Brechts well-known sarcastic remark that Schoenbergs atonal music is all too melodic, thus inadvertently hits the mark: the melodic line has to take upon itself the burden of harmony. One should put to Brechts credit that he perceived the error of the usual reproach according to which atonal music lacks melody -- its the opposite which holds, in the atonal music, the excessively expressive melody pays the price for the prohibited harmony, and it is this lack of harmony which creates the unpleasant experience in the common listener. The further thing to do here is to introduce the rather obvious link between the couple harmony/melody and two other couples: space/time and synchrony/diachrony. In Schoenberg, the prohibited synchrony (harmony) returns in (is displaced on) the diachronic melody -- or, space returns in time (and is it necessary to add that the term displacement /Verschiebung/ acquires here its whole Freudian weight?). What this means is that, in order to comprehend Schoenberg properly, one has to temporalize (translate into melodic line) space itself. Schoenberg is here anti-mythical: if, as Levi-Strauss claimed, the most concise definition of the myth is Wagners designation of the Grail domain in Parsifal (Zu Raum wird hier die Zeit -- Here time becomes space), in Schoenberg, it is space itself which becomes time. It is here that the term expressionism acquires its proper place: it is only when the direct, natural (harmonious), expression of the subject is prohibited, that this barred subject can effectively express itself, in a gesture in which expression is forever linked to its inherent failure. In other words, the paradox of expressionism is that it emerges at the very point when the direct organic expression of the subjects inner essence is barred -- no wonder that the ultimate icon of expressionism in painting is Munchs Scream, this paradigm of the alienated individual unable to connect with the world. Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar, Operas Second Death, Routledge, 2001.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 02:51:44 +0000
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