On the Hallelujah Effect as Performance

Every bit of kd lang's interpretation of Cohen's Hallelujah is deliberate, controlled, contrived, packaged, performed.  To say this takes no part of the achievement away from kd lang (nor, indeed as her performance is indebted to him, does it detract from John Cale’s song-setting achievement, just as Buckley and Wainwright are similarly, indeed far more closely indebted). And to say such things, as they also apply ceteris paribus, does not detract from Leonard Cohen, the master song-writer.  How could any such claim detract?

In each case, and this is a matter, in varying ways, of taste, programming, affect: we are watching a consummate artist at work. And as Nietzsche said, speaking of Wagner, we might do well to ignore all such issues of technique, that is to say, all questions concerning the conditions/motivations/practices of the “artist” where, as Nietzsche supposed, what matters is the work, the working of the work of art as music. 

Nietzsche himself suggests that he would be both drawn in and made anxious at the same time by what he in the title of a Gay Science aphorism, described as Women who Master the Masters.  As Nietzsche reflects and his observation touches on the voice quite apart from gender and apart from music, but not apart from the stage:

A deep and powerful alto voice of the kind one sometimes hears in the theater can suddenly raise the curtain upon possibilities in which we usually do not believe.  All at once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with lofty, heroic, and royal souls, capable of and ready for rule over men because in them the best elements of man apart from his sex have become an incarnate ideal. (GS §70)

 The problem for Nietzsche is that this ideality is usually then read back into men and that the entire project still falls short of what real human beings do, or better said what they do not do.  If Nietzsche had learned one thing from less than enraptured reading of Goethe’s Faust, it would be to see through love to its vanities.

But where Nietzsche challenged that the theatrical bet placed on the efficacy of such voices, female, or as he pointed out, mostly male (as in “the ideal male lover such as Romeo” [ibid.], and we should not miss the irony here), tended not to succeed, the musicologist, Ernest McClain reminds us that Leonard Cohen’s achievement is a real or working one, a practiced one, attuned to musical efficacy, for us, today.



  

Between Performance Practice and the “Becoming Human of Dissonance”

Nietzsche’s philological and phenomenological investigations of the spirit of music in antiquity began with his explorations of the musical character of the Greek language as spoken/sung, beginning with his reflections on Greek music drama and dance, all replete with little illustrations, arsis/thesis.^[1] Nietzsche’s exploration turns out to be all about dance, drama, but above all about the literal music of the poem itself, which phenomenological hermeneutic in turn was dependent upon Nietzsche’s discovery of the musical resonances of ancient Greek.

And because kd lang walks the music as she does it struck me that we might learn something hear something, guess at something, for, as Nietzsche also always reminds us, we need to guess where we do not, cannot know. What might this tell us about the chorus, about its movement in ancient Greek tragedy, and about the tragedian, qua lyric artist, as Nietzsche posed this question, but also and indeed in terms of the song itself?

Nietzsche argued that the artistic role of his own science, namely of classical philology as science, corresponded neither to that of the artist nor that of the composer but and much rather to the performer. As such, the scholar’s work would amount to a virtual making present, that is in its German and phenomenological articulation, a Vergegenwärtigung of the kind one can perform by articulating, that is speaking/singing “sight-reading” ancient Greek within the constraints, that is also to say the “chains” of rhythm and time — that is to say, now as Nietzsche meant his original subtitle: out of the spirit of music.

Nietzsche alludes to Beethoven’s music as artist and not less theoretically by way of Beethoven’s own early 19th century Harmonienlehre of dissonance and consonance^[2] and Beethoven’s reflections on dissonance are of interest to Nietzsche’s own writings on dissonance but also on harmony and not less on the differences between Greek musical forms and lyric convention, as Beethoven rather didactically explains:

Keine Dissonanz soll eher resolvieren, als bis der Sinn der Worte völlig geendet ist — Wo man sich verweilet: lange Noten; wo man wegeilet: kurze Noten.^[3]

We note that Nietzsche emphasized a similar precision at the heart of poetry in a religious if demystifying context in his own writings: rhythm and rhyme are used to influence the deity. If Beethoven’s significance cannot be overstated in the context of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy even if we were only to note the relevance of the woodcut he commissions for the title page of his first book, illustrating Prometheus freed from his chains and which same Prometheus Nietzsche thematizes as formative for humanity but, unlike the Western parallel of a creator God, as Prometheus assumes the responsibility for, that is the guilt of human transgression upon himself as Nietzsche discusses the different conceptions of sin, the Greek blames the gods and the titans for his shortcomings and the Judeao-Christian finds humanity guilty of its own sins. The allusion — via Goethe to be sure — is to Beethoven’s ballet: Creatures of Prometheus [Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, Op. 43].

I argue that it is the Beethoven context as such, including Wagner's then absorption with Beethoven (but also quite independently of that as Nietzsche's interest in Beethoven predates his aquaintance with Wagner) that is relevant to Nietzsche’s project in The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as indeed in other related studies. Thus: Nietzsche, who also had ambitions as a composer, undertakes to clarify the particular kind of performance context as lived in terms not as we ourselves might experience it but in term of what he speaks of as the origin of the tragic work of art (out of the folk song and in the context of religious ritual and specifically vernal or fertility cults) together with the importance of dance to song in the lyric poetic and musical context of the ancient Greek tragic art work.

Notes

^[1] See, again, Babich, “Wort und Musik in der Antiken Tragödie. Nietzsches ,fröhliche’ Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 37 (2007): 230-257, here p. 235 in addition to Babich, “The Science of Words or Philology” and Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, first chapters and throughout.

^[2] See Henry Hugo Pierson’s edited compilation of Beethoven’s studies and theory of composition: Ludwig van Beethovens Studien im Generalbass, Contrapunkt und in der Compositionslehre aus dessen Handschriftlichen Nachlass gesammelt und herausgegeben von Ignaz Xaver von Seyfried (Leipzig: Schuberth & Comp, 1853 [1830, 1832]), references throughout.
^[3] Don’t resolve any dissonance until the significance of the word has come fully to an end — where one lingers, long notes; where one hastens away, short notes.

Woodcut, commissioned by Nietzsche for the first edition of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, 1871.

Although the publication history of the title vignette has been thoroughly discussed,[1] the reference to Beethoven is nearly completely overlooked[2] or else it is reduced in a trope that seems to be an obligatory tic for those who write on Nietzsche, as scholars do tend in nearly every case to discover that Nietzsche should be reduced to Wagner, say, as is common whenever one speaks of Nietzsche and music, or else as in the case of other associations, to Gerber, Lange, or Schopenhauer. Here I would add yet another reference to Beethoven beyond the title, recalling as Nietzsche did, that and since Hölderlin’s Sophocles, the heart of tragedy is nothing other than “joy” itself: das freudigste, freudig zu sagen.[3] Accordingly, we find that at the beginning as at the end of his first book Nietzsche refers to Beethoven. And at the end attempts to illustrate what he called “the music” of the tragic art form: a “playing” with dissonance, with the “thorn of suffering.” The key metaphor is musically technical.[4] And with Beethoven, we are, as the musicologists tell us, already underway to what comes to be called the “emancipation of dissonance”[5] in studies of early 20^th century atonal music.[6]

We have emphasized that Nietzsche’s resolution of the question of tragedy was musical (BT §22), referring to the sound, the music of very words themselves, that is to Greek as it was sung. But where our reflections return to kd lang, singing of desire and its indigence, its failures — our love is not a victory march —referring to the paradoxical question that illuminates the problem of pleasure and pain in the ancient Greek tragedy play, speaking of the very phenomenon of “musical dissonance” (BT §24), we are returned to kd lang’s as she sings, repeating Cohen’s Hallelujahs and including the gut pain of loss and disappointment in oneself; both defiantly and as she crouches into this, drawing her singing out of the depths: Hallelujah in the face of pain, hence and thus they embody, incarnate, Nietzsche’s description of the “becoming human” (BT §25) of dissonance.

For McClain this is the strength not the weakness of popular music and this is why, if we follow his argument, so many artists are drawn to ‘cover’ Cohen’s Hallelujah.^[7] In another context I would keen to emphasize that the language of ‘cover’ is a music industry term: all about copyright and royalties. Here the point takes us to the heart of the “problem of the artist” as Nietzsche posed this problem, although it should be noted that Nietzsche only raises the question as he does because of his keen concern for what he also called the “genius of the heart,” that quality, whatever it would take, that would be able to break everything as Nietzsche says, “self-satisfied” about us, and we are if anything consummate masters at self-satisfaction even as our world goes as it were to hell in a hand-basket, animals, life of all kinds, destroyed at a pace like no other, human beings along with every other being, and the earth with it.

This “genius of the heart” might expose us, where being so exposed is the first condition for reflection, compassion, for what Heidegger called thinking.

Here we note the reality of dissonance in tension with the ideality of consonance. And it is for this reason that in his notes Nietzsche gives us his reflections on pain as productive, and that is to say, and it is here that Ernest McClain’s analyses of pain in musical metaphorics can be useful to us,[8] related as counter-color and as generating the beautiful, to use the language of generation as McClain illustrates it.

The indifference, the equanimity in the face of either pleasure or pain that is an allusion to Schopenhauer in Nietzsche is also the same that alludes to the dreamer’s insight into, or through the veil of Maja. It is we ourselves who are the figures in the dream of a god, — figures, as Nietzsche reflects upon Schopenhauer’s initially Buddhist point, who have figured out how that god dreams.

Beyond Nietzsche’s published work on the work of art, on the artist, on consonance, dissonance, harmony in The Birth of Tragedy and including discussions of both tragedy and music in Human, All-too-Human, one has in the notes numerous discussions of these themes but in each case it makes all the difference to note the relevance of Nietzsche’s inquiry into what he titles in his notes the “Origin and Goal of Tragedy.” As Nietzsche here explains:

What is the feeling for harmony? On the one side, a subtraction [wegnehmen] of the with-sounding [mitklingenden] overtones, on the other side, a not-individual-hearing of the same. (KSA 7, 164)

To explore what we might call Nietzsche’s Harmonienlehre further here would require a hermeneutic of influence and reference but at this juncture, in this context, it is worth noting that in the same locus we read Nietzsche’s critical accord with Schopenhauer, invoking nothing less modern than the notion of a “false tone” (KSA 7, 202) included together with pain — and we may think of Cohen’s cold and broken Hallelujah, as we also recall what I once called “Nietzsche’s impossibly calm ideal,”[9] in order to characterize his elusive image of a “cold angel,” just short of the calm that is the extraordinary breath that is the end of kd lang’s Hallelujah.

The question of the artist, the question of the performer, of the dynamic actuality of the singer, invokes the working power of the work of the composer, as it is this that was also for Nietzsche the very political question of musical culture. There is for the Greek no term for art, there is for the Greek no cult of the artist but rather a contest between artists, in a democratic culture of contests that involved the entire polis. It is thus that I understand Nietzsche’s musing: „es muß viele Übermenschen geben.“ (KSA 35 [72], 541)[10] — that is there have to be many instances of what Nietzsche imagined as a future higher humanity in order that each might speak and play and live for and with each, for the sake of a higher culture and just because, as Aristotle also emphasized, good things can only develop among like and similarly good things. Only an excellent individual can appreciate an excellent individual. The rest of us find such “excellence” grating or and in another sense of the term, dissonant. Thus Nietzsche argues that the exception tends to perish and never reproduces itself, and as a corollary, contends that only kind of human being survives as the fittest, i.e., beyond “the day after tomorrow” as Nietzsche puts this very modest future, and that is, as he says, “the incurably mediocre.” But this makes the exception problematic.

In this way Nietzsche struggled from start to finish with the question of whether the artist, the genius, the maestro was to be valorized as we do indeed valorize the artist. “The problem of the artist” is thus related to the “problem of the scientist,” which Nietzsche would also go on to differentiate in more colorful terms as “gay” versus “gray,” that is as plodding researcher vs. “Argonaut” of the spirit. Thus Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy distinguishes between what he calls “the spirit of science” (BT 17, cf. HH I, §6, §224, §264) and the Spirit of Music out of which he traces the genesis of the tragic work of art. And arguably, it is the cult of the artist, the cult of the star, that is also to say: the music-, the culture-industry that similarly blocks our path today.

Here we return to kd lang. For Nietzsche, the scientist is an artist tout court, but one who not only fails to know this about him (or herself) but who also denies it, dissembling this ‘artistry’ whenever an inkling of this truth comes to light be it for him- or for herself but above all for society — inasmuch as here too one finds (as everywhere) will to power and it is science today, rather than religion, that is the very best means for the advancement of both our slavish capacities and our slavish morality, where there is for Nietzsche, and of course, no other kind.

kd lang, so I have argued above, would seem to know all this — and more — about the artist. And thus Nietzsche privileges the artist above the scientist, but and only for the sake of life.

As kd lang sings what Cohen would say: Hallelujah.

k.d. lang at the Beacon Theater, June 21, 2011. Photograph: Babette Babich

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[1] The title page is analysed by Reinhard Brandt, “Die Titelvignette von Nietzsches ‘Geburt der Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik’” Nietzsche Studien 20 (1991): 314-328. Brandt emphasizes the connection with Wagner.

[2] By contrast, the connection between Nietzsche and Beethoven is rarely adverted to, although a key exception would be Carl Dahlhouse. I discuss this further in the book that has grown on the basis of this essay, The Hallelujah Effect, forthcoming, 2012. See further and for a general and contextual discussion Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially what Chua there designates as the “symphonic monument that towered over the nineteenth century,” p. 235f. where I would argue that this is relevant to Nietzsche’s own analyses of Beethoven’s symphonic form in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writing.

[3] [Joyfully to say the most joyful.] Beethoven and Hölderlin were both born in 1770 and as Günter Mieth observes the influence of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, “An die Freude” is to be seen in Hölderlins’ representation of Bacchus as “‘Freudengott’” in Miethe, Friedrich Hölderlin: Zeit und Schicksal (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), p. 113.

[4] See further on this technical dimension, Babich, “Mousike techne: The Philosophical Praxis of Music in Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger” in Robert Burch and Massimo Verdicchio, eds., Gesture and Word: Thinking Between Philosophy and Poetry (London: Continuum, 2002) pp. 171-180; 200-205.

[5] A visual metaphor for this same “emancipation” with reference to Beethoven is already evident in Nietzsche’s commissioned woodcut illustrating the liberation of Prometheus and used as frontispiece for his first book. But it is also important to note that the subtitle of Thomas Harrison’s 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). The term as such is usually attributed to Arnold Schoenberg who uses it in his 1926 essay “Gesinnung oder Erkenntnis?” in: Schönberg, Stil und Gedanke. Aufsätze zur Musik, ed. Ivan Vojtěch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1976), Vol. 1, p. 211. But for a discussion of the origination of Schönberg’s “Emanzipation der Dissonanz,” see August Halme’s Harmonielehre (Berlin: Göschen, 1900) analyzed as “Befreiung der Dissonanz.” See too Rafael Köhler, Natur und Geist. Energetische Form in der Musiktheorie (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996), throughout, but here: p. 230ff. Of course the claims in this regard go even further back in the 19th century (see here, among others, Barbara R. Barry, The Philosopher’s Stone: Essays in the Transformation of Musical Structure [New York: Pendragon Press, 2000]) a circumstance to be expected given the dynamic between consonance and dissonance as this Beethoven discusses just this tension in his own writings on composition.

[6] Musical dissonance in this sense permeates the 19th century and I argue that this inspires Nietzsche’s own notion of dissonance. This is not quite the place to argue this but this may be where, perhaps, Adorno himself might have been going in his unfinished masterpiece, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

[7] “The appended Hallelujahs sung here are freely varied by the singer to please herself (and NOT what is printed). They are an equivalent to your expected Greek choral response, and Lang makes them her own as a “reaction” to the memory of the verse she has just sung, a counterpoise of nostalgia and disappointment shared universally—in which the audience is invited to participate sympathetically and does; people are partly applauding themselves along with her professionalism.” McClain, email to the author: Sunday, May 01, 2011 06:41PM.

[8] See McClain, “A Priestly View of Bible Arithmetic: Deity’s Regulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology” in: Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science. Van Gogh’s Eyes. and God (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 429-443.

[9] Babich, “Nietzsche’s Critical Theory: The Culture of Science as Art,” in Babich/Cohen, eds., Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, Critical Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 1-24, here p. 13.

[10] [There have to be many over-humans.]