Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007
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‘Consciousness and the Imagination in the Music of the French Impressionists’
by
University of Surrey, UK
Impressionist music is often understood in purely visual or pictural terms, and this is fuelled by the particularly descriptive and evocative titles of many of Debussy and Ravel’s pieces. This descriptive aspect is however only the uppermost level in a style of music which endeavours to go beyond the appearances in order to capture the “Inexpressible”, as Debussy once said. That music was thought to go beyond the physical world and reveal the essence beneath the appearances, was in itself a Romantic common-place. But the difference between the Romantic approach and the Impressionist approach lies in where this “essence” is perceived to be. For the Romantics, the essence is “out there”, to be found in the objects themselves and the world itself, even in a parallel transcendent world but always one which is external to us. For the Impressionists, as for many philosophers at the turn of the century interested in psychology and the mind, the essence is within, within our own minds, within our own perception and consciousness - a consciousness which is understood to shape, or even, in some extreme cases, to create the external physical world which surrounds us. I will be arguing in this essay that it is only by understanding the music in terms of consciousness that its full expressive potential becomes apparent.
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Why do we listen to music? What makes music so interesting? How can we explain how music has the effect it does on our minds? If we put aside the question of the conventional or cultural associations we make in relation to music, to focus on our response to the purely musical characteristics of music in general, it appears that there is a conceptual blank in the gap between the music itself, as what is heard, and what we make of it, i.e. the potential mental understanding or appreciation of it. The philosopher of music, Peter Kivy, described this epistemological gap as the “black box of music”:
Let us, then, treat music, in this regard, as what the scientists call a ‘black box’: that is to say, a machine whose inner workings are unknown to us. [...] We know what goes in: the musical features that, for three centuries, have been associated with the particular emotions music is expressive of. And we know what goes out: the expressive qualities the music is heard to be expressive of. (Kivy, 2002, 48)
The ‘what is heard’ can indeed be easily described in a multiplicity of manners, from the traditional musical analyses, the most extreme of which assert that music is a closed non- or self-referential system which can only be understood from within with a technical internal vocabulary, itself created from within (i.e. the ‘formalist’ approach (Kivy, 2002, 68)), to what is considered (by the formalists or purists) as more subjective and representative descriptive approaches, or even to the psychological or neurological experiments involving brain scans, which endeavour to describe what happens in the brain when one listens to music (cf. the research carried out on music and neuroimaging at the Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, published recently by Lahav, Schlaug and Saltzman, 2006, or Itzkovitz, et al., 2005). All of these, however, fall short in understanding this gap between music itself and the meaning(s) and value we attribute to music and thus fail to give satisfactory answers to the questions, such as why is music important, why do we listen to music, what precisely is it in music which we are relentlessly drawn towards.
If we were to take one step back and observe music from a distance, one of its major characteristics is that the sound world of music is free from the all-pervading notion of geometric space, all too easily representative, whilst at the same time suggesting the constant metamorphosis in time of simultaneous (sound) events within a complex, multi-layered design. As Peter Kivy argued in his more recent reflections, such purely formal qualities are fundamental to our understanding of the nature of musical expression because they are what music is all about:
music [...] is “merely” sonic wallpaper, but it is wallpaper with some pretty impressive features. It is multidimensional wallpaper. It is quasi-syntactical wallpaper. It is deeply expressive wallpaper. And it is deeply moving wallpaper. These features, I urge, help redeem music from the charge that as a decorative art, it is somehow demoted to the status of the trivial. (Kivy, 1993, 358)
Music thus makes sense to us primarily as a sonic pattern, a pattern which is in constant creation and mutation as the music plays and which is only fully complete as the last note of the piece dies away at the close of the performance. More importantly, the perception of the pattern is a two-way process: even though the pattern is given to us, to some extent, by the musical composition itself, it is also created by us as we listen and piece together the different musical elements. In such a way, the musical pattern is thus perceived and created by our consciousness of it. Could musical expression not therefore be a direct expression of the very process of our consciousness, process whose complexity often escapes direct linguistic expression but which may find in music a more appropriate manifestation? And if so, does this not explain the value we give to music, as it thus becomes intimately linked to our very conscious being?
Laird Addis will draw an interesting parallel between the modalities of musical expression and those of our consciousness. He argues that the processes of “pure” consciousness, that is, consciousness devoid of its “content” (i.e. “consciousness” as opposed to the consciousness “of” something), is similar to the expressive modalities of absolute music, that is, music which is also devoid of “content”, as long as one makes the distinction between “states of consciousness” (consciousness of) and pure consciousness (as a process). As Addis argues,
consciousness, Husserl and Sartre were wont to say, is always consciousness of something, although not necessarily of “something” that exists. This is so much the case that when one tries to specify the character of any particular state of consciousness – be it a perception or a remembering or a desiring or a contemplating or an imagining or whatever – one can, apart from mention of its “formal” characteristics as an event (such as those of duration and intensity), only describe what that consciousness was about. To describe one’s perceptions of a parade is to describe the parade – as we perceived, to be sure, but even so the parade is not any perception of it. Thus, to put the point paradoxically, to describe a state of consciousness is to describe something other than the state of consciousness, that which the consciousness is a consciousness of. (Addis, 2004, 42-43)
Thus understood in terms of consciousness, i.e. a process of awareness, music cannot fall into the linguistic or representative trap of describing our “consciousness of”, but could actually be perceived to be an instance of, or at least the direct expression of the processes of the mind per se. Music may therefore enable us to capture and express states of consciousness in themselves rather than what the state of consciousness was of. As a result, music could have the potential to reveal the actual process of consciousness, totally abstracted from its content, and which Bergson himself compared to a musical process in his exploration of the consciousness (Bergson, 1888/2003, 48-49). For Bergson, music provides an “image” in sound (the word “image” here is obviously not taken in its visual sense but as “mental representation” or “conception”) of the “durée pure” (pure duration) which itself is defined in terms of states of mind made up of a simultaneous layering of multiple elements (Bergson, 1888/2003, 50), in the same way that we may describe music. By thus defining “pure duration” by the consciousness itself (and vice versa, consciousness thus becomes “pure duration”), music becomes an integral part of the equation, central to our understanding of the consciousness. Music is in itself an analogy for this correlation of time and ever changing states of consciousness. Not only a concrete manifestation of the “durée pure”, music thus also becomes the “image” of a conscience pure, consciousness itself taken as process. To quote Monroe Beardsley,
music, then, is no symbol of time or process, mental or physical, Newtonian, or Bergsonian; it is process. And perhaps we can say it is the closest thing to pure process, to happening as such, to change abstracted from anything that changes, so that it is something whose course and destiny we can follow with the most exact and scrupulous and concentric attention, undistracted by reflections of our normal joys or woes, or by clues and implications for our safety or success. Instead of saying that music can be no more than this, we ought to say that music can be all of this, as nothing else can be. (Beardsley, 1915/1981, 338-339)
But even the similarity of music with psychological processes is not straightforward as many critics cannot agree as to what “psychological processes” are actually denoted by the music: “we cannot decide among the innumerable possible qualities, so that if the music is a sign at all, it is ambiguous.” (Beardsley, 1915/1981, 336) Kivy, in a similar reasoning, will end up asking the same question in a chapter entitled ‘The Profundity of Music’ in his study of absolute music, Music Alone: “The problem is that we – at least I – have no clear idea at all about why serious well-educated, adult human beings should find pure musical sound of such abiding interest that we are moved to call the subject ‘profound’” (Kivy, 1990, 216). Monroe Beardsley, on the other hand, will conclude with a “negative” view, that music can neither express anything nor signify anything, that it has no reference to anything and does not function as a symbol or an intermediary between our mental representations and the real objects, but “is process”:
And perhaps we can say it is the closest thing to pure process, to happening as such, to change abstracted from anything that changes, so that it is something whose course and destiny we can follow with the most exact and scrupulous and concentric attention, undistracted by reflections of our normal joys or woes, or by clues and implications for our safety or success. Instead of saying that music can be no more than this, we ought to say that music can be all of this, as nothing else can be. (Beardsley, 1915/1981, 338-339)
Beardsley is aware that his conclusion is not entirely satisfactory as it fails to resolve the discrepancy which he perceives exists between music as process – expressing or signifying neither emotions nor ideas – and music as being “valuable”, i.e. music as meaningful: “How this [music as process] makes music valuable, and what value it has, we are to ask later” (Beardsley, 1915/1981, 339). Yet again, we return to the question as to what extent is an expression of pure abstraction of any value? The answer lies again in the similarities which can be drawn between music and consciousness. If one of the essential, if not the essential, characteristics of music is to create a “composition” of relations and correlations, rhythmic patterns and structures out of indeterminate and fundamentally non-representative sound, similarly can our consciousness also be approached as that which makes sense out of what Virginia Woolf perceptively described as the “orts, scraps and fragments” (1941/1960, 220) of our daily experiences, by making relations, correlations, patterns and structures, and thus going beyond the appearances to find an underlying pattern – one which is not given to us, which is not external to us, but one which is created by our own consciousness. What is interesting in Kivy’s interpretation of musical meaning is that he sees the value of music’s abstract nature not in the music itself but in our apprehension of the underlying abstraction of music as a process of transcendence. For Kivy, the value of absolute music lies in the way that music “liberates” us from our concrete material world to a world of purely formal and aesthetic structures:
listening to absolute music is, among other things, the experience of going from our world, with all of its trials, tribulations, and ambiguities, to another world, a world of pure sonic structure, that, because it need not be interpreted as a representation or description of our world, but can be appreciated on its own terms alone, gives us the sense of liberation that I have found appropriate to analogize with the pleasurable experience we get in the process of going from a state of intense pain to its cessation. (Kivy, 2002, 260)
The listening experience is thus situated between the dialectical opposites of the real concrete “world” and the abstract aesthetic “world” of music. So doing he is not describing music itself as a process of abstraction away from a concrete world as the music is pure abstraction, but the musical experience, which brings to life this process. And this is why Kivy, in his more recent reflections, will attempt to redeem the value of music’s purely formal qualities, putting its potential for a representative or symbolic meaning in second place. It is only because music is fundamentally “wallpaper” (see above, Kivy, 1993, 358), i.e. an abstract pattern of sound, that it may give rise to representative extra-musical interpretations derived from its patterns, because such patterns correspond to the underlying patterns made by our consciousness in our endeavours to create a cohesive and meaningful whole out of our experiences. To return therefore to Laird Addis’s image of a “procession”, a piece of music may have structural, dynamic and rhythmic (abstract) qualities which suggest the life and being of a procession (or whatever else it may suggest to the individual listening to the music) and therefore bring this to mind as we listen, but it also gives us the means to move away from the representative aspects, away from the appearances, and explore the way our consciousness makes sense of our experiences as an abstract, creative and essentially musical process. And that music reveals in this way the very process of our minds explains the value we give to music. It is this process which we shall now briefly explore within the context of Debussy’s piano music as, interestingly, such an understanding of musical meaning is in fact a return to the aesthetics underpinning much musical Impressionism, whose representative or programmatic aspects have often obscured the more significant abstract qualities of the music understood in terms of the expression of states of consciousness.
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At first
view, Debussy’s ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’, would seem to be an example of a
borrowing from Impressionist painting, water being a particularly favoured theme
in many of Monet’s paintings of gardens – the famous water-lily pond in the
garden at Giverny, for example. In ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’, you can nearly hear
in sound the type of pointilliste style of many other Impressionist painters. We
could compare, for instance, the effect of the fragmented colours in this style
of painting to the effect of the harmonies emerging from a nebulous fragmented
pattern of arpeggios and repeated notes in the music – the effect in both
painting and music given by listening or seeing the works from a distance, as a
whole. Just as painters sought to capture the effects of light, making the very
atmosphere tangible in their attention to misty and hazy textures, ‘Jardins sous
la Pluie’ also evocatively suggests changes of atmosphere in the handling of its
sonorous textures, from the clear-cut “Vif et Net” (lively and clear) opening
pages (see figure 1 below) to the more hazy watery pedalled central
Figure 1. Debussy, ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’, bars 1-3
sections. Even more than its connection to Impressionist painting, another aspect of this music lends itself to extra-musical interpretations. Water, of course, was not only a subject of much painting but was also a traditional subject in much nineteenth century music. The heritage of musical symbolism which underpins ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’ cannot be ignored – arpeggiated figurations are commonly used to represent running water in programmatic Western music, the Jeux d’Eaux à la Villa d’Este by Franz Liszt, for instance, springing to mind. In fact, we must remember that however much we try to understand how music makes meaning in the absolute, we cannot ignore the fact that we are not listening to music in a bubble. We are culturally conditioned to respond to music in certain ways, to the point that we may even be projecting onto the music we hear certain conventional emotions, thoughts and images, thus thinking our own musical experience in terms of these conventions without even realizing we are doing so. Our musical experience is imbibed by our social and cultural baggage and this is not only true of the listeners but also of the composers who will also often write according to a conventional code of musical semantics or musical symbolism in order to be “understood” by their audience (Meyer, 1996). To a certain extent, we are expected to listen and respond to music according to the conventions of the moment. It cannot indeed be denied that a great percentage of all Western music of the past 400 years or so is basically conventional because music, as a man-made artefact was seen to potentially represent, symbolise or mimic extra-musical events – Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, composed in 1723, uses the same musical imagery as Debussy’s piece, for instance – the same rumbles of thunder, the same fast arpeggiated tremolandoes to represent the shimmer of running water. On its uppermost level, this representative aspect of music can be easily illustrated and it wouldn’t be difficult to compile a dictionary of musical symbolism charting different musical traditions and associations. We would be merely describing from a historical perspective the way music has been culturally encoded. We would be establishing a sort of language of music. Speaking of the piece itself, not only is it inscribed within a cultural context and a musical tradition, but it also contains within itself references to water and storms. The title itself, “Gardens in the Rain”, in French, suggests less gardens, than rain. In addition to this, Debussy quotes a famous nursery rhyme, ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois, les lauriers sont coupés’ (we shall not be going to the woods because the laurels are cut), which in an earlier piece he transformed into ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois parce qu’il fait un temps insupportable’ (we shall not be going to the woods because the weather is awful). He certainly had the rain in mind and not the gardens. All these elements lead the listeners to hear the piece in terms of its extra-musical allusions. Such an awareness of the larger cultural context in which the piece is inscribed no doubt contributes to the listener’s perception of the allusive richness of the music. However, the listener’s attention is not only drawn to the representative aspects of the music but also to the purely musical features of the music, characteristics which do not give rise to any imaginative responses but which give us the key to our complete understanding of the aesthetic purport of this music.
What actually strikes the listener foremost
in this piece, is less the atmospheric moods and images than the actual
technical aspect, the vibrancy and urgency, and sheer excitement given by the
virtuosic figurations and arpeggios, which, it is true, correspond to the life
and being of a rain-storm but can also be heard in themselves, for themselves.
The fact that ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’ is part of a group of pieces entitled
Estampes is particularly significant. ‘Estampes Japonaises’, or Japanese
prints, were quite the vogue at the turn of the 20th Century,
reflecting the growing interest in the culture of this country. The
numerous universal exhibitions, which were
taking place in London and Paris in the
late 1860s, 70s and 80s, all featured Japanese art. Painters such as Gauguin,
Monet, and many other French artists of the period, felt attracted to the
stylized ukiyo-e landscapes of 19th Century Japanese artist, Utagawa
Hiroshige, for example, to the point of actually reinterpreting his prints in
their own works.
Hiroshige’s aesthetic emphasis was perceived less to lie in the picture itself than in the patterns of etched lines, and the shapes and planes of an overall geometrical design, thus distilling the atmosphere of the scenes depicted to their most expressive and powerful essence. Debussy was very much familiar with the style of Japanese prints, and sought to capture the same effect in his musical Estampes, a collection of three musical “prints”. ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’, the third piece in the series, as well as evocatively suggesting the patter of raindrops, a children’s nursery rhyme and the threatening rolls of thunder, goes beyond such programmatic and representative features by bringing into play more abstract musical characteristics. These, as I will argue, can be understood in terms of an expression of a state of pure consciousness, just as Hiroshige’s print of a rainstorm in the Yamagushi gorge (see figure 2 above) is more than a faithful and realistic representation of a raindrenched landscape, but captures the more elusive abstract qualities of the scene.
If the descriptive aspect is only the uppermost level, the essence of this style of music, which after all is not “absolute music” but programme music, complete with titles and extra-musical associations, lies therefore in the relation between what the title evokes (these representative effects) and what lies beyond the title, intimated in those purely abstract non-representative musical features or effects which cannot be explained or understood in extra-musical terms. In Impressionist music above all, because it is still music (and therefore fundamentally an abstract sonic pattern) and precisely because it does have extra-musical titles, both the representative and the abstract are brought into sharp focus simultaneously and we thus have the impression of going beyond the appearances of whatever the title and the representative features of the music suggest, into a world of pure abstract sound. What is important is less the subject of the piece in itself and the relation between the musical features and what they may suggest visually (the relation between the arpeggios and waves, for instance), which would remain but an expression of the external perception of the object, but rather in the relation between the subject of the piece and the expression of its mysterious essence, understood in terms of the “Inexpressible, which is the ideal of all art”, as Debussy once said in a letter to André Poniatowski in February 1893 (Debussy, 1987, 42). In the Préludes, composed in 1909-1910, 7 years after the Estampes and ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’, Debussy goes one step further and is seen to be exploring this gap between what is expressible of the object, and its paradoxically inexpressible essence. It is up to the imagination of the hearer to bridge this gap, to hear beyond the visual, so to speak. Significantly, Debussy placed the titles at the end of these pieces. And this, for a very important reason: he wished his listeners not to take the titles as programmes but rather as suggestions, allowing the listener to create their own imaginative response derived from the abstract musical relations, textures and colours which are often far from being painting in sound but rather, the embodiment of abstract relations and correspondances. The essence of each piece is thus found to lie in the effect of the shift of colours and harmonies, in the internal relations between chords and melodies, in the abstract pattern of sound – it is this effect which captures the inexpressible because it is purely musical and as such, quite impossible to render in words.
Début-du-siècle artists felt that the moment was no more visual than it was auditive, tactile, sensual in general. The moment was in fact a blending of these various senses within our consciousness, thus subliminated into a more general pattern of relations and correspondences which reflected the particular atmosphere of the moment perceived as a compound of sensations. It is this effect which the artists were searching for in their works. This is what Debussy endeavoured to capture in his prelude ‘Les Sons et les Parfums tournent dans l’Air du Soir’, a line taken from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Harmonie du Soir’. The title illustrates the interest Modernist artists of that period had for the synaesthetic nature of our perceptions. Though the music cannot express the actual scents turning in the air, the quality of the harmonies, the ambivalent rhythmic undertow and the ever-shifting tonalities, capture the elusive nature of the whole experience of Baudelaire’s poem.
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Like many Post-Impressionist paintings, and we could think here of Cézanne’s depictions of apples and tables, Impressionist music is therefore characterized by this duality, the idea in particular of going “through the looking-glass” to capture the essence of life itself, which is to be found not in the subjects of the pieces, the objects and events which are depicted, but in our own process of consciousness of these subjects, objects and events, as they are revealed by the abstract features of the musical compositions. In Cézanne’s paintings, perspective and realistic appearances are secondary compared to the abstract dynamics of the correspondances between the objects, colours and planes recreated in our imagination as abstract relations – relations which even distort the realistic side of the picture and this was noted by art critic Roger Fry, who described the originality of the Post-Impressionists, Cézanne’s style in particular, as the subsumation of representation to the more abstract formal qualities without however actually abandoning representation altogether (Fry, 1910/1996, 76). Similarly, in Impressionist music, the concrete images are thus merely the pretext, a very essential pretext nevertheless, for bringing to life the creative process of our own consciousness, a consciousness understood in terms of a unifying pattern-making process. And this is why we are drawn to music. If we are, therefore, to take music as the process of the mind itself, one in which in Impressionist music in particular, the representative features become mere pretexts for an expression of the abstract features they imply in a bid to capture the consciousness itself, the musical experience becomes all the more significant.
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