Aesthetics and Interpretation 14 Putting Modernism Together Spring 2012, MW 12-1 + a weekly section Professor Daniel Albright (albright@fas)

1. Course Description How do you put together the literature, music, and painting of an age? Do they fit together like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, or like the limbs and organs of a body?or do they remain isolated from one another, resisting integration? In the Modernist age (which, for our purposes, begins with the FrancoPrussian War, climaxes with the Great War, and ends with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression), there was a special belligerence to these questions. It was an age that had many different models of itself: to the Cubists it looked like a vast jigsaw puzzle, to the Expressionists it looked like a convulsive body, to the Dadaists it looked a heap of junk following an explosion. We will try to sort out these various models by sorting out the aesthetic and cultural assumptions that made them attractive. Our main strategy for investigating ways of comparing the arts will be to study simultaneous developments during certain key years: what does it mean that Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899) appeared at the same time as Claude Debussys Nocturnes, beyond the fact that the word Impressionist has been used to describe each? Why did the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel such striking artistic kinship around 1912? We will also connect these key years by tracing the evolution of artistic movements. We will give roughly equal attention to literature, music, and painting; the course doesnt assume that you have a technical background in any of those media, but it does presuppose that you have a certain curiosity about technique. How artists achieved their peculiar effects will always be the object of our investigations, but all such technical questions finally involve the entire intellectual history of the age. I assume that (for example) Impressionist painting and the idea that reality consists of impressions are wound together inextricably. The whole intellectual and scientific climate of the age is brought to bear on works of art: Kandinsky appealed to Rutherfords model of the atom; Juan Gris studied the mathematician Poincar; Schoenberg abolished tonic C from the universe of music at the same moment when Einstein was establishing another c, the speed of light in a vacuum, as a sort of new tonic for the physical universe. During the lectures I will develop some of the large themes of Modernism, and scrutinize certain telling details of particular novels, paintings, and musical compositions as reflexes of these large themes. Two of these large themes will be: (1) Modernism as a testing of the limits of art itselfhow far can art go toward expressiveness? how far toward inexpressiveness? how far toward representation? how far toward abstraction? (2) Modernism as a destabilization of artistic categories, calling into question the difference between high art and popular art, between evocations of the past and extrapolations of the future. This is a course about Extreme Art, and I hope it will equip students to confront the strangenesses, stridencies, and exhilarations of the artistic world which they will come to know in the first half of the twenty-first century. 2. Lecture Schedule Jan 23 1. INTRODUCTION I Introduction. Modernism defined historically as the art of 1872-1927, ahistorically as the testing of the limits of aesthetic construction. Methods for studying paintingPanofskys separation of iconography (identifying the subject of a painting) and iconology (understanding the presentation of the subject as the reflex of a culture); Modernist painting as building upon / spoofing / usurping / erasing past painting. 2. INTRODUCTION II

Jan 25

Methods for studying literature: recent literature as building upon / spoofing / usurping / erasing past literature. Methods for studying music. Musical semantics: the history of codes (Byrds woeful Orpheus; Monteverdis stile concitato). Ways of manipulating kinesthesia (heartbeat, breathing) by music. Structuralist binaries encoded in music (Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked): how music thinks. Jan 30 3. NIETZSCHE Read Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy (1872)126 pages. Todays themes: ancient Greece as the locus of modern Europes dreams: Winckelmann on the cheerful and the general. The emancipation of Schopenhauers Will. The rhythm of dreams and dreamless sleep governing Nietzsches book. Reverse sun-spots. Feb 1 4. WAGNER Read Nietzsche: On Truth and Falsehood in the Extramoral Sense (1873)10 pages. Listen to Wagner: Prelude and Love-Death from Tristan und Isolde (1865). Todays themes: Nietzsches anti-Platonicism: the death of forms, the death of god. The sadistic origin of Christian morals. Changes in the sort of music thought appropriate for Greek tragedy, from Mendelssohns Antigone on. Nietzsches debt to Wagners essay on Beethoven. Nietzsches Manfred-Meditation. Feb 6 5. PATER Read Pater: The Renaissance (1873): Luca della Robbia, The School of Giorgione, Winckelmann, Conclusion57 pages. Todays themes: Matthew Arnold and Walter Paterthe shift from criticism as mineral assaying (the touchstone) to criticism as a measure of intensity of electrical fields. Nietzsche and Pater. Winckelmann and Pater: the homosexual Greece. The explicit vs. the veiledapproaching the aesthetic of Symbolism. Feb 8 6. IMPRESSIONISM Look at Impressionist paintings on website. Todays themes: The optical science of Chevreul. The publics response to the first Impressionist exhibition. Painting retinal instead of mental images: the blind man given sight. Dispensing with old conventions (outline, black shadows) while creating new ones. Renoirs concept of Irregularism in light of Nietzsches philosophy. Feb 13 The Year 1899 7. CONRAD Read Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1899)93 pages. Todays themes: changing the venue of experience itselfthe shift from Conrads Congo diary to the novel. Phrenology and the role of the skullGeorge Eliots model of the realistic novel vs. Conrads. Conrads attraction to and fear of Symbolismthe hatred of the explicit. The attack on the steamship and the attack on the nounthe horror, the horror. Feb 15 8. DEBUSSY Listen to Debussy: Nocturnes (1900-1).

Todays themes: Debussys aesthetic as expressed in Monsieur Croche Antidilettantelisten to the wind. Destabilizing tonality with ninth-chords. Ezra Pound on Debussys eye music: strategies for increasing musics powers of the picturesque. Interpreting Nocturnes with and without Debussys hints at a program. First paper due at time of section meeting. Feb 17 Feb 22 First take-home examination will be distributed at 9am, to be posted on the course websites drop-box by midnight Sunday 19 Feb. 9. FUTURISM Read Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909); Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912); The New Religion-Morality of Speed (1916). Boccioni et al., Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910). Valentine de Saint-Point, Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913). Russolo, The Art of Noises (some of these available at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism). Look at Futurist paintings on website. Listen to Russolo, recording of Futurist music and reconstruction of Risveglio di una citt (1913). Todays themes: war as the worlds hygiene, Marinetti as the caffeine of Europe. Imagination without wires, literature without punctuation. Why a sports car or an airplane is more valuable than the Louvre or the Uffizi. How to write speed, how to paint speed. Why music is more trivial than noise The Year 1913 10. SCHOENBERG Listen to Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire (1912); and Schoenberg / Pappenheim: Erwartung (Expectation, 1909). Todays themes: the emancipation of dissonance and the air from another planet: Schoenbergs second string quartet. Erwartungs harmonic language: chords with major sevenths; the concept of chromatic saturation as a replacement for consonance. Disruptions of continuity. Pappenheim and the Anna O. of Freuds and Breuers case history. Adorno and the electroencephalogram as the ideal artistic act. The decline of Expressionism into self-parody: Gemeinheit (from Pierrot) and trephination. Pierrots in Laforgue and Giraud. Bakhtin on the carnivalesque; is Pierrot Lunaire positive or negative parody? Feb 29 11. EXPRESSIONISM Read Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)80 pages; and Kokoscha, Murderer, Hope of Women (1907). Look at paintings by Kandinsky, Heckel, Kirchner, and Grosz on the website. Todays themes: early ExpressionismEdvard Munch, Die Brcke, Der blaue Reiter. Jack the Ripper as a figure of power. Woodcuts and other gashes. Strategies for dematerialization in art. Kandinsky on the unity of all the artistic media. Mar 5 Mar 7 Futurism exercises / Quiz 1 12. KAFKA Kafka: The Judgment (1912), The Metamorphosis (1912), In the Penal Colony (1914), An Imperial Message (1917)92 pages.

Feb 27

Todays themes: the theatre of unbeing. Stories in which the characters arent people. Learning how to read an upside-down fiction: beetle as angel. Gnosticism. Transmission difficulties between spirit and matter. Mar 19 13. CUBISM Harrison, Frascina, and Perry: Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, chapter 2 (Frascina on Cubism 93 pages)be sure to study the pictures carefully. Todays themes: Picasso and Braque as mountaineers. Creating depth and volume: classical perspective vs. simulations of uncrumpled paper. Apollinaires notions of Cubism. Analytic vs. synthetic Cubism. Cubism as cerebral (a play with signifiers) vs. Cubism as intuitive (Les demoiselles dAvignon). Apollinaires calligrams. Mar 21 14. IMAGISM Read Pound: A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste (1913)6 pages; Sept. 1914 Vorticism article11 pages; Lustra14 pages. T. E. Hulme: Romanticism and Classicism (1913)27 pages. Todays themes: poetry as a stripping down to a pictorial or tactile minimum. A poem as rebus or picture-pun. Well-defined poetic images vs. skeins of silk and plates of spaghetti. Imagism and Vorticism: Alvin Coburns vortoscope and the taking of Picassos from nature. Mar 26 15. THE RITE OF SPRING Listen to Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1913). Todays themes: the premireriot as the proper response to Modernism. Nijinskys choreography: the hunched-in as opposed to the turned-out; Dalcrozean arithmetic. Stravinskys hard bits of rhythm. Roerichs archeology of pagan Russia. T. S. Eliot on Stravinskys convergence of the archaic and the up-to-date. The odd look of the Joffrey reconstruction of the ballet. Mar 28 16. MANN Read Mann: Death in Venice (1912)64 pages. Todays themes: Nietzsche and Mannhow the loss of relation between Apollo and Dionysus destroys. Tadzio as a caricature of Apollo, the red man as a caricature of Dionysus. The implied music of Manns novel; Aschenbach and Mahler. Aschenbach and FaustSchoenberg as a protagonist of a Mann novel. The Year 1919 17. DADA Read Richard Huelsenbeck: Dada Almanac (1920): articles by Tristan Tzara (including Dada Manifesto), Huelsenbeck (including What did Expressionism Want?) and Partens70 pages. Listen to Duchamp, Erratum musical. Look at Dada pictures.

Apr 2

Todays themes: the Great War and the great war on art itself. Hugo Ball and the Dada cabaret. Dada visual motifs: biomorph (Ernst, Arp) and garbage (Schwitters). Dada literature: make a poem by the

Tzara recipe and commit an act of literary criticism upon it. Dada music: Duchamp and Schwitters. Dada as a form of realism, sometimes oddly rigorous. Apr 4 18. NEOCLASSICISM Listen to Stravinsky: Pulcinella (1919). Read T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)8 pages; Gerontion (1919)3 pages. T. E. Hulme, Romanticism and Classicism (1913)27 pages. Todays themes: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. Theft: revivifying the past vs. announcing its extinction. The art of defamiliarization: Shklovsky and Proust. Adumbrations of Neoclassicism in Tchaikovsky. Strategies for asserting artistic individuality in the act of renouncing it: comparing Stravinsky with Pergolesi and Gallo. Eliot: identifying oneself with the mind of Europe. Gerontion: the senescence of the present, the enfeebling of the past. The Year 1927 19. SURREALISM Look at Surrealist paintings on the website. Read Andr Breton: Discourse on the Paucity of Reality11 pages. Todays themes: games with disorientation and false spacewhy Surrealist paintings, unlike Dada ones, have horizon lines. Bretons Surrealist Manifesto: French psychic automatism. Simulations of mental disease. Magrittes The Conquerors (1925) and acephalism. Second paper due at time of section meeting. Apr 11 20. OEDIPUS REX. Listen to Stravinsky / Cocteau: Oedipus Rex (1927). Todays themes: decadent Neoclassicism: decadence as the use of functional elements as nonfunctional ornaments. Nietzsches Dionysus gone gaga. The fracturing of the stage into ministages; Greek tragedy emasculated or turned into cabaret. Leonard Bernstein on Oedipus Rex: Handel meets hoochie-koochie. The liberation of prosody from language. Adaptation of the tragic ritornello from Glucks Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). Dada happenings or Surrealism dreams / Quiz 2 21. LAWRENCE Read D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterleys Lover (1927)338 pages. Todays themes: Lawrences notion of the unconscious, hostile to Freuds. Lawrences biophysicshis subject is not diamond or charcoal but carbon. Guide to proper sexual behavior. Obscenity in theory and practice. Apr 23 22. MECHANICAL MEN Look at Lawrences and Duncan Grants paintings and Mark Gertlers The Merry-Go-Round on the website. Listen to Antheil: Ballet Mcanique (1926). Todays themes: Clifford Chatterley and H. G. Wells: the extrapolations of science fiction into ever scarier futures. Lawrences robots: the poems Sea-bathers and The Triumph of the Machine. Duncan Forbes and Lawrences attitudes toward modern art. Models of health and disease as reflected in the human and animal figures in Lawrences paintings. Antheil and Lger:

Apr 9

Apr 16 Apr 18

the teasing-out of the mechanical aspects of the human body. Antheils wish to send a message to Marsthe last strident dream of Modernist assertion. Apr 25 Panel Discussion on Modernism. You and the teaching staff are on the panel.

Apr 27 Take-home final examination, posted at 9AM, due at course website drop-off box at midnight, 29 Apr. 3. Required Reading, Listening, and Looking A. Books and Short Essays (all in English or English translation; all in print; short pieces available in the Sourcebook) books to be purchased at the Coop Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness Harrison, Charles, et al. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction Huelsenbeck, Richard. Dada Almanac Kandinsky, Vassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterleys Lover Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy Pater, Walter. The Renaissance in Sourcebook available at the Science Center basement Breton, Andr. Discourse on the Paucity of Reality Eliot, T. S. Gerontion -----. Tradition and the Individual Talent Hulme, T. E. Romanticism and Classicism Nietzsche. On Truth and Falsehood in the Extramoral Sense Note: This makes about 99 pages of reading per week, not taking into account the listening and the looking. Because the meeting on Lady Chatterleys Lover has the heaviest reading, students should prepare accordingly. B. Music (streaming audio and libretti for select works available on the course website) Antheil, George. Ballet Mcanique Debussy, Claude. Nocturnes Duchamp, Marcel. Erratum musical Schoenberg, Arnold. Erwartung -----. Pierrot Lunaire Stravinsky, Igor. Pulcinella -----. Oedipus Rex -----. The Rite of Spring Wagner, Richard. Prelude and Love-Death from Tristan und Isolde C. Slides (organized by week on the class website) D. Reference Works on Modernism (to be placed on reserve) Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916

Ellmann, Richard, and Charles Feidelson, Jr., eds., The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature Everdell, William R. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origin of Twentieth-Century Thought Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, et al., eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents Levenson, Michael. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-22 Watkins, Glenn. Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century. 4. Course Requirements Course work will consist of two take-home examinations and unpredictably scheduled quizzes, plus two short papers (four pages each) and a term paper (ten to twelve pages). These papers will be graded according to the usual virtues of good organization (clear statement of a properly delimited thesis plus a logical marshaling of supporting evidence), and according to the force and grace of your prose. Those who enjoy creative writing and / or acting may substitute a playwriting exercise (see the syllabus above for the Futurist exercise and the Dadaist / Surrealist exercise) for one of the short papers, pending approval of the project by the courses central administration; if this appeals to you, please tell me so. (If we cant fill those two 50-minute periods with student volunteers, well have extra quizzes instead.) We will supply a list of suggested paper topics; you shouldnt regard yourself as limited to these topics, and in any case you should first discuss your topic with your section leader. The slides will be available on the Internet, and you will be provided with means to listen to the musical selections; you should attend to them carefully, because they are overwhelmingly pleasurable and because you will be tested on them. Final grades will be computed as follows: 15% for each of the two short papers (remember, the acting/writing exercise can replace one of the papers), 20% for the term paper, 20% for section participation, 30% for the take-home examinations and quizzes. We will accommodate students with disabilities. If you are in need of an accommodation, please bring your letter from the Accessible Education Office (AEO) to your TF or the course head by the end of the second week of the term so we can make arrangements. During my office hours (MW 11-12, Barker 152), I prefer company to solitude, and I hope that, if you like, you will come to talk with me, for any reason, or for no reason at all.

Website Music: I could not put the files in the correct order, but each selection that is divided into several tracks (or files) has a number to allow it to be placed in the correct position. 1. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde: Prelude (cond. Furtwngler, 1953) 2. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde: Love-Death (cond. Furtwngler, 1953; soprano Flagstad) 3. Debussy, Nocturnes: Nuages (cond. Monteux, 1951) 4. Debussy, Nocturnes: Ftes (cond. Monteux, 1951) 5. Debussy, Nocturnes: Sirnes (cond. Monteux, 1951) 6.-9. Schoenberg, Erwartung (cond. Scherchen, 1955; soprano Magda Laszl) [Note: these tracks should be recorded continuously]

10.-12. Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire (cond. Boulez, 1962; reciter Pilarczyk) 13.-14. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (cond. Markevitch, 1959) 15.-36. Stravinsky, Pulcinella (cond. Stravinsky, 1953) [Note: these tracks should be recorded continuously] 37.-38. Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex (cond. Stravinsky, 1961) 38.-40. Antheil, Ballet Mcanique (cond. Peress, 1989) [Note: these tracks should be recorded continuously] Music for students to buy: Wagner: Tannhuser / Siegfried-Idyll / Tristan, cond. Karajan (DG 423613) Debussy: Orchestral Music, cond. Haitink (Philips 438742) Schoenberg: Erwartung / Pierrot Lunaire, cond. Boulez, with Minton and Martin (Sony 48466) Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring / Firebird / Petrushka / Pulcinella, cond. Abbado (DG 453085) Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex, cond. Salonen (Sony 48057) Antheil: Ballet Mcanique, cond. Spalding (Naxos B00005NCYE)

Outline Lecture 4: Nietzsche I. Difficulty of defining what a man is: man as blur or monster. Time and space as artificial constructs. II. Nietzsches predecessor Schopenhauer: individuality as delusion; the universal Will that works through every desiring subject, whether man, woman, or beast; the hope to escape from appetite by moving from Will to Representation. III. Nietzsches skepticism. Art better than abstract thought. The Birth of Tragedy as a work of art, a dream-book. Apollo and dreaming; Dionysus and dreamless sleep. Falling down into the

pre-human. IV. Structure of The Birth of Tragedy. 1. Greek tragedy grew out of choral hymns worshiping Dionysusthe god of drunkenness, riot, pain, ecstatic dismemberment, and the primal oneness of all things; 2. human beings are too frail to accept the dark truths represented by Dionysuswe have to believe in the illusion that we are private individuals with private wills, and we have to screen ourselves from the abyss by inventing beautiful images, dreams of glory; 3. we call these beautiful images gods, and identify Apollo in particularthe god of light, music, and claritywith the principle of the saving illusion; 4. therefore, instead of simply singing choral hymns to Dionysus, we intersperse these hymns with staged enactments (called tragedies) of the pretty stories that Apollo devises to distract us from the intolerable Dionysiac truth that we ought never to have been born; 5. the ideal psychic functionality of Greek tragedy was destroyed by Socrates, who substituted abstract rational speculation for the immediate apprehension of the cosmos available only through artistic meansthis led to the decadent tragedies of Euripides; 6. when Greek tragedy was resurrected in the form of opera, around 1600, its inventors produced only a bloodless and vain parody of Greek tragedy, suited to the rationalistic temper of the times; 7. but the spirit of Greek tragedy has at last resurrected itself in the music dramas of Richard Wagner, a composer intimate with both Dionysus and Apollo; 8. the ugly and the dissonant are necessary to the construction of the human subject; 9. Germany, the most pagan of countries, is the place where tragedy will be reborn. Lecture 5: Wagner I. Tristan und Isolde as Nietzsches ideal modern presentation of the Dionysiac. 1. The Tristan-chord as a riddle, an unconstruable musical objectthe Mark of Dionysus.. 2. Wagners Beethoven essay: Tristan und Isolde as an attempt to realize Schopenhauers philosophy; the sound world (unconscious, dreaming) vs. the light world (categorical, captious). 3. Nietzsches discussion of Tristan und Isolde: the Apollonian text and stage image vs. the Dionysiac music. The transfiguration finale.

II. Nietzsches own musical compositions. III. Nietzsche and religion. Absence of clear artistic structure (Wagner) correlates to absence of clear ethical structure. 1. The death of God (The Gay Science). 2. Cruelty as the primary human appetite (Towards a Genealogy of Morals). IV. Nietzsches turning against Wagner: Wagner as a neurosis; music as Circe. V. On Truth and Falsehood in the Extramoral Sense. 1. Real leaves vs. the vain concept leaf. 2. A world consisting of a heap of unrelated particulars is functionally equivalent to a completely undistinguished abyss-world. VI. How Nietzsche changed our idea of ancient Greece: two musical examples. Lecture 6: Pater I. The breakdown of the object in the domain of criticism instead of philosophy. 1. Matthew Arnolds objects vs. Walter Paters impressions of objects. 2. Pater on Giorgiones Concert: the diffusion of the artist, the dissolving of the art work. II. The ancient vs. the modern. 1. Winckelmanns conception of classical Greek art: generality and cheerfulness. 2. Pater against generality. 3. Paters electromagnetic metaphors: the modern as a continual flux of forces penetrating matter. Luca della Robbia and Browning. III. Pater and Dionysus: Denys lAuxerrois. The pagan as a domain of homosexual license. IV. Audens caricatures of academics: two images of ancient Greece. V. The literature of solid objects vs. literature of electromagnetic fields: Hopkins The Windhover.

Lecture 7: Impressionism I. Dappled light in Hopkins Pied Beauty and Renoirs La moulin de la Galette. Light as a force that generates objects. II. What is visual truth? 1. The Renaissance answer: perspective. 2. The 19th-century French answer: shimmer of fleeting percepts. Recognition vs. the shock prior to recognition. A. French Impressionism and Nietzsche: Renoirs Society of Irregularists. B. Sources of impressionism: contemporary physics, Chevreuls theory of complementary color. 3. Futility of hoping that any method will yield visual truth. III. The world before category: painting equivalents to instantaneous perception. 1. Hasty incomplete schematics: Monets Impression: Sunrise. 2. No differentiation between clothes and flesh: Renoirs Dancer. 3. No differentiation between object and background: Morisot. IV. Dionysiac aspects of Impressionism: I paint with my penis. Lecture 8: Conrad I. The genre of the novel: as inside, so outside. Conrads violations of this equivalency principle. A novel without facts. II. Means of evoking psychic states. 1. Symbolism. A. Kurtz as emblem, deaths-headKurtz too symbolic. B. Inkblots and indefinitenesses. 2. Impressionism. A. Painter-like aspects of Conrads prose.

B. Suppressions and deferrals of important nouns. III. The empty novel. 1. Empty setting: all black or all white (map, fog). 2. Empty plot: Kurtz as a dead end. 2. Empty characters: the Manager; the Managers spy; Kurtz as hollow man; Marlow himself (the phrenologist scene). IV. Source material: Conrads Congo diary. Facts snipped away to facilitate an allegory about mind vs. body. Two allegorical scenes: (1) the two knitters; (2) the French gunboat. V. Conflicts between European and African models of virtuous behavior. 1. Kurtzs missionary position. 2. The cannibals economy of action. 3. How Conrad judges between these two models. Lecture 9: Debussy I. Equivalents in music of the patches and blurs in Impressionist painting: (1) parallel fifths; (2) seventh and ninth chords; (3) successions of unrelated chords. II. Discarding the musical textbook, using natures own procedures of composition. 1. Imitating birds in the fashion of Beethoven or Poglietti: what Debussy doesnt do. 2. M. Croche contra artifice. 3. Music conceived not as thematic development but as a study in color: Debussy and Whistler. 4. Music shaped not like a sonata or rondo but like a wave: Sirnes. III. Ways in which Debussys music is not (in Monets sense) Impressionistic: remoteness instead of immediacy. 1. Ghostliness and dreaminess: Ftes. By contrast, Ives Fourth of July is acute, assaultive. 2. Memory as offering more to the composer than emotion.

3. Etherealizing and volatilizing effects: the end of Ftes; the beginning of Nuages. IV. The intensity of the aimless: Debussy and Musorgsky. Lecture 10: Schoenberg I. Schoenberg and Einstein: smashing the Tables of the Law. Early experiments in atonality. II. Atonality as an expression of the divine; Schoenbergs second string quartet I feel the air from other planets. III. Atonality as an expression of the unconscious; Schoenberg and Freud. 1. Schoenbergs career as a painter. 2. Erwartung and the emancipation of the dissonance. A. Brain convulsions. B. Elliptical textures. C. Hysteria: Marie Pappenheim and Freuds Anna O. D. Chromatic saturation and oceanic feeling. IV. Pierrot Lunaire as a parody of Expressionism. 1. Clown history: Watteau and Laforgue. 2. Giraud: the extraterrestrial and the bloodthirsty. 3. Sprechstimme: neither speech nor song. 4. Bakhtin and negative parody. Lecture 11: Expressionism I. Expressionism: impressions distilled into hieroglyphs of psychic states. II. Schools of Expressionist painting. 1. The spiritual-intellectual school: Der blaue Reiter.

A. Kandinskys notion of abstraction as liberation from the material world. a. Abstractionism as apocalypse: Improvisation Klamm and The Flood. b. Abstractionism as primitive amoeba-like shapes: early watercolors. Fascination with Rutherfords atomic theory as a deconstruction of matter. c. Abstractionism as form determined by paint itself. B. Kandinskys notion of erasing the boundaries between artistic media. a. Everything is just vibration: color and sound alike. b. Dislike of paintings that tell stories (Night). c. Approval of paintings that resemble music. Scriabin. Kandinskys response to Lohengrin. 2. The sexy-icky school: Die Brcke A. Their precursor: Edvard Munch (Madonna). B. Genitals as face: Schiele and Gerstl. C. Kirchner: mutilation (Self-Portrait as Soldier) and paranoia (Schlemihl); all details as expressions of the painters torment. D. Grosz and multiple-personality disorder. Jack the Ripper as Expressionist hero. E. Kokoschka, Weininger, and pathological misogyny. Women not loathsome because they dont really exist. Murderer, Hope of Women. Lecture 12: Kafka I. Kafka and Expressionism. 1. Like the Expressionists he dwells on ickiness of things. 2. Unlike the Expressionists hes ironical, funny. II. Kafkas gnosticism: the whole sensory universe is false, corrupt, unreal. Fiction as a selfdismantling theatre. 1. The Judgment as a dispelling of family illusions. Kafkas explanation that the friend is only an emblem of the relationship between father and son.

2. The Metamorphosis. A. The beetle as soul, since the spiritual is the exact opposite of the physical. Assimilation into beetledom as assimilation into the spiritual world. B. Co-dependent Gregor enabled his family to maintain illusions. C. The beetle as angel, living in a delirious world without gravity. D. Gregors home as freak showanother sort of theatre. Home as prison and abyss. 3. In the Penal Colony. A. What the world should be: a machine for reinforcing spiritual commandments. B. What the world is: an infernal machine that carves meaningless designs into your body. C. The story as a critique of Expressionist art. Tinguelys self-destroying machines. III. Monodrama.

Lecture 13: Cubism I. Apollonian ideas of Cubism: Cubism as the opposite of Impressionismpertains to mental concepts, not retinal images. 1. Thinking the human body, instead of seeing it (Picassos LAficionado). 2. Squashing as a way of maximizing the recognizability of things. 3. Platonic forms and Bertrand Russells hypothetical perceivers. 4. Mathematics in Les demoiselles dAvignon and Braques Nude. II. Dionysiac ideas of Cubism: Cubism and the abyss; deep seizures of reality. 1. Representing volume by means other than perspective. Painting addressed to the sense

of touchpainting beyond the eye. A. Dissolving the boundary between figure and background (Braques Harbor). B. Eerie facsimiles of whole-body experience: Les demoiselles dAvignon and African masks. 2. Completely unintelligible figures. 3. Magical sign-play; bodies made of paper. 4. Taboo aspects of Cubism. A. Incorporating actual objects: Picassos Still Life with Chair Caning. B. Obscene word-games: Picassos Au Bon March. C. Transgressions against media boundaries: Picassos Guitar and Glass. III. Apollinaires calligrams: poetry that turns into Cubist painting.

Lecture 14: Imagism I. Desire for a poetry stripped down to something hard and irreducible, real. II. Elementary unit of poetry: the image. 1. Images are not symbols: no fixed value. 2. Defamiliarization: scaling of the eyeballs. 3. Trusting things, not words. 4. Specimen imagist poem: In a Station of the Metro. Pound and Kandinsky: nonrepresentationalism, or bi-representationalism III. Object-similes. 1. The pine and the armor-fragment. 2. Gaudier-Brzeskas Red Dancer IV. Vorticism: making the image dynamic, part of a focusing process. 1. Lewiss Timon of Athens: painting as whirlwind.

2. Coburns vortographs: taking Picassos from nature. 3. H.D.s Oread: poem as whirlpool. 4. The vortex as phallus; the brain as a clot of semen. V. Turning the vortex backward: Pounds satires (The Garden, Les Millwin) VI. T. E. Hulme, the theorist of the new classicism. 1. Why Fancy is better than Imagination. 2. Digital vs. analogue art. 3. Poetry that seeks the physical body. Lecture 15: The Rite of Spring I. Primitivism: sexual desire and sexual terror. Convergence of the savage and the ultra-modern: the law of parity. 1. D. H. Lawrence and Africa 2. Bartk and Eastern Europe II. The history of The Rite of Spring. 1. Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. 2. The low repute of ballet: Degas. 3. Nijinsky and the homoeroticizing of ballet. 4. Roerich and the folkloristic roots of The Rite of Spring. 5. The god Yarilo, Herder, and magical seizures of the divine among primitives. III. Stravinskys scenario for The Rite of Spring. 1. Nietzschean aspects: mankind not yet differentiated from bears, from the mass of nature itself. 2. Hugos sketch: hard to tell men from boulders.

IV. Stravinskys music: the abyss speaks. 1. Bear-rhythms in Petrushka and The Rite of Spring: inertia vs. frenzy. 2. World of too much gravity: knees buckle. 3. Cubist aspect of the music; heterophony. 4. Spanish gypsy tropes (Soler): familiar things monstrously misplaced, like an Henri Rousseau painting. 5. The musics escape from the ballet theatre: Walt Disney. V. Nijinskys choreography. 1. Dalcroze and the arithmetic of gesture. 2. Nijinsky and Buffalo Bill. VI. Conclusion: Eliot on the convergence of savage ritual and factory noises. Lecture 16: Mann I. Death in Venice as a Nietzschean novel. II. Manns obsession with Wagner. 1. Tristan and The Blood of the Wlsungs. 2. Wagner as disease; Groszs In Memory of Richard Wagner. III. Death in Venice as a recasting of Euripides The Bacchae. 1. Aschenbach as Pentheus. 2. Avatars of Dionysus: the red men. First, the traveler. IV. Aschenbachs career as a novelist. 1. Obsessively Apollonian character. 2. Manns games with his own canon. 3. Whispers of homosexuality.

V. More Dionysuses. 1. The elderly dandy. 2. The oarsman as Charon. VI. Tadzio. 1. Apollonian formal perfection starts to give way to Dionysiac sadism. 2. Loosening of muscles: the hand gesture. VII. Still more Dionysuses. 1. The buffo baritone. 2. Aschenbach himself, feminized and abject. 3. Is Manns own art Dionysiac or Apollonian? VIII. Music: Aschenbach and Gustav Mahler. Lecture 18: Neoclassicism I. The swerve of Expressionism to its opposite: the Great War; the swing of the aesthetic pendulum. II. The New Objectivity: the work of art considered as a physical object, not a pseudoperson. 1. Cocteaus recalling to order. 2. Franz Rohs Post-Expressionism 3. Odd convergences between Expressionism and the New Objectivity: Groszs Jack the Ripper reconsidered. III. Defamiliarization. 1. Habit as villain: Proust and Nabokov. 2. Shklovskys enstranging. IV. Stravinsky as enstranger. 1. tude for Pianola: eliminating the performer.

2. Music expresses nothing. 3. Affectionate 19th-century reworkings of 18th-century music (Tchaikovsky) V. Pulcinella. 1. Composition history. 2. Hoaxes within hoaxes. 3. Comparisons of Pulcinella to its source material. VI. Eliot. 1. Mature poets steal; the creative mind as shred of platinum. 2. Europes senility. 3. Loss of body, loss of mind. Lecture 19: Dada I. A short history of nonsense. 1. The Anglo-Saxon roots of Jabberwocky. 2. Hopkins and the movement to rid English of Latin. 3. Joyces Finnegans Wake: convergence of the hypermeaningful and the meaningless. II. Dadaist essentialism. 1. Hugo Ball and Kandinsky. 2. African aspects of Dada; phonemes more real than words. 3. Nietzschean aspects of Dada: gods buffoons. III. Dadaist indifference. 1. X is Y, so who cares? 2. The new Tower of Babel; Tatlins Monument for the Third International 3. Unpronouncable poems.

4. X is not X: entering a state of pure contradiction. IV. Dadaist realism. 1. Tzara: imitating the real incoherence of the universe. 2. Anti-illusionism: approving Picassos incorporations of real objects into art. 3. Imitating not the shapes of nature but the processes of nature. A. Arps amoeboids. B. St. Gonorrhoeicus; dada as cancer. C. Ernsts Stratified Rocks 4. Dada as garbage: Schwitters. A. Merzbild collages. B. Living in a whole garbage environment Schwitters studio. V. Dadas great forerunner: Duchamp 1. The ready-mades: loss of the boundary between art and non-art. 2. Duchamps musical compositions. A. Randomizing procedures in the first Erratum musical. B. Comparison of Duchamps music to Schwitters Ursonate. Lecture 20: Oedipus Rex I. Non-Wagnerian procedures for representing Nietzschean abyss in music: mechanical depersonalization. II. Stravinsky as murderer. 1. Killing the text: an opera in Latin, more phonetic than semantic. 2. Killing the music: using extinct musical devices. A. Refusing the German avant-garde: Schoenberg and the 12-tone method. B. Stravinsky as Frankenstein: jolting the corpse of dead music.

C. Merzbild music: Verdi, Wagner, Offenbach translated. a. Bernstein on Stravinskys Verdi-isms. b. Your instructor on Stravinskys Verdi-isms. 3. Killing the drama. A. Cubist dismemberment of the stage. B. Cocteaus masks. III. Resurrections: how Stravinsky brings all these dead things back to life. 1. The prime binary: terror vs. pity. 2. Versification as a source of power: dactylic rhythm. 3. Another binary: truth vs. falsehood. A. Authenticity represented by musical simplicities. B. Inauthenticity represented by self-display and burlesque. 4. The ritornello form as the basic modality of tragedy (Gluck): walls squeezing together. Lecture 21: Surrealism I. Surrealism as eroded classicism. 1. Stravinsky and de Chirico: the knob beneath the mask. 2. Neoclassicism and Surrealism similar: a landscape of ruins (Krenek). II. History of Surrealism. 1. Apollinaires program note to Saties Parade. 2. Bretons totalized surrealism. 3. Surrealism vs. dada: psychological chaos vs. exterior chaos. 4. Bretons definition: pure psychic automatism. III. Procedures for cultivating irrational thought.

1. Scrambling the field of resemblances; Nietzsche, Renoir, and Breton on leaves. 2. Generating metaphors by processes of abutment; the earth as a paper hoop. 3. Trances: automatic writing, automatic drawing. IV. Surrealism and insanity. 1. Exploring the Freudian unconscious, but for the sake of growing sicker. 2. Simulations of mental disease. A. Breton on simulating hysteria. B. Dals paranoiac-critical method. a. How disturbing sexual thoughts derange space and time (Vertigo). b. Dal and Oedipus: mom as a piece of cheese. c. The Persistence of Memory and Einstein. d. Paranoia entails the painting of invisible images. C. Magritte and prosopagnosia. a. The Key to Dreams: miswiring the brains language system. b. Lost Worlds and Alzheimers disease. Lecture 22: Lawrence I. Socrates vs. Dionysus: Chatterley vs. Mellors. Mellorss incredibility. II. The novel of the body. 1. Lawrences hatred of cerebral, stream-of-consciousness novels. 2. The Romantic tradition of anti-mentalism (Schelling, Arnold). 3. Lawrences manual of psychology, Fantasia of the Unconscious. A. Rehabiliting the Freudian id.

B. The body is the unconsciousness. C. Plexuses and ganglia. D. Noses. 4. Characters in novels: how the unconscious is inscribed on the outer body. A. Cliffords broken spine, Mrs. Boltons bosom. B. Connies solar plexus. C. Maps of inner force-fields: drawing horses, painting protoplasm. III. The double perspective: depicting inauthentic surfaces and authentic depths. 1. Wragby Hall and Mellors cottage: Mindland and Bodystan. 2. Connie as the Lady of Shalott, living in a mirror. 3. The senescence of the English language. 4. Apocalyptic orgasms: the inner bodys oceanscape. 5. Connie / Mellors vs. John Thomas / Lady Jane. IV. Lawrence and Futurism: the biophysics of humanity. Lecture 23: Mechanical Men I. Robots: Clifford and the coal miners; how Clifford has a radio instead of a brain. II. Strategies to get rid of human bodies. 1. Contraceptives. 2. Evolving into disembodied minds. 3. Babies in bottles (H. G. Wells) III. Lawrences paintings and Modernist painting. 1. Michaelis as a Picasso African mask. 2. Duncan Forbes and Duncan Grant.

A. Grant and geometry. B. Grants Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting. 3. Lawrence as the anti-Forbes/Grant. A. Trees on fire. B. Orgies. C. The swan within the electron. IV. George Antheil as a mechanist-Modernist composer. 1. The time-canvas: figure and ground. A. Noise as a background. B. Silence as a background. 2. Message from Mars.

Quotations Wagner, Beethoven: besides the world that presents itself to sight, in waking as in dreams, we are conscious of the existence of a second world, perceptible only through the ear, manifesting itself through sound; literally a sound world beside the light world, a world of which we may say that it bears the same relation to the visible world as dreaming to waking: for it is quite as plain to us as is the other, though we must recognize it as being entirely different. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: Wagners art is sick. The problems he brings to the stagepurely problems of hystericsthe convulsiveness of his affect, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices [. . .]: all this taken together represents without any doubt a picture of sickness. Wagner est une nvrose [Wagner is a neurosis]. [. . .] Wagner is [. . .] our greatest miniaturist of music: he crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His richness in colors, in half-shadows, in the secrecies of dying light spoils you to such an extent that after him almost all other composers seem too robust.

The two words infinite and meaning were really sufficient: they induced a state of incomparable well-being in [German youths]. It was not with his music that Wagner conquered them, it was with the ideait is the enigmatic character of his art, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Wagner; it is Wagners genius for shaping clouds [. . .] There is nothing wearing, nothing decrepit, nothing fatal and hostile to life [. . .] that his art does not secretly safeguard [. . .] He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and disguises it as music; he flatters everything Christian, every religious expression of decadence. [. . .] all of the counterfeiting of transcendence and beyond, has found its most sublime advocate in Wagners art [. . .] by means of persuasion of sensuousness [. . .] Music as Circe. Hopkins, The Windhover: To Christ our Lord (ll. 1-8, with scansion notation): I: cught this *mrning *mrnings * mnion, * kngdom of * dylights * du(phin), dapple- * dwn-drawn * Fl(con), in his * rding Of the * r(lling) level * nder * nath (him) steady * ir, and * strding * Hgh there, how he * rng upon the * rin of a * wmpling * wng In his * cstasy! Then * ff, * ff * frth on * swng, As a * sktes (heel) sweeps * smoth on a * bw-bend: the * hrl and * glding Re *bffed the * bg * wnd. My * hart in * hding * Strred for a * brd,the a * cheve of, the * mstery of the * thng! * Hopkins, Pied Beauty: Glory be to God for dappled things-For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold , fallow and plow And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. Renoir, project for Society of Irregularists: Observers have noted in fact that, despite the apparent laws which preside over their formation, the works of nature from the most important to the most insignificant are

infinitely varied, no matter what type or species that belong to. The two eyes of even the most beautiful face are never exactly alike; no nose is ever situated immediately above the middle of the mouth; the segments of an orange, the leaves of a tree, the petals of a flower, are never exactly identical. It would seem that every type of beauty derives its charm from its diversity. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, review of first Impressionist exhibition: The common view that brings these artists together in a group and makes of them a collective force within our disintegrating age is their determination not to aim for perfection, but to be satisfied with a certain general aspect. Once the impression is captured, they declare their role finished. The term Japanese, which was given them first, made no sense. If one wishes to characterize and explain them with a single word, then one would have to coin the word impressionists. They are impressionists in that they do not render a landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape. The word itself has passed into their language: in the catalogue the Sunrise by Monet is called not landscape, but impression. Thus they take leave of reality and enter the realms of idealism. Le Siecle, 29 April 1874 Louis Leroy, review of first Impressionist exhibition: I glanced at Bertin's pupil; his countenance was turning a deep red. A catastrophe seemed to me imminent, and it was reserved for M. Monet to contribute the last straw. Ah, there he is, there he is! he cried, in front of No. 98. I recognize him, papa Vincents favorite! What does that canvas depict? Look at the catalogue. Impression, Sunrise. ImpressionI was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it . . . and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape. Upon entering the first room, Joseph Vincent received an initial shock in front of the Dancer by Renoir. What a pity, he said to me, that the painter, who has a certain understanding of color, doesnt draw better: his dancers legs are as cottony as the gauze of her skirts. I find you hard on him, I replied. On the contrary, the drawing is very tight. Bertins pupil, believing that I was being ironical, contented himself with shrugging his shoulders, not taking the trouble to answer. Le Charivari, 25 April 1874 Conrad on Symbolism: . . . a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. This statement may surprise you, who may imagine that I am alluding to the Symbolist School of poets or prose writers. Theirs, however, is only a literary proceeding against which I have nothing to say. I am concerned here with something much larger. . . . All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty. (letter to Barrett H. Clark, 14 May 1918) It is a strange fate that everything I have, of set artistic purpose, laboured to leave

indefinite, suggestive, in the penumbra of initial inspiration, should have that light turned on to it and its insignificance (as compared with, I might say without megalomania, the ampleness of my conceptions) exposed for any fool to comment upon or even for average minds to be disappointed with. Didnt it ever occur to you, my dear Curle, that I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even of my tales in the background? Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and explicitness, in facts and also in expression. Yet nothing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art. (letter to Richard Curle, 24 April 1922) From Conrads Congo diary: 1/2 hour after Harou arrived very ill with billious attack and fever. Laid him down in Govt shimbek. Dose of ipeca. Vomiting bile in enormous quantities. At 11 gave him 1 gramme of quinine and lots of hot tea. Hot fit ending in heavy perspiration. At 2 P.M. put him in hammock and started for Kinfumu. Row with carriers all the way. Harou suffering much through the jerks of the hammock. Camped at a small stream. At 4 Harou better; fever gone. General direction N.E. by E. 1/2 E. Distance 13 miles. Up till noon sky clouded and strong N.W. wind very chilling. From 1 P.M. to 4 P.M. sky clear and a very hot day. Expect lots of bother with carriers to-morrow. Had them all called and made a speech, which they did not understand. They promise good behaviour. Thursday, 31st. Left at 6. Sent Harou ahead, and followed in 1/2 an hour. Road presents several sharp ascents, and a few others easier but rather long. Notice in places sandy surface soil instead of hard clay as heretofore; think however that the layer of sand is not very thick and that the clay would be found under it. Great difficulty in carrying Harou. Too heavy--bother! Made two long halts to rest the carriers. Country wooded in valleys and on many of the ridges. Debussy, Monsieur Croche Antidilettante Monsieur Croche was a spare, wizened man and his gestures were obviously suited to the conduct of metaphysical discussions [. . .] He spoke almost in a whisper and never laughed, occasionally enforcing his remarks with a quiet smile which, beginning at his nose, wrinkled his whole face, like a pebble flung into still waters, and lasted for an intolerably long time. He aroused my curiosity at once by his peculiar views on music. He spoke of an orchestral score as if it were a picture. He seldom used technical words, but the dimmed and slightly worn elegance of his rather unusual vocabulary seemed to ring like old coins. I remember a parallel he drew between Beethovens orchestrationwhich he visualized as a black-and-white formula resulting in an exquisite gradation of greysand that of Wagner, a sort of many-colored make-up spread almost uniformly, in which, he said, he could no longer distinguish the tone of a violin from that of a trombone. To see the sun rise is more profitable than to hear the Pastoral Symphony. . . . Discipline

must be sought in freedom, and not within the formulas of an outworn philosophy only fit for the feeble-minded. Give ear to no mans counsel; but listen to the wind which tells in passing the history of the world. Debussy, program for Ftes Ftes gives us the vibrating dancing rhythm of the atmosphere with sudden flashes of light. There is also the episode of the procession (a dazzling fantastic vision) which makes its way through the festive scenes and becomes merged with it. But the background remains persistently the same; the festival with its blending of music and luminous dust participating in the cosmic rhythm. Debussy told Poujaud that Ftes was a reminiscence of old-time merrymaking in the Bois de Boulogne, with happy crowds; the drum-and-bugle band of the Garde Nationale enters, beating a tattoo, and vanishes. Debussy told Dukas that the music of Ftes was based on distant memories of a festival in the Bois de Boulogne; the ghostly procession was . . . made of cuirassiers! [heavily-armed cavalry] Debussy on Nuages: Program: Nuages renders the unchanging aspect of the sky and the slow, solemn motion of the clouds, fading away in grey tones lightly tinged with white. One day, in stormy weather, as Debussy was crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris with Poujaud, he told him that on a similar day the idea of [. . .] Nuages had occurred to him, he had visualized those very thunderclouds swept along by a stormy wind, a boat passing, its hooter sounding. These two impressions are recalled in the languorous succession of chords and by the short chromatic theme. Pound on Debussy: When Debussy was new to us, those of us who heard him at all found in the Sunken Cathedral [Prludes 1.10], in Sails [Prludes 1.2], in Gold Fish [Images 2.3], in the Granada [Estampes 2] . . . suggestion of colors, suggestion of visions . . . And this visionary world was a delight. By his very titles it was hinted to us that the composer wished to suggest scenes and visions and objects, and, to a great extent, he succeeded. He succeeded, I do not wish to be paradoxical, in writing music for the eye, with the result [that]. . . the effect of his music diminishes on repeated hearing.