We have recently written on Schumann’s Morning Songs, Op. 133, for piano. Like these, the Theme and Variations in E-flat major for piano WoO 24, also know as Gesitervariationen (Ghost, or Spirit, Variations, due to Schumann’s self-declared source of inspiration as it is mentioned in Clara Schumann’s diary of February 17, 1854), are among Schumann’s…
Category: Music
On Schumann’s Songs of Dawn
Jankélévitch famously wrote that “only music can express things which are infinitely ambiguous, as, unlike logic, music must not opt between things which are incompossible or contradictory: it can bring forth and develop, with the help of polyphony, several independent lines of discourse.”(⦼) As a matter of fact, poetry can do it, as well. Consider,…
Ulysses’s Siren
Suppose a series of musical notes forming a melody (the black circles are the notes, the arrow indicates their succession): Suppose, though, that instead of hearing the notes sounding cleanly one after another, some of them were shaken by a gusty wind; as a result, such notes would “look” more or less like this (on…
Ars Variationis
Contemporary thought often suffers from a twofold delusion. There either needs to be a model for everything or else everything is taken to be a difference in itself. In this way, pure identity and pure difference move their pawns against each other in an endless and fruitless game. Translation, of course, is the first victim…
The Enigma of the Sensible
Commenting on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: What is important is not that Julien Sorel [i.e. the protagonist], after he has learned that he has been betrayed by Madame de Rénal, travels to Verrière and tries to kill her. It is that silence, that dreamlike journey, that thoughtless certainty, and that…
Nature and Culture in Musical Perspective
I Curves, Concavities, and Pottery Bowls The following drawing (which we have adapted from Paul Klee’s notebooks) represents the earth before any name is given to what the earth contains and, consequently too, before any distinction is made about its components (solids, liquids, and gases; obscure and bright things, long and short and hard and…
On Beauty and Perfection // Carlos
Perfect is an adjective meaning thoroughly done (Latin per-fectus) and thereby done with care and eventually too, then, completed or free of fault. If, as a general rule, what is beautiful is that which is perfect, then neither everyone nor everything can be equally beautiful. Conversely, if, as a general rule, what is beautiful is…
On Abstract Music // Sofya
Abstraction is a mystery—a question mark, an opening to the unknown. Butoh, a contemporary avant-garde theatre-dance originated in Japan, is danced from a question mark, from the unexpected. Abstraction seems to me to be something similar when the mind alone is involved. Let’s take music. Music, like painting, can be both abstract and figurative; and…
Death through Music // Sofya
I have never experienced anyone’s death. Fortunately none of my relatives or friends have died and I have neither seen nor felt people dying. Before listening to the fourteenth and last fugue in Bach‘s incomplete The Art of the Fugue, published posthumously in 1751(*), I could understand, but never experience, someone’s death. And then with…