I think of Stravinsky's Les Noces (written between 1914 and 1923): a portrayal (the term Ansermet uses as a pejorative is actually quite appropriate) of a village wedding; we hear songs, noises, speeches, shouts, calls, monologues, joking (a tumult of voices prefigured by Janacek), accompanied by an orchestration (four pianos and percussion) of fascinating harshness (which prefigures Bartok).
And I think of Bartok's piano suite Out of Doors (1926), the fourth part: nature sounds (the voices of frogs at a pond, it seems to me) suggest to Bartok rare and strange melodic motifs; then into these animal tones merges a folk song that, human invention though it is, lies on the same plane as the frog sounds; it is not a lied, that song of the Romantics meant to display the "affective activity" of the composer's soul; it is a melody come from the outside as a noise among other noises.
And I think, too, of the Adagio of Bartok's Third Piano Concerto (a work of his last, his sad, American period). The hypersubjective theme, ineffably melancholy, alternates with a second, this one hyperobjective (which incidentally recalls the fourth part of the Out of Doors suite): as if a souls sorrow could find consolation only in the nonsentience of nature.
I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud). I remember the gloomy years I spent in Bohemia early in the Russian occupation. I fell in love then with Varese and Xenakis: those pictures of sound-worlds that were objective but nonexistent spoke to me of a life freed of human subjectivity, aggressive and burdensome; they spoke of the sweetly nonhuman beauty of the world before or after mankind moved through it.
Melody
I listen to a polyphonic chant for two voices from the twelfth-century School of Notre-Dame in Paris: underneath, in augmented note values, as a cantus firmus, an ancient Gregorian chant (a chant that goes back to an immemorial and probably non-European past); above it, in shorter note values, unfolds the polyphonic accompaniments melody. This embrace of two melodies belonging to two different eras (centuries
apart) has something marvelous about it: like reality and parable at once, here is the birth of European music as art: a melody is created to go in counterpoint with another, very old, melody whose origins are almost unknown; so this new one is there as something secondary, subordinate, it is there to serve; though "secondary," it is this voice that brings to bear all the invention, all the labor, of the medieval musician, whereas the melody it accompanies has been taken unchanged from an antique repertoire.
This old polyphonic composition delights me: the new melody on top is long, unending, and unmemoriz-able; it is not the product of some sudden inspiration, it did not spring forth as the direct expression of some state of mind; it has the quality of an elaboration, a "craftsman"'s work of ornamentation, a work done not to let the artist open his soul (show his "affective activity," to use Ansermets term) but to let him, in all humility, embellish a liturgy.
And it's my impression that until Bach the art of melody would keep that quality the earliest polyphonic composers gave it. I listen to the Adagio of Bach's E Major Violin Concerto: like a kind of cantus firmus, the orchestra (the bass instruments) plays a very simple theme, readily memorizable and many times repeated, while the violin melody (the focus of the composer's melodic challenge) soars above, incomparably longer, more various, richer than the orchestras cantus firmus (to which it is nonetheless subordinate), beautiful, spellbinding yet elusive, unmemorizable, and for us children of the second half, sublimely archaic.
The situation changes with the dawn of the Classical. Composition loses its polyphonic nature; in
the sonority of the accompaniment harmonies, the autonomy of the various singular voices disappears, and disappears still more as the great innovation of the second half-the symphonic orchestra with its thickness of sound-gains prominence; the melody that was "secondary," "subordinate," becomes the main point in composition and dominates musical structure, which incidentally undergoes a complete transformation.
Then the character of melody changes too: no more is it the long line that runs through an entire piece; it can be reduced to a phrase of a few measures, a phrase that is very expressive and concentrated, and thus easily memorizable, that can catch (or provoke) a direct emotion (more than ever before, music is set a great semantic task: to capture and musically "describe" all the emotions and their nuances). This is why the present-day audience applies the term "great melodist" to the composers of the second half-to a Mozart, a Chopin-but rarely to Bach or Vivaldi and still less to Josquin des Pres or Palestrina: the current idea of melody (of what constitutes beautiful melody) was shaped by the Classical aesthetic.
Yet it is not true that Bach is less melodic than Mozart; it is only that his melody is different. The Art of Fugue: the famous theme
is that kernel out of which (as Schoenberg said) the whole is created; but that is not the melodic treasure of The Art of Fugue; the treasure is in all the melodies
that arise from this theme and form the counterpoint to it. I like very much Hermann Scherchen's orchestration and recorded interpretation; for example, Contrapunctus IV, the fourth single fugue: he conducts it at half the customary speed (Bach did not prescribe the tempi); immediately, at that slow tempo, the whole of its unsuspected melodic beauty is revealed. That remelodization of Bach has nothing to do with roman-ticization (no rubato, no added chords in Scherchen); what I hear is the authentic melody of the first half, elusive, unmemorizable, irreducible to a brief phrase, a melody (an entwining of melodies) that bewitches me by its ineffable serenity. Impossible to hear it without great emotion. But it is an emotion essentially different from one stirred by a Chopin nocturne.
As if, behind the art of melody, there hid two possible intentionalities, contrary to one another: as if a Bach fugue, by bringing us to contemplate a beauty of being that is outside the subjective, aimed to make us forget our moods, our passions and pains, ourselves; and as if on the other hand Romantic melody aimed to make us plunge into ourselves, feel the self with a terrible intensity, and forget everything outside.
Modernism's Great Works as Rehabilitation of the First Half
The great novelists of the post-Proust period-I have especially in mind Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz, or, in my generation, Fuentes-were highly sensitive to the nearly forgotten aesthetic of the novel previous to the nineteenth century: they incorporated essayistic
reflection into the art of the novel; made composition freer; reclaimed the right to digression; breathed the spirit of the nonserious and of play into the novel; repudiated the dogmas of psychological realism in creating characters without trying to compete (like Balzac) with the etat civil-with the state registry of citizens; and above alclass="underline" they refused any obligation to give the reader the illusion of reality: an obligation that reigned supreme throughout the novels second half.
The point of this rehabilitation of the first-half novelistic principles is not a return to this or that retro style; nor is it a simpleminded rejection of the nineteenth-century novel; the point of the rehabilitation is more generaclass="underline" to redefine and broaden the very notion of the novel; to resist the reduction worked by the nineteenth century's aesthetic of the novel; to give the novel its entire historical experience for a grounding.