Beyond the Style Breach
Peter Schat · 2012
In order to understand a style, according to Frans Briiggen, one must study its predecessor. A style is born, not made. A n d dies, as wel l . O n l y some ideas survive. This is w h y style is of no concern to the true creative talent. What is important to h i m is making the right decisions d o w n to the smallest detail; countless decisions, made at h igh speed: this note is good, this one must go, make this a beat sooner, here a little bit later, suddenly a sforzato, now piano, this instrument is better here than that one, etcetera and so on, patiently weaving on - and, i n one fell swoop, a new style is born. One cannot want to do this, one can at most hope that it w i l l occur. So too i n the evolution of a new type of plant or animal: at a certain place and time, the famous biological niche appears, &s;space for viabi l i ty &s; , w h i c h makes a new life-form possible, but is impossible to predict beforehand. A l l major styles i n art, f rom baroque, rococo, classicism and romanticism, to impressionism and modernism, are such &s;spaces for viabi l i ty &s; and we call certain artists &s;great&s; not because they arrived o n this planet as new messiahs, but because they were first to discover, often coincidentally, these spaces, by, once again, resisting what came before. (A &s;style&s; was originally the instrument w h i c h the ancients used to inscribe u p o n their wax tablets. The upper part was flattened i n order to wipe away what was written. Especially this flattened bit interests me.) Different styles are related by transitions of style; it is precisely these transitions w h i c h quicken the heartbeat of the inspired musicologist. I w o u l d l ike to point out a few of these transitions. M y criterion i n doing this is what one might call a &s;hinge&s; i n music history: the first measures of Wagner&s;s Tristan und Isolde f rom 1856. In the third entrance of the main theme, I construct the fo l lowing transition: The reason behind this is that even though Wagner wrote d o w n a revolutionary chord, for generations to come haunting E u - rope like a spectre (as we shall see), he nonetheless never abandoned the tonal deep-structure of the music, the tonality. Even more than that: nothing emphasizes the (diatonic) tonality so much as the (chromatic) leading notes that yearn for their target notes. A n d these first measures (as i n the entire love opera for that matter) seethe w i t h these leading-notes, d o w n into the most hidden-away middle-voices and fills, langsam und schmachtend. One can imagine al l of twentieth-century music as a struggle against these leading-notes.