On the Meaning of Music The essay is the first installment of what at one time may become a book entitled On the Meaning of Music, or Why Music? In the Charlie Chaplin film Limelight there is a wonderful dialog between the old clown Calvero and the young dancer he saved from a suicide attempt: Dancer: Why didn’t you let me die? Calvero (drunk): What’s the hurry? Are you in pain? (The dancer shakes her head.) Calvero: That’s all that matters, the rest is fantasy. Millions of years it’s taken to evolve human consciousness, and you want to wipe it out. What about the miracle of all existence—more important than anything in the whole universe! What can the stars do?! Nothing! They can sit on their axis. And the sun? Shooting flames two hundred eighty thousand miles high! So what! Wasting all its natural resources. Can the sun think? Is it conscious? No! But you are. (The dancer has fallen asleep ...) Pardon me my mistake.1 To prepare this lecture I have interrupted work on my opera, to be entitled Prospero, the text of which is based on Shakespeare’s Tempest. Before I ask myself why I compose at all—in other words, what is the meaning of making music for me personally—I must ask myself why I am giving a lecture about the meaning of music—that is, what it means for me to write about the meaning of music. The question is easy to answer. For some time now I have been entertaining the idea of writing a little book, if possible, in a style comprehensible for non-specialists as well, which gives an account of what is important about music for a contemporary composer, for a composing contemporary—in this concrete case, for me personally. And not only about the music that I write, but also the music that I hear. This lecture is an occasion for me to formulate my first thoughts on the topic. Why I want to tackle the topic rather than any other, when there are so many other topics related to music, is another question that may not be so easy to answer. I could certainly restrict myself to writing about composing, which is difficult enough. Why don’t I? Is composing perhaps not enough for me? Is it not so important for me that I want to dedicate my entire energy to it? Or is the very reason that composing is so important for me that I want to better understand why it is so important for me? Or: Is theorizing more important for me than practical activity? (To the extent that it can be claimed that composing is practical activity.) As regards this last question, I believe that theory cannot be separated from practice, although it is also clear that the composer is first and foremost supposed to compose, or, as the case may be, what is composed should enjoy primacy over what is theoretically thought, at least for me. The fact that I selected such a topic certainly also has to do with the time, namely with its passing, or, more precisely, with getting older. The time is coming in which one asks the fundamental questions of life: What do I actually want? What is the most important thing in life for me? Why am I the way I am? Or, even more generally: Why do I exist? What is it all about, or is something at all? My God, these are questions!—whereby this exclamation does not ring true, because, if I had a God I could call upon and upon whom I could rely, it would all be considerably easier. The problem begins with the fact that I am unfortunately not religious. I may not be religious, but I am also not a-religious. For religio actually means connection, or cohesion—and, indeed, I am of the opinion that all living beings and all non-living subjects are somehow connected. What I mean to say is that I feel that there are flowing boundaries between all living and—perhaps only apparently?—non-living things in our world, and that there is a fundamental unity.2 Someone who does not belong to one of the many religions at our disposal—all of which are essentially related, of course—may perhaps feel an even greater urge to ponder the meaning of his activities and of human 1 [Transcribed from Limelight (1952): The Chaplin Collection (Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2003).] 2 Cf., for instance, W. Welsch, ―Reflecting the Pacific‖, in: Contemporary Aesthetics, www.contempästhetics.org. existence in general. Whether he finds a plausible answer to these questions is another issue. Yet the span of time we are given is short, and considering that death is approaching inevitably, it becomes more and more important to ask oneself what one would like to do with the time left. So you ask the essential questions, that is, the questions about the nature of existence. And this, of course, includes also the question about the meaning of what one’s purpose in life is—in my case: music. I would like to split the question implicitly contained in the title into two parts, namely one as to what it means for me to hear music; and the second, as to what it means for me to write music. I will start with the second part. Why do I write music? I could answer: because I cannot do anything else, or because composing is what I do best. Yet this answer would not get at the core of the question. First, I could imagine doing something else; and second, the decision about becoming a composer was already settled at a point in time (namely, on the day of my tenth birthday, when I made up my first composition, a waltz in C minor) before I could know whether there was anything else I could do as well or as badly, or in any case not better. For whatever reasons, the longing to make music was predominant already then. I gave in to this longing and over these many years have acquired a degree of artistic skill that allowed me to practice this profession my whole life long, and even to live from it. What is this longing? What is this profession or ―calling‖? (in German ―Beruf‖ means profession and derives from ―rufen‖ or call). I don’t believe that it has anything to do with being ―called upon‖ to do what one believes to do best (who does the calling?); rather, one does what one considers most important, something that bestows meaning to one’s life. The motivations involved in someone’s striking out on a certain path are extremely varied and generally cannot even be reconstructed after the fact. Not to exclude the possibility that they have to do with experiences that you already made in the womb. Especially as far as music is concerned, acoustic perception can be decisive at the earliest age, all the way back to the foetal stage.3 Also important are feeling of success in childhood, which brings me to a personal recollection. All in all, I will keep this lecture as personal as possible, as I cannot answer for theoretical notions, but only for what I have experienced myself. When all is said and done, it doesn’t matter what one says, but rather what one does—and I think that’s the only subject to be discussed in a well-founded and authentic manner. Thus, as a child I had developed a certain skill in playing well-known songs on the harmonica—a skill that made me successful with the Boy Scout troop I was a member of at the age of eight or nine. I was also successful when I started playing a piano that stood around at home, mute and dusty, picking out familiar melodies and even inventing short pieces like the birthday waltz I mentioned above. These successes and rewards were probably so important to me because I wasn’t so successful in other areas like playing soccer with kids my age or in school, which became very difficult for me when my parents sent me to the German school in Rome at the age of ten when I didn’t speak a single word of German. Our teacher was a musician and became my first piano teacher. He supported me in my attempts to compose and encouraged me to play my pieces for the class. When he found out that I had been introduced to the great Paul Hindemith—the most famous German composer at the time—as the youngest Italian composer, I had made it, at least as far as my musical career at the German school was concerned. In addition to the experience of success, however, what counted was my pride in being able to prove my seriousness and stamina. When I insisted to my parents that they should let me take piano lessons, my mother said it would end up just like it did with my stamp collection, namely that after three months I would have had enough of the piano, too. Well, the fact that I still remember my mother’s skepticism nearly fifty years later certainly means something. Is it conceivable that I became a composer to prove to my mother and to myself that I am capable of being steadfast and of sticking with a decision once I’ve made it? Why not. The paths of providence are infinite. In this case composing also—and not least—was important to show my parents and myself (hence the superego and the ego) that I am a person to be taken seriously, someone who is reliable because he is able to keep his word.