linear music explained

Linear music explained

Karol Berger's book Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow sets as its task the

origins of musical modernity, specifically from the perspective of

musical time. Berger carefully distinguishes modernity from modern

music, where modernity is a fissure in a continuous historical

lineage, generally located around the Industrial Revolution (with the

French and American revolutions as the political counterparts). In

pre-modern times, time was viewed as a cycle (e.g., of the sun and the

seasons). By the end of the 18th century, time was viewed as

progressive, a linear history moving from the past toward the future.

Berger chooses Bach and Mozart as musical illustrations of these two

perspectives, and Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for

philosophical background.

His chapters on Bach deal primarily with the St. Matthew Passion

(which it has been a pleasure to hear again), with a short interlude

on the first fugue from the WTC. The most illuminating section on Bach

was on the fugue, which points out that the events in the fugue do not

depend on one another in any meaningful way. Given the subject of a

fugue, a certain number of "demonstrations" of the way the subject(s)

may be harmonized and combined, each demonstration being independent

of all the others. The demonstrations are essentially in an unordered

set. Bach of course does combine them in a meaningful way according to

a tonal plan, but in Berger's estimation, this combination comes

later, and is of lesser importance than the demonstrations themselves.

I was much less moved by his discussion of the Passion, where he shows

how Bach musically represents the Christian belief that our finite

human time is enmeshed in the infinite time of God. While I don't

doubt that this was indeed Bach's intent, the Christian story was

considerably more real in Bach's time than it is in ours, where it has

become more metaphorical (this is part of the transition to modernity

that is the overall subject of the book). I don't believe one needs to

be a devout Christian, versed in the arcane details of 18th century

theology, to appreciate this magnificant work.

Undeniably, by the time of the Viennese classics, a listener was

certainly expected to remember various events that occurred in the

course of a piece. The classic sonata form, with two themes, a

development and a recapitulation, all on a fairly standard tonal plan,

makes little sense without some kind of short term memory to

understand the structure of the piece. Berger demonstrates musical

linearity with detailed examples from Mozart and Beethoven, but in

both cases already showing how the conventions of the sonata form

become expectations to be subverted.

A long interlude in the center of the book describes in some detail

the philosophical changes that underpin Berger's arguments. Both the

theological arguments behind the eternal time that precedes and

follows the insignificant human time scale, as well as a summary of

Rousseau's philosophical positions on our rational self-determination,

are presented in some detail. Berger's intent is to show the

philosophical changes that were current during the late 18th century,

and which informed both the composers and listeners. If the arguments

seem a bit esoteric and irrelevant today, an awareness certainly can

inform contemporary interpretations of the music.

Granted, the classical concert repertoire is often too heavily

invested in the Viennese classics that form the primary focus of this

work. But when Berger says that "the Viennese classics have shaped our

musical expectations and values to such an extent that we expect these

values to inform any music we encounter," well, I'm sorry, but Berger

needs to get out more. Discontinuity and various kinds of nonlinearity

have been part of classical music since Schoenberg and Stravinsky --

are there corresponding changes in our views on time? What perspective

change do we need to appreciate a mobile form work like Cage's Atlas

Eclipticalis, where the linearity is subverted from one performance to

the next? Unfortunately, Berger's steadfast refusal to consider modern