Parallels of Meaning

Jean Barraqué (1928-1973), the most philosophically concerned of composers, and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969), the most musically minded of philosophers, both shared in the history of a war-torn Europe that raised questions not just about art and its place in modernity, but about thought itself. While Adorno’s stark dictum, ‘After Aushwitz all culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage’ answered in the negative, neither man gave up on the hope of the arts unmasking the reality of suffering that they so effectively conspired to bury. Yet this hope, in which the two title works are cast, manifests itself as critique; a critique that modernity, as Terry Eagleton said, had ‘muted and blunted’.

One of the reasons for this, according to Eagleton, was the revolutionary nationalism that transfigured Europe’s cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. Just as the young Barraqué discovered his musical vocation in the works of Schubert and Adorno became the Frankfurt Institute’s social theorist of music, fascists began their own flirtations with music (e.g. the Reich’s Wagner-worship and Heydrich and Canaris’ weekly houseconcerts) and musicians began to flirt with fascism (e.g. Karajan’s Nazi membership and Cortot’s work for the Vichy). Culture was no longer just a force that bound humans to humanity, as Georg Simmel had thought. It had become a force of separation and its social capital had capitulated into a nationalistic creed.

Advanced capitalism also played a role in the empirical world’s assimilation of art; an assimilation that paralysed dialectic between the two, since they both had become one. As demonstrated by Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the twentieth century saw the rise of the phenomenon of culture as industry, which transformed culture into a commodity. Art, however inefficiently, was increasingly transformed into a tool for extracting capital and was bound to the very phenomenon it had previously worked to critique. As this totalising system whirred into action, Horkheimer and Adorno saw an increasing aesthetic homogenisation and short-termism that reproduced the same vacuous messages, recycled and repackaged.

Another reason for this decay in the critical role of art was its secularization and subsequent failure to provide a surrogate for religion in post-Christian culture, as Wilhelm Dilthey and others had hoped. The dissipation of the utopianism provided by that the Abrahamic faiths, threatened to collapse aspiration. Society risked taking on a truncated world view in which the possible remained an unthought and injustice and suffering remained a brute fact. Adorno, while dismissing ‘art-religion’ as ‘hubris’ was particularly keen on art retaining its utopic search. He wrote:

'In their relation to empirical reality, artworks recall the theologoumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other.'

For such a recollection to be achieved though, Adorno insisted that there must be a different kind of art and, indeed, a ‘different kind of aesthetics’. The reason for the latter, Adorno put as follows:

'Subjective and objective aesthetics, as counter-poles, are equally to be criticized by a dialectical aesthetics: the former, because it is either transcendentally abstract or contingently dependent on the taste of individuals; the latter because it misrecognizes the objective mediatedness of art through the subject.'

The two examples of broadly ‘subjective and objective’ aesthetics that Adorno critiques in his Aesthetic Theory are Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, respectively. Adorno’s relation to both is complex. While he would refer scornfully to Kant’s aesthetic of disinterestedness as ‘castrated hedonism’ and condemn Hegel’s equivalation of form and content as having ‘helped transform art into an ideology of domination’, he was also very aware of the aesthetic ground gained in their work and was sensitive to the danger of regressing in a bid for progress. This necessary element of conservatism was the reason for an aesthetic of critique that, instead of drawing on a blank slate, sought to resuscitate aesthetics.

This was also an attempt to change art. And while Simon Jarvis rightly noted that Adorno didn’t seek to give ‘prescriptive maxims for the production of art’, it is nevertheless true to say that Adorno did provide a vision for what art must become in order for such a resuscitation to be possible. In the opening pages of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno wrote:

'Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber... It can do this because through the means of form, art has turned against the status quo and what merely exists as much as it has come to its aid by giving form to its contents.'

Adorno then, as a corrective to Hegel’s previously mentioned conflation of form and content, described this form as a ‘law of movement’ that was the means through which art ‘opposes the empirical’ world. But since Adorno believed ‘art must be derived concretely from its other’, its content must instead reflect the world. Form is, therefore, transformed into the means by which the world can be recast as critique.

In music, Adorno saw serialism as a possible way in which this could be done. One reason for this was Adorno’s insistence that the artistic content must reveal the ‘perennial unfreedom’ of the world. The serialist tradition provided a point of tension between the autonomy of the artwork and a compositional framework, which illuminated this basic unfreedom. This, though, made him particularly disdainful of the excesses of integral serialism when ‘the employment of technical procedures already amount to an artwork’, since the very tension serialism provided was abrogated by its inflexibility. Dodecaphonic music also provided the most radically dissonant of works and in this dissonance Adorno saw a possible mimesis of ‘social alienation’ that he returned to again and again in his writings. And finally, Adorno understood the rise of atonality to be unavoidable. As he put it: the ‘authority of the new is that of the historically inevitable’.

Adorno takes these twin aspects of art’s form and historicity as the phenomenological underpinning for one of his defining concepts:

'That by virtue of which truth-content is more than is posited by works of art, is their participation in history and the determinate critique which they execute on history through their form.'

This ‘truth-content’ seeks to avoid the meaning of an artwork collapsing solely into the intentions of the artist, as in Freudian aesthetics, or into the mere perceptions of the audience, as in Kantian aesthetics. Instead Adorno posits an internal meaning to the artwork, which is derived from its own interplay of mimesis and rationality that makes it constitutively other from the artist.

This mimesis was perceived to be rooted in both the natural world and human desire, and it was the reason for Adorno’s strong resistance to Kantian disinterestedness, since he thought that the sensual was as essential a part of art as it is part of the world. To Adorno, this meant just as much the ‘revulsion and disgust’ in Kafka, as it did the eroticism in Flaubert; and while ‘undefracted, it has an infantile quality’, Adorno thought that ‘in important artworks the sensuous illuminated by its art shines forth as spiritual’.

Many of these prescriptions of mimesis/critique, sensuous/spiritual, flexible/unfreedom strike one as contradictory, because they are. And yet Adorno didn’t seek to reconcile such seemingly irreconcilable differences; he instead took them to be negatives of the unreconciled, unenlightened world. He termed this a ‘negative dialectic’ and, in one way or another, all his work was concerned with elucidating these inconsistencies.

This complex aesthetic vision was realized to a remarkable degree in the first completed published work of the French composer Jean Barraqué, which saw someone commit themselves to the high serialist tradition with a passion and intensity that was, arguably, unmatched in the post-war period.

Barraqué and Adorno seem to have made little to no mention of one another in their writings, though Paul Griffiths does speculate on Adorno's possible influence on Barraqué. Nevertheless, many of their interests did converge. Both were atheists, raised as Catholics, with unorthodox political views and a dual interest in music and philosophy. Barraqué who, at the time of writing the Sonata, was considered a great intellectual amongst his peers at the Paris Conservatoire, was particularly devoted to the works of Freidrich Nietzsche, who so profoundly nourished Adorno’s aesthetics, especially in relation to Wagner. Søren Kierkegaard's depiction of despair, shorn ‘from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation’, as Adorno put it, was also foundational to both men; with Adorno even writing his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard in 1931. The chief musical influence for both Barraqué and Adorno, though, was undoubtedly Beethoven; whose symphonic works they both wrote analyses for and whose use of form was such an important influence on both men’s work.

While these biographical parallels are striking, Adorno’s insistence on the degree of independence between artwork and artist puts a cap on their ability to illumine the Piano Sonata’s relation to his writings in Aesthetic Theory. Especially since Barraqué's work lacks the ‘startling inner coherence’ that Simon Jarvis attributes to Adorno's writings. Instead, Barraqué went on to produce work of great transcendence in the La Mort de Virgile cycle, as well as the ‘life-giving diurnal music’ of Sequence, as described by André Hodeir. Indeed Patrick Ozzard-Low went as far as to write a paper comparing the thought of Barraqué's later work to that of Adorno’s nemesis: Martin Heidegger.

Developing parallel themes between actual philosophical and musical works is a much harder task and is always fraught with danger, but Adorno’s own philosophy does, at least, make it possible. He himself argued that there was a very real relation between the work of Beethoven and Hegel, ‘an analogue that must go beyond mere analogy’, and indeed a deep relation between language and music, dialectic and form. Though he certainly warned that we should be careful not to detach what 'cannot be detached from the music'; such false semiotic extraction from different cultural phenomena was, of course, one of the foundational reasons for Walter Benjamin’s famous critique of analogy in modernity, in which 'any thing…can mean absolutely anything else'.

But as soon as we put Barraqué’s Piano Sonata (1950-52) and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) side by side, we begin to see symmetry. Just as the former begins without a beginning, the latter ends without an end; and just as the latter begins by bringing itself into question, so too does the former close on an aporetic tone.

While we should avoid reading more into the abrupt ending of Adorno's magnum opus than the simple product of an author’s untimely death, the blind force with which the Sonata's opening tears through the silence, requires a reflection which the music itself denies us.

Fig 1: Barraqué’s Sonate pour piano, bar 1 to bar 3, beat 4

Fig 2: Bill Hopkins’ notation of the Sonata’s Prime 1 and Inversion 1 tone-rows

The opening gesture, with its sharp, fortissimo attacks on each note that career down to an augmented fourth in the bass, marks an unmistakably violent beginning to the piece. It recalls Adorno’s axiom: ‘violence done to the material imitates the violence that issued from the material and that endures in its resistance to form’. And yet, in the Piano Sonata, nothing precedes this violence other than the world from which the work necessarily proceeded. It is a mimetic refraction of the blind violence of the cosmos. The fast tempo marking and the overlapping tone rows continue to resist the listener’s vain attempts to pick themselves up in the frantic opening measures of the work. This is intensified by the tone-rows sharing the A-flat, F and G-sharp (see Fig. 2) in the first, second and third bars, respectively (the four opening tone rows are Prime 1, followed by Inversion 10, followed by Prime 4, followed by Retrograde 10), which act as Webern-like pivots that allow new rows to spin off before the previous rows have come to an end. This interconnectedness creates both a textural density and a musical intensity, as we see the music testing and teasing the will of form in an attempt to free itself from the shackles of the tone-row. This is what Barraqué’s student Bill Hopkins meant when he said that, for Barraqué, the 'prime importance of serialism...is in providing a suitable basis for "musical dialectic".'

Fig 3: Barraqué’s Sonate pour piano, the final 11 bars

Forty-five minutes of dialectic later and the attempts for freedom are expunged, as the bare row is all that remains. The close is marked by two falling phrases, in advance of the last line’s final jagged rise. The row peaks with a fortississimo marking on an augmented fourth, before the muted tone of a perfect fourth and the pluck of a major second, appearing like an afterthought, brings the work to a close. While the music here is startlingly bleak, it is the grand formation of the work to this point that designates its real character. This is art that fears its own extinction.

In Aesthetic Theory’s opening line, Adorno acknowledges that threat:

‘It is self evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation the world, not even its right to exist.’

Both offer up the possibility that all came to nothing in the end and while both figures described despair in ultimately catastrophic terms (Adorno: ‘he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain’ and Barraqué: ‘everything is lost’), they both come perilously close to it at times.

In toto, Barraqué’s Piano Sonata proceeds from fast to slow; being made up of one movement, divided into two parts. Barraqué noted that this ‘duality of two structures, rapid movement and slow movement’ is ‘developed in a divergent manner all through the work’, since both the fast first half is interspersed with slow tempi and the slow second half is given brief periods of momentum that recall elements of the opening.

What undergirds this development, though, is a movement from sound to silence. Barraqué aimed for ‘a completely integrated sense of silence as a structural value’. Since silence is the antithesis of music, by allowing it to enter into the work, Barraqué was allowing for untruth to enter. This creates a ‘dialectique du son et du silence’', as François Nicolas put it, that, like Adorno’s dialectic, is negative.

Fig 4: Barraqué’s Sonate pour piano, bar 293 to bar 295

At Fig. 4, mid-way through the work, we see the piece’s first sustained encounter with this silence. Here the logic of the row begins to disintegrate. Alongside a preceding Retrograde 7 row, the Retrograde 12 that begins on the F-sharp of bar 293 moves through the first seven notes of the row before reaching the staccato-marked B-natural of the same bar. Here silence intervenes and when the music stutteringly returns at a slower tempo in bar 294, a new Retrograde 12 bar begins. Subsequent to this strange fracture in the musical logic, the music does away with the interweaving of rows and goes through a series of Retrograde rows, with silences intervening at the middle and end of each of them. Barraqué marks that the silences are to be played progressively longer, which has the curious effect of making it harder and harder to discern which pauses are disjunct or conjunct in relation to the row. Here we see that the original intervention of the pause at bar 293 not only manages to conceive the subsequent silences that 'impregnate' (to use Barraqué's description) page 19, but consequently it actually allows for an enveloping irrationality to enter into the musical schema.

There are further musical dichotomies that contribute to this aural break down of the row. The bass C-naturals in bars 293 and 294 represent examples of two other such ‘negative dialectics’. The first is the perceptions of notes as sounds (as Griffiths puts it: ‘acontextual, as if heard alone’) and as tones ('as part of the unfolding of a serial form'). This is usually linked to faster and slower passages, respectively (the tempo at Fig. 4 is ‘Modéré’), with the ‘rapid’ sections moving with mechanistic precision and the slower passages becoming increasingly incoherent.

This compliments another compositional dynamic, in which Barraqué places the notes in registral blocks. The low C-naturals are repeated before and after Fig. 4. From bars 288 to 300 we hear the note played 8 times. The 17-bar Modéré section, on pages 12 to 13, sees the same note and the E major third above it repeated 22 times, written out in with a strange syncopated slink. This is not like Dallapiccola or Berg trying to make tonal sense out of the tone-row, this is purely irrational and it takes on a disconcerting fetishistic quality.

The Sonata’s harbouring of such contradictions transforms dialectic from the 'instrument of domination' critiqued by Adorno into an anti-dominational corrective to art’s tendency to correct the world’s own contradictions. This ‘negative dialectic’ is nothing less than a dialectic of truth and untruth.

'Suicide or creation?'

That was the question Barraqué put to Boulez upon the completion of his Sonata. For Barraqué, art acted as a counter-weight to the pressing inevitability of death, but he knew it couldn’t collapse the tension. He instead turned that tension inwards, into spiritual kenosis that searched for truths etched in the darkness. Adorno recognized this as the genius of French music:

'Even the sensually most dazzling French works achieve their rank by the involuntary transformation of their sensual elements into bearers of a spirit whose experiential content is melancholic resignation to mortal, sensual existence.'