Order 2336844: Timbre/Sound Color: What is it?

II

Magic rattle, human harp

The vibrating note travels. It dóes not remain in its place, as colour does. True, colour is likewise emitted to catch the attention, but then it stays put. For a white to detach itself from a garment, or a wall, is unthinkable. In contrast, the whole of the surrounding air can be full o f a sound.

There was a time when the musical note did not appear such a free agent. It was linked quite specifically with the instrument producing it. When first consciously produced, it was wholly attached to its instrument and had no other association. Thus the original rattle rattled as the thing it was; the rattling sound is merely its verb, as it were. The thunder-stick whirred and the drum beat itself: that was the main thing. Thus here the sound is an attribute of the instrument, to which it is linked in a purely material sense. Its sonorousness is used for magical purposes, for healing the sick, driving away evil spirits and summoning good ones. But it is not primarily the sound which performs the spell, but the actual magic drum being used. The crucial element is the sacred instrument, as ancient as possible, specially painted or with special incisions. At the most it is through the power o f rhythm, in the dance, that music as such becomes more advanced, itself exerting an immediate influence. Yet, even now, the drum will fascinate by being hollow, subterranean, the cymbal by being metallic.

The more the musical note developed, the more it parted from this foundation. It surmounted its instrument, so to speak, and now used it as merely a means o f assistance. Now the ringing and tinkling broke loose from the ringing brass and the tinkling bell; musicians no longer just ‘attended on’ their instruments but availed themselves of them. This change is marked by the invention of the pan-pipe: the first instrument which did not emit fearsome or muffled sounds in isolation but gave out a well-ordered series o f notes. It is at this point that music is born, music as a shout of sorrow or pleasure and not as material magically sounding. No longer do we hear the speech o f the wood or metal, but neither do we discern the ‘soul’ of a flute or horn.

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Instead the miracle of music is now itself triumphant in every quar- ter. Previously the ‘tricking out’ o f the rattle with bird feathers ‘charged with spirits’, and o f drums with magical incisions, was at least as important as the frightening or alluring sound that they made; but now, this faith in the material thing disappears completely from the musical viewpoint. On a miniature scale, the rattles, drums and thunder-sticks had even been worn as lucky charms, but not the pan-pipe, which was unconsecrated. The rattling field o f the instru ment yields to the opening up of the auditory field, in which music had not until now, after its deliverance from the magic o f the material thing, made its home. T o be sure, the compass, technique and expression o f the instruments are and remain of importance, for it is only with amateurs that the instrumentation is a secondary con- sideration, or even interchangeable. But even where,. desper ate attempts were made to bind the exodus o f music tcfthe knownFealm^ a magicking of the instruments or f i j i F u r á ^ in this oíd style was absent. It is not the tinkling bell but^Ke tinkle itself\ JjA that now emerges from(materíal^leprived o f itsímagic} And in the process, the material can Tounder completely in the covered orchestra^The musical note evinced much vigour in turning from the attribute o f a thing intojthe yery thing that matters, i n a developed State; from an adjective into a substantive; from ag^YtulToug) excrescence of objects that were rubbed, struck or blown ínfo^mnH versal, t h o u g h ) ^ ^ ^ l!k t tis t ic ^ é a ln ^ with melodic and above all human relations o f its own!/%usih which to start with only denoted a piece o f wood that men shook or sacred implements for their hear- ing, furthermore became, over and beyond its physical character, a colossal realm whgse.,qbjective nature was still largely unknowru/If one were bent on^demonstfatíhg an object\for it in the known realm, one no longer referred to sacred instruments, even in the context o f magic objects. Rather, notes and their scales were related to whole constellations, to the harmony of the spheres, to the ‘Lyra Apollinis’ that was supposed to stretch across the seven known planets. But even here, the actual melodies were still floating through space, not located or indeed incarnated in some existing object. Even so-called tone painting ‘describing’ rain or thunderstorms, where it possesses any musical merit, registers only the psychomorphous action of rain falling, a storm erupting, daybreak or nightfall, without having localised such events in a concrete sense. And as for the ‘Lyra Apollinis’, the harmony of the spheres as echoed in the scales and

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' ̂ harmony of music (% mperstitior^ which persisted from the time of \ the Pythagoreans up to Kepler and indeed Buxtehude), music’s real

development has confounded all such ‘natural’, indeed astronomi- cal, object-definitions. W hy, even in the much more genuine realm of ‘human’ object-relations, music still travels under top-secret orders. And assuredly these contain no references, directly or primarily, to an origin linked with material things and the magic o f things.

There are nonetheless, amid the fluctuations, some noteworthy remains. Sound’s ability to be everywhere and nowhere has asserted its claim, yet it is not necessarily lacking in the instrumental ‘where’ which bound it to start with. In the first place this is still conveyed by the fact that trumpets are associated with kings and trombones are associated with priests. Trumpets which ‘proclaim that kings are approaching’ - what we have here is not just convention or external historical association. On the contrary, the trumpet and the trom- bone are themselves standing for monarchic or sacerdotal might, alm ost irrespective o f w hat they are playing. Granted, the trumpet has ceased to be a sonorous fetish, yet neither is it just the attribute of a king, since it resounds as the actual r o ja l splendour which this king is projecting. And secondly, instruments portrayed as having their own magic still occur on the stage, in magic operas; here they are por trayed with great forcefulness, even. W ith their diabolical clattering in the orchestra, Dr M iracle’s tinkling phials in T he Tales o f H offm ann belong to this category. They make a light, glassy sound compared to the D o ctor’s roaring and shrieking, but one that is equally spellbinding. Directly(archatc>— on the brighter side of the coin - are the horn which plays in O beron , Papageno’s bells in The M agic Flute and the magic flute itself, carved by Pamina’s father ‘from the very base of the thousand-year-old oak, by thunder and lightning, gale and tempest’. And once again it is not just their melody which casts a spell, but the fetish to which it is given. In Dr M iracle’s case the flute of the Pied Piper is suggested, and in Tam ino’s the zither playing o f Arion and Amphion, not only in respect o f their great artistry but in respect o f the magic instrument in each case as well. Ultimately, to be sure, this element o f the magic object appears to be only a surrogate for the supreme concentration o f music at a crucial point in the action, viz. a point effecting some transformation. Takeftfó^ nuhp^^^nm y-scarcely still remembered in terms of ^ m a g ic'D h je ^ — which, purély as melody, echoes down into Florestan’s dungeoíTin Beethoven’s Fidelio. At that stage the

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trumpet is almost completely forsaken, and in it we hear solely the M inister’s voice or the realm o f salvation which has suckled music since it first became Christian. But even the archaic enclaves which preceded it (in Papageno’s bells, in Tam ino’s flute) no longer qualify as vestigial proofs o f ancient magic instruments. They fail to do so at all in terms o f the philosophy o f musical metal, and they barely qualify in terms o f the gnostic-celestial instrumental sym- bolism that Abert rediscovered in his book, M usikanschauung des Mittelalters. It is not the paucity o f the remains that contradicts the ‘pagan’ interpretation o f music in the context of magic objects (for the remains are nonetheless lodged in a high, if not the highest, musical authority). But even f a consecrated. befll which is another revealing remnant, rings not from the depjh o f the metal but down from aloft; essentially it is within the church tower that the metal thus dedicated is hanging and operative.|ln an orchestra, jh e belPs ‘metal mouth’ is, rather̂ a subject for ridicule. Indeed, even music whose áim is black magic (like Stravinsky’s Rite ofSpring) derives its instrumented gruesomeness only incidentally from the clanging brass or resonant bell. — . . „

W e are now coming to the actual purpose o f our enquiry. For all this harking back brings us to the singer, the problem o f the singer himself, especially in opera; he is the ‘remnant’ which shows the most life. The singer really still is a beating drum, or rather, a harp that plays its own music. Here — in contrast to those previous remnants which were rarely found and faintly bizarre, though important — the musical note has a definite site, namely a body that sings in the ' cess o f acting. Here music, in the process o f floating, alights onxa visible instrumental provenance; it thereby adheres at the same timé\ to other visible objects and denotes them. By means o f t h e singer, the ] melismatic and even the symphonic elusiveness of music finds itself ̂ placed in an operatic scene and the action which this localises. In solo song and in oratorio.ÍE eliu m an voice isju st an instrument like other 3 instruments, and the singer just a mildly stressed vehicíe for the

“n^sidC'But as for opera, this is not only a place where tKehm han voice will not cause an obstruction. Here — and not just to further the expansión of human song — it is a form of dramatic action which is necessary and supremely justified in a specifically musical context. And in using singers.it puts instruments on the sta^e that ^ phys.i- cally active and significant once more: not sacred instruments, but ones^wítK’a’ natural emphasis. Here w e have on the stage a Ttind o f

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human harp. This instrument’s voice signifies purely the instrument itself; only on a secondary level do its actions signify the instrumen- tally detached musical content. Certainly the origins o f opera are not archaic in the aforesaid sense. Yet the opera singer is distinctly in touch with the archaic remains, with music as the attribute of an object set in motion and emitting its own sound. Although this parallel may seem an odd one, it is one o f the facts of music and has proved to be effective in practice. Apárt from the music within whose fabric they are found, soprano and alto, tenor, baritone and bass do in fact ‘attend on’ the instrument which they represent and with which théy are linked through a personal bond. Henee the associ- ation of individual vocal categories, i.e. individual ‘instruments’ in the vocal depártrnent, with specific natural qualities o f the m ale ór fem ale ch a ra ctersc o rresponding to them ispartly extra-musical and, indeed, pre-musical. Here music is not ‘formallylfserf-suFfícient|at all. Ñ or does it articúlate in an expressive role — as still applies in the solo song — suffering, longing, anger or love ‘in general’, to cite Schopen- hauer’s abstract and too emancipated interpretation. Rather, it is now the case that music is attached to the material o f its instruments, being the sound and speech o f this very material. In the role of soprano or bass, it renders the ‘soul of the natural condition’ which thus sings o f itself|A nqteqnthe recorder will never revea!, thew opd, ,and a trumpet note..will neyer. reveal the ‘souP of the metal, whereas in the casé offthe lyricaí instrument o f th e body^ the voice is also manifested as a revelanon of its soprano, álto, tenor or bass character there on the stage. And the associations change in accordance with the way an age views thé ’̂‘charáctefs of voices’. W ith M ozart the tenor, for instance, representeS a rather gentle cantabile quality: Tam ino has it, as does the less powerful Ottavio. The baritone voice, in contrast, represents the very condition o f Don Giovanni, the actual hero o f an amorous intrigue, as well as the condition of Count Almaviva. Even Figaro’s own bass voice is readily reconciled with Susanna the soubrette, whose youth he shares. But when ideas changed in the nineteenth century, the tenor carne to the fore. With Verdi, and more ‘victoriously’ still with Wagner, he became the aurum p o ta b ile of youth and erotic power — heroic power in fact. Blond hair, a sunny radiance, strange white gods and their fetishes were now the prestige, as it were, o f the tenor instruments, the way they looked, and they had a character not previously associated with them. Today, this heroic resolve is fading again. The baritone is

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regaining ground once more as the instrumental sound o f masculine vigour, minus all cello-like smoothness, bland benevolenee or acquiescence. This matches our aversión to a high imperious voice expanding in song - even if the actor’s ñame is Radames. But none of these changes would have occurred had it not been for the singer’s representation o f himself, which affords a lover of operatic voices the presence o f a distinct vocal object. Here the instrument’s association with a character revealingly arrests, at any rate, the elusiveness which music, even non-Rom antic music, still normally possesses. For vocal trumpets, unlike the ones that you blow, really are kings. Indeed W alther Stolzing’s high trumpet, which is a sheer paean to himself, almost finishes — even without the m elos — by transforming the awakened Mastersingers into a love nest’s attendant spirits. W hat has replaced the archaic magic of the object, to some extent at least, is a kind o f intrinsic magic o f the material, the singing love-poetry or the instrumental live Ímpetus of an especially effusive display o f the material itself, which is localised. T o be sure it is also this, for its own part, which enables opera music to have its issue in a human world portrayed on the stage and to transform the pan-pipe, or the harp, into actors; these, however, now voice human m aterial. They are serving the music above them - with the limiting ideal o f the entire theatre itself as a magic flute. ,

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