Again at the NY Philharmonic, eavesdropping via the lobby jumbotron.
First piece, a composer trained in China, currently in the US. Some hints in the program on the theme and the intentions, but without the ear to hear the choices, simply a decent, generic piece of music
This is one danger of travelling -- not understanding the nuances, why things are one way and not another, the "this, not that" of Brecht, you stop listening for nuance. The schein, the first broad sense, becomes the both the center and the boundary of the experience.
C.S. Peirce had the notion of the percept, that sensory intuition that you have no power over, no ability to judge or characterize. Then came the perceptual judgment, the conceptual understanding, and the universe of meaning and inference.
Leibniz:I would rather have (an Indian) tell me what he heard, than a Cartesian tell me what he understood..
Now the Schumann piano concerto. Written by a major critic in order to bring sophistication to a form cheapened by the emotional and effusive composers of Paris, and the showboating soloists.
The soloist here one of the international cadre, a soft and sensitive reading, appropriately conversational. He sits close to the instrument, hunched over the keys, casually brushing a glissando as he might shuffle cards at a table.
A challenge to the concerto form -- in Mozart, a competition of virtuosity, in Beethoven, a political argument, in Schumann, a treatise of shared authorship. Peirce and the other Bostonians, particularly Dewey, had peculiar notions about truth, tending to find it in social agreement in these modern times. (Justice Holmes, a frequent interlocutor of the Boston metaphysicians, held to stronger notions of personal truth. It was that which he himself could not help but think to be true.)
Gierke traces out the history of the German notion of brudderschaft, against the background of natural law and the German corporate and university forms. The notion is that the collective action is qualitatively different from the sum of the private acts. It brings something fundamentally different into the world.
But this would seem to work against the material nature of a concerto, the thing itself. If the concerto's soloist is simply of one mind with the orchestra, you've just added an instrument to the orchestration of a symphony. The basic reality of the concerto is someone standing alone with a notion of virtuosity, or right, or truth, and entering into a dialogue with the voice of the chorus behind him. Drama itself emerges precisely with this individuation -- in Aeschylus, three figures step out of the universe of the chorus, and not only have a more full human existence from this self-definition, but also occasionally turn to speak to the universe that they have their existence from, and against.
But something about modernity counsels against these private truths. Intransigence. The individual is told that these private impulses of truth are ignis fatui, evanescent, illusory. And therefore that they must remain silent.
Which would be an excellent beginning for a concerto, if the soloist was of a different cast of mind.
Now, the Tchaikovsky -- Little Russian. And instead of sound, we begin with song, a solo horn playing a folk melody. It's a bit odd to think that anything you watch over a lobby viewscreen monitor can inspire an authentic individuality, but the meaning of the experience, the choices the creators make, these are still available to you in the abstract, though you're not with them as they enact them. Mechanical reproduction arguably makes the meaning, the moral choices more important, as we only have the ideas -- we are not in the room, participants in the ritual.
The second piece of the night from a composer steeped in the conservatory culture of the East. Contrast the sedate and conversational German concerto. There was a recent novel about the writers' conservatory in Moscow -- Elias Khoury, I think, Albanian. Though the most memorable scenes were on the train that the protagonist used to escape from the city from time to time.
To make a symphony of songs would certainly put you on the wrong side of some 19th c. German intellectuals -- (pace Beethoven, late Mahler, and Second Vienna School generally), since you're shortchanging negative capability. They would think you've missed the point of classical music, and miss the possibility that their certainty about this would undercut their own notions of collective truth. In fairness, if you don't have the sensibility of the composer, and you just hear it as a schmaltzy schein, like the easy charms of Austrian operetta (Gypsy Queen, etc.), then yes, it's a cheap popular entertainment. But the Kindertotenliedser isn't. Song, in the symphonic context, indicates the presence of another soul. (There is a neurological basis for this -- perceiving it as a relic of a human experience, we are drawn into imitation and the ritual.)
As opposed to the intellectual flights of fancy that come from sound, you are confronted with the stark evidence of the other human. Friday's footprint in the sand. This changes the equation completely -- and there's a moral choice involved. The song, the evidence of the human with a moral center, a melody surviving centuries as part of the truth of individual souls, can either lead us to trite schmaltz, or a deeper consideration of the presence of another human soul.
Perhaps a consideration high on the list of truths to be imparted in the conservatories of the East a few generations ago.