Heideggerian Thought in the Early Music of Paul Hindemith (With a Foreword to Benjamin Boretz)

Abstract

Heideggerian Thought in the Early Music of Paul Hindemith (With a Foreword to Benjamin Boretz) 1? Martin Scherzinger Foreword to Benjamin Boretz Though there are many sides to Benjamin Boretz's critical poetics, two are central. On the one hand, there is a body of insights into and intuitions about how certain stretches ofmusic actually go. His com ments on music are always illuminating, often dazzling. I doubt that Mahler, Schoenberg, Babbitt, and all the other composers he considers could find a more sympathetic, attentive, and particularly cocreative listener-reader. But it'swhat happens along theway that seems to linger when Boretz's songtexts are ended: an invitatory quest to maximize awareness of music's non-coercive specificity. It is an invitation that sur HeideggerianThought intheMusic ofHindemith 81 faces repeatedly and inno way superficially throughout his writings. This, on the other hand then, isBoretz's meta-discursive journey: an adumbra tion of "primary creative activity" (2003, 95) through which listening might become "primal composition" (190); an act of discovery, as deeply personal as it is anti-authoritarian, which resists programmatic closure or constraint in even its most intimate syntactic details (95, 190). Reductive music-speak (whether formal or ideological), becomes, for Boretz, shouting without resonance. It isdamaging to the ear: "hearing analyses, hearing serial structures, hearing complex time-pattern relation ships, hearing motivic transformations, hearing adumbrations internally and intertextually and historically, hearing ideologies, hearing anything which is ontologically in the verbal?or symbolic?referential-linguistic domain rather than hearing music in its own fully ontologized experiential-intellectual language, is not only to freeze and paralyze the cumulating evolution of a person's innermusic-experiencing history, but threatens to annihilate the entire intuitivemusic-experiencing history a person may have already accumulated" (351-2). This kind of "ascriptive" discourse institutes the passive foreclosure of what could become active with invisible and mysterious design. We are encouraged to probe "thought inmusic" (in the double sense: to probe thought inmusical terms no less than to probe music's "creative content," which is also its "ontological reality"); an activity sometimes described as experiencing (music) "with no names" (277, 351, 338). What Boretz means bymaxi mum musical awareness, primal composition, unlabeled experience, etc., is revealed inpage aftermagical page. I will not attempt to disclose these insights today. Neither will I attempt?as I have done elsewhere?to suggest theirphilosophical limits, nor?as I have done elsewhere still?to elaborate their surprising histori cal acuity.1This is a time for congratulation and celebration. I offer these reflections to celebrate Ben's birthday; to celebrate his unique genius. Instead of more critique and reflection on it, I will therefore offer an excursion inspired by his musical thought-patterns. Though Boretz may not recognize his positions in the object ofmy reflections, I offer a way of listening to a particular historical moment ofmusic-making thatmay go as a response to an invitation: tomake creative hearing (inmy musico logical inquiry) primary. My personal doubt about the philosophical via bility of unfettered non-ascriptive thought (at least in the context of public utterance), aswell asmy personal interest inmusic's relevance to aspects of the social, historical, philosophical and political arenas, leads me to rein inmy analytic flight with contextual categories. Though it will become clear inwhat follows, I announce my speculative position in advance: Strenuous musical engagement (like Boretz's), especially in 82 PerspectivesofNew Music times of political crisis (like these), contributes to social upliftment. My aim is to probe its limits. Of course there is also a theory of politics at work in the Boretzian text. But, though he intermittently alludes to it,Boretz does not, except in an inconclusive way, address politics pure and simple. At the risk of oversimplifying, one might say that Boretz despairs of politics and looks to music for redemption. There is also, more prominently perhaps, a philosophical/metaphysical superstructure inwhich Boretz's language Muse speaks. His thought converses and resonates with the highest philosophical achievements of romanticism, modernism and post modernism (from Hegel and Schopenhauer through Adorno and Heidegger toDeleuze and Derrida). He addresses the ontology ofmusic itself, and, in the spirit of this continental philosophical tradition, the American maverick does so in a...