Arthur Berger

by tristero

Regular commenter olvlzl has done me a nice honor by dedicating his post on composer Arthur Berger to me. Berger is one of those excellent American composers that those of us in the know love and appreciate but who gets only a fraction of the performances he deserves. I hope at least some of you take the trouble to hear some of his music. I was struck by this passage from olvlzl’s post:

I could tell you that roughly measures 25 through 31 of the first movement of Berger’s Duo move me to an all encompassing state of ecstacy every single time I hear it or play through the piano part. Just remembering how that passage sounds can take me out of myself. I could try to think of further metaphors or write a formal technical description, to give a partial explanation of what happens at that time in the music and then guess why it produces that effect. All of that might be entirely true, in part, and entirely useless in total. Any elucidation that someone reading that description might think they%u2019ve received would be deceptive. It would tell you nothing useful, it might endanger your own experience of the music. I would have to motivate you to experience the music, to listen to it, complete and in its entirety, to have any hope that you could know what I was talking about. No one who had not heard the music would know the first thing about it.

This is something that musicians who have some kind of verbal ability grapple with all the time (sidebar: I doubt Monk thought too much about it, frankly). How to understand what music means, what it is. Olvzl’s words reminded me of a book I’m reading now, Music and the Ineffable by Vladimir Jankelevitch, which argues rather beautifully that due to its very nature, music is not really a language, by which Jankelevitch means that the actual experience of music cannot be translated into words, and therefore it has no “meaning” as we understand the word. It’s a complex argument and may seem counter-intuitive to many of you, but I basically think Jankelevitch, and olvlzl are quite right.

When I was in grad school, the requirements for getting a doctorate in Composition were that you had to write a substantial piece of music along with an essay analyzing the piece. I thought this was the height of idiocy (this was long before the present White House infestation, I was young and innocent). Why? Because everyone I knew who had gone through the program had done exactly the same thing: They’d written the essay first and then wrote a piece that was consistent with it. That’s because no matter how hard you try, you can’t write music that reduces down to a verbal or formal description unless you start with such a description first. And who wants to defend their music to a group of bored academicians by saying, “Frankly, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that g#, I just liked the way it sounded” when you know that will cause them to reject your thesis?

So I kept on suggesting to the graduate music faculty that maybe they should call up their colleagues over in the English department and suggest that anyone interested in a doctorate in English should have to sing their dissertation. For reasons that utterly escape me, they thought I was joking.

Anyway, read olvlzl’s post. And listen to Berger. He’s worth it.