Archetype of Hope:

Beethoven, Timbre & The Social Art

by Emmanuel A A Vukovich

The following essay has been revised from doctoral essays [www.emmanuelvukovich.ca/6964645-essays] and an article on music and the Foundation Stone Meditation written for a forthcoming book by Les Editions PERCEVAL in English, German, and French.

“The only philosophy which can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” —Theodore Adorno

In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951).

“Our artistic heritage is, in a way, the DNA of our civilization. If we let that go, we risk losing the spiritual genome, so to speak, of the future. It is our shared human identity; an identity we share even with our enemies.” —Carter Brey, principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic

Recent events have catapulted the world toward a defining moment of historic proportions. Last year marked the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The expected triumph of music’s Promethean hero and representative of humanity’s musical freedom was all but silenced (at least outwardly) by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This text asks whether this current musical and cultural void might be seen as a kind of reflection of Beethoven’s deafness, a metaphor for the collective deafness and turning-point of our time.

The Threefold Nature of Music

Throughout history, cultures from around the world have evolved the language of music through three primary musical elements: rhythm, melody, and harmony. While rhythm was born out of music’s role in ritual and dance, melody evolved out of the singing in chant and prayer. In the evolution of Western music, the development of harmony and tonality became the primary musical language for becoming conscious of, and communicating, the awakening of feeling within the human individuality.

In The Inner Nature of Music, Rudolf Steiner speaks of the modern human being’s relationship with music as being based in feeling, the realm of harmony:

Today, harmony is at the very center of all musical experience. Our experience of music is based on feelings. Harmony addresses the feeling life directly and is experienced in feeling. But the human being’s whole feeling-nature is twofold. We have a feeling that tends more towards thinking, and a feeling that tends more towards the will.3 Out of this twofold capacity of feeling developed the archetype of the human being as a threefold being, an imagination reflected in the archetype of music.

Rudolf Steiner, “The Human Being’s Experience of Tone,” GA 283, lecture of March 8, 1923, Stuttgart.

Out of this twofold capacity of feeling developed the archetype of the human being as a threefold being, an imagination reflected in the archetype of music.

Actually, it would not be so very hard to give the idea of the threefold human being popular currency if people today were conscious of their musical sensibility… If the experience of music became vivid and vital in people, they would feel that the etheric head lies in melody, the etheric middle system lies in harmony, and in the limbs we have the rhythmic element of music. You then have the etheric body incarnate before you. It is just that instead of “head” we say melody, instead of “rhythmic system” we say harmony, and instead of “limb-system” we say rhythm.

The etheric is the field of living formative forces, which carries also in the human being the powers of thought and memory. –Editor

Steiner, ibid.

Thus, we arrive at an image of the archetype of the “being of music” in which melody, harmony and rhythm resonate in the etheric threefold human being as thinking, feeling and willing.

Beethoven

Beethoven’s music has long been associated with the archetype of heroic freedom born out of the threefold ideal of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, & fraternité. This Promethean narrative of autonomy emerged out of Beethoven’s middle period beginning with the Eroica Symphony completed in 1803, and casts a long and singular shadow persisting into our present time. When we hear Beethoven’s music, we think of human freedom. However, this heroic narrative has become increasingly problematic; the individuality and autonomy it asserts can divert into forms of egotism and authoritarianism while the liberal independence it espouses can degenerate into prejudiced and discriminatory ideologies.6 Might it be possible, today, to re-envision an alternative framework for Beethoven’s music?

Daniel KL Chua, Beethoven & Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

In Beethoven & Freedom, renowned contemporary scholar Daniel Chua discusses the great 20th-century German thinker Theodore Adorno’s seminal yet unfinished work Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music and, in a certain sense, completes the philosopher’s opus. Inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Chua transforms the long-held Promethean narrative of autonomy through which all people are free and equal—“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”—into its mirror image of alterity (or “one-another-ness”) as the capacity to relate to another—“Eines Freundes Freund zu sein.” The inclusion of equality, fraternity, and our common humanity based on friendship, is the fulfillment of Beethoven’s music and its promise of freedom for our world today.

Theodor W Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed Rolf Tiedemann, trans Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 34

Schiller/Beethoven “Ode to Joy”; literally, “all human beings shall become brothers” and “for one friend a friend to be.” –Editor

If we place these two narratives of Prometheus and Orpheus side by side, a Beethovenian meta-narrative begins to emerge. On one side stands the self-realization of the autonomous individual, while on the other is the recovery of the individual through the encounter with another. At the centre of this form, however, is a void. The act of self-realization engenders a loss of freedom. In the act of assuming the divine fire, Prometheus is condemned to eternal suffering. Yet this void is simultaneously also the necessary precondition enabling the recovery of freedom. Orpheus’ encounter with Eurydice in the underworld initiates the possibility of a recognition: to see the individuality of another.

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet Opus 130, “Cavatina”

Cavatina

In the 4th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 130 titled Cavatina (meaning tone or song), we hear music that transforms its listener not through a Promethean act of heroic autonomy, but rather through the fragility and vulnerability of alterity. In the middle of this song, Beethoven inserts an eight-measure “interruption” creating a kind of opening void or wound:

The Cavatina reveals the most intimate and vulnerable side of Beethoven in a lyrical outpouring that seems to flow from the deepest wellspring of human experience. Beethoven even confided to a friend that every time he thought of this piece, it brought tears to his eyes. In the middle section of this movement, he marks Beklemmt (meaning choked). Music’s most natural impulse – to spin itself out in melody – seems to be in serious danger, as if the singer of the Cavatina’s song has choked or lost their voice. This music is in C-flat major, a key which lies beyond the normal harmonic spectrum and which, in a sense, exists only in relation to other keys. Enharmonically it may seem identical to B major, but not in the hands of string players sensitive to the nuance of its color and to the context in which the key is reached: by a slow, simple stepwise descent from the home key, E-flat, to D-flat, and finally to C-flat. The coda of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, composed more than two decades earlier, descends similarly, but from E-flat to D-flat, and to a bright and assertive C-major, instead.

Eugene Drucker, Emerson String Quartet, Stony Brook University, 2019

Composed at the end of his life, the Cavatina invites us to reconsider our understanding of Beethoven’s musical legacy. Rather than asserting itself in heroic individual autonomy, this music opens a space of waiting... Waiting perhaps to receive the “gift” of alterity (otherness). Through this act of hospitality, it offers the listener the possibility of being seen in specific and complete individuality. Judith Butler calls this “our willingness to become undone in relationship to another; which constitutes our chance of becoming fully human.” Often in conversation it is not the meaning of the words spoken that matters most, but the quality with which they are spoken, the tone and timbre of the voice, and then the quality of listening following speech, which ultimately touches the heart and opens the soul to the vulnerability, fragility, and intimacy of our shared humanity. In music this quality is known as timbre.

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 13

Timber: In Latin, Tympanum, bell; in German, Klangfarbe, tone color.

Timbre

Contemporary musical creation, performance, and discourse does not focus on melody, harmony, or rhythm; timbre has emerged as a fourth element. While this new element has, in fact, always been present in musical performance practice as a fundamental human experience of sound, it has only recently become conscious in musical thought.

Timbre is the phenomenological and qualitative experience of a unique musical tone; it is often described through associative sense-experience qualities such as light and color (bright/dark), temperature (warm/cool), texture (rough/smooth, wet/dry) and clarity (transparent/ opaque). Timbre is that aural quality of music enabling us to distinguish a unique individual performer, voice, or instrument, from another.

One of the central questions of musical discourse today is whether timbre can be articulated and communicated similarly to the way in which rhythm, harmony and melody have each evolved into a unique, independent, and differentiated element of musical language. Rudolf Steiner foresaw this when he said:

If the inner wealth of feelings experienced in music can be transferred to the single tone, then we will experience the single tone, in all its inner wealth and multiplicity, as a melody. In the future, the single tone will come to be experienced as something musically differentiated. In the single tone will lie a whole range of musical differentiation. So far there is scarcely any sense or inkling of this.12

Steiner, ibid.

The Social Art

The question of timbre is considered today to be a future frontier of music. The challenge of communicating timbre, however, is that it has multiple interpretations depending on the perspective of its performer, the instruments through which it is voiced, and the environment in which it is experienced. Evolving a compositional notation and formal language for timbre, therefore, requires the recognition, reconciliation, and collaboration of alternative and often polarized or diametrically opposing points of view. For this very reason, timbre has the possibility to connect music with some of the most pressing global environmental, societal, and spiritual questions in the world.

Over the course of his life, Beethoven pushed the limits of music. Recent research by performers, composers, and scholars comparing the manuscripts with the first and subsequent printed editions of his works, suggests that he may have also evolved a more highly sophisticated compositional language for notating “expressive markings” than has previously been printed, published, or analyzed. It is known that Beethoven first wrote out the pitched rhythms in black ink, and would return after with a coloured wax crayon to notate expressive performance indications such as dynamics and hairpins, articulations, slurs and phrasings. This indicates that he might have considered this as a separate creative step to the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic compositional process. While today we have roughly nine different dynamic markings between ppp–fff, Beethoven had developed at least 36 dynamics markings. The same is true of his markings for articulation (accents, dots, sforzandos), hairpin and swells (crescendo & decrescendo), and phrasings (slurs). This much more highly nuanced spectrum of expressive markings indicates the possibility that hidden within the often-illegible manuscript scribbles of Beethoven’s own hand are the humble beginnings of a new formal compositional language for timbre.

“Hairpins” are angle marks (like < and >) of variable width, standing for crescendo (“getting louder”) and diminuendo (“getting quieter”). –Editor

The p and f stand for Italian piano, quiet, and forte, loud; so ppp is to be played very, very quietly, and fff very, very loudly. –Editor

With the emergence of a new musical consciousness around timbre, it might eventually become possible to realize Steiner’s vision of melody within a single tone. A deeper understanding of this question (in light of anthroposophy) could enable a musical awakening, similar to the way in which the renewed study of the kingdom of fungi has given rise to a renewed understanding of the deep and invisible interrelationships within nature.

From Threefold to Fourfold

Beethoven’s music offers us a vision of the historic turning point we currently find ourselves in: a transformation of consciousness. In music, this metamorphosis is manifesting itself through the emergence of a fourth element, timbre, within the threefold musical language of rhythm, harmony, melody. In the human being it is a transformation of thinking, feeling, and willing from the individuality to the collective—“ego to eco.” Perhaps the most powerful musical expression of this archetype is the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:

The above musical gesture, as simple and compact a motive as it is possible to conceive, expresses three upbeats leading to a downbeat. The three upbeats, equal in pitch and length and preceded by a rest, lead over the bar-line to a new pitch that is equal in length to the entire measure before it. The musical archetype of these four notes, and the silence out of which they emerge, have become the instantly recognizable individuality of this monumental work; a cornerstone of the Western musical canon.

Matthew Guerrieri, The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

Perhaps it was necessary for Beethoven to lose his hearing, and gain, in the words of Rilke,

the countenance of him whose hearing a god had sealed; so that there might be no sound but his own... He in whom sound was clear and enduring; so that only the toneless senses might bring the world to him, silently, a tense world waiting, unready, for the creation of sound. Your music: would that it were about the world, not only about us. Would that a pianoforte had been built for you in the Theban desert, and an angel had led you to that solitary instrument through desert mountain ranges where lie kings, courtesans, anchorites. He surely would have flung himself upwards out of fear that you would begin. And then you would have poured forth, Pourer-forth, unheard, giving back to the universe only what the universe can bear. Bedouin out hunting would have galloped by in the distance, superstitiously; but merchants would have flung themselves on the ground at the edges of your music as if you were a storm. Only a few solitary lions would have circled round you at night, afraid of themselves, menaced by their own agitated blood.

Rainer Maria Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Conclusion

Today, humanity faces a similar collective social and cultural deafness of global proportions.

These days, it seems like the happenings of social life are everywhere framed in a narrative of polarities: true/ fake, mask/no mask, vaccination/anti-vaccination, racist/anti-racist, individual rights/social rights, spiritual/ material. This kind of binary narrative, without the willingness to open a middle inclusive way, sets the ground for divisive forces that are both powerful in their clarity and disempowering in encouraging into sleep our capacity for discernment and honest conversation. —John Bloom

John Bloom: From the General Secretary, January 18, 2021, at www.anthroposophy.org/blog

Is it possible that the binary narrative, this great wound of separation that we experience today, may also be the very condition necessary for our redemption—the opening of a middle space “waiting to receive the ‘gift’ of another”? Beethoven’s music offers us this archetype of hope: to hear once more the inner voice and song, the timbres and colors of our shared humanity, connecting us with our ancient stars and preparing us for the future of a new age.

Our time will never rise above the barriers that the past has erected unless the great souls of the past come to its aid. We are reunited by what we admire in common, by what we revere in common, by what we comprehend in common. —Charles Maria von Widor, 1907

Emmanuel Vukovich, (www.emmanuelvukovich.ca) born in Calgary, Canada (1980). Waldorf education in Calgary and Spring Valley, New York. Violin and music studies at The Juilliard School, McGill University, New England Conservatory of Music, and Stony Brook University. Studies in Environment & Agriculture at McGill University and Biodynamic farming at The Pfeiffer Center. As a concert violinist Emmanuel has performed throughout North & South America, Europe, and Australia. He is founder and artistic director of The Parcival Project, an international collaborative of performing artists, and co-creator of Parzival & Feirefiz, a new musical narrative of the grail. His interest in collaborative leadership and musical timbre has led him to explore the role of music in human evolution.