John Adams
What Music Can and Cannot Do
Music, unlike poetry or literature, does not consist of signifiers. (Or in the cases where it does, these signifiers are only of the crudest and most generalized sort: Mahler’s clarinet imitating a cuckoo or timpani in the Pastoral Symphony imitating thunder.) The great paradox about music is that it is nearly powerless to represent concrete things, yet it is exceptionally precise in evoking feeling.
Music, being the most psychologically precise of all the arts, can direct our emotional sensibilities to change on a dime. One need only see the same scene in a film each time with a radically different musical accompaniment to understand the almost subversive power of music. A large part of Theodore Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy was based upon his keen awareness and suspicion of this power to manipulate, a power that music more than any other art form possesses.
So that “consistent, explicit” matter that is contained in the little Vinteuil phrase that plays such a big role in “In Search of Lost Time” is not a thing, but rather a constellation of feelings, feelings that themselves can evoke concrete images or situations. They constitute a “book of unknown signs” that the artist spends his life decoding and revealing.
First comes the feeling. Then follow the images: people, places, things, encounters. But Proust, particularly when he returns to meditate on the power of memory, proposes that the essence of experience lies not in the concrete thing but rather in the emotion.
The Vinteuil phrase, like a phrase from “Tristan and Isolde” represents a the “acquisition of sentiment.” Proust accords the highest imaginable truth-value to this sentiment. He describes it as linked for all time with the destiny of the human soul “of which it is one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments.”
John Adams
This celebrated composer and conductor has his own site Hell Mouth aka: Earbox.
This site was flagged by Doug Palmer over on Feel Free To Laugh
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