J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

possibilities. Some accuse Brahms’s orchestration of being muddy. This may be a good name for a
first impression of it. But if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought. The mud
may be a form of sincerity which demands that the heart be translated, rather than handed around
through the pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought. 82
Like that of work and leisure, the antinomy of pain and pleasure is complex
and sometimes hard to disentangle. In musical terms this antinomy can be represented
by that between music (i.e. that which can be comprehended) and noise (that which
resists comprehension.) From the time of Beethoven onward, noise, in this sense of
resistance to the listener’s appropriation of the music, became an increasingly essential
part of composer’s task. Composers who lacked that particular sort of aural grit—
Hummel, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Bruch—tended to be marginalised. As Richard
Taruskin has famously said: ‘the history of music in the nineteenth century could be
written in terms of the encroachment of the sublime upon the domain of the
beautiful.’ 83 As we know, this process did not cease in the twentieth century. Rather,
it intensified, acquiring a dogmatic, historicising inevitability; emblematic is the title
of a recent book about this repertoire: Hard complexities: the pleasure of modernist
music. 84
There was another composer of Beethoven’s time who also specialised in ‘hard
complexities’. Like the later Beethoven, his music showed an extraordinary
predeliction for ‘learned’ counterpoint, for extreme contrasts of textural density, and
for startlingly dissonant voice leading. Like Beethoven, his roots were in the
82 Essays before a sonata, in Three classics in the aesthetics of music (New York, Dover, 1962), p.119.
83 ‘Resisting the ninth’, 19 th -Century Music, 12/3 (Spring 1989), 249. Nor did it begin in the
nineteenth; see, for example, J. Webster, ‘The “Creation”, Haydn’s late vocal music, and the musical
sublime’, Haydn and his world, ed. E. Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), H. D.
Wyatt, ‘Aspects of sublime rhetoric in eighteenth-century music’, PhD diss., Rutgers University
(2000), and K. B. Wurth, ‘The grand style and the aesthetics of terror in eighteenth-century musical
performance practices’, Tijdschrift voor muziektheorie 9/1 (Feb 2004), 44-55.
84 Arved Ashby, ed. (University of Rochester Press, 2004). Reinhold Friedl has gone even further in
this line of thought with his article ‘Some sadomasochistic aspects of musical pleasure’, Leonardo
Music Journal 12 (2002), 29-30, reflecting on the passive, submissive role of the performer and the
listener in much ‘new’ music.
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