Our friend Muriel Berman treated
Margot and me to dinner and concert at Philadelphia's
Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts on 8 February
2003.
It was
our first visit to the new venue. We liked the daring
of the luminous glass canopy that encloses the
performance halls--Verizon Hall and Perelman Theater.
The vastness and quietness of Commonwealth Plaza--a
space of its own serving both main halls--dispelled
the sense that a crowd was assembling. The box office
line for the evening's performance stretched back
through the plaza like a tame and friendly dragon.
These last-minute concertgoers queued comfortably
inside while the nasty Broad Street winds blew
outside. The gift shop (I'm no fan of such) was
easily approachable from the mall-like plaza. Its
unusually interesting stock of stuff--puppets,
miniature instruments, theme scarves, etc.--amounted
to a colorful sideshow in itself.
The upstairs
restaurant served fine fare--coq au vin for Muriel,
crab cake for Margot, striped bass for me. Stylish
young people (they seemed to be stars in training)
fussed over us. They knew Muriel as a regular
concertgoer and attended to her accordingly. Their
good service gave us plenty of time to find our seats
for the 8:00 p.m. performance.
We
sat at dinner on the second tier, with a view of the
vast space below and above. The keynote of the whole
complex was OPENNESS. Spaciousness. Though crowded,
it gave me the sense of being in control of where I
was. This impression sharpened when I recalled the
Academy of Music just up Broad Street, with its
cramped vestibule and its intimate 19th-century
lobby, which tested one's elbow action and skills at
slithering through.
MUSIC
MYSTIFIES IN A SPACIOUS PLACE
When
we
entered the concert hall, bearing its Verizon promo
stamp, the impression of openness sustained itself,
but with a difference. The design of the hall created
a tension between spaciousness and intimacy, a
tension absent out in the vast plaza.
The cavity of
Verizon was vast and uncluttered. But I felt it
soften and move closer to me under the influence of
its dark woods and the violin shape of the balconies
(symbolically obvious, yes, offensive to the eye,
no). The stage was not the remote enclosure of the
Academy. It was low to the seats in the front rows
and surrounded by concertgoers on all sides.
Ten minutes
before the scheduled start, the seats were half
occupied. Muriel worried that the audience would not
get to their seats in time. Surprisingly, most did,
with little fuss. People moved with ease through the
wide aisles to their generously proportioned new
seats. The hazards of walking down the tight aisles
of the Academy to tight seats were just nostalgic
memories.
Wolfgang
Sawallisch and his players took the stage with as
little fuss as the audience took its seats. They
seemed to be assembling to play for Muriel, Margot,
and me, not for the house, much less for posterity.
That, of course, was partly because of Muriel's prime
box seats; but her seats at the Academy had been
equally advantageous and had not given us this
feeling of connectedness.
My impressions
of acoustics are naïve; I record, anyway, that the
sound of the orchestra and the pianist reached me
cleanly and clearly. This seemed to be the
predictable consequence of the open and uncluttered
design of the hall (but of course testified to
sophisticated engineering beyond my understanding).
The house was
not full but nearly so. The new venue seemed to
liberate Philadelphians from their restraint, always
felt at the Academy. In Sawallisch's repeated ambles
on and off stage to applause, he might have been our
famous old uncle instead of our famous old maestro.
The venue brought him closer to us. The family was
freer to admire.
MUSIC MYSTIFIES IN A SPACIOUS
PLACE
Then
too,
the approachability of the program made the people
more inclined to applaud:
--Mendelssohn's Calm
Sea and Prosperous Voyage Overture, Op. 27,
a musical interpretation of poetry by Goethe.
--Schumann's Piano
Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54,
composed from 1841 to 1845 for performance by his
spouse Clara, his artistic soul mate. Rudolph
Buchbinder of Vienna performed on the keyboard--a
Germanic romantic in action.
--After
intermission, Symphony No. 1 in
B-Flat Major, Op. 38 ("Spring"),
Schumann's 1841 flight into symphony in search of the
sound beyond Beethoven.
I knew the
Schumann piano concerto from a CD. Buchbinder's
playing was fun. The piece is a magazine of musical
moods. The pianist has to leap from one to the next
with agility. Buchbinder added joy to agility: I
wanted to mirror the mood swings he bestowed so
blithely on the house. His big Germanic presence on
stage seemed incongruously to generate lightness and
deftness. The felt intimacy of the new hall abetted
this impression.
I borrow some
words from the program notes by John Daverio that aim
to describe the piano concerto. The orchestra opens
with a "hammerstroke." The pianist
"refracts" the orchestra's opening
"through a shifting kaleidoscope of musical
moods." The "guises" of melody include
"noble hymn," "dreamy nocturne,"
"passionate rhapsody." The composer
"restores the tune to the winds" following
the piano's "haze of trills." There is
"an intimate dialogue" between the piano
and the string section. A melody makes an
"entrance" with the cellos. A dialogue
"dissolves" into echoes. The music
"plunges" and "interrupts." The
piece sets up a "rhythmic tug of war between
quick triple time and a pattern moving precisely half
as fast."
But descriptive
words seem to fail in the face of performance,
whether the piece in question is familiar, like the
Schumann piano concerto, or less familiar, like the
Mendelssohn overture and Schumann's symphony. Home
from the concert, I wonder why this is so. Did I
experience what these words suggest? Or was the
experience something that neither descriptive
impressions nor the composer's narrative cues
identify clearly?
I think of the
specific narrative references. The Mendelssohn
overture "conveys the poems' situation in purely
musical terms," says the program note.
Mendelssohn sought to say in music what Goethe had
said in his two poems. Schumann's symphony is a
musical statement on "spring." It lies
somewhere between "absolute" and
"program" music, according to the program.
MUSIC MYSTIFIES IN A SPACIOUS
PLACE
This
distinction recalls
to mind Susanne Langer's theory of the symbolic
significance of music in her vintage study of the
symbolism of reason, rite, and art, Philosophy
in a New Key (1942). It is a
relic of my reading of nearly forty years ago.
Although her argument has dimmed in my memory, I
retain the impression of sheer luminosity surrounding
her thoughts on music.
My cheap
paperback edition has been slowly decomposing on the
bookshelf, but I still can read it. It preserves
Langer's keen insight into the musical event. What,
she wondered, did it essentially signify? I read
those browning pages again to retrace how she thought
her way to an answer.
Langer thought
that the narrative associations of program music,
such as we see in the Mendelssohn overture and the
Schumann symphony, miss the essential point of
musical meaning. Music for her lacked the assignment
of specific meaning found in language. Although music
has "significant form," this significance
is "not conventionally fixed" as we find it
in language. To use her technical term, it is an
"unconsummated symbol." (204)
Langer was
saying that we cannot pin a particular non-musical
content to a musical form. What, then, does music
convey if not a delimited meaning somewhat comparable
to conventional verbal meaning? She suggested that
music's lack of symbolic consummation involves it in
an "ambivalence of content." (206) As
responsive listeners follow the music, they hear
"a transient play of contents." The
contents come and go with the progress of the piece.
These contents or meanings are not pinned down. The
listeners assign meanings instant by instant as the
piece plays on. These meanings are "probably
below the threshold of consciousness, certainly
outside the pale of discursive thinking." (206)
In these brief
associations, listeners gain insight through flashes
of understanding. But their insight, Langer said,
does not--contrary to common opinion--identify
the feeling of the sound with the feelings of the
listeners. (Nor, of course, did she believe that this
insight leads to programmatic narrative images.)
Instead, the sounds that
the listeners hear imply "the
way moods feel." (207)
Listeners, that is, have flashes of understanding
into the form of feeling.
Many listeners
sense that the sounds conflate with their very own
feelings. Langer had an explanation for this commonly
felt but, in her view, false sense. It comes about,
she said, because the symbolic forms of music are not
"consciously abstracted." That makes them
like primitive myth.
That is, they
remain confused with the things that they symbolize.
The things that they symbolize are moods--"vital
impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and
dying and feeling." (207) In essence, Langer
insisted that, despite this confusion, "What
music can actually reflect is only the morphology
of feeling" (my emphasis), not feeling itself.
(202)
It is fun to
revisit the Langer I remember as the elegant spinner
of fine points. Her careful emphasis on the formal
properties of music heightens my impression of what
was going on in Verizon Hall with the music of
Mendelssohn and Schumann.
MUSIC MYSTIFIES IN A SPACIOUS
PLACE
During
the performance, I looked out across the
audience--easy to do from Muriel's box situated at a
higher level on the main floor. Expressions on faces
varied--some vacant, some wide-eyed, some intense,
some pensive. Some bodies were still, seemingly
enraptured. Others were fidgeting. Hands rubbed jaws
or cradled foreheads. Couples touched. Most eyes were
on the stage, but some were moving about, like mine.
Some remained closed, avoiding visual distraction
from the auditory experience. From this spectacle I
could derive the sense of the hall:
Restraint.
Receptivity. I will try not to initiate. Do to me
what you will. I belong to the sound. I suspend my
disbelief in what I'm hearing, what I'm seeing. I am
open to the disciplined complexity in front of me. It
is something more than a physical vibration. I am
receiving significance through my ears and eyes.
How remarkable
that hundreds of people decided to suspend their
lives for two hours to enter this little alternative
life. They left the life of food and sleep and sex
and sickness for a life that rides on air.
Spurred by
Langer's forays into artistic theory, I try to decide
just what was happening to them as they (we) lived
that temporary life of air. Her emphasis on the
primitive had a convincing ring. Music seems like the
mystery art. It remains in the realm of what Ernst
Cassirer (referred to by Langer) called
"mythical consciousness." (208) Despite its
grounding in thoroughly physical instruments subject
to the sternest physical laws, it voids the
scientific consciousness of listeners. It puts them
in touch with a "myth of the inner life--a
young, vital, and meaningful myth." (208) This
makes it akin to the early human rituals that did not
differentiate an objective world from the subjective
consciousness of celebrants.
Langer's vintage
analysis, dependent on her mentor Cassirer, indeed
sharpened my impression of our evening at The Kimmel
Center. But it did not cut cleanly through to a clear
explanation. Her acceptance of something mysterious
in music--despite her insistence that the musical
form of feeling and the feeling of listeners in
principle remain separate--told me that enchantment
is still possible. The Kimmel Center remains like a
house of mystery. Come back,
it beckons--a newly primitive
experience is waiting here for you. Just check your
Broad Street life at the door and let the music have
its way with you.
