Composing with the Remnants of History
How to move forward when everything has seemingly already been done? Coming after Johannes Brahms—who saw himself, according to Richard Taruskin, as the last link in the musical tradition, then recently consciously apprehended—Gustav Mahler established a different, more dynamic relationship to the past. Famously, Mahler would coalesce in his compositions distinctive components of the Germanic symphonic tradition along with popular, immemorial musical manifestations. The eventual clash between these and other elements, the traditional modernist argument goes, led to complex harmonies and formal structures that would lay out the groundwork for atonalism. Still, in 1938 Theodor Adorno argued that “everything Mahler manipulates already exists.” That is, his music would only create something new—yet contrary to the notion of “progress,” Adorno tells us—through the specific rearrangement of worn-out elements. Notwithstanding Brahms’ hopelessness with the continuation of musical tradition, or Adorno’s enthusiasm with Mahler’s music, these positions were hardly new. From the last decades of the 19th century until the middle of the next one, we can find several thinkers developing a model of historical continuation that operates similarly to the one delineated by Adorno, yet more robustly and originally. Georg Simmel, Aby Warburg, and even Adorno’s peer, Walter Benjamin, each in a different fashion, all of them dedicated themselves to the question of how the past survives in the present. Although each of them worked with different objects, all three were interested in examining the same figure, a powerful metaphor that illustrated such a dynamic—the ruin. The ruin, they claim, proposed a different design of history, one that does not subordinate itself to the notion of teleological progress. Moreover, by its fractured nature, the ruin repudiated grand systems. Coming back to Adorno’s argument, one could say that Mahler composed with ruins. In any event, the ruin has come into fashion once more. Due mainly to our collection of current crisis, this notion has become popular again, so much so that Svetlana Boym called it a “ruinophilia.” A movement that might answer to both a nostalgic impulse as a new way to face the future, one not fabricated with the same patterns of progress that have guided us here. In this regard, it seems to answer to a desire to foresee a more open future, allergic to great narratives of redemptions—all that a ruin is not. Having that in mind, along with the declared end of history and the end of modernist teleologies, how are contemporary composers addressing not only the past but also the future? How did the notion of ruins, so present in the fields of visual arts and architecture, appear in the music realm, in case it has? To answer questions like these, three composers will be examined: Thomas Adès, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Kaija Saariaho. As their most powerful compositions will show, the musical tradition is still alive in their poetics, as well as a notion of the future, although not in any simple way. Perhaps the ruin can illuminate how these pieces operate.
Keywords: ruin, musical history, modernism
Biography
João G. Rizek is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he is also a Research Assistant with the Collaborative Research Centre 1512 Intervening Arts. His doctoral research investigates the relationships between art and politics in Brazil in the 1970s through a cluster of thinkers and artists, specifically through their conflicting understandings of the “Brazilian people,” the focal point of their divergent productions. João G. Rizek holds an MA in Visual and Media Anthropology, also from the Freie Universität Berlin (2018), and an MA in Musicology from the São Paulo State University (2014). For his undergraduate degree, he studied Social Communication, having specialized in Film Studies at FAAP in São Paulo (2011).
Free University of Berlin, Germany – j.rizek@fu-berlin.de