Heidegger

Allen heard this and said:

> I heard a commentator on NPR talking about Schubert’s “Unfinished,”
> saying how much more autobiographical the symphony became with
> Beethoven and Schubert. That’s why Hayden and other predecessors
> were able to write so many more symphonies than Beethoven and
> Schubert. There was so much more at stake with Beethoven and
> Schubert. So much more was risked, put out there.
>
> I then got to wondering if the same thing can be said to have
> happened in philosophy with the romantics. But then it occurred to
> me that philosophy has always been autobiographical “with much more
> at stake,” at least in the tradition of thinking from Heraclitus
> through Heidegger. This deeper personal investment shows itself on
> this list in some powerful ways. That’s why the Jud character was
> invented.

Strangely enough (and a bit to the side), Allen, recently I was intrigued,
rather, re-intrigued by a program concerning Bach’s Art Of Fugue. So many
questions remain especially about the unfinished last fugue (score-wise, it
just peters out suddenly); some even reckon a nice romantic scene of JS just
dying at the writing table while he was attempting to finish the final (and
most lovely) fugue; some reckon the Art Of Fugue was written over a long
period and not just the last thing he wrote, etc. One of the only performers
to not subtly just ‘fade out’ this last fugue of the Art is the astonishing
Glenn Gould who just stops suddenly after his exquisite rendering on piano:
somehow marvellously moving.

Equally involving is the question of which instrument(s) the pieces of the
Art were composed for: the score has a separate staff for each voice of the
fugue in each case, which could indicate that 1) it was written for several
(not explicitly named) instruments, e.g., a string quartet, or 2) it was not
written so much for performance as for reading/education/playing with the
musical puzzles it raised, etc. Indeed the Art has been performed on many
combos and solo setups.

The thing about this sort of Bach (Art Of Fugue, Well Tempered Clavier, etc)
is that the musicality shines through the actual voices employed to render
it in sound: one hears (with an other ear cocked at ‘form’ perhaps) the
music and not just the sound of the music, thus ushering in the multiple
interpretations such a generous kind of music allows, suggests and even
revels in. The extraordinary richness of possible (good) interpretations of
the score in such musics (like that of Shakespeare’s scripts), for me,
reminds me of the same in Heidegger’s renditions of others’ thinking via his
own (thinking the unthought in the other); the handed-down traditions of
interpretations and re-interpretations as a weave of a rich fabric
(sometimes a tangled web) that renews itself in the same way that great
performances (always interpretations) of musical scores renew and
re-invigorate that music for contemporary audiences. The strange notion, in
music or philosophy, of ‘exactness’ of ‘finally correct’, etc,
performances-interpretations-readings is anathema to many with a more
generous spirit whereupon the score/script/text moves on, handed down from
one ear/hand/voice to another, gathering itself in its diaspora…

regards

michaelP

Posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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