‘All About is Night’: Spiritual Anxiety and the Ritual Impulse in World War I Europe by James Berry, BA, MM A Dissertation In FINE ARTS: MUSICOLOGY Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved Dr. Christopher Smith Chair Dr. Stacey Jocoy Dr. Thomas Cimarusti Dr. Michael Borshuk Professor Genevieve Durham DeCesaro Peggy Gordon Miller Dean of the Graduate School August, 2011 Copyright 2011, James Berry Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 Acknowledgements This document is indebted to several people who aided in its creation. A special debt of gratitude is owed Christopher Smith whose continued encouragement and careful editor’s eye was invaluable to the final version of this dissertation. Additionally, I would like to thank the members of my committee who suffered tirelessly through quick reading turnarounds: Stacey Jocoy, Thomas Cimarusti, Michael Borshuk, and Genevieve Durham. I am equally indebted to Dorothy Chansky who was a through reader and editor. In addition, I should thank the faculty and administration of Ohio Valley University for their ceaseless understanding and support throughout the completion of my degree. ii Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………… ii I. THE BANKRUPTCY OF CIVILIZATION ....................................................... 1 II. SYMBOLS OF CHANGE ............................................................................... 14 III. AN INHUMAN FINAL CEREMONY .......................................................... 40 IV. DUSK TURNED INTO NOTES .................................................................... 70 V. SHORT LITANIES........................................................................................ 105 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................... 115 iii Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 CHAPTER ONE THE BANKRUPTCY OF CIVILIZATION On August 3, 1914, the British statesman Lord Grey of Falloden said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” 1 He was expressing a view that was reflective of the views of many artists and musicians at the beginning of what would become the first truly world-wide war, that the progress of human culture foreseen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was forever lost. The five years between 1914 and 1919 changed the world forever through political revolution, economic upheavals, and intellectual turmoil. Romain Rolland, one of the greatest war writers, remarked at the onset of the War: “It is horrible to live in the midst of this demented humanity and to be a powerless witness to the bankruptcy of civilization. This European war is the greatest catastrophe in history over the centuries, the ruin of our most sacred hopes for the human fraternity.” 2 The lives of everyone, including those previously on the forefront of the musical avant-garde, were thrown into chaos. Ralph Vaughan Williams took part in the War as an ambulance driver, while Igor Stravinsky was forced to leave his homes in France and Russia and flee to Switzerland for the duration of the War. J.R.R. Tolkien served as a soldier on the Western Front. While in the English army, he wrote the beginnings of what would become the mythology of Middle Earth. Written during this time, the poem “Habbanan beneath the Stars” describes an encampment of men: 1 Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 3. 2 Ibid., 13. 1 Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 There is a sound of faint guitars And distant echoes of a song, For there men gather into rings Round their red fires while one voice sings – And all about is night. Tolkien was expressing the uncertainty of his time. Though men may gather around their fires, they are surrounded by darkness. Paul Valery, shortly after the War, observed in an address at Oxford that “modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We feel that a civilization is as fragile as a life.” 3 Some composers responded to this sense of ‘fragility’ by seeking to create music whose sense of spiritual journey could speak to human needs. This document argues that the composers Erik Satie and Ralph Vaughan Williams addressed post-World War I cultural trauma through the creation of music which evoked ritual-like responses to reconnect with the human needs formerly addressed by sacred music. These two composers and the specific pieces discussed in the following chapters are tied together by the process through which they responded to the War. Each piece is an example of varying compositional responses to this ritual-like process. Victor Turner wrote that artistic performances have “something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, even ‘supernatural’ character of religious action – sometimes to the point of sacrifice.” 4 Turner also describes the concept of “social dramas” in which the normal order of society has been disrupted by conflict. “In large-scale modern societies, social dramas may escalate from the local level to national revolutions, or from the very 3 Hans Kohn, “The Crisis in European Thought and Culture,” in World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History , ed. Jack J. Roth, 25-46 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 28. 4 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 12. 2 Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 beginning may take the form of war between nations.” 5 World War I, then, can be viewed as an example of a large-scale social drama which restructured social groups and brought long term conflict. Turner describes a process which moves from “breach,” where the potential conflict becomes evident, to “crisis,” the period of conflict, and finally to “redress,” where the conflict is resolved. The common modes of redress include the judicial means of courts and the ritual means provided by religious institutions. In modern societies, however, Turner describes how “the third stage … has moved out of the domains of law and religion into those of the various arts.” 6 Therefore the artistic creations of composers and authors, for example, may serve as a means of redress, as a way for the rupture of social drama to return to the norms of society. For the purposes of my argument, I will suggest that the work of Satie and Vaughan Williams, as described in later chapters, was an example of such an attempt at redress, made even more evocative through the connection to their spiritual questioning. Though it is beyond the scope of this document to attempt to provide a comprehensive definition of the sacred, a short discussion of the terminology used in this document is necessary. In describing the sacred quality of certain objects, Catherine Bell comments that “their sacrality is the way in which the object is more than the mere sum of its parts and points to something beyond itself.” 7 Calling something sacred is to denote it as different or separate from something else which might be called profane or mundane. In the same way, a sacred experience is separate from a mundane experience. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157. 3 Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 A sacred experience is one which includes attitudes and the expression of values of the transcendent or the spiritual. This document will explore the sacred experience in terms of two characteristics: ritual-like actions and connotations and liminoid phenomena 8. Ritual-like actions are otherwise normal actions which become symbolically invested through a combination and juxtaposition of supra-situational associations. These are not rituals in the sense of being closely linked with the sacralities of traditional and organized religion, but instead are behaviors, events, or objects that have characteristics similar to rituals. Catherine Bell provides a model for identifying ritual- like actions through the presence of specific characteristics.9 Bell lists formalism (high degrees of formal actions as opposed to informal or casual ones), traditionalism (attempts to make a set of activities identical to or consistent with cultural precedents), invariance (sets of actions marked by precise repetition or self-control), rule-governance (presence of elaborate sets of rules governing the action in question), sacral symbolism (creation or use of objects, places, buildings, or people viewed as sacred), and performance (actions that share characteristics with performance activities). These qualities can denote ritualization individually in some cases, though it is much more common for them to appear in various combinations. Ritual-like actions can be religious in origin, for example pilgrimages which become ritual-like through traditionalism, invariance, and sacral symbolism, or secular in origin, for example the ritual-like actions of a baseball pitcher (invariance and performance). Thus, the invocation of a chorale at the opening of Satie’s Parade can be 8 The term “liminoid” will be discussed in detail below. 9 See Bell, Ritual , 138-170. 4 Texas Tech University, James Berry , 2011 seen as ritual-like through traditionalism, rule-governance, or even sacral symbolism. In the same way, other musical actions become ritual-like by employing those