A Hunger Artist

Influence / Interpretation / Adaptation A Hunger Artist Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Electronic Music and Recording Media Mills College, 2014 by Dylan Neely Approved by: Reading Committee __________________________ James Fei Director of Thesis _______________________________ Zeena Parkins Reader of Thesis _________________________ Maggi Payne Head of the Music Department _________________________ Dr. Kimberley L. Philips Provost and Dean of the Faculty TABLE OF CONTENTS Influence 4 Interpretation 10 Adaptation (I) 14 Adaptation (II) 22 Conclusion 3 Bibliography 341 Appendix: A Hunger Artist Score 37 4 “Every writer creates his own predecessors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”1 – Jorge Luis Borges Influence A Hunger Artist is a one-act chamber opera adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story by the same name. I first read Kafka in a required college seminar class shortly after turning seventeen. The class, covering a wide swath of post-Enlightenment Western thought, had already swept through texts from Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, W.E.B. Dubois, and E.M. Forster, but it was the final module on The Trial, read alongside Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that affirmed for me the fundamental shifts in human perception that occurred over the centuries-long project of modernity.2 I had known Kafka as a mythic figure, the gloomy Austro-Hungarian Jew from Prague whose multivalent name is loosely thrown about to describe nightmares and long lines at the DMV. I had eagerly anticipated reading The Trial but had been unprepared for the thrill of his words, which led me to devour all of his novels and collected stories within months (in translation, with some stumbling through the shorter stories in German). I have returned to Kafka’s parables, stories, and novels regularly. There is no writer, with the possible exception of Borges, whom I find as endlessly renewable. 1 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Direction Books, 2007), 201. From the essay Kafka and His Precursors. 2 A feeling that was, in retrospect, overblown. Fredric Jameson complicates the relationship between the quote-unquote project of modernity and the aesthetics of modernism effectively: “Most often, the aesthetic experience is itself called upon to function as a utopian suspension; while in modernism, aesthetic value has most often been conceived as a call to radical innovation – whether as a substitute for modernization or revolution or, on the contrary, as a reinforcement of either or both of those things, it is never very clear; and sometimes as a compensation for them.” Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (New York: Verso, 1998), 36. 5 Walter Benjamin describes Kafka’s “stories pregnant with a moral to which they never give birth.”3 The ambiguity of his work makes it tempting and exhilarating to read explanations into it; Bill Dodd writes: “Kafka criticism abounds with hobby-horse interpretations which fail to do justice to the structural complexity and semantic and semiotic richness of the fiction, reading into it excessively partial religious, existential, psychoanalytic, and other frames of meaning.”4 While wary of the efficacy or ultimate truth-value of such partial interpretations, the fecund intellectual experience of analyzing Kafka’s work has been a source of musical inspiration – coincidentally or not, I began seriously composing notated music within a month of first reading The Trial. This gushing is by way of saying that, far from being an incidental text, the desire to interpret A Hunger Artist was something that struck me upon my first reading of it and that gestated in the six years since that time, even as my musical education transpired and provided me with tools necessary to attempt an adaptation. Decisions concerning the adaptation and interpretation of the text were inextricable from the musical composition. Formal choices and details of the musical material arose from close considerations of the text and a desire to align the music and text around a cohesive aesthetic vision. Cohesion, though, need not imply an aspiration toward dramatic realism or a desire to collapse the distinctions between music, movement, text, and staging. The relationship between text and musical setting takes multiple stances in the piece and is not always one of straightforward support, paralleling the interpretive ambiguity of the text. 3 Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 2: 1927 – 1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 497. 4 Bill Dodd, “The Case for a Political Reading” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, ed. Julian Preece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 133. 6 The aesthetics of vocalization is a central concern in dramatic adaptation. Discussing the rise of opera at the turn of the seventeenth century, Ruth Katz writes: “But the need for ‘pretexts’ for singing continually underlines the fundamental problem opera confronts: namely, the problem of marrying words and music and the resistance that this encounters in the music drama. Hence the extensive theorizing about the aesthetics of opera, and the persistent efforts to define the power and the limits of words and music, which have accompanied the empirical efforts of composers to find solutions.”5 Related to this question of the singing voice and the words being expressed, there are the encompassing issues concerning the adaptation of literary material into opera or music theater. At least two fundamental aesthetic problems are apparent: the affective relationship between music and text, and the translation of prose into dramatic form. These are both overarching questions, which contain within themselves competing historical narratives and unresolved debates over the aesthetic, philosophical, and political principles underlying their various interpretations. Composing A Hunger Artist necessitated numerous decisions over the treatment of language and the relationship of music to text. While these choices are informed by the historical debates over musical dramaturgy outlined below, they aren’t easily reducible to a clear ideological framework. Musical meaning and literary semantics are both contested terrain, and attempting a synthesized, reified definition of their relationship to each other – either in analysis or in compositional practice – is beyond my aspirations. It appears as both impossible and undesirable, an endeavor to replace a flexible shear with a teetering wall. Theorizing music drama would require some sort of working dialectic between semantics, the study 5 Ruth Katz, The Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Invention of Opera (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 28. 7 of meaning in language, and the heavily debated field of music semiology. Nicholas Cook provides a good summary of these issues: “Not only are there widely divergent explanations of musical meaning, but whole systems of musical aesthetics have been built on the premiss that music simply does not have meaning. Now what distinguishes the concept of meaning from that of effect is that the former is predicated on communication, on human agency, whereas the latter is not (that is why we talk about the effects of sunlight, not its meaning). It follows that any analysis of musical meaning needs to begin with a clear grasp of the communicative context within which this meaning is realized. But musical meaning is all too often discussed in the abstract, rather than in terms of specific contexts, as if it were somehow inherent in ‘the music itself’ regardless of the context of its production and reception.”6 The comparison of prose and poetry to music was a common trope of Romanticism; as music was situated closer to ideals of transcendence and abstract, non-signifying aesthetic beauty, literature was elevated in its move toward music. Within the rise of “art religion” and the l’art pour l’art ideology of the late- nineteenth century music was held as the ideal form of artistic expression, as evinced by Walter Pater, who declared, “All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music.” Peter Gay bluntly summarizes this statement as, “the purpose of art is art.”7 The related concept of “absolute music” was an invention of the nineteenth century – a term coined as a pejorative by Richard Wagner; Carl Dahlhaus explains: “The older idea of music, against which the idea of absolute music had to prevail, was the concept, originating in antiquity and never doubted until the seventeenth century, that music, as Plato put it, consisted of harmonia, rhythmos, and logos. Harmonia meant regular, rationally systematized relationships among tones; rhythmos, the system of musical time, which in ancient times included dance and organized motion; and logos, language as the expression of human reason. Music without language was therefore reduced, its nature constricted: a deficient type or mere shadow of what music actually is.”8 6 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4. 7 Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 54. 8 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 8. For more on this discussion, see chapter one, “Spirituality and Power in Western Music,” of The Musical Politics of 1920s Berlin, my undergraduate thesis. 8 This theory was explicated most influentially by Eduard Hanslick, who wrote, “Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.”9 Recalling as it does Cage’s call to “Let sounds be themselves, rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expression of human sentiments,”10 the unquestioned romanticism of strains within the post-war musical avant-garde becomes evident. Taruskin elucidates this link: “It fell to Cage to magnify and purify the notion of absolute music beyond anything the romantics had foreseen. In his compositions of the 1950s, romantic art reached the most astounding, self-subverting purism of its whole career.

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