Jeff Dunn <[log in to unmask]>:

>Commentators on music commonly refer to this or that piece as being
>'nostalgic' expecting their readers immediately to understand what they are
>talking about.  Of course what they mean by a piece BEING nostalgic is that
>it is presumed to make a majority of listeners FEEL nostalgic or empathize
>with nostalgic elements in the music.  But what really IS 'nostalgia' in
>music?

Let's examine the leitmotive technique!!  (or "Erinnerungsmotive" as it
was also called).  I posted some of this long ago in another thread:  The
composer creates a link between "something" (anything that can be replaced
by a substantive:  an object, a character, a concept) and a melody or
harmonic scheme, through simultaneity (or contiguity) and repetition (both
music and object are presented together a certain number of times).  Later,
this unity is broken:  the musical content may appear in stage without its
non-musical "substantive", and then we can "see" or feel it, in spite that
it's not physically present.  Is just like our mind try to recompose that
broken primordial unity (music-object) and, doing this, we take a renewed
(almost painful) conscience of the fact that the object "lacks".  That's
a sort of nostalgy.

I like especially how this feature of leitmotiv is employed by Dave
Raksin at the soundtrack of Otto Preminger's "Laura".  Remember the secene
of the dectective at Laura's room...  nostalgy (at the spectator), but also
fetishism (at the detective, and perhaps also at the spectator).

In fact, fetishism and nostalgy, as every metonimic operation, shares a
common law similar to the physical principle of inertia, and the leitmotive
technique shows it very well.  I found a beautiful formulation of this
"law" at Spinoza's "Ethica" (Part III, Prop.  XIV):

   "Once that the soul has been affected once by two simultaneous
   passions, if it's later affected by one of them, it will be affected
   also by the second one".  (Sorry for the cacophonic translation).

Of course, we can feel nostalgy even with the silliest, stupid and
unexpressive music.  It depends only on where and when was that music heard
before.  So, the leitmotiv doesn't need to have any "intrinsec" quality
(except the number and moment of its repetitions) in order to evocate an
object.  The author of the soundtrack of Sergio Leone's westerns knew this
very well...

>Griffiths mentions one way to establish his 'farewell' nostalgia, 'a four-
>note' scalewise descent in the minor mode.' Other standard means of evoking
>nostalgia by purely musical means includes the Romantic gestures of leapy
>melodies, swell-and-ebb dynamics, rubato, suspended harmonies.  Semi-
>extramusical means include references or near references to bygone styles,
>instrumentations and tunes, not to mention actual texts.

In the way in which Griffith describes it, the work seems a parody.
In fact, couldn't these same musical resources and quotes be interpreted
as signs of ironic or satyrical intentions by the composer?.  It has
necessarily to be "nostalgia"?.  (My question is adressed to Griffiths,
of course)

>But when I get to Mr. Griffiths' views on the subject, I am somewhat at a
>loss:
>
> 'Many of the world's great songs are addressed to the departing:
> the recently dead, lost lovers, missed opportunities.  Music speaks
> of these things as memory speaks, makes us aware both of distance
> and of remaining closeness.  Nothing is lost, music says: it is
> here.  But also: it is here only because it cannot come back.'
>
>It is here only because it cannot come back??

Erudite footnote:  Griffith tried here something that among writers of old
times was knew as "paradox".  But for our ruin, Wilde and Chesterton are
definitively gone..  sigh!!.:-)

> 'In other words, music offers the consolation that what has gone is
> always available, while at the same time insisting, rudely or gently,
> that it has, indeed, gone.  Like memory, music can store.'
>
>Hmm, music can store.  And pigs can fly.  Or is Griffiths saying 'people
>can remember'?

I would bet that he tried to say the last.  Evidently, the venomous style
fits better to Mr.  Griffith than the sentimental one.

> 'A final cadence, particularly in slow music, can also sound
> like a valediction, because this is the point at which music not
> only expresses passing but itself recedes.  This vanishing and this
> eternal presence have been the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov's
> persistent topics through the last three decades ...'
>
>Yes, when music ends, it says goodbye.  It can do it with a door slam like
>the W.M.B.  Enigma variation of Elgar, or it can go on interminably like
>Kilar's 'Exodus.' But Griffiths gets mystic here with his 'vanishing' and
>'eternal presence.'

Well, many contemporary writers (art critics especially) gets cheesy and/or
boring when they get mystic.  Getting mystic with elegance is a literary
ability that became increasingly rare since the second half of the past
century (sigh again!!!).

>Does what he have to say make sense to any of you out there? Perhaps I'm
>missing something profound.  But if I were missing something profound,
>wouldn't I be nostalgic about it?

Absolutely.

Pablo Massa
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