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Excellent
article and putting on the table what 'meaning in music' actually might be. Is
musical meaning located in the work itself, or does it consist of references
towards the world outside the work? My understanding of the article is, that it
says that music which has no bearing on the human condition, is mere ornament,
more or less chique entertainment, nice after a heavy meal but unconnected to
the real business of human existence and hence, easily developed into sonic art
which 'means' only itself. But I think it is clear that Debussy never intended
to avoid meaning in his music, but located it away from the egocentric 'I'
which was cultivated by the romantics. The comparison with Mahler makes all
this clear: for Mahler, the emotional experience of the Self was central to his
work, while for Debussy, it was the experience of the world that he wanted to
render, without the 'I' coming in-between with its emotional outbursts. That is
why we have 'Nuages' not as the Self reflecting upon itself during a summer
night sky, but as the Self loosing itself in its observation of the sky where
clouds calmly sail ahead. So, Debussy's art is, in fact, very modest,
forgetting the Self and being absorbed into the world, and expressing the
process very eloquently.
This
means that this music is very subtle, in psychological terms. In Pelléas, it is
not the 'thrills' of nice sounds that form its meaning, but the revelation that
the lovers occupy a wave length inaccessible to Golaud, who gets insane with
jealousy because on that ethereal level, his wife commits adultery but not in
'real' terms, so she is 'guilty' and 'not guilty' at the same time. To be able
to express such subtleties, a music is needed that is capable of expressing
meaning with equally subtle means, and thus: meaning that directly relates to
the human condition.
With
Mahler, meaning is trumpeted fortissimo at every bar, so much so that the
listener forgets and excuses his vulgarities, clumsiness and lack of stylistic
consistency. It is, anyway, very true and meaningful music. Debussy however,
opens a door to much more subtle worlds of meaning, through which we can only
enter if we accept that there are more ways in which we can experience meaning
in music.
The
obvious sensual beauty of Debussy's music does not show that it must therefore
be 'meaningless', but in contrary underlines the beauty which is embedded in
the natural world, and thus in the human psyche which has developed together
with the world in millions of years of evolution. With an amplifying glass,
Debussy picks-out the beauty of the world and relates it to our capacity to
perceive it, thereby confirming that we are part of the world. If that is not
meaning, within and outside music, I don't know what it otherwise could be.
Debussy
was, of course, misunderstood by modernists, who lacked the subtlety to hear
where this music is 'about', and only perceived the sonic surface of the music.
They also misunderstood Webern, who was a passionate and very frustrated
romantic, and tried to concentrate the last drops of existential meaning in
cristalline constructions, where they easily evaporated under the gaze of quasi-scientific
postwar modernism.
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The discussion that ensued on SD can be read here:
