Maestro Ludwig Wittgenstein

[walto]

Wittgenstein's Music -- All Four Bars of It -- Offers a New Window Onto His Work and Influence
Simon Tait



The Independent [London] - 12 November 2003



Ludwig Wittgenstein's only known musical work had its world premiere last week in Cambridge. It is called, according to the title that he had pencilled above his two-line score, Leidenschaftlich (in English, "Passionate"). At four bars, it lasts less than 30 seconds and is little more than a powerful, fiery flourish.

Yet it brought an invited audience of 150 curious Wittgenstein enthusiasts, unaware of his musical pretensions, to Emmanuel College's acoustically refined new Queen's Hall auditorium, including the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, the new master of Wittgenstein's own college, Trinity; the composer Anthony Powers; and the architect Sir Colin St. John Wilson, who built the new British Library.

On their programmes was a photograph of the tiny scrap of lined notepaper on which Wittgenstein had scrawled his four bars. "There's nothing particularly remarkable about it," says Powers. "We haven't found a snatch of a lost great work. But it's like the continuation of an incomplete sentence, as if he had started to say something and hadn't the words to finish it, and turned to music. That's what is really interesting."

The little phrase was discovered by Dr. Michael Nedo, director of the Wittgenstein Institute at Cambridge, in a notebook of 1931. It had survived Wittgenstein's destructive frenzy of all his preparatory work because everything he wrote in his home city of Vienna between 1929 and 1938 had been sequestered at the annexation of Austria, out of his reach.

"We don't know if this was supposed to be part of something else, but what we can tell is that it was written by someone used to writing musical notation," Nedo says. "It clearly came naturally to him."

That the father of 20th-century philosophy should find himself lost for words should not be a surprise, Nedo says. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," Wittgenstein told philosophers at the end of the preface to his only book published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What an artist understands and a philosopher doesn't is that there are other much more eloquent forms of expression than mere language.

"He is the most quoted author of our time," says Nedo, himself a physicist by training. "But no one wants to read him. It's because we have to read him as a philosopher, not as an artist — because he is translated by philosophers who use philosophical language, which was not his."

The concert, performed by the Viennese Aron Quartet, was the first in an annual series devised to highlight the philosopher's dependence and influence on art. It included the music he loved: Bach, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, and a clarinet quartet by another family friend, Joseph Labor, which Wittgenstein had always wanted to have performed in his adoptive home of Cambridge but that, until last week, never was. (The clarinet was the only instrument that Wittgenstein learnt to play.)

The concert also marked the publication, after 40 years of research and preparation, of the first 17 volumes of the complete written works of Wittgenstein, edited by Nedo, who presents them in the multi-layered way that he believes Wittgenstein would have wanted. There are perhaps another 50 volumes to go. "He wrote completely differently from the academic, more like a fugue with repetitions of themes reappearing in changing circumstances," Nedo says. "This is how you understood something, by looking at it again and again, first this way, then that, as you do a musical theme. Philosophers translating him could not understand that, and had to use their own language, which is why he has become unreadable. His heirs made the mistake of striking out the repetitions so the changing nature of his writing was lost."

Wittgenstein was born in 1889 into a wealthy Austrian family that was steeped in art. His sister was painted by Gustav Klimt, the protege of Ludwig's uncle Paul; his grandfather adopted the 19th-century violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, whom, aged 10, was tutored by Mendelssohn, and who later taught the younger Wittgensteins.

Ludwig's many brothers and sisters were also taught piano by such family friends as Clara Schumann and Brahms. Indeed, his older brother Paul became a leading concert pianist, who, remarkably, managed to continue his platform career even after losing his right arm while fighting on the Polish front in the First World War. Richard Strauss, Ravel, Britten, Prokofiev, Korngold and Franz Schmidt were among the major composers who wrote left-hand piano works for him.

Yet Ludwig never learnt the piano. "It was acknowledged that he was the one with the best ear and the best eye, but he knew too well the limitations of his creative powers as a musician, and this was not his vocation," says Nedo.

Finding his vocation took Ludwig Wittgenstein half his lifetime. He was a natural and gifted engineer, fascinated by mechanical flight. In 1908, aged 19, he went to Manchester to study aeronautics, and actually patented a helicopter system. He moved on to study mathematics at Cambridge, which turned him towards philosophy, and in about 1912 he was introduced to Bertrand Russell and G.W. Moore, who became his mentors. He was to be associated with Cambridge, on and off, for the rest of his life, eventually succeeding Moore as professor of philosophy.

In 1913, he inherited a large fortune from his father, which he gave away as a distraction. A year later, when war broke out, he joined the Austrian army, winning medals for bravery, and also developing the thoughts that became his Tractatus. But he suffered from deep depressions at the Front, and tried to relieve them by organising fellow-soldiers to sing or whistle multipart Bach fugues.

He completed his Tractatus soon after the war — it was eventually published in 1922 thanks to Russell's influence — and for Wittgenstein it contained all that needed to be said about philosophy: "It is in two parts," he said, archly. "All that I have written and all that I have not written." A major thesis of the Tractatus is that language has become confused, unclear and obfuscating, as if it is clothing concealing the naked truth. The covering could be torn away by the artist, particularly the composer who has a multi-layered language at his disposal, one that can not only repeat but make different statements simultaneously.

In the 1920s, Wittgenstein turned his back on philosophy to become a village primary-school teacher (which is when he was obliged to learn the clarinet), devising an entire curriculum and a primary-school dictionary. He also repaired the steam engine at the local weaving mill, experimented with photography and tried his hand at sculpture. Then Wittgenstein became a gardener's assistant at a monastery, and at one point described himself as an architect. He actually designed a modernist house in Vienna for his sister Gretl, which still stands but is a sadly run-down monument to his extraordinary versatility.

Then, in 1929, Russell and Moore persuaded him to return to Cambridge to teach at Trinity, and until war broke out again, he divided his time between there and Vienna. He stayed in Britain during the Second World War, working as a hospital porter, and returned to Cambridge at the end but resigned his professorship in 1947 to concentrate on writing his Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, two years after his death, at 62, from cancer.

"Wittgenstein was not only inspired and comforted by art, he was an inspiration for artists," says Nedo. His taste, says Anthony Powers, was surprisingly conservative: his favourite painter was Pissarro, and he seldom went anywhere without the poems of Goethe or Kleist, or the writing of E. T. A. Hoffmann, another polymath from a century earlier who left behind a symphony, nine operas and two masses.

"You would think that with his modernist turn of mind, he would like modern music, but though he knew people such as Schoenberg and Webern, his likes didn't get far beyond Brahms," Powers says.

He does, nevertheless, inspire modern composers. Elisabeth Lutyens wrote a motet inspired by him, and Powers himself has composed a chorale based on the Tractatus. "The phrasing, the form of words he uses, the way some sentences look as if they have meaning but actually go nowhere, are all amazingly musical, and it seems a perfectly natural thing to put it to music," Powers explains.

Wittgenstein has also been a major influence on contemporary artists such as Barnett Newman and John Latham, and Derek Jarman, who made a stark television film about Wittgenstein shortly before his death in 1994. Jarman is believed to have been heavily influenced by Wittgenstein for his strange last film, Blue.

And the architect Sir Colin St. John Wilson has also been a lifelong adherent to Wittgenstein. By an extraordinary coincidence, the house he built for himself in Cambridge in the 1960s is now the home of the Wittgenstein Institute. "I'm a devoted fanatic, but I would regard him as a rogue architect. Even so, though I had never seen Wittgenstein's house in Vienna, the similarities between the ideas in it and in my house are quite startling."

Philosophy as a discipline was too protective, Wittgenstein said, and failed for him because it could not look beyond its own tight confines. "The creative ambition of an artist, on the other hand," says Michael Nedo, "is to make us see things differently, to see the world afresh. As Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus, '...then he sees the world rightly'."




(C) 2003 The Independent - London. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

[Dr Dave]

This is exceptionally silly. Should we be looking for Santayana's Greatest Hits?

[walto]

FWIW, Samuel Butler wrote a couple of oratorios in the style of Handel, and Nietzche apparently wrote some bad concert music as well.

[dbrhythm]

At one point I had a Nietzsche CD and a CD with about 25 minutes of strings by Adorno. I tried to pay attention to the stuff, but I thought it was pretty weak. Not that I know what they were after.

Would love to hear the Wittgenstein for the cult of personality factor.

I think Adorno was actually considered a potential compositional talent before he decided on a career in philosophy. I believe he studied under Webern.

I saw the Leipzig String Quartet perform all of his quartet music this past September. I'm the last person to judge it's merits vis-a-vis "real composers," but I rather enjoyed.

[Nate Dorward]

Actually as it happens there's a concert of Adorno's music forthcoming in the next few days here in Toronto. The program is as follows:

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25
CONCERT 8 pm:
THE MUSIC OF THEODOR ADORNO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Admission $5.

At the Goethe Institut
163 King St. West, 416/593-5257
SW Corner King West and University, St. Andrew Subway station

Program:
Theodor Adorno Two Quartets
Alban Berg From Seven Early Songs: Schilflied
Die Nachtigall
Im Zimmer
Theodor Adorno Two Propaganda Poems for Voice and Piano (Lyrics:
Bertolt Brecht)
Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano op. 6 (Lyrics: Else
Lasker-Schüler, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin)
Arnold Schönberg String quartet, D major (1897)

Members of the Madawaska Quartet with Kathryn Sugden and Rafael Hoekman
Sarah Fraser, violin; Kathryn Sugden, violin; Anna Redekop, viola;
Rafael Hoekman, cello; Carolyn Harrington, Piano; Xin Wang, Voice

Introduction by Professor Lydia Goehr, Columbia University

There will be an afternoon symposium on Theodor Adorno, his philosophy
and
his writings on music. For details see the Goethe Institut web site at:
www.goethe.de/uk/tor/

For further details contact:

Doina Popescu
Deputy Director
Programme Coordinator
Goethe-Institut Toronto
Tel.: 416/593-5257
Fax: 416/593-5145
popescu@goethetor.org
www.goethe.de/uk/tor/

I should also point out that originally Stanley Cavell was a composer. His early essay "Music Discomposed" (on contemporary composition & its use of aleatoric & ultraserialist techniques) is very much worth reading: it is collected in his first book of essays Must We Mean What We Say?.

"He is the most quoted author of our time"

Well, most quoted philosopher anyway. I actually find it pretty irritating how often very cryptic or debatable epigrams from Wittgenstein get detached from the work & treated as self-evidently true axioms.

[Nate Dorward]

Oh Wittgenstein's philosophy's fascinating, it's just that I get annoyed when say a sentence like "The limits of my language are the limits of my world" (from Philosophical Investigations) is tossed around casually by say Marjorie Perloff or others as if its meaning & implications were perfectly clear & as if Wittgenstein were simply right & that was the end of the matter.

[Nate Dorward]

Especially when it's actually Creeley or Dahlberg they're quoting! (thinking of the fact that the two slogans most attributed to Olson are sentences he quoted from them in "Projective Verse"--Olson credits them but most people forget the source)

[Squaredancecalling Steve]

from Olson's "Projective Verse"

(1) A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. . . . the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet get in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away?

This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves a whole series of new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION--puts himself in the open--he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware. . . .

(2) . . . the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.)

(3) Now (3) the process_ of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.

[walto]

I just love theorists, don't you? They're so....theoretical!

I got some promo from a label the other day for a disc called "under careful watch the spoken words fly." The performers are saxophonist Ali Shaikh and pianist Dan DeChellis. The saxophonist writes that he

"...knows the instrument to be one continuous string rather than its now popular style of limited tonal/timberal [sic] characteristics...The move towards a (rather) saxophone--derived compositional process has been developing for the past decade. In the past decade he has moved on to solo/ensemble music that realizes his autobiographical past, present and future through sound (improvisational form, C.M.E. compositional system, Fifth Dimensional Music, Hope Arch Unitary Meditational Reality Graphic. Within the past two years, due to a major life-shift/deconstruction, he has found this Work to deepne further to move himself closer to remembering the stuff that is his...(life)...(house-memory storage) with the hopes of understanding/repairing/utilizing strange mechanisms. Additional help was given by physical-explicit-emotion, internal reflection and also by Compassionate Companionship (an educated community of realizers looking ahead to further development). It is obvious that radical change will be a major challenge as the present phase ends and a new major stage unfolds."

FWIW, as this sage was born in 1982, I figure the major autobiographical "life shift" he's so proud of during past decade was probably puberty.

[Brian Olewnick]

You sure that's not one of Braxton's illegitimate kids?

[Uli]

Originally posted by walto
I just love theorists, don't you? They're so....theoretical!

I

I love'em if they are trying to get practical and use their theories to determine what is better than what. That's where they fail miserably, imho. Even in theorie there is more than one theorie.

[walto]

Yeah, I thought of Brax too. Have to get more politics in there to get any Prevost tint to it. At least he manages to get "deconstruction" in there somewhere. That's a start.

[Nate Dorward]

Gah! Well, it's not quite as bad as the most absurd Braxton liner notes I've seen (there are only a few moments where it crosses the line from turgidness to genuine opacity, whereas with Braxton there's extensive commerce between the two areas). But it's getting there. -- Olson's "Projective Verse" isn't going to win any prizes for the clarity or coherence of its claims, but it offers a hell of a lot better slogans than De Chellis: "Form is never more than an extension of content" is a slippery but memorable little koan.

[MRS]

The Olson document in question is probably one of the most important critical statements of the twentieth century.

[MRS]

"What is rhythm but her limpidity"

[walto]

"...a hell of a lot better slogans than De Chellis."

It wasn't Dan that wrote that stuff, it was his (youthful) sax player.

"A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader..."



Well, it may be important, or wildly important, or most important or whatever, but it's circular nevertheless. ("...by way of the transferred energy itself...") Huh?

[MRS]

It's not circular. . .it is grasped from its source and filtered through the poet. I think Olson's is in a direct line from those of HJ and Pound.

[Nate Dorward]

Originally posted by Michael Schaumann
The Olson document in question is probably one of the most important critical statements of the twentieth century.

Yes, I know, & I'm a fan of Olson's work, but it's not the world's clearest or most coherent pieces of writing. Well, so what: since when did aesthetic manifestos have to be crystal clear or coherent.

[MRS]

There are also direct references in WCW's 'Desert Music.'

[MRS]

Originally posted by Nate Dorward
Yes, I know, & I'm a fan of Olson's work, but it's not the world's clearest or most coherent pieces of writing. Well, so what: since when did aesthetic manifestos have to be crystal clear or coherent.

Hilarious and true!