"The Perplexities of the Rights of Man" * (1)

“The proclamation of human rights was also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born […] In the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human  rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by  government and constitution, but by social, spiritual and religious forces (2).

  

Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new arbitrariness of society.

[But] man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into member of a people.

[…]

The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to ensure them.

[…]

The full implication of this identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were [not] […] safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of nation-states in […] Europe. […]

The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as “inalienable” because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back on their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. Or when, as is the case of the minorities, an international body arrogated itself a nongovernmental authority, its failure was apparent even before its measures were fully realised .

[…]

The stateless people were as convinced as the minorities that loss of national rights was identical with loss of human rights. […] The more they were excluded from right in any form, the more they tended to look for a reintegration into a national, into their own national community. […]

Not a single group of refugees or Displaced Persons has failed to develop a fierce, violent group consciousness and to clamor for rights as – and only as – Poles or Jews or Germans, etc.      
[...]
Civil rights - that is the varying rights of citizens in different countries - were supposed to embody and spell out in the form of tangible laws the eternal Rights of Man, which by themselves were supposed to be independent of citizenship and nationality. All human beings were citizens of some kind of political community; if the laws of their country did not live up to the demands of the Rights of Man, they were expected to change them, by legislation in democratic countries or through revolutionary action in despotisms.

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable - even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them - whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. "     

 notes

*And of Woman, one presumes (fff-note)

(1) Hannah  Arendt – From The Origins of Totalitarianism- (1951)  extracts from the  text reproduced in “The Portable Hannah Arendt” (2003)

(2) as far as those individuals were perceived as being a faithful member of some social or religious group, I would add  (fff-note)

Fragments there will always be

Lament for the sins of the world 

Perhaps this blog’s title should drop the Frivolous (however ironical), and go just for the Fragments.  

Fragments there will always be. 

Fragments of history? Such as: exactly 100 years ago Germany invaded Belgium and Europe went to war. Over the past year I’ve been diligently ploughing through  authoritative books on WWI. (5 books out of a corpus of 25.000+)  

And what did I learn about the causes of WWI: nations feeling threatened and afraid of being encircled by enemy states, lust for vengeance of perceived historical wrongs, declining empires and the  scramble for their remains, idle youth rallying to a “pan - this or that” cause,  national honour, inflexible military plans with their own logic, etc. 

Fragments of current world affairs?  Such as war in Gaza, civil war in Syria, barbarous ISIS marching on in Iraq, unrest in the Ukraine,etc.

Europe’s 1914 decision makers have been called sleepwalkers. I wonder whether “we” are wider awake now?

Ah, but a contemplative flâneur is ill-suited to comment on turbulent world affairs.  

In fact, I increasingly feel like one of those medieval monks fully occupied with “pleurer les péchés du monde en attendant le jugement dernier”. 

As if there are two worlds

The setting was serene enough – a terrace near a pond on a summer day.  Insouciance in the air, but not in her words. She sighed “even now, at 75, I don’t get used to it. It’s as if there are two worlds. One where people care for each other and strive for beauty and knowledge and one where they can only kill and destroy”.

I myself often wonder how people in past ages did it – concentrate on science and art amidst wars and other calamities.

So it’s with great interest I read Gardiner’s account of German 17^th Century composers – caught up in a bloody age, yet composing relentlessly. And I learn with satisfaction how, in the midst of Protestant-Catholic strife,  these Lutheran composers eagerly incorporated musical advances made by “the enemy” , the catholic Italian composers.  

" […] The spiralling violence of the Thirty Years War.[…]  Fear of death was matched by fear of life itself, which had become tainted through the sustained distress of warfare, malnutrition and disease. […] Much of the music to emerge from the war years […] now gave a similar topical emphasis to the vanity of human existence. […] The clearest evidence of this malaise comes from the foremost German musician of his day, Heinrich Schütz, who […] spent his thirty-third to sixty-third years in the eye of the war’s storm as Capellmeister to the Dresden Court. His letters convey a picture of widespread depredation and demoralisation, but also the immense courage required to keep alive one’s personal faith – or any artistic  outlet for it – in such straitened circumstances."

[…]

"The influence of Catholic Church music, […], acted as a blood transfusion to the music of the Lutheran Church. […]  It inspired a whole generation of exceptionally talented composers, all born around the middle years of the seventeenth century. […]

These composers gave a new creative impetus to the process of grafting Italian styles of church music on the native rootstock, fusing the vigour of vernacular declamation with the colour and passion of Italian sonorities. Given the bitter feeling between Catholic and Protestant, and the traces which remained of a deep-seated Germanic fear of the corruptive forces of Italian culture […] this is remarkable. But it is typical of the inquisitive yet easy-going pragmatism of creative musicians in all ages that they should wish to source and acquire new techniques regardless of their provenance. […] Such an exchange of ideas across political and administrative frontiers, and across religious divisions, suggests a parallel with what George Steiner calls the ‘communitas of the sciences …. The ideal of a commonwealth of positive, beneficial truths, transcending the bloody, infantile conflicts of religious, dynastic and ethnic hatreds …. As Kepler reportedly said, amid the massacres of religious wars, the laws of elliptical motion belong to no man or principality.’

The same could be said  of music.”   

(from : Music in the Castle of Heaven; John Eliot Gardiner)  

travelling with George Eliot

falling in the space-time gap (June 28th)

swimming in (tempered) light

I’ve been scolded before, about leaving my books on the windowsill, exposed to the sunlight.

But, really, the windowsill-dwelling books are coping well. Because, one, sunlight is relatively rare. And, two, the layers of grime on my windows (composed of billions of car-exhaust-fumes-particles)  undoubtedly function as a high-protection UV filter.

Books-and-(tempered)- light obviously remain one of my favourite photo-subjects, especially now that I am testing a new camera. One that should be better at capturing the “aquatic” quality of indirect late afternoon light. 
  
Books swimming in light. And me in my element. 
That's worth a double exposure! 

About (not) putting music into words

Describing  

Lovers  of art history books  of course know the exquisite sensation of reading insightful words that match the pictorial evidence.  The exhilarating interplay of seeing and understanding.  Describing paintings, there’s a whole  body of literary texts and poems devoted to it , and a venerable word to consecrate the habit:   ekphrasis.

And how about describing what we hear?  For sure, there are lovely poems built entirely around  onomatopoeia’s.  And language is sound of course.  Clattering rain – thundering thunder – twittering birds (1).   So yes, obviously,  we can describe what we hear – but can we describe music? 

  

While in art history there is a well established, long standing relationship between evocative descriptions on the one hand and the visual  arts on the other , this seems  less so in the history of music where descriptions tend to be either technical (and reserved for the musically initiated) or limited to the review of a performance. (2)

Descriptions of works of visual art  are both very precise and very imaginative, immediately conjuring up a scene or an image while also evoking emotional and philosophical meanings & associations. 

But a description in words that effectively evokes a piece of music for the non-initiated?  Well, there are the CD-sleeve notes that give a  blow-by-blow account of the musical progression in terms of instruments, motives, rhythm, melody – sometimes mixed with indications of “emotional” pitch.(3)  And yes, there may be program music where even an accompanying story can be told.  

 However, in musical history there seems  to be no equivalent (at lease not on the same scale) of  the formidable tradition of  "written-out art history", be it in the form of those innumerable “Ecrits sur l’art”  (by many a  poetically inspired writer or artist), or as libraries full of lavishly illustrated and copiously written art history books. 

A quick Google search yielded an interesting article (“Some Thoughts Towards a Theory of Musical Ekphrasis “ ) about Musical Ekphrasis, but tellingly enough it dealt not with  the poetic  description of pieces of music, but rather with the opposite question, i.e. whether music can describe scenes.(4)

Moved to silence  

Perhaps music is indeed too abstract and “springing from [...] depths of the human psyche” that are too deep to fathom?(4)  Maybe we should really follow “Einstein’s summary advice” about Bach’s music (and about music in general) :  “listen, play, love , revere – and keep your trap shut” (5) .  

Luckily,  John Eliot Gardiner, for one,  did not shut up but wrote a wonderful  600+ pages book on Bach.  With insights and formulations that nearly belie the impossibility of describing music.  How well he does justice to the intricate evidence of Bach’s music itself: its mystifying complexity, sure,  but also its “rhythmical elasticity and buoyancy”, its dancing qualities, its empathy and emotional depth, “so full of poignant emotion that we are moved to the very core of our being “. 

Each of us has experienced the shattering effect music can have,  musical reception is highly subjective and the sheer depth of the accompanying emotions could make us (us = uninitiated but sensitive souls)  believe that we each  have some personal,  special insight in “the truth” of the music. This is most likely not the case, the emotion may very well be  not at all relevant to the composer’s aims, let alone to other musiclovers, it is a secret garden not to be shared. (6) 

So, not being a distinguished musical connoisseur, I shall hereby “shut my trap” – and finish with Auden’s words (7)

“All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt and connect.
From Life to Art by painstaking adaption
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.

Pour out your presence, O delight, cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;
You, alone, alone, O imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.”

Non-musical notes

1) Word-examples inspired by the impressive electrical storm we had here at noon : first an oppressive stillness, then a bang and a flash, heaven’s floodgates opened, and the rain started pouring down: first aggressively clattering, then turning into a soothingly purring noise.  And soon a few courageous birds started signing again, while the first  sirens started wailing ( a medley of car alarms and fire engines).

2) of course there are many many reviews, of concerts, of CD's, songs and tunes , both classical and pop/contemporary - , just as there are private testimonials/love declarations to certain pieces of music : but they are not an imaginative, literary genre in their own right 


3)   There’s an  app from Touch Press editions that offers a “multi-media” guide to Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony. Quite impressive – while the music plays you can follow the progress on the score, you get to see the instruments taking their turns to perform, and there’s a continuous written comment running on what exactly is happening. All very instructive and insightful – but not qualifying as ekphrasis ... 
 

4)  

“As I understand it, what must be present in every case of ekphrasis is a three-tiered structure of reality and its artistic transformation:

A.      a scene or story--fictitious or real,

B.      a  representation of that scene or story in visual form (a painting or drawing, photograph, carving, or sculpture (or, for that matter, in film or dance; in any mode that reaches us primarily through our visual perception), and

C.      a rendering of that representation in poetic language.

The poetic rendering can and should do more than merely describe the visual image. Characteristically, it evokes interpretations or additional layers of meaning, changes the viewers' focus, or guides our eyes towards details and contexts we might otherwise overlook. Correspondingly, what must be present in every case of what I will refer to as "the musical equivalent to ekphrasis" is 
  A.      a scene or story--fictitious or real,
   B.      its representation in a visual or a verbal text, and
   C.      a rendering of that representation in musical language.

5) John Eliot Gardiner – Music in the Castle of Heaven   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/30/music-castle-heaven-js-bach-john-eliot-gardiner


6)    Gardiner has this lovely habit of not only having copious references at the end of the book , but also plenty of illuminating quotes at the bottom of the page (it’s surely not an accident that he refers to Walter Benjamin’s  constellations), such as this one by Peter Williams: “ The exquisite world of imagination opened up by any powerful music is itself problematic, for it tempts listeners to put into words the feelings it arouses in them and so to visualize a composer’s priorities and even personality. There must be few people who have played, sung, listened to or written about Bach’s music who do not feel they have a special understanding of him, a private connection, unique to themselves, but ultimately coming from their idea of what music is and does. This might be quite different from the composer’s “


7)  Trust WH Auden to write as insightfully about paintings (Le Musée des Beaux Arts) as he does about music (The Composer).