SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Discourses on Time in the European Avant-Garde A Dissertation Presented by Aaron Allen Hayes to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music (Music History and Theory) Stony Brook University May 2016 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Aaron Allen Hayes We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Judith Lochhead – Dissertation Advisor Professor, Department of Music, Stony Brook University Stephen Decatur Smith – Chairperson of Defense Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Stony Brook University Edward Casey Professor, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University Benjamin Steege Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Columbia University Brian Hulse – Outside Member Associate Professor, Department of Music, College of William and Mary This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Discourses on Time in the European Avant-Garde by Aaron Allen Hayes Doctor of Philosophy in Music (Music History and Theory) Stony Brook University 2016 In the 1950s and 1960s, European composers, especially those interested in the development of serialism and electronic music, framed many of their aesthetic and compositional challenges as problems of time. This dissertation examines the writings and music of five notable composers from this era, and reconstructs the philosophical discourses that implicitly and explicitly provide the intellectual horizons for these temporal problems. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraqué attended the seminar offered by Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire National Supérior de Musique de Paris. With the exception of Barraqué, these composers also attended the International Summer Courses at Darmstadt, the famous center for new music in post-war Europe. There they engaged with the philosopher Theodor Adorno and other composers who were also interested in developing theoretical approaches to new music. This musical and intellectual climate fostered a number of discourses that considered time to be of central importance to the study and creation of music. In doing so, these composers channeled the broader concern with time that marked philosophy and science in the twentieth century. In each chapter of this dissertation, I situate the music and writings of these composers into the philosophical discussions of time that lived in close proximity to their intellectual world. While there were a variety of different theories about iii musical time to emerge from this era, these composers shared a similar set of intellectual inspirations that led them to formulate their problems in similar ways, notably the problem of musical experience. The first two chapters demonstrate that Henri Bergson’s thought provides an important philosophical background for a number of composers, especially the music and theory of Stockhausen and Boulez. Stockhausen’s interest in ‘qualitative’ forms of musical time channel the strong Bergsonian influences that the composer most likely received through Messiaen, Adorno, and Pierre Souvtchinsky. In Stockhausen’s famous essay, “…how time passes…” and his woodwind quintet Zeitmaße (1957) it becomes clear that his concept of ‘qualitative flow’ relies on a Bergsonian response to his scientific study of acoustics. Boulez must be viewed in a similar context. The idea of ‘smooth’ time that Boulez works through in his 1960 Darmstadt lectures parallel the mathematical concept of smoothness in the work of Hermann Weyl, a compatriot of Einstein who was influential in the development of topology. But contrary to Boulez’s mathematical heritage (the field he studied before committing himself to music), the composer was also concerned with the experience and ‘occupation’ of time, and brought in psychological principles of musical experience that also echo Bergsonian premises about the nature of musical time, especially Bergson’s critique of early twentieth century mathematics. After pointing out the resonances between Boulez’s concept of smooth and striated time with both Bergson and the development of calculus and topology, I demonstrate how this tension within the concept of smooth time is exemplified in one of his settings of Mallarmé’s poems, ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ (1957) from Pli selon Pli. Both Stockhausen and Boulez thus use the problem of time to negotiate between scientific or mathematical frameworks on one hand, with their concern with the temporal nature of human experience on the other. The confrontation between Goeyvaerts and Adorno at Darmstadt over the aesthetics of integral serialism is another famous situation that was directly related the issue of musical time. Adorno’s philosophy of time grounds his critique of serialism, and Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos (1951) illustrated for the philosopher the problematically ‘static’ character of serial music. The way in which Goeyvaerts and Adorno conflicted in their interpretation of musical time provides a major window into the general aesthetic challenges that the composers at Darmstadt presented themselves with. In the fourth chapter, I develop a related notion of iv musical stasis that was interpreted through the theological concept of eternity that Messiaen, Goeyvaerts, and Stockhausen referred to, focusing on the influence of their their Catholic faith and the theological traditions surrounding time and eternity. Responding to the large body of work on Messiaen’s theological background, I argue that Messiaen’s concept of eternity is indebted on many points to Augustine, even though the composer himself refers most often to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. This subtle yet decisive difference in the theological understanding of eternity opens up a number of useful analytical approaches to Messiaen’s interest in rhythm and his influence on his students. This influence can most readily be felt in Messiaen’s Quatre études de rythme (1951), and my analysis focuses on the metric and rhythmic elements of the first etude, ‘Île de feu I.’ The final chapter develops a concept of temporality that grows out of the intellectual world of Barraqué. Although it is well known that Barraqué was Michel Foucault’s lover in the early 1950s, the full implications of their shared intellectual pursuits have not been fully grasped by prior scholarship. Their mutual interest in the writings of Hermann Broch, Maurice Blanchot, and Ludwig Binswanger clarifies some of the extent to which Barraqué absorbed important theses about the nature of human temporality from these philosophers. My analysis of Barraqué’s piece, Le temps restitué (1957) for soprano and large ensemble illustrates how Barraqué interpreted the philosophical question of human temporality through the treatment of voice, expressivity, and large scale organization. These composers do not share a single definition of time, but rather the same intellectual horizons. These horizons provide composers with a set of problems that are generative of a diversity of creative solutions. The question of time helped to articulate a set of common problems and challenges that these composers took to be of central importance to their compositional and theoretical efforts, and likewise defined a significant portion of their historical influence. v To my Family Soli Deo Gloria vi Table of Contents List of Music Examples ix List of Tables x List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xii 1 The Historical and Theoretical Horizons of the Question of Time 1 Bias 1: The Independent Composer in the Ivory Tower 13 Bias 2: The Independent Scholar with Original Ideas 15 Bias 3: For and Against Hume 21 Bias 4: The Intellectual versus the Specialist 26 Intuitional versus Dimensional Concepts of Time 32 Chapters 37 2 The Bergsonian Horizons of Stockhausen’s Concept of Time 40 Bergson 45 Souvtchinsky 47 Adorno and the Frankfurt School 50 Messiaen 59 Stockhausen 67 Zeitmaße 75 Conclusion 83 vii 3 The Mathematical and Philosophical Construction of Boulez’s Smooth Time 85 The Continuous and the Discrete 90 Boulez 101 Improvisations sur Mallarmé II—‘Une dentelle s’abolit’ 112 4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Time and Goeyvaerts’s Sonata for Two Pianos 125 Historical Background and Serial Structure 129 Adorno’s Perspective on Serialism, Analysis and the Nature of Time 134 “Melody” and Subjective Expression 147 Unconscious and Conscious Motivic Relations 153 Conclusion: 1966 Panel Discussion on Time 161 5 Messiaen and Eternity 165 Metaphorical relation to eternity 167 Psychological relation to eternity and the experience of ecstasy 176 Rational notion of eternity and Messiaen’s ‘charm of proportions’ 181 Conclusion 197 6 Existential Temporality in Barraqué’s Le temps restitué 202 Barraqué, Blanchot, Broch 206 Time and Temporality 210 Binswanger: Dream Gestures, 2nd Movement 230 Conclusion 243 7 Conclusion 247 Bibliography 255 Appendix: Barraqué’s adaptation of Kohn translation of Le temps restitué 273 viii List of Music Examples 1.1 George Frideric Handel, Sonata op. 1 no. 7, HWV 365, 1 1.2 Anton Webern, Concerto for Nine Instruments