IV.
first endings
Read Part I, Part II, and Part III.
A series of composer evenings at the local music library in Kongens Lyngby, just north of Copenhagen, made a lasting impression on the teen-aged Hans Abrahamsen.
[The conductor-composer] Svend Aaquist, who was a few classes above me, showed me Henning Christiansen’s music and Pelle [Gudmundsen-Holmgreen]’s music, and I really felt that this was the new music. At that time, I also started to listen to electronic music, and I had heard a little about Stockhausen and all that, but I felt that in many ways it was old music. It was a systematic music and an unfree music. But when I saw, for instance, Henning Christiansen’s Models, I became deeply fascinated by the way of “cleansing” music [“rense” musik].
What stands out about the four movements of October is not simply their deployment of limited material and rough-hewn compositional techniques—the first movement is, for the most part, a systematic “add-one-note-and-recombine” affair—but the repeated chords or notes that end each movement. In the case of the fourth and final entry, they comprise the entire piece. We hear a middle C-F♯ tritone repeated 43 times, mostly in consecutive sixteenth notes. Interest, of course, then arises where there are hiccups. The predecessor to this piece seems to be Schoenberg’s op. 19, no. 2, also only nine bars long, whose repeated iteration of the considerably sweeter-sounding G-B dyad Alex Ross has likened to “two eyes, staring ahead, never blinking.” The repetitions seem to mark time, but, marked 56 units per minute, at a pace slightly slower than the tick of a second hand. Time has slowed down just enough for it to feel as if time is simply that slow.
October is unlikely to grab those who only love Abrahamsen’s “hits”: Schnee, let me tell you, anything from the aughts and beyond. Even those enamored by his works from the eighties might find it strange. This was a different period. It’s the Pablo Honey of Radiohead, La révolution du langage poétique of Julia Kristeva. It’s a piece that inevitably lulls you into working backwards, to cast a shadow upon the reverse flow of time. It’s a Columbo episode, the inverted detective story. In many ways, the notier, swirlier, snowier works that form a part of the Abrahamsen fairy-tale landscape seem to fit a generic “early style” far more readily than they do a “late style.”
The English professor Gordon McCullan and art historian Sam Smiles, in their edited volume collating a series of sustained investigations into “lateness” by a range of scholars from music, the visual arts, and literature (Late Style and Its Discontents, Oxford), take down the romantic, generic, and most important, transhistorical nature of late style (impossible, they argue) attributed commonly and uncritically to figures like Beethoven or Goethe. The most recent and reticent influencer of these deeply held beliefs is, they claim, the late Edward Said (On Late Style). As they pronounce boldly of the “unwary scholar”:
Elucidating late style requires more than deploying a few sentences from Said, whose book, for all its flaws, seem to function all too often in current critical writing as the only required evidence of research into ideas of lateness.
McCullan writes of an experience at a 2002 visit to the Musée Picasso when he predicted, with no particular expertise in art history, the description the museum mounted on Picasso’s late works, completed in his nineties, with its emphasis on renewal, rediscovery, “return to the ‘childhood’ of art,” and, at the same time, a “forecasting” of the “trends of contemporary painting.” It disturbed McCullan that it seemed he was “looking not so much at Picasso’s late style as at late style’s Picasso.” He concludes:
“Late style” is not a natural phenomenon—a real, if ineffable, characteristic of the output of certain geniuses late in life—but a trope, a critical construct, one which rapidly became an artistic construct, a genre that creative artists could choose to adopt.
The authors are quick to separate the oft-conflated concepts of Spätstil (or late style) and an Alterstil (or “old-age style”), which is, in their view, a mere refinement of the late style, applicable to masters who have achieved an old age. Proximity to death, or more precisely, to one’s own death, “at any age” (emphasis theirs) can provoke a late style, and this allows for a distinction with the Mozarts, Keatses, and Schuberts, not to mention countless female creatives who cut their careers short when marital and maternal responsibilities took precedence.
In a way, to bloom late is to die late. Scarlatti was a late bloomer. So was Picasso, in this way. So was late J.S. Bach—he was a poppy alright, so off-trend he was. But then, of course, death, especially those deemed premature, “before one’s time,” not finishing off one’s full season, has its own way of boosting some careers, another way of reading “late bloomer.” Abrahamsen is a particularly notable example of a late bloomer: he was barely given a mention in the Danish Music Information Centre’s 2000 national respective, and his early works from the 70s are rarely, if ever performed (I still have yet to hear, in any medium, his deliberately foursquare Skum for orchestra). He suffered a case of composer’s block in the early 90s, during which he arranged works by Debussy, Bach, and Nielsen, and his output today continues to hinge flexibly on his arrangements of his previous work, explicitly stated or not.
It was only when he met his partner Anne Marie Abildskov that he came to the end of his “fermata” (which I cannot help but hear pronounced as “fuh-may-ta,” in his characteristic accent). The work that broke the impasse, his Piano Concerto, seemed in its own way to be a first “late” work. One senses easy periodizing here, a break away from his earlier “concretist” or self-consciously polystylistic works—written in his autumn—to the descriptive, fantastic wintry world of Hans Christian Andersen and snowscaped fairy tales. The self-exoticizing aspect is not absent—if the past is a foreign country, the timeless fiction of a foreign country is a doubly att/ref/ractive lens.
But is it possible to have a “modernist” view upon late style—prescient but reflective, fragmentary but consummative, with “forms incomprehensible to their contemporaries” and “creative rejuvenescence” (to quote Albert Brinckmann)—at the very start of one’s career? [1]
The answer is, in fact given by Smiles himself:
We need a more open, more critical, and more historically and generically sensitive engagement with late work…In particular we need a critical engagement with late work that recognizes the limitations of the working premise that lateness is a transhistorical phenomenon that aspires to the condition of the modern, [which] misrepresents late-life creativity by modern and postmodern writers, composers and artists…If we are to build coherent and lasting critical accounts of significant creative artists at the end of their lives, we need to stop sustaining an outmoded myth of lateness and begin to address the actual conditions of late creativity.
But here’s the thing: we ought to accept that lateness is a “transhistorical” phenomenon insofar as composers like Abrahamsen seemed to have approached it from the only place he could, from the start of his career. Lateness is sequential, so we are all late Beethoven, late Schoenberg; we are all reflections, and so we are all reflecting. As scholars like Jean Christensen argued, Denmark, being a European artistic backwater in the 50s and 60s, observed the mainland from a distance, thereby doing more objectifying than reckoning work. Denmark is a late bloomer by all accounts, at least to western music. Its trendiness (see: Eliasson, happiness, hygge, Ingels…) is a sign of its latest-ness, ascending from side act to main stage.
If the notion of “early lateness” seems to be a case of Harold Chasen dressing up in an age-inappropriate tuxedo, going to funerals (Fun!-erals!), and faking his own suicides (as Pauline Kael describes him: a “sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan”), before meeting the “carpe diem”-touting Maude, it may be a way of bringing a quality of ever-present “transhistorical” lateness to his otherwise privileged, dull, conformist life. It creates moments of “eruptive subjectivity,” as Adorno would have it. Simply put, death, especially self-inflicted, can put a whole lot of import on the life immediately before, for oneself and for others, who then run otherwise mundane events over and over in their minds, weighing them down with ever more layers of significance (see: Levé, Vivier, Wallace, whose second Google autocomplete option is his name followed by “death”). It “both fulfills its presentiment and demand[s] that we complete [his] self-portrait, re-read and re-view it in light of deferred information,” as Yevgeniya Traps says of Levé’s Suicide.
When Harold first chats with Maude and says to her, “You don’t look eighty,” she retorts, “Greet the dawn with the Breath of fire!” Later, she admits, “of course, there’s no doubt the body is giving out. I’m well into autumn. I’ll have to be giving it all up after Saturday.” We might also note that the very first track of the soundtrack to Harold and Maude is Cat Stevens’s campfire-affable take on the hymn “Morning Has Broken.” If the film is about any one thing, it is about Maude’s autumn catalyzing of Harold’s second awakening, which results in the dawn of a life estimably worth reflecting on. This life only just begins at the end of the film, enwombed by feelings of an impending morning. Early life can have late styles, I contend, if we reflect upon for whom the lateness first belongs. Harold gets his glimpse at someone who has not only lived to old age, but who has done the one thing he couldn’t—actually kill herself. Late styles are similar in this regard, especially if we are aware and sensitive to their myths and generalities, those very ones McCullan and Smiles argue against.
YouTube kept suggesting to me recently that I listen to Paul Badura-Skoda’s last recital, on the 31st of May, at the Vienna Musikverein. I gave in. Between the Schubert op. 90 Impromptus and Mozart’s C minor sonata was Schumann’s Kinderszenen. The first entry, “Of Foreign Lands and Peoples” (=”Of the Past?”) obviates any sense of dreamy recollection—Badura-Skoda is impatient as a nostalgic. Like Debussy’s Children’s Corner and Abrahamsen’s Ten Studies for piano (1984/98), which overtly references Schumann (and Mahler, and Schoenberg, and Chopin…), this is hyper-reflectivity, not capturing the innocence of childhood like one would a cloche over a butterfly, to study it, but rather to capture distance that is only possible through lateness. In this way Schubert might not have been able to pull such a feat; though his twelve or so years of creativity were fecund, such precocity colliding with any semblance of the onset of death precludes such distance.
“I think we dutifully admire the Shakespearean writer, able to capture the seven ages of man from mewling infant to second childishness,” Zadie Smith writes, in an essay on Levé, “but we reserve our special adoration for writers who get—how to put it?—stuck at this intense, imbalanced and unforgiving age,” one in which “overhearing a phoney [sic] conversation could make you want to kill yourself.” She advances the idea, then, that he is eternally early. I used to think I could never listen to anyone below the age of thirty perform the last Schubert sonata. Any performance has me wondering whether the player would elect to take the first ending of its first movement, whose “heavenly length” promises such a tortured, relived second childishness, led in by an infamous chthonic trill. How could they possibly plumb the depths (and deaths) of lateness? But I know now I had found such lengths difficult. And I have since changed my mind. Now, I wonder if I can listen to anyone below the age of thirty play Kinderszenen. What do they know of earliness? ⫷ [Oct. 31, 2019]
[1] I recently had a discussion with a friend about the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, who began as a committed modernist and, in his recent music, his “old-” and “late-style” music, seems to me as aerosol cheese as you can get without heading to your local 7-Eleven.
