It is nevertheless necessary, as I said before, that the pupil learns to manipulate the devices that produce tonality. For music has not yet evolved so far that we can now speak of discarding tonality; moreover, the necessity for explaining its requirements arises also from the need to recognize its functions in the works of the past. Even if the present allows us to envision a future freed from the restrictive demands of this principle, it is still, even today, but much more in the past of our art, one of the most important musical techniques. It is one of the techniques that contribute most to the assurance of order in musical works of that order, consistent with the material, which so greatly facilitates the untroubled enjoyment of the essential beauties in the music. One of the foremost tasks of instruction is to awaken in the pupil a sense of the past and at the same time to open up to him prospects for the future.
Applied to our present concern, that means: Let the pupil learn the laws and effects of tonality just as if they still prevailed, but let him know of the tendencies that are leading toward their annulment. Let him know that the conditions leading to the dissolution of the system are inherent in the conditions upon which it is established. Let him know that every living thing has within it that which changes, develops, and destroys it. Life and death are both equally present in the embryo. What lies between is time. Nothing intrinsic, that is; merely a dimension, which is, however, necessarily consummated. Let the pupil learn by this example to recognize what is eternal: change, and what is temporal: being. Thus he will come to the conclusion that much of what has been considered aesthetically fundamental, that is, necessary to beauty, is by no means always rooted in the nature of things, that the imperfection of our senses drives us to those compromises through which we achieve order. For order is not demanded by the object, but by the subject. The pupil will conclude, moreover, that the many laws that purport to be natural laws actually spring from the struggle of the craftsman to shape the material correctly; and that the adaptation of what the artist really wants to present, its reduction to fit within the boundaries of form, of artistic form, is necessary only because of our inability to grasp the undefined and unordered. The order we call artist form is not an end in itself, but an expedient. As such by all means justified, but to be rejected absolutely wherever it claims to be more, to be aesthetics.
This is not to say that some future work of art may do without order, clarity, and comprehensibility, but that not merely what we conceive as such deserves these names. For nature is also beautiful where we do not understand her and where she seems to us unordered. Once we are cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty, and once we have recognized that only the necessity to produce compels him to bring forth what will perhaps afterwards be designated as beauty, then we will also understand that comprehensibility and clarity are not conditions that the artist is obliged to impose on his work, but conditions that the observer wishes to find fulfilled. Even the untrained observer finds these conditions in the works he has known for some time, for example, in all the older masterworks; here has has had time to adapt. With newer works, at first strange, he must be allowed more time.
But, whereas the distance between the onrushing brilliant insight of the genius and the ordinary insight of his contemporaries is relatively vast, in an absolute sense, that is, viewed within the whole evolution of the human spirit, the advance of his insight is quite small. Consequently the connection that gives access to what was once incomprehensible is always finally made. Whenever one has understood, one looks for reasons, finds order, and what we claim to perceive as laws defining order and clarity may perhaps only be laws governing our perception, without therefore being the laws a work of art must obey. And that we think we see laws, order, in the work of art can be analogous to our thinking we see ourselves in the mirror, although we are of course not there. The work of art is capable of mirroring what we project into it. The conditions of our conceptual power imposes, a mirror image of our own nature, may be observed in the work. This mirror image does not, however, reveal the plan upon which the work itself is oriented, but rather the way we orient ourselves to the work.
The positive gain of a work of art depends upon the conditions other than those expressed by the laws and is not to be reached by the way of the laws. But even what is negative is gain, since through avoiding such particulars as presumably hinder the realization of artistic values the pupil can lay a foundation. Not one that promotes creativity, but one that can regulate it, if it will allow itself to be regulated! Instruction that proceeds this way accomplishes something else, as well.
It leads the pupil through all those errors that the historical struggle for knowledge has brought with it; it leads through, it leads past errors, perhaps past truths as well. Nevertheless, it teaches him to know how the search was carried on the methods of thinking, the kinds of errors, the way little truths of locally limited probability became, by being stretched out into a system, absolutely untrue. In a word, he is taught all that which makes up the way we think. Such instruction can thus bring the pupil to love even the errors, if only they have stimulated thought, turnover and renewal of intellectual stock. And he learns to love the work of his forebears, even if he cannot apply it directly to his own life, even if he has to translate it in order to put it to very different use. He learns to love it, be it truth or error, because he finds in it necessity. And he sees beauty in that everlasting struggle for truth; he recognizes that fulfillment is always the goal one yearns for, but that it could easily be the end of beauty. He understands that harmony – balance – does not mean fixity of inactive factors, but equilibrium of the most intense energies. Into life itself, where there are such energies, such struggles – that is the direction instruction should take. To represent life in art, life, with its flexibility, its possibilities for change, its necessities; to acknowledge as the sole eternal law evolution and change – this way has to be more fruitful than the other, where one assumes an end of evolution because one can thus round off the system.
Rick says:
thanks for the richter pics – they go well with my recording of the frisell music. now i can listen and gaze….
Shipp says:Halfway through the first painting/song, I ran out of breath, because I wasn’t breathing.