Reassessing Romanticism

Chaya Czernowin and Wieland Hoban's monodrama _Algae_ (2009) teems with life and lurches toward death, flora "crumbling into bloom" as a narrator torn by "inner voices" shuffles toward self-destruction. Similarities to Lieder of Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Wolf, and others abound, in both the nature-fixated text and the relationship between inhuman yet narrating piano and despondent, voiced persona. Yet given Czernowin's post-tonal idiom, saturated with breath and other sounds of indeterminate pitch, the harmonic twists that render the nature-human divide and the dissolution of subjectivity audible in Romantic song lie beyond reach. One solution: to exaggerate differences between the wailing solo Bass and mechanistic piano through divergent means of sonic flux. The pianist can, and does, bend time. Feathered beaming and "drunken rhythm" pervade the part. The singer bends pitch, landing in the cracks between the piano's equal-tempered gamut. In this talk, I argue that Hoban's updated poetic Romanticism finds vivid musical expression in Czernowin's score, in particular her microtonal vocal writing.
Composers of the nineteenth century seldom called for microtonal effects, yet they lived and worked in a time of acoustical research that raised its specter, and against a backdrop of cultural obsessions with nature that included the harmonic series. Drawing on the work of David Trippett, Francesca Brittan, and Holly Watkins, as well as my and others' interviews with the composer, I make a case for reading Czernowin as an artist of new-complexity means toward hyper-Romantic ends. Microtonality plays an integral part in this drama of musical fixity and flux. Just as Romantic artists explored mysteries of microscopic life, the sublimity of flora and mountains, and the constitution and dissolution of inner life through new timbres, textures, and techniques, so does Czernowin explore ideas of nature and selfhood, life and death, and rationality and madness through moments of microtonality. Ultimately, I look back to Czernowin's training, influences, and entire oeuvre as part of a broader, more speculative inquiry, to plumb the depths of the composer's organic and – to borrow from Watkins – "biotic aesthetics" of musical creation.

Musicologists have reflected on Adorno's writings for nearly five decades but given scant attention to the German sociologist Norbert Elias, whose essay "Kitschstil und Kitschzeitalter" (1935) analyzes kitsch as a relational, not a pejorative, category. In Elias's conception, Kitschstil, exerting its force on nearly all works of art after the later eighteenth century, affected not only popular music, but also canonical works from Beethoven to Wagner and beyond. Elias and Adorno both worked in Frankfurt between 1929 and 1933 but produced their writings on kitsch independently of one another. Elias traced the emergence of kitsch to the decline of court society and the dilution of craft traditions. Kitschstil belongs to an industrial society where artistic forms are unstable and increasingly individualized. "Kitsch" points to the constant risk of formlessness in romantic and modern art; it is a germ latent within even the greatest works, and indeed, its strongest potential for development lies in compositions created out of originality unconstrained by prescribed tastes and traditions--precisely the sorts of works Adorno would exclude from the domain of kitsch (for Adorno, originality and independence are alien to kitsch).

I argue that in comparison to Adorno's contemporaneous writings on kitsch, Elias offers a heuristic alternative and a broader historical range. Adorno tends to re-enforce our received ideas about post-Enlightenment music and therefore also flatters our confidence in definitions of kitsch and what may be excluded from it. Because Elias weakens the evaluative dimension of the word, associating it instead with changes in social conditions, his conception instills radical doubt about the scope of kitsch, compels us to ask questions about the social inflection of forms, and truly invites us to re-imagine the historiography of nineteenth-century music. This paper will propose examples from symphonic music by Gounod and Mahler to explicate the tension between these two disparate concepts of kitsch in music. Contrary to Adorno, Elias would have detected the residue of the "form-creating strength of court society" in Gounod; whereas Mahler's symphonic work shows the true compass of "the kitsch style, with its specifically new greatness and smallness."