Lodewijk Muns

• The anti-polyphonic prejudice
• Counterpoint and communism
• ‘Absolute music’ and ‘absolute philosophy’: Ludwig Feuerbach
• ‘Barbarism and bad taste’: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• How political can counterpoint be?
• To conclude: a toast
• References

(This can be read as an aside to The purity of counterpoint, ep. 19 of the podcast Beyond the Bony Labyrinth) (Nederlands: De puurheid van polyfonie).

The anti-polyphonic prejudice

Counterpoint is “the combination of simultaneously sounding musical lines according to a system of rules” according to a dictionary definition. The result of this is polyphony, a tissue of several such simultaneous ‘lines’, ‘parts’ or ‘voices’. A composition can be more or less contrapuntal-polyphonic, depending upon the consistency with which the parts or voices are sustained as independent ‘lines’.

In The purity of counterpoint I discussed the aesthetic prejudice that music is ‘essentially’ abstract in nature. It is a view most plausibly applicable to certain kinds of polyphonic-contrapuntal music, understood as a mere play of interrelations between ‘lines’ that are just that, without expressing or representing anything. But even in strictly polyphonic music, purity or abstraction is often compromised by aspects such as vocality, character, mood and movement.

A remarkably rigorous formulation of the view that counterpoint embodies the supposed abstract (or ‘absolute’) essence of music is found in a footnote of Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. It contains a quotation from the philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart:

To this day, even music experts repeat the statement that music expresses feelings, as if the feeling that it might arouse […] is based on the general rules of simple and double counterpoint that constitute its true essence. What might the old masters who elaborated the possible forms of the fugue have wanted to express? They did not want to express anything at all; their thinking was directed not go beyond the essence of the art, but right into the heart of it.

(The quotation first appears in the sixth edition of 1881. The original source is Herbart 1831).

I have compared this with a quote from Richard Wagner, written during his revolutionary phase of the 1840’s. For Wagner, in this stage of his thinking, counterpoint is the paradigm of ‘absolute music’ as he understands it negatively: as a kind of music that lacks motivation in the “inner necessity” of human feelings, thoughts, desires, and body movements. Instead, it is “arbitrary laws and inventions” that keep it going, “and these laws and inventions are those of counterpoint.”

Counterpoint, in all its manifold offspring, is art playing with itself artificially; it is the mathematics of feeling, the mechanical rhythm of egoistic harmony. In its invention, the abstract art of music pleased itself so much that it pretended to be nothing but an absolute art that exists for its own sake – as an art that owed its existence not to any human need, but purely to itself, to its absolute divine essence.
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850) (Wagner 2004: 1168)

Counterpoint and communism

That might sound like the rancorous ramblings of a failed music student, but there can be no doubt about his contrapuntal skills, and in his autobiography Wagner enthusiastically recalls his lessons with the Leipzig Thomaskantor Christian Theodor Weinlig.

The rejection of  counterpoint is an odd corollary of the utopian sociopolitical ideology that had made Wagner, a few years earlier, an active revolutionary. This ideological context determines the meaning of such terms as ‘absolute’, ‘artificial’, ‘egoistic’, and ‘human need’. ‘Absolute’ is music that does not express or reflect human motivation; the ‘absolute state’ is a state that is not grounded in basic human needs, but on arbitrary power and authority.

As for ‘egoism’: it figures as the opposite not of ‘altruism’ but of ‘communism’.

One risks being arrested for using this word; but there is none that better and more precisely designates the direct opposite of egoism. Anyone who is ashamed to be considered an egoist these days – something nobody openly wants – has to accept being called a communist.
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850) (Wagner 2004: 1274)

Wagner’s communism is based on the conviction that ‘the people’ (das Volk), once they have the freedom to satisfy their basic needs and desires, would be able to live in a state of harmony. The ‘highest’ needs of any individual are those that can only be satisfied in commonality. Such a society supposedly existed in prehistoric times, and could and should be reestablished in the near future.

All human beings have but one common need […]: the need to live and to be happy. Therein lies the natural bond of all human beings; a need which the rich nature of the earth is perfectly able to fulfil.
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850) (Wagner 2004: 1312)

The main inspiration for this communist ideology is the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose materialist critique of German idealism and Christian belief was the intellectual fashion 1840s. The title Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft echoes that of Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843). The first edition includes a dedicatory letter to the philosopher.

Within this Feuerbachian belief in man’s natural ability to harmonize his desires, he manages to accomodate his own interests as an artist: opera, drama, is a communal creation.

The most necessary and strongest need of the perfect artistic man is to communicate himself, in the highest fullness of his being, to the fullest commonality; and this he can achieve, in such a way that it is universally understood, only in drama.
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850) (Wagner 2004: 1293)

‘Absolute music’ and ‘absolute philosophy’: Ludwig Feuerbach

By having its motivation in human actions, as represented in drama, rather than as an abstract or ‘absolute’ play of forms, music can achieve its highest potential. The fateful term ‘absolute music’, that has for more than a century muddled music aesthetics, signifies in this context a kind of music that is abstracted or ‘absolved’, severed, from such motivation in human agency.

Wagner most likely derived this use of the word ‘absolute’ from Feuerbach’s critique of what he calls ‘absolute philosophy’, by which he means German idealism (including, particularly, Hegelianism). It is a way of thinking which is ‘abstracted’ from the person who thinks (das Denken, abstrahiert von dem Ich, dem Denkenden). This thinking ‘I’ is not an ungraspable immaterial self, but a complete human being, mind and body. Such “absolute thought, i.e. thought that is isolated and cut off from sensuousness” necessarily gets stuck in its own abstraction, referring to nothing but itself. The new philosophy should appeal to reason not as “without essence, colour or name”, but as an extension of the body, “saturated with blood” (die mit dem Blute des Menschen getränkte Vernunft) (Feuerbach 1843 § 23, 50).

‘Barbarism and bad taste’: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Feuerbachian optimist view of human nature and society had its short bloom at a time when there was as yet no biology and sociology to reckon with – just a few years before the decisive contributions of Marx and Darwin. That maybe makes its naivety more excusable than similar trends in the more recent past.

Looking backwards instead of forwards, it is striking how Feuerbach’s ‘philosophy of the future’ reverts to the sensualism and materialism of the late Enlightenment. When we consider Wagner’s attempt at a grand vision that embraces music, human nature and society, then strong parallels can be drawn with Jean-Jacques Rousseau – without any likelihood however of direct influence. Both entertained a wishful fantasy of mankind’s natural state, blamed convention and artificiality for its corruption, and hypothesised an original unity of music and language, with melody as the primary vehicle of musical-linguistic expression.

For both, too, the rejection of counterpoint is a consequence. According to Rousseau, music should give expression to human feelings. It is only melody that can do that, because of its close relation to speech. But counterpoint, as a multiplication of voices, is a matter of artifice. Contrapuntal forms offer only “arbitrary and purely conventional beauties, which have hardly any merit other than that of a difficulty overcome”. Our hearing cannot distinguish several voices at the same time; therefore, “all that results is confusion and noise”. “Fugues, in general, make music noisy rather than pleasant”. And…

With regard to counter-fugues, double fugues, inverted fugues, ostinato basses, and other difficult nonsense that the ear cannot tolerate nor reason justify: these are obviously remnants of barbarism and bad taste, which remain in existence, like the portals of our Gothic churches, only to shame those who had the patience to make them. (Rousseau 1753: 44)

The association of complexity in music with gothic architecture was a fashionable topic in the 18th century, before new sensibilities taught people to appreciate the gothic style for its sublime grandeur.

That one is unable to perceive several voices at once is patently untrue: any experienced listener can enjoy the interplay of voices. However, it may be true that, strictly speaking, we are not able to perceive several voices at the same time. Presumably we switch our attention from one to the other very quickly, resulting in a quasi-simultaneous synthesis. A similar process occurs when reading a musical score.

How political can counterpoint be?

The anti-contrapuntal prejudice that we find with Wagner and Rousseau is part of a more comprehensive view that can be characterised as politically ‘leftist’.

Consider, on the other hand, Heinrich Schenker, the music theorist whom I briefly discussed in The purity of counterpoint. His still controversial theory can be seen as the elaboration of Herbart’s thesis quoted above. This ‘absolutist’ aesthetics is embedded in a set of sociopolitical views that on the whole is characteristic of the far right: German-nationalist, racist, monarchist, authoritarian. Schenker’s right-wing views were at the same time radically elitist; Wagner was in his revolutionary phase, in intention at least, a left-wing populist.

(An overheated controversy has occurred in 2019-2020 over the alleged racist nature of Schenker’s theory and the institutions that embrace Schenkerian theory. What it failed to deal with is the question of the validity of the theory as a theory of musical structure and music cognition, as I did in my 2008 essay.)

Counterpoint can hardly be inherently or necessarily political, but according to my intuition a condemnation of counterpoint is more typical of the left. A polyphonic protest song seems almost a contradiction in terms. As a system of fairly strict rules, counterpoint is easily associated with ‘academic’, ‘scholastic’, ‘institutional’, ‘orderly’, and at least since Bach’s death, ‘antiquated’. The ostentatious counterpoint of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg turns its nostalgic quasi-academicism into a subject of comedy.

At the beginning of his career, when he has just completed his counterpoint studies, the nineteen year old composer concludes a Concert Overture in C major with a fugue that sounds like a preliminary study for Die Meistersinger, though without irony. The piece lacks any drama or conflict, and when the theme is finally subjected to fugal treatment it obviously fulfils the function for which it had been designed. The overture as a whole seems a celebration of the facility Wagner had acquired through his studies with Weinlig.

Two years later he wrote:

We should free ourselves from the tangle that threatens to smother us, throw off a good deal of affected counterpoint, banish all visions of hostile fifths and augmented ninths and finally become human beings. […] Why is it that no German opera composer has made it for so long? Because no one knew how to acquire the voice of the people – that is, because no one got hold of life as true and as hot as it is.
Die deutsche Oper (1834) (Wagner 2004: 6024)

To conclude: a toast

Deprecating counterpoint was a passing stage. In the article “Zukunftsmusik” of 1860 (with quotation marks: the term was used polemically contra Wagner), he credits the “Christian spirit” with the invention of harmony, and of counterpoint and polyphony as its embodiment. This old (Baroque) polyphony produces “an effect that is so marvellous and so much touches the heart to the core, that no other art has a comparable effect” (Wagner 2004: 3231).

In later years Wagner could be as proud of his contrapuntal achievements as he was at the very outset of his career.

Around Christmas 1877 he is working on his last music drama, Parsifal. It contains an interlude in march rhythm which he jokingly calls a Bademarsch – a march that could be played on the bandstand of a spa town. As Cosima Wagner notes in her diary:

R. works on his Spa March and joins me at lunchtime, highly satisfied with a counterpoint. […] We bring out a toast to the counterpoint, in great spirits.
(Wagner 2004: 37324)

There is no clue as to which part of the music she is referring to – but a good guess would be that it is an imitative structure of two bars, which is then repeated and transposed. If you reduce it to the essential voices, you get this five-part invention (the counterpoint begins after the trill):

References

(Translations are my own.)

Eybl, M. ‘Heinrich Schenker’s Identities as a German and a Jew’. Musicologica Austriaca, no. 2018, 21 September 2018
Feuerbach, L. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft. Zürich: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs, 1843.
Hanslick, E. Hanslick-Online.
Herbart, J.F. Kurze Encyklopadie der Philosophie aus praktischen Gesichtspuncten entworfen. Halle : Schwetschke, 1831.
Muns, L. Playmobil Bach: Google’s No-Good-Doodle, 2019.
Muns, L. The Animated Arabesque: Hanslick on Musical Beauty, 2014.
Muns, L. The Inner Work of Music: Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s “Generative Theory”, 2015.
Muns, L. Why I Am Not a Schenkerian, 2008.
Pederson, S. ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’. Music and Letters 90, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 240–62.
Rawidowicz, S. Ludwig Feuerbachs Philosophie: Ursprung und Schicksal. De Gruyter, 2013.
Rousseau, J.-J. Lettre sur la musique françoise. s.l.: s.n., 1753.
Sadie, S., ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Schenker, H. Der freie Satz. Wien: Universal Edition, 1935.
Schweitzer, A. J. S. Bach. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1908.
Schweitzer, A. J.S. Bach. Translated by Ernest Newman. Vol. 1. London: Black, 1923.
Wagner, R. Werke, Schriften und Briefe. Edited by Sven Friedrich. Vol. 107. Digitale Bibliothek. Berlin: Directmedia Pub., 2004.