Arts
Wordless musical analysis
Hans Keller
On Saturday evening (4 November) Radio 3 is broadcasting Hans Keller's latest 'functional analysis' — of Mozart's String Quintet in G minor, K.516. The work is performed by the Dartington String Quartet, with Brian Hawkins (viola).
Imagine you didn't understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; I daresay that shouldn't be too difficult to imagine. What is, perhaps, a little more difficult to envisage is my coming along and saying, 'Don't worry, I'll explain it all to you, but not in words. I'll write a piece of contrapuntal music about this theory of cognition – and in no time, it'll be crystal-clear to you. Why, the "thing in itself' can be beautifully illustrated by way of a fugue subject, disembodied by, say, a keyboard instrument, and as for Kant's "appearance", that'll develop, with the help of orchestration, in the fugal exposition which, in German, is known as "development" anyway. Come to think of it, I'll take in Schopenhauer, too, make it a double fugue, the other subject representing the "will", so that there won't be any difficulty in representing "representation" . .
'Enough', you'd say. 'I'm quite a musical person, even though I don't know those technical terms of yours, but then, I needn't: what you propose to do is to give me a musical analysis of conceptual thought, so I needn't really listen to your conceptual description of your music, which doesn't exist yet, anyway. The trouble is that I don't want to listen to the music either: that's not the way I'm going to understand philosophy. Words are words and music is music.'
Are they? Is it? In that case, why do you so easily accept words about music, not to speak of music about words in a song or opera, or indeed in church? The answer is that you can throw verbal light on music, and musical light on words, but that in order for light to be thrown on something, it's got to be there in the first place, which is the only place that counts intellectually, even though the sterile intellect easily takes, and mistakes, the second place for the first, 'appearance' for the 'thing in itself', 'representation' for the swill', explanation for experience, civilization for culture, and culture for what it is about.
In short, in order for something to be there in the first place, it's got to be inside you – which, incidentally, is the whole story of The Critique of Pure Reason: those Germans just use a lot of long words. Shamelessly, I should go so far as to say that if you want to have something explained, you have to understand it in the first place: it has to be there, inside you. You can explain a ballet to me until the cows come home from a dance I'd be unable to distinguish from it.
Enough, I said, many years ago. While I have always been inordinately fond of words, hundreds of thousands of which I had used to explain music which, for many a dutiful, even learned, recipient, existed as little as does my contrapuntal masterpiece on The Critique of Pure Reason, as much as does a cows' ballet, it suddenly struck me . . . No, that's not quite accurate. It didn't, to begin with, suddenly strike me at all. What happened, very gradually, was that I used more and more music examples in my analytic essays and papers, more and more things themselves, and fewer and fewer words. At the end of one of these analyses, I mused – prophetically, I hoped – that one day it might become possible to write an analysis consisting of music examples almost throughout, with just a few words in between. And it was when I corrected the proof of this (still very verbal) piece that a crucial thought did, at last, strike me sud denly: why one day? Why any words? Why, for that matter, music examples that have to be read? Why not continuous music to be heard, experienced, music about music that's there inside you, explaining the music behind the music to those who instinctively understood it in the first place? For that matter, how else can one explain musical logic? Hardly by conceptual logic, its demonstrable opposite. Only by musical logic, which has to be heard to convince.
I sat down and wrote to the BBC (this was well before my BBC days): would you be interested in performing a wordless analytic score, together with the work it analyses? If so, choose the work: I want to preclude any suspicion of special pleading. Upon con sultation, they said yes–depending on what the score was going to look like, and they chose the Mozart D minor Quartet, the great one. I wrote the analysis, and it was performed on the then Third Programme, and published by The Score. Proper com missions ensued, from other radio organ izations, too, from William Glock for the Summer School of Music at Dartington, from Benjamin Britten for the Aldeburgh Festival, and from a London concert society: 'functional analysis', as I called it (as well as the theory behind it), was made – or SO I thought. It was and it wasn't. There still is opposition to it, hostility even, and that will remain. There are people who can't overcome their anxiety at the loss of words (the neurotic intellectual's lifeline) as well as their shock at the gain of insight into the unitary background of a composition, the contrasts of whose foreground — of the notes as you hear them when you listen to the work itself — easily repress the background on which it is based, in the experience of some composers as well as many listeners: they don't want to know that everything they hear is, fundamentally, the same, springs from the same basic idea, that there is no contrast without unity, that meaningful art doesn't divert, but diversifies. And that's all functional analysis is about — the unity of contrasts. There's nothing else worth analysing — because everything else can be heard without analysis.
My proudest moment, or my one proud moment, came at that Aldeburgh Festival where one of my functional analyses was performed. At question time, a charming, elderly lady got up and said that for her, the analysis destroyed the poetry of the Mozart quartet which had been performed together with the analysis. Whereupon Britten, not normally a verbal controversialist, got up, said that for him it added to the poetry, and sat down again. There are indeed two types of poetries — the poetry of knowledge and the poetry of concealment: the psychology of clothes offers ample evidence on a more primitive level — and in this respect, the fate of functional analysis, both its appeal and its repulse, will remain the same as that of psychoanalysis, with which it also shares its essentially self-analytic nature: by analysing my own musical experience (what else is there to analyse?), I hope to analyse yours; where I don't, I have failed. For the rest. I don't see the remotest reason for objecting to your dislike of musical analysis as such; what I object to is your listening to what you dislike. If you abhor analysis, just go away quietly instead of listening noisily.
So what's going to happen on Saturday? In principle, all functional analyses take the form of analytic interludes between movements — the complete first movement running into the first analytic interlude, which leads into the second movement, and so on. But in practice, this formal approach varies, of course, according to the structure of the work. In my analysis of Beethoven's G major Concerto, for instance, an analytic cadenza (played most 'poetically' by Clifford Curzon) replaced Beethoven's own cadenza'— and on Saturday too, there'll be a tiny analytic cadenza between the introduction to the last movement and the body of the finale. An entirely new departure will be the analytic introduction with which the whole performance starts: normally, I don't allow myself to analyse anything before it has been heard, but the G minor Quintet is so well known, the analytic introduction so functional and ( I fondly imagine) natural, well-nigh self-evident, that I don't think a major crime against artistic experience will have been committed.
Since this Mozart Quintet is a long work, and since the analysis always tends to be as long again as is the work itself, I decided to structure it into two parts, Part I finishing with an analytic postlude to the minuet, and Part H starting with an analytic prelude to the slow movement. The entire structure finishes with an analytic postlude which, of course, succeeds the finale.
For the rest — just listen, if you want to. Conceptual thought is out; if you can't banish it, that's not my problem. The analysis simply has to be listened to as music. You needn't even know what a first or second subject is. Mozart didn't either: the terms had not been invented, but his music had — as had (if it hasn't gone wrong) my analysis which, I submit, unearths nothing that wasn't there in the first place.
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