Back in seminary, we started practicing some goofy music. At the time, I thought, “why on earth are we singing this craziness?” Now I understand: it was so I would have interesting things to talk about later.
“Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter, bind a Leopard to the altar, and consecrate his spear to the Lord.” – from Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722-1771).
It was – quite literally – craziness. Christopher Smart was in an insane asylum at the time. Benjamin Britten took the poetry and set it to music that fit the mood: idiosyncratic, one might say.
I remembered all this while I read a review for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's concerto "Nobody knows de trouble I see."
Apparently, the music was written in the 50’s in postwar Germany and, as the reviewer put it, “it represents the attempt of a German composer to find a place for an African American spiritual in the world of the then-new German music, which was trying to replace old-fashioned emotion with the scientific method.”
I wondered if perhaps this composer felt the postwar impulse to banish pathos in favor of logos was motivated by well-intentioned fear. Perhaps, trying to find a more wholistic voice that combined all parts of the self, he sought a voice of sorrow that could moan its hopeful pain through a highly structured musical medium.
As the reviewer points out, Zimmerman later killed himself, “caught in a nightmare from which he couldn't escape.”
Tragedies of this sort raise complicated questions for me. In the modern world, how many of our crazy artists would simply be medicated into happiness… have the pathos driven straight out of them? Is what we seek in psychoanalysis the discovery of a fully logical self? What of the passionate self? (This is, of course, completely ignoring ethos, the third leg of the classic rhetorical tripod).
Hmmm…. More on this later…
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