What is the Meaning of This?

EssaysReflections

Jun 4

I was in Freud’s office once. It was when I was living in Vienna briefly, while I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in music. I was taking an interdisciplinary class on psychoanalysis and archaeology with a visiting professor who, one day, decided to take us to Freud’s home. We saw where he ate and worked, we saw his waiting room, and, eventually, his office. The professor made a point of explaining that Freud was especially fond of antiques, trinkets, and ancient artifacts — his office had been overpopulated with them. Thousands, I think she said. Why surround himself with all these memories of the past, and, pointedly, the past of others? Was it just to constantly remind himself of the process of psychoanalytic excavation, the idea that, on the couch, we are constantly working to uncover the relics buried within us, with hopes that memories of early experiences will unlock our ability to live our lives in the present? Or was it because the objects took on new meaning for him, given their modern context? Perhaps he just liked to look at these old things and thought they made him seem sophisticated.

Why do we take up things from the past that seem on the surface to have no relevance to today’s culture? In a recent album for esteemed classical music label Deutsche Grammophon, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson organized a program of works by two French composers: the Baroque Jean-Philippe Rameau and the impressionist Claude Debussy. For the album, Ólafsson spent months choosing 28 pieces that he would later spend even more time learning to play and then months longer figuring out how to sequence in order to create a conversation of sorts between the Frenchmen. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Ólafsson said he made around a hundred Spotify playlists while searching for the perfect sequencing. He encouraged listeners to stick to the order he prescribed, to listen to it as an album, though he recognized that many would simply choose their favorite tracks and only listen to those.

Indeed, programming and sequencing are the keys. In the middle of the album, Ólafsson places Debussy’s “Des pas sur la neige,” which comes from the composer’s first book of preludes. The composition, maybe more than any other of Debussy’s preludes, exemplifies how the composer gave primacy to melodies and their improvisatory nature, how they seem to find their own delicate way, like footsteps in snow. The harmonies follow, giving colorful support, providing unexpected new contexts and refusing traditional progressions at every point. This is the essence of impressionism — the focus on mood and feeling over teleology at the expense of tradition. So when Rameau’s “The Arts and the Hours” — an Ólafsson transcription from the composer’s final opera, Les Boréades — arrives a few tracks later, the listener has French impressionism in her ear, which releases the impromptu feeling of Rameau’s own melodies — an amazing break from the rigid, technical writing one usually expects from a Baroque composer. Now, Rameau almost sounds like Satie. Debussy and Rameau gain new life under Ólafsson’s fingers, and new pathos; both give us, in this context, a glimpse at the spirit of serious music.

From a musicological perspective, we can listen to this album intently and come to new conclusions about the passing harmonies of each composer, how they treated melodic contour, what their counterpoint and musical forms say about the way they regarded the social norms of their time. We could think about, in light of Debussy’s pianistic reveries, what Rameau’s music means on a piano, as opposed to harpsichord, for which it was composed; we might, then, contemplate the intersection of composition, technology, and listening. But few listeners will treat the album this way. Our impulse is to play it as a form of entertainment — which it is — spun at a low volume in cars and kitchens, offices and bedrooms; the point for listeners today is not listening to the music of Debussy, but to enjoy the act of “listening to Debussy.”

Why do we continue to listen to these compositions, some of which we have already heard so many times? Because something mysterious and enticing remains — we have yet to fully understand the meaning of this music. Rameau and Debussy will cycle back until they don’t need to anymore. Ólafsson understands this. “I see all music as contemporary music, I don’t make a distinction,” he said last month in an interview with Gramophone.

If we play the music of Rameau today we play it inevitably so differently from the way it has sounded before — certainly in his time, when he had nothing close to the modern piano, and when the horse was the fastest means of transport. But because we are reinventing the music, obviously it is contemporary. It is new music.

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Wanting to write an essay about Ólafsson’s wonderful new album, I returned to Caesura to try to put my thoughts to paper. But when I looked at the new Caesura website, my thoughts moved from the parallel fifths in my headphones to the digital scene before my eyes. Why has this magazine started up again after three years of hiatus? As a founding editor, I wondered this. Is the mission to pick up where we left off, or is the goal now more reflexive: to understand the fate of the original object, an arts criticism publication started by four writers in 2016, which ran for about a year and then ceased publication? In any case, Caesura has returned to provide a “new” path for critical outliers who want to think about art in 2020. Taken over by a team comprising new and original editors, Caesura was resurrected from its grave. With the labor of payment and new design, the project lives again. It might be a good thing. It might.

In Hulu’s Devs (2020), a recent science fiction miniseries directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), a team of computer scientists work in a clandestine, Google-like compound, struggling with questions of whether the universe is deterministic or whether free will exists. Creating powerful hardware and software to attempt to map all of human history, the team ultimately comes to argue over whether they ought to use an algorithm based on the many-worlds interpretation, which creates a mostly accurate human history by selecting one from a series of possible human histories, or whether they should use the single-world interpretation, which would be infinitely more challenging, but would ultimately allow them to see the world’s sole, authentic history.

Near the end of the show, programmer Stewart, who is skeptical of project leader Forest’s reasons for pursuing this technology, reads Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” during a particularly suspenseful moment of the show. Forest responds that he doesn’t know who wrote the poem. “Such big decisions about our future… by people who know so little about our past,” Stewart says to him. “Isn’t knowing our past exactly what we’re doing here?” Forest asks. “No, it isn’t,” Stewart replies. The members of the project are thus shown to each have their own interpretation of the project’s meaning; the director himself betrayed that he did not understand the true nature and potential of his own life’s work.

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An album of music by Rameau and Debussy; a TV show about a machine that can conjure any moment from the history of humanity on a screen; a resurrected arts criticism website. Today’s culture and its criticism seem like they are dying to keep the past alive. But to what end? If knowing our past isn’t exactly what we’re doing here, then what are we doing? Questions about Caesura’s present and future lie not exclusively in the art of today and how we think about it, but, rather, in what can be learned from the publication’s plight and ultimate deterioration in its own moment, the ancient era of 2016-2017. Like the music of Debussy, its successes and failures remain alive today, a puzzle to be overcome.

As a product, a commodity, Ólafsson’s album has the luxury of an advertising campaign and a sales team that has made sure it is visible and accessible everywhere one can hear recorded classical music. Its broadness is its greatest quality; its strength is that it knows exactly who its audience is: everyone. It will be immensely successful, even if few listeners take up the intellectual task Ólafsson has presented. But who will Caesura’s audience be in 2020? It’s an essential question, and one that was not answered during the magazine’s first run. The answer won’t solve the problem of art criticism in the 2020s or even ensure the publication’s success, but it could be a good place to start. //