Jandy’s Anthology

This is what my father told me when I was five: a key signature is a king’s court in miniature. It is ruled by a king (the first step) and his two right-hand men (steps five and four). They have four other dignitaries at their command, each of whom has his own special relation to the king and his right-hand men. The court houses five additional tones as well, which are known as chromatic. They have important parts to play in other keys, but here they are simply guests.

Since each of the twelve notes has its own job, title, and function, any piece we hear is more than mere sound: it unfolds a certain action before us. Sometimes the events are terribly involved (as in Mahler or–even more Bartók or Stravinsky): princes from other courts intervene, and before long there is no telling which court a tone belongs to and no assurance it isn’t working undercover as a double or triple agent. But even then the most naive of listeners can figure out more or less what is going on. The most complex music is still a language.

That is what my father told me. What follows is all my own. One day a great man determined that after a thousand years the language of music had worn itself out and could do no more than rehash the same message. Abolishing the hierarchy of tones by revolutionary decree, he made them all equal and subjected them to a strict discipline: none was allowed to occur more often than any other in a piece, and therefore none could lay claim to its former feudal privileges. All courts were permanently abolished, and in their place arose a single empire, founded on equality and called the twelve-tone system.

Perhaps the sonorities were more interesting than they had been, but audiences accustomed to following the courtly intrigues of the keys for a millennium failed to make anything of them. In any case, the empire of the twelve-tone system soon disappeared. After Schönberg came Varèse, and he abolished notes (the tones of the human voice and musical instruments) along with keys, replacing them with an extremely subtle play of sounds which, though fascinating, marks the beginning of the history of something other than music, something based on other principles and another language.

When in my Prague apartment Milan Hubl held forth on the possibility of the Czech nation disappearing into the Russian empire, we both knew that the idea, though legitimate, went beyond us and that we were speaking of the inconceivable. Even though man is mortal, he cannot conceive of the end of space or time, of history or a nation: he lives in an illusory infinity.

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous “onward and upward” slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.

(If all the obsession with the word “onward” has become universal nowadays, isn’t largely because death now speaks to us at such close range?)

In the days when Arnold Schönberg founded his twelve-tone empire, music was richer than ever before and intoxicated with its freedom. No one ever dreamed the end was so near. No fatigue. No twilight. Schönberg was audacious as only youth can be. He was legitimately proud of having chosen the only road that led “onward.” The history of music came to an end in a burst of daring and desire.

(p 178-179)

Filed under: 20th-century, fiction on June 11th, 2007