Abschied (Part 3): Gaps, Wounds and Other Empty Places
(Schoenberg, in his apartment in Vienna, c. 1911. On the wall hangs photographs of Mahler as well as a portrait of Mahler painted by Schoenberg. Sitting at my desk, I look on Schoenberg as Schoenberg looked on Mahler: “I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake … every photograph is this catastrophe.” (Roland Barthes) )
I.
A gap opens between tenses when someone dies: no longer “She smiles”, “She laughs”, “She dances”, but now and always “She smiled”, “She laughed”, “She danced”. Death leaves the gap gaping and unbridgeable, a wound, a rent in the cloth so the heart is exposed, widening as the past accumulates till we no longer have to correct our tongue when it misspeaks for we have grown habituated to speaking of her only as memory.
II.
There is always a gap between the thing and our understanding of it. No sketches are extant for op. 19. The entire piece seems to have been conceived as a whole, complete in its first draft, unmediated by planning or revisions.
It was written in just over two days: the first five on February 19 1911 and the sixth on June 17 of that year. In the period between the end of 1909 till the first World War, Schoenberg was convinced that music existed as the pure expression of the unconscious, an intuitive art that, as he described to Kadinsky, had nothing to do with “one’s tastes, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” In a letter to Busoni, Schoenberg insisted that music was “not built, but expressed,” a spontaneous creation which considered sketching and planning intrusions of the conscious intellect.
III.
There is a gap between the right hand and the left, between the first chord (the “RH chord”) and the next (the “LH chord”), a separation, not only in sound, but visually on the page as well, with each chord marking its own territory on its own staff (they never share one). The distance in space is reflected in the interval of time between their two soundings, first at a distance of three quarter notes, then another three, then only one quarter note and then another one: the gap closes, but never completely. In French, a “gap” is at once a noun (ecart) and a verb (ecarter). A distance, a space, an interval, a difference, a deviation, a departure; to move apart, to separate, to exclude, to push aside, to withdraw. The “RH chord” is an echo of the common practice, an emblem of the old, it is rich in tertian associations because of its ambiguity (dominant 7th? D major added 6th?). The “LH chord” is a quartal trichord; it is a symbol of the new, an assertion of the composer’s individuality, a conscious exclusion of the triad. There is a deviation, a difference that seems irreconcilable. The gap must always remain open, letting itself be “ceaselessly marked and remarked.”
IV.
Recall the final measure, the gesture in the left hand of the falling 9th (B-flat to A-flat) that ends the entire work:
I’ve described this as the left hand’s concluding quartal trichord (A-flat, E-flat, B-flat)
derived from this descending series of fourths:
The final gesture is, however, ambiguous in its reading because a gap exists in its construction: a note, a single note - the E-flat - is missing. This exclusion is both its identifying mark as well as its withdrawal of identity, and it forever leaves the falling 9th, the closing gesture, open to interpretation, letting itself be “ceaselessly marked and remarked”. What if, for example, that “missing” note was not an E-flat but was instead an F?
With the F, it is the “RH chord” unveiled, transposed down a half-step. It is not an absurd connection to make considering the fact that the interval of a major 9th is a prominent characteristic of the “RH chord”. Also, the two forms of the “LH” and “RH” chord, in those specific transpositions in the final measure are, to borrow from David Lewin, isomorphic: although the set class is different (the “RH chord” is (025) while the “LH chord” is (027)), they share the same transformational network (where T=Transposition and I= Inversion):
Now, recall the right hand of the final measure: it is the “RH chord” restated for the last time
I’ve also described this chord, if one agrees with and follows the systematic deployment of right hand quartal trichords, as the second to last trichord in the right hand’s ascending series (F-sharp, B and E, but the E is dropped and replaced with an A):
Strikingly, these two chords are also isomorphic:
In order to better appreciate the journey that has taken place over the span of a mere nine measures, it should be pointed out that the “LH chord” and the “RH chord” in their original forms
are not isomorphic. It is only in the final measure of the work, significantly inthe left and the right hands, where we find a coincidence between isomorphic forms of both the “RH chord” and the “LH chord”, arrived at through the systematic derivation and deployment of quartal trichords constructed from ascending and descending fourths. We see and hear the “RH chord” in measure nine while expecting a quartal trichord (the “LH chord”), which we find sharing the same transformational network as the “RH chord”; we see and hear an ambiguous falling 9th in the left hand, which could be seen as both the “RH chord” and the “LH chord”, both of which are similarly isomorphic:
Our hands have come together. The two chords that once seemed so distant are now revealed as one in the same, bearing the same shape, derived from the same transformational processes. The gap that once seemed unbridgeable is, in the final measure, closed.
V.
(My reading is indebted, obviously, to David Lewin and his notion of isomorphism. But also to Sean Gaston and his notion of the “gap” in The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derria and to Derrida for the quote: “ceaselessly marked and remarked.”)
