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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253338181 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/16/2002 |
| Series: | Russian Music Studies |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.89(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Schnittke Reader
By Alfred Schnittke, Alexander Ivashkin, John Goodliffe
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2002 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33818-1
CHAPTER 1
FROM SCHNITTKE'S CONVERSATIONS WITH ALEXANDER IVASHKIN (1985–1994)
IVASHKIN: There is such a marked difference between twentieth-century culture and the cultures that preceded it that some commentators have been inclined to suggest that in the twentieth century a new, fourth age in the development of human civilization has begun. This idea was expressed in 1921 by the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov. "If, according to Auguste Comte," he wrote, "there have been three ages of human development, the mythological, the theological, and the scientific, at the present time a new mythological age is beginning." Do you agree that in our day symbolism and irrationality are playing an ever-increasing role and that our age is in some ways opposed to the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment and closer to the Middle Ages? Are you personally conscious of the boundaries of the modern age in the past, present, and future?
SCHNITTKE: I completely agree with this idea, and also for subjective reasons. I have already said that after my stroke1 find myself able to remember much less than before, but at the same time I am aware of much more. I have come to rely not on intellectual knowledge but on a kind of animal feeling. I know something and can explain why it is so, can find arguments to support it (I usually do), but somehow I am not concerned about whether they exist or not. But I still know it, even though no one has ever explained it to me. Before my stroke I had to remember things and work out how to give a correct reply to any question.
Another personal and subjective feeling I have concerns my relationship with my son. I have long been aware of a kind of barrier between different generations. Our generation still adopts an intellectual stance; we are a generation with a kind of intellectual leavening: everything has to be weighed and measured. But the younger generation seems to lack this "leaven" by which everything has to be worked out mentally. But a direct primordial awareness of something is immeasurably more penetrating than intellectual awareness. If you ask my son about something, he has his answer ready, even though he has never spoken of or thought about the subject before. That means there can be knowledge without any formal training, and it is not of literary origin. For our generation intellectual knowledge may gradually change into intuitive knowledge, but perhaps it is still intellectual knowledge that only appears to be intuitive. But in the case of my son it is not at all intellectual knowledge, but an intuitive feeling that is much more precise. Fiction interests him far less than his reading about what interests him at any given moment. Everything that I first took an interest in only in my forties — oriental literature, philosophy — has been of interest to him from the very beginning. And this sphere of knowledge opened up for him long ago of its own accord. He did not have to move into it or decipher its meaning; it was already open and ready for him. It is strange that he has been interested in the East from early childhood. He has always been passionately interested in China and Japan — things for which a formal education gave him no predisposition. China was generally rejected as an intellectual topic because of its strange and wonderful atmosphere, something that remains obscure to us even today. But my son was still interested in the world of the East, rather than our world. The whole development of what is both positive and negative in rock music, in modern art in general, is directed against the pronouncement of long monologues and explanations and toward the idea of providing solutions that may be paradoxical but are still natural, and which have not been painfully worked out.
So in this respect a change of times is undoubtedly taking place, but it is not happening all at once. It is taking place gradually, revealing itself in the way a certain thing comes to predominate over another. One might say that on the whole, while people are apparently getting used to the development of what is intuitive, they still incline to what has already passed away. There is still a certain lack of precision, but there is certainly a move toward the intuitive. A revival of interest in what was taking place a hundred years ago, an interest in Blavatskaya, for example. In general I have the feeling that nothing in history has a definite end, nothing can be finally defined or quantified. From each successive present-day perspective we merely gain the impression that we have finally achieved absolute clarity. Then seventy years go by and everything changes completely and we see a reappearance of what seemed to have gone out of existence long ago.
IVASHKIN: Which events in the twentieth century do you see as the most important? And which event — cultural, scientific, social — has had the most influence on your work? Can such events influence art? The present century has developed new conceptions of time, space, and the theory of relativity. Are any of these reflected in your music?
SCHNITTKE: I find it hard to speak of a single influence from one thing in particular, but I can mention a number of things that had a powerful influence. One of the most powerful "impressions" (forgive my use of this word) was the atom bomb and all its consequences, especially moral consequences. After the first atomic explosion there seemed to be no way out — all the dangers and horrors, all the even more terrible bombs and weapons. The power of these weapons seemed to reduce every value to nothing. That is true in a certain sense, but not everything was deprived of its value. The inescapable tragedy that hung over our existence twenty-five or thirty years ago now seems to be there no longer, in spite of the fact that the actual number of universal dangers has not decreased, but our moral tension has been somewhat reduced.
Something that made a great impression on me and continues to do so is my growing feeling that the same amount of time can vary in length. In human life — at any rate in my own case — time has two circles of development. The first, the longest, which seemed for me to come to an end in 1985, and the second, which began after that time. Now every day has a very long time span. It contains a great deal. This is once again a primordial feeling, seeming to originate from childhood (although I haven't yet entered my second childhood!). This new feeling that time is once again expanding has been of great benefit to me. Previously, I constantly felt tired, life seemed to be "wearing me down," everything grew wearisome, there was so much of everything, and it had all already been. But now I have regained my ability to evaluate various phenomena not merely in the way they are linked together, but each one separately. This lengthens the experience of every second. I do not feel that each second is a momentary grain of sand. It is a segment of time, something in itself. And I had long since lost this sense of its being something. Even now I often grow weary, quickly, and for many reasons, but it is not the weariness of the age or the decade. It is a weariness that is very powerful, it seems to cover everything. But I need only half an hour to forget all about it. This is why my attitude to time has completely changed.
I have begun to feel in particular that for different people, and for one person at different periods of life, the length and speed of time can differ greatly. This is a kind of time that is infinitely varied, even though it contains the same number of seconds. The seconds tick by in the same way, but the distance between them varies. This is why I have come closer to the Einsteinian view of time, that it is relative. I have begun to understand this better because my own experience shows me that in my own life seconds have varied in length. I have reached this idea of time without any technical experiments or space travel.
IVASHKIN: You will recall Lev Tolstoy's Circle of Reading, something he published in his lifetime that contained excerpts from books written by various philosophers and authors. What is your "circle of reading"? Do you ever copy down anything that you regard as essential for your work or life? Are there any texts, formulae, or rules that you constantly repeat to yourself or to which you constantly return? What kind of reading matter do you prefer, fiction or essays?
SCHNITTKE: In theory I would be in favor of trying to systematize life in every possible way, and this would include copying things down. But that's only in theory. In practice I've never been able to do that, and nowadays I wouldn't even want to, just as I don't want to do anything else I was so anxious to do earlier. I am now conscious — and this follows from what I was saying before — that knowledge is both finite and at the same time infinite. It is finite insofar as you apparently cannot put into it any more than a certain quantity. If you learn something new, you are bound to lose something else that you read or learned before, and this moves away into the shadows and ceases to have any profound significance. There is a kind of standard amount of knowledge. But of course it is only a relative amount, because it is well known that when people are dying, they re-experience everything they have seen, known, said, done, and heard. They remember everything, including what their conscious memory no longer recalls. Their subconscious remembers everything.
Irrespective of this, I have come to understand that to rely on systematized knowledge comprising quotations, names, books, and an inner world built up over a long period (like constructing a whole state or world inside yourself) would be wrong for me. The reason is that human knowledge has one special characteristic: the more of what human beings are aware of unconsciously is transferred into the area of what they know consciously, the more of what is known consciously comes to lose those elements that are invisible and imperceptible, those elements that are a kind of shadow of human thought, before it crystallizes. In a certain sense the very word "crystallizes" already imposes a limitation on this strange and infinite world. When crystallization takes place, the whole outer shell of the world vanishes, and with it an infinite number of undiscovered possibilities. That's the danger of crystallization. When knowledge comes to be crystallized, although it acquires something, it loses a great deal. The "crystal" may be something bright, sparkling, and solid, but it is still a crystal, not a living thing, organic, changeable. This is why my preference is not for encyclopedically systematized knowledge, but for the kind of knowledge a human being has without appearing to know it. This is the kind of knowledge I now regard as more important.
As for reading, strange as it may seem, I used to read less, and I needed to read less than I do now. I remember that I had a passion for ideas from the East, and the time came when I lost interest in literature. It all appeared second rate and trivial, apart from a few philosophical writings. I somehow lost all sense of fiction having any connection with real life. Reading, I lost the feeling that fiction always made sense. I found it lacking in the kind of knowledge that is crystallized, clear, and complete.
But now I have again returned to an earlier feeling, when my reading of philosophical writings brought continual disappointment. Like many people nowadays I subscribe to Voprosy Filosofii [Problems of Philosophy]. One day I open it and find myself bitterly disappointed in Nietzsche, who had previously produced a literally hypnotic effect on me (I have not read many of his works, just one or two), but now what he writes seems so trivial and superficial. I just cannot read it.
Nor does Solovyov now seem serious enough. His seriousness is the kind of seriousness that systematizes, greatly superior to Nietzsche. But I think even he is now out-of-date. He was to make striking revelations and in many respects did so, but his writings now produce an impression of tiredness and mental indigestion.
I think my attitude to philosophy has now basically changed. The philosophy infused in the Bible, which contains everything, including philosophy, has not lost its meaning, but the kind of philosophy that creates a system, however lofty it may be, has to some degree lost any meaning for me or relevance for the present day. So I have renewed my interest in fiction. But of course I realize that our current fascination with what we were deprived of for decades is the fascination people feel for what they have been starved of. I now realize how much we were starved of it, and I have been reading for the past three years and have still not grown tired of it. But many of the things I previously pounced on no longer arouse my interest. I no longer get excited about the endless articles that appear in every newspaper about Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, or Pasternak. But when I opened the copy of Novyi Mir [New World], where they had started to publish extracts from The Gulag Archipelago, I was deeply shaken. That was one of the most powerful sensations I have felt in recent times. I look forward to its continuation, and in one way I am pleased that I did not read it before. I had naturally read parts of it, but never in their proper sequence. So now I am keen to read it all.
IVASHKIN: Do you regard modern thought as too rational and materialistic? What is your attitude to magic, religion, signs, and omens? Do you think it essential for the maintenance of spiritual discipline to observe the feasts in the church calendar, to adhere to the formal requirements of religious faith? Which philosopher do you take the closest interest in? Is there any particular philosophical system that is consonant with your own view of things?
SCHNITTKE: I am unable to name any formally organized system that I could regard as decisive for me, one that would dictate my way of life, or my way of working. Of course, at various times I have yielded to what I was reading and found fascinating at that particular moment. But nowadays I have generally lost my capacity for being fascinated by reading a book or studying philosophy. I have lost it because it is as if I am continually aware of the total inadequacy of a philosophy of ideas. Even at its most subtle it still reveals its permanent shortcomings. It is for this reason that all those naive mystics who were disinclined to systematize and limit what they knew, simply expounding it, are now more important to me than those who erected a structured system of knowledge. If one starts with Jesus Christ and takes the Gospel of Saint John, the writings of Saint Augustine, Meister Eckhart, or Saint Francis, in every case we are dealing with a mystery that will always remain a mystery, even when it is manifested through the naive and sunny disposition of Saint Francis. It is a mystery you cannot explain. This for me is the highest form of literature.
Moreover as soon as the mystery is systematized, as soon as it becomes a question of mysticism being measured out, as in the case of Rudolf Steiner or anyone else, I lose interest completely. I lose faith in it right away. As long as human beings hold on to the feeling that the mystery is truly limitless, they never reach the stage of relative systematization, and one can always place reliance on what they say. But as soon as they begin to systematize, they immediately fall into one of the many errors caused by knowledge that is relative only, and I'm no longer interested.
As for religion, all the formal routine of religious faith — constantly followed every day in a virtuously literal interpretation — has, for logical reasons, lost its value for me. I cannot defend the idea of people motivating everything they do and say in connection with their religious faith on such realistic grounds. For them it may still be a religious faith, but its daily ritual seems to have lost its foundation. Seems, I emphasize, because if I ever find peace in a kind of "zero" position, I am at once brought back to a naive and primitive sense of religious faith and find I can at once have faith in it all, in spite of the naivete of religion and its rituals. At a religious service I experience not only the joy of being there but also a feeling of depression — from the fact that during a long ceremony there may be ten-minute periods that are exciting but also other ten-minute periods that are just empty, when one is present only in a formal way. But religious faith never loses its basic qualities. And these are to be found in the fact that you have a sense, through all the imprecise words, the numerous translations, all the explanations of ritual, all the unreliable stories about them, all the false and incorrect interpretations — through all of these you sense the original meaning, derived not from a limited conscious mind that creates systems but from something limitless, like the words of Saint Francis or Saint John. In the naiveté something infinite is preserved. In spite of the unconvincing words, there seems to remain something invisible, what is most important, what is basic. So I am ready to submit to any ritualistic discipline, since I detect shining through it not the precision of every moment but the very basis of religious belief.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Schnittke Reader by Alfred Schnittke, Alexander Ivashkin, John Goodliffe. Copyright © 2002 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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