreme Commander.”

Such statements are faulty for at least four reasons. First, they imagine music as materializing out of thin air. Without preparation or hesitation, the composer sits at the piano and lets the opus pour forth. But anyone who has improvised music or jotted down a melody knows that it involves practice, forethought and trial and error. Moreover, most composers write within generative musical systems, which provide structures and formulas to draw upon. Their motivation is exposure and experience, not divine direction.

A second and related issue is the false notion that composition cannot be taught, learned or acquired. Romantics and their ideological inheritors willfully ignore that composition has many prerequisites: listening, studying, performing, reading, etc. Rather than a skill bestowed at birth or received through revelation, music writing is available to anyone who has the desire, discipline and determination to do it.

Third is the elitism implicit in the mystical view. Almost without exception, writings about the inspirational muse involve composers of Western art music. It is their music that cannot be replicated. Classically trained musicians like Schenker and Schoenberg acknowledged that folk music and other popular forms exist in wide variety. But, for them, the homegrown-ness and abundance of such music indicated its worldly origins, and made it less than the rarified creations of “high culture.” The bias of this view is too obvious to warrant comment.

Fourth, most of the world’s music has practical aims. The impulse to compose is more likely to come from necessity than artistic urge. The many functions of music range from instruction and storytelling to work and exercise. These “mundane” motivations have proven strong enough to generate the majority of music ever heard.

And then there’s the revealing statement from Cole Porter. When asked what stimulates him to write, he responded: “My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.”

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Absolutely Not

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

German Romantic authors introduced the concept of “pure” music, or music without extra-musical meaning. They conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm—a language transcending anything that could be said about it and any link that could be made between it and the things of this world. Richard Wagner was an early critic of their proposition. To him, music without signification was as impossible to create as it was worthless to consume (he coined the term “absolute” music to mock the very idea). Even when devoid of words, subject matter and programmatic purpose, music is intertwined with the environment in which it is heard and the images and feelings it induces. Its message might be abstract and open to interpretation, but it is not absent.

Life occurs in context. Being alive means being engaged in a perpetual and usually unconscious process of amassing observational input, experiential data and sensory information. Nothing that we taste, touch, smell, hear, see or think can be divorced from prior experiences, and all of it is present when we encounter new stimuli. We cannot help but make connections between incidents current and past, and the lens through which we perceive reality is modified with each passing moment. We are swimming in a stream of constant accumulation.

Our relationship with music exists in this perceptual complex. Aesthetic tastes and artistic meanings are influenced by factors like culture, environment, schooling, philosophy and politics, not to mention the settings and situations in which listening takes place. It is possible in a lab or study hall to reduce music to an organized composite of pitches, intervals, alignments and values. But music is not received in this mathematical manner. It comes to us as a container brimming with associations, the contents of which are the by-product of our unique life experiences. It triggers a varied assortment of memories, visuals, sensations and sentiments. In short, we derive meaning from it whether we intend to or not.

The same is true for the music’s creator. Composers tend to work within inherited rules and conventions, or actively reject those norms. Either way, they situate themselves in relation to other styles and composers, and cannot escape the connotations they carry. As much as they might desire to write music for its own sake, it will always be about something. Absolute music—or, better, music that pretends to be absolute—may be vague in purpose; but neither the composer nor audience hears it as purposeless.

This discussion is summed up in the words of musicologist Nicholas Cook: “Pure music, it seems, is the aesthetician’s (and music theorist’s) fiction.” Music is never just sound. It is everything the sound evokes.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.

Expressing Expression

Jonathan L. Friedmann, Ph.D.

The popular appreciation of music as a language beyond words has origins in nineteenth-century German Romanticism and its unrestrained obsession with the expressiveness of musical sound. While composers of the genre were busy expanding the emotional dimensions of their craft, poets were writing about music with equal sentimental effusiveness. The expression heard in the works of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms inspired poets like Tieck, Schlegel and Heine to pour out laudatory verses proclaiming music’s unsurpassed ability to convey true feeling. To the poets, music was the embodiment of expression itself—their most venerated aesthetic principle—and they regularly infused their poems with musical references in hopes of harnessing that emotive power. Their ethos is captured in a quote from E. T. A. Hoffmann: “Music is the most romantic of all the arts—one might almost say, the only entirely romantic one.”

The view of music as a transmitter of emotions spread throughout Europe and influenced other fields. Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher and biologist, concluded that “primitives” developed the capacity for music specifically as a means of communicating their state of being. This anthropological assumption, while a product of its time, had many antecedents. The ancient Greeks, for instance, devised a musical system comprised of modes intended to evoke or intensify particular reactions. Other societies past and present possess a similar (if not as systematic) awareness of music’s potential to penetrate and manipulate our inner lives. Nonetheless, the exuberance with which Romantic-era writers emphasized and exalted music’s expressiveness has not been equaled.

As an example, here are some of Hoffmann’s comments on Beethoven: “Thus Beethoven’s instrumental music opens us to the monstrous and immeasurable. Glowing rays shoot through the deep night of this realm, and we sense giant shadows surging to and fro, closing in on us until they destroy us, but not the pain of unending longing in which every desire that has risen quickly in joyful tones sinks and expires. Only with this pain of love, hope, joy—which consumes but does not destroy, which would burst asunder our breasts with a mightily impassioned chord—we live on, enchanted seers of the ghostly world!”

Embedded in this characteristically verbose appraisal is the contradictory concession that music is “immeasurable” and thus incapable of being justly described in words. Goethe said it best: “Music begins where words end.” Try as they might to explain the sounds and effects, the poets freely admitted that their verse—like other art forms—could only approximate the purity of emotional transmission they felt in music. Theirs was an era when composers and performers greatly expanded the range and intensity of dynamics, phrasing, articulation, tempo, harmony and all manner of musical coloration. Sympathetic feelings aroused in audiences reached unprecedented levels, and it was widely held that the soul of music made contact with the soul of the listener. All of this put music outside the grasp of language.

It is not necessary to adopt the often-exaggerated stance of the Romantics to value music’s emotional impact. Nor must one agree with the view of post-modern detractors, who argue that feelings induced by music are illusory, to acknowledge the limits of musical expression. Still, it is easy to accept the basic Romantic assertion: our emotional responses to music, real or imagined, account largely for our interest in the art form.

Visit Jonathan’s website to keep up on his latest endeavors, browse his book and article archives, and listen to sample compositions.