Musings on Music
A reflection on Jos Kessels’ ‘new theory of harmony’
Music has always been a serious business for me. I don’t play an instrument, I can’t even read music. Unfortunately, I have always had to settle for the position of a ‘passive’ receiver. However, within this limited scope, I have often wondered how I could become a ‘better listener’. For me, this is a question with fundamental epistemological and ethical implications. I must also admit that I have perhaps not made much progress in answering this question.
So I was delighted when Jos Kessels’ book beckoned me from the shelves of my favourite bookshop. After reading it, however, I came to the conclusion that the author’s answer to my question was definitely not mine. But because I disagree with the author so thoroughly, reading the book helps me to clarify my own position.
What is the argument that Jos Kessels puts forward in this book? He begins with the disconcerting fact that we cannot really explain the magic of music. The sciences (musicology, psychology, neuroscience) approach the phenomenon rationally and are unable to grasp its essence. To do justice to the musical experience, and to grow as human beings in the process, we need to tap into other sources of knowledge and develop an idiosyncratic practice of imagination. This practice is rooted in a combination of a phenomenological and a hermeneutic approach. This means, first, that it does not shy away from subjective intuitions, but rather articulates them; we must begin with the highly personal response to the acoustic signal that reaches our bodies. Up to this point I’m happy to follow the reasoning.
According to Kessels, music is also a language, but one that covers a much wider semantic field than our linear written and spoken language. In order to decode some of this complex meaning, we need to develop a musical theory of interpretation (hermeneutics). The ‘new theory of harmony’ referred to in the book’s subtitle provides a metaphorical ‘transducer’ for transforming the sonic impulses of music — its moving sound forms — into a narrative developed by the listener and relevant to that person, revealing the notional core of music.
In the restriction of music to language and its emphatic interweaving with one’s own biography, I disagree with Jos Kessels. I find the practice of imagination, as he documents it from his own musical experience (as a pianist and as a listener), anything but convincing. Even a little embarrassing in its childlikeness. The stories he tells have a dreamlike character and a moralistic slant. They are stories about the man, Jos Kessels, and the idiosyncratic desires and traumas that have become intertwined with him over the course of his life. For example, Kessels recounts a disagreement with a close friend that arose during the Covid lockdown. Listening to Thomas Larcher’s Second Piano Concerto, with this painful conflict in the background, has a cathartic effect on the author: “… during the concert, the whole story of the last few months with my friend suddenly surfaced for me. It was as if I heard it reflected in the music, with all the ups and downs, the despair and the hope for change, the moments of threat and relief, the lying awake at night (…) In particular, the moments of release from tension were touching, a reconciliation, a kind of metaphysical consolation”.
The answer to the question “What was it about?” is a dreamlike story in which the author himself plays the main role. It is, as dreams tend to be, devoid of any surface logic and quite idiosyncratic. He concludes: “This is what happens: the music transports me to another reality, of relationships and ideas freed from the constraints of my earthly existence. They form a picture of an unlived life, in a different, richer, more ephemeral self, with completely unforeseen developments and the most unexpected forms of warmth and love. They strip me of my ordinary, everyday stature, wash me clean of old tal and ingrained notions. They are melodies and lines from an unnameable source. It is as if the music is calling to me from all sides: find the place where it sings! Find the place where it sings!” As a listener and reader, I am not sure what to make of this. A Platonic metaphysics, a Christian redemptive ethics and a Jungian anthropology are mixed together here in a murky broth.
In my opinion, Jos Kessels wants to move too quickly towards the integration of ‘sounding music’ (musica instrumentalis) with ‘human music’ (musica humana) and ‘music of the world’ (musica mundana, according to the tripartite division proposed by Boethius, often referenced in the book). In doing so, he does violence to the essence of music, reducing it to yet another reflection of our own (usually overfed and bloated) egos. I am content to regard music as ‘sounding, moving forms’ (to use the critic Eduard Hanslick’s famous phrase). I am then, according to Kessels, merely a ‘formalist’.
Below is an excerpt from a review I wrote about my impressions of a recorded version of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (1904–1905), performed by the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden Baden und Freiburg under Michael Gielen. My notes date from 2011. I quote them here at length because I am trying to express the fundamental strangeness of music as a dynamic sound sculpture.
There is no ‘story’ here. This is absolute music indeed, in all its glittering splendour and baffling intricacy. Gielen plays on significant variety in tempo, a very lean orchestral sound, analytic clarity in the work’s rhizomatic voices and painstaking attention to minute shifts in expressive registers. His approach doesn’t strike me as particularly ‘modernist’. It’s more-dimensional than that. Gielen weaves a rich tapestry of different layers here. There is the explicit historicism that pervades this whole symphony (the references to Strauss waltzes, the baroque figurations, the serenade character of the Nachtmusiken, the rondo template of the finale). Then Mahler doubles up this historicism in his backward glance to the Wunderhorn years, not only in the brooding references to the first movement of the Third but also in the authentically Bohemian sounding first Nachtmusik, transporting us back to the First Symphony, in the manner of Callot indeed! But then these wistful or ironic figurations are counterbalanced by a radical expressionism, expertly suggested by Gielen in a truly ‘schattenhaft’ scherzo that, paradoxically, in its lightness of touch prophesies the abstract, shattered but still monumental visions of expressionist painters such as Feininger or Jawlensky. Richard Strauss compartmentalised psychedelic rage and regretful nostalgia in two consecutive works, his Elektra (1908) and Rosenkavalier (1910), respectively. Mahler simply brings those two worlds together within the confines of the same work. The second Nachtmusik is a serenade, a ‘Ständchen’ with some genuinely warmhearted lyricism, crisscrossed with nightmarish overtones. A ‘Siegfried Idyll’ running amok! The finale, often so depressingly overblown and disjointed, really comes to life here. More than once I wondered what I was listening to, so disorientingly fleeting are the perspectives offered. It’s kaleidoscopic and coherent at the same time: a most satisfying and genuinely symphonic end to this unsettling work.
All this is a most unsatisfactory rendering of what is in effect a most intricate musical process. I’m experiencing it as absolute music but I have to resort to hapless similes to reveal something of that experience. When I listen I am not relying on narratives to keep track of the unfolding process, but it’s an almost holographic experience that appeals to an inner eye for structure and space, and an inner sense for shifts in texture. It’s like experiencing a medium of fantastically differentiated viscosities, like feeling the swoosh of a trapdoor suddenly opening under your feet, the dizzyness of constantly shifting perspectives. It involves horizontality and verticality, sequentiality and mirroring, stasis and dynamism, body and mind. That’s what a Mahler Seventh in the right hands can do.
There is no doubt that, for me, the most intense musical experiences are strongly linked to their fundamental otherness. And this applies not only to music, but also to experiences in relation to other art forms, such as painting and poetry. In a sense, the more abstract the art presents itself, the easier it is to build a deeper relationship with it. Programme music, figurative painting and narrative poetry seduce us into a superficial hermeneutic process by their language-like nature. It is all too easy to overlook their sculptural quality, their dynamism and their textural richness. There are poets I don’t understand when I just read them. Reading them aloud creates something of what I experience as meaning, even if I cannot articulate it. And it is this strangeness that fascinates me and stays with me. My experience speaks to me as something fundamentally human and yet unfathomable.
The same goes for experiences of nature. Two years ago, with my son, I stood on a summit in the Mont Blanc region. I wrote a poem about it:
It was a beautiful moment
When we stood there,
The two of us,
On that wafer-thin point
From which the world fell
Steeply away on all sides.
A steady, cold wind
Blew into our faces.
We mentally hugged the crystals
In the granite boulders
Beneath our feet.
We wondered if
Had we come far enough.
And the answer came,
Without any sign of effort:
Yes, we had come far enough.
Here I am trying to grasp an experience that feels (chillingly) strange and familiar at the same time. And I want to leave it at that. It’s quite enough. There is no message or life lesson in it. It does not tell me how to deal with interpersonal dilemmas. It is not about ‘me’ at this point. How I later metabolise this experience is another matter and has nothing to do with the ‘essence’ of this phenomenon. I can choose to begin to build a relationship with it, to begin to honour the perceived depth of the experience. This does not mean that I attach meaning to it by spinning a story around it. I cherish the experience, carry it with me, marvel again and again at its acuteness, its purity and its starkness, and cultivate gratitude for the fact that I was allowed to share that delicate moment with my son. That in itself is quite something. I don’t put the experience behind a narrative veil. And even if I were tempted to do so, I would not confine myself to my own world of experience, but would explore the resonances with transpersonal, mythological imagery. Perhaps I would end up, metaphorically speaking, at the summit of Parnassos. I might go back and re-read John Fowles’s The Magus, where a Parnassus journey is a brilliant, lyrical climax. Or I might get carried away by Michael Jakob’s history of the trope of the ‘fake mountain’ and how it has fed our Western imagination since the Renaissance. In this way, I weave a narrative around my private experience that connects me to other destinies across the centuries. Perhaps in this way, if I so wished, I could build a discursive bridge to other human and non-human lives today. All that is possible. Where it takes me depends on the attention and empathy I invest in my imaginative practice. But the experience remains what it is. I do not claim to decipher its essence. It remains largely opaque. And the same applies, as far as I’m concerned, to the mystery of music. We should be content with that.
For Dutch-speaking readers: I was once invited to be a guest on our classical radio station Klara to talk about my passion for music. The broadcast is still available for listening.
